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Операция "Ой морозь морозь" - Maintain a high operational tempo through the winter, attacking weak points as able

6 (60%)

Операция "Не морозь меня" - Slow things down, making a few major and considered attacks without wasting strength

4 (40%)

Total Members Voted: 10

[Fishbreath]

Alright, time for some strategy talk. At the moment we're fighting on three fronts, so I'll give my impressions on each of them with some thoughts on what we might do next. This is where your input comes in, too.

Ukraine/Belarus
Given the current strength of our forces on the Western Front, plus what reinforcements (to the tune of 20-30 divisions) I've been able to scrounge up from elsewhere, I'm convinced we'll be able to contain the German advance until winter, through which we'll be building a ton of infantry. It would be a lot easier if it weren't for the other two fronts. Enemy forces probably total around two hundred to three hundred divisions. We can't afford to pull anything off this front; every territory we have to fall back out of is production capacity lost, and we'll probably need it later.

Turkey
A sideshow right now, with some thirty Soviet divisions (twenty of which are opposing a possible but unlikely Turkish re-crossing of the Bosphorous to the mainland; the other ten are spread out over the area) facing a handful of Italian paratroopers and amphibious infantry, but it could flare up. Intelligence suggests Italy has about a hundred divisions in total, plus a fleet that'll make it difficult to hit them on their own territory until we're most of the way through Germany.

Geographically, Turkey is likely to be the most interesting of the fronts, because it's not covered in mud or jungle (although there are some mountains), and maneuver ought to play a major role.

The Far East
The thorniest problem we face right now. At the front line in the mountains in Khabarovsk, our fiftyish divisions face thirtyish American divisions. It's almost certainly going to stay that way for a while, since the largest attack that can come from one province without taking huge effectiveness penalties is 24, and even that requires a field marshal that we don't have.

I think my next move here is going to be to redeploy Rokossovsky to Turkey and Zhukov to the northern part of the German front, and to send some of our headquarters units back to the west to aid in counterattacks (should the opportunity present itself). I'll eventually be able to kick the Americans out of Vladivostok, but that's not a near-term proposition, and if the Americans want to launch attacks against a prepared infantry defense in the mountains, with air support on call, that's their own business, and I would welcome the experienced infantry units.

Edit: hey, we passed 7000 views.

[Zrk2]

Nice. How far back do you plan on falling?

[stabbymcstabstab]

I got a plan but It might lost a few divisions but Is it possable to pull a few of the german divisions into one area where their useless and we can attack the weaked area they attacked from.

[Elfeater]

Send my men against the Turks... I've had my lesson of fighting against the Americans...

[Fishbreath]

Nice. How far back do you plan on falling?

My present goal is to go no further than the Daugava/Dnieper line, which runs from southeast from Riga, Latvia to Smolensk, and from Smolensk just about due South to Kiev and then the Black Sea. On the game map, Smolensk is the only province that doesn't get the river defense bonus, and in the late 30s I put a honking great land fortress there in preparation for this very contingency.

I'm not too worried about holding Leningrad, actually, nor Moscow to a lesser extent. The terrain in the north is favorable for us. In the south toward Stalingrad and (more importantly) Baku, the steppes are not the greatest place to establish defensive positions, but we'll have to work with it.

I got a plan but It might lost a few divisions but Is it possable to pull a few of the german divisions into one area where their useless and we can attack the weaked area they attacked from.

On a much smaller scale, this is something I'm trying to do already. As we retreat out of provinces, we tear up the roads and burn everything useful to the ground. This dramatically reduces the effective supply efficiency of units in the province, which dramatically reduces their fighting efficiency as they run out. If the Germans push, say, two provinces deep into my line, that leaves me an opportunity to cut off that salient at the base, encircle the units that penetrated the deepest, and destroy them entirely.

On the other hand, we might also be well-served by beating up the Germans wherever we can and letting them retreat. They're trying to maintain and supply an army larger than ours, plus supplying their allies, while repairing and reinforcing units we bloody, and they have slightly less industrial capacity and and a dramatically smaller amount of manpower than we do. Even losses or even 2-1 in their favor are probably still an economic win for us.

Send my men against the Turks... I've had my lesson of fighting against the Americans...

Your men are in the north of the German front, unfortunately, and it's quite a walk down to Turkey.

[Elfeater]

Hmm that's an issue... Then Walk quickly stay put and wait for orders

[EuchreJack]

Send my men against the Turks... I've had my lesson of fighting against the Americans...

Your men are in the north of the German front, unfortunately, and it's quite a walk down to Turkey.

Fret not, noble comrade!  I shall smite thy enemy in your steed!  For the Motherland!

[Fishbreath]

I've arranged rather a busy weekend for myself, so if I don't get to play tonight, I probably won't until Monday. You can expect the update on Monday or Tuesday night.

Edit: missed playing last night, so I'll be playing tonight and posting tomorrow. Sorry for the delay.\

Edit 2: I kind of stopped taking notes and pictures toward the end because holy cow there are a lot of Germans, and they're all in bits and pieces of my territory, so if tomorrow's update gets sparse toward the end, that's why. To sum up, I haven't lost a whole bunch of land, and what I have lost is burned to the ground, but it's getting difficult to trade space for time in the quantities that I'll need before reinforcements on a large scale start arriving.

[Elfeater]

Oh noes! whats happened to my men! and HOLD THE THICK RED LINE!

[EuchreJack]

Send some troops temporarily from Turkey.  We can hold with a bit less temporarily.

Worse case scenario, I can hold parts of Turkey while the Italians take the coast and my other forces assist in defense of the Motherland.  We can throw the Italians back into the sea when reinforcements arrive from the East.

Mother Russia must come before everything else!

EDIT: Actually, it might be better if I return to defend Russia with my Headquarters unit and core troops, leaving the auxillaries to defend Turkey.  You probably need the force multipliers and stack limit boosts that a Headquarters unit such as mine would provide far more desperately against the Germans than the Italians.

[Fishbreath]

Update coming tonight, only a few days in advance of the next one (ideally).

EuchreJack, it turns out I was wrong about where Rokossovsky was stationed. He was actually facing off against Romania already, and he's needed there. Zhukov will be sticking to the European front too. The Italians are really stockpiling troops in the Dodecanese (they're up to 16 divisions), but I seriously doubt they'll be able to push through, and they're not capable of landings in force in mainland Anatolia, so I'm not concerned there. Rokossovsky will be staying in the Ukraine for a while, I expect.

[Fishbreath]

Not my usual style. This is a near-transcription of my notes, edited for clarity, because I've been extraordinarily busy this week.

Spoiler: 7 May, 1943 (click to show/hide)

0900 21 April
Not much going on. There aren't currently any counterattacks worth making.

1000 21 April
How quickly things change. Bielsk in Poland and Beltsy in Romania come under attack, both facing 2-1 odds. Troops fall back from Bielsk, having been redeployed too recently to put up any serious resistance, and burn the province to the ground. Zhukov is redeploying. He'll be until the middle of June.

1800 21 April
German aviation tests the mighty VVS for the first time.

0000 22 April
The mighty VVS has once again proven its worth, shooting down just under four hundred German bombers for only 150 losses. A group of modern fighters, redeployed from the Far East, is reorganizing at the airbase in Mogilev, and will be fully ready for action in about a month.

1200 22 April
Germans attack Siauliau, just south of Jelgava. I suspect the Germans will be making a strong push in the north.

0900 23 April
Twelve air groups of Soviet fighters, mixed LaGG-3s and Yak-7s, catch four groups of FW-190As, winning a decisive victory: some 150 German losses to our 75.

Berzarin's defense of Beltsy has already lasted two days at this point, and is still doing alright. With enough bomber support, we may be able to turn this into a win.

0000 24 April
Kowel in Poland is under attack.

0000 25 April
Outlasting even my grandest expectations, Berzarin is forced to fall back from Beltsy. It probably should still go in the books as a win.


0700 25 April
Turkey update! The Italian landings on the mainland have been forced back to once province, and they're about to lose three divisions in that pocket. We have a mechanized force of seven divisions here, which ought to be enough to hold against landings. More troubling is the force the Italians are building up in the Dodecanese, which (at the end of this update on 7 May) totals 16 divisions. Granted, to attack they have to attack mountains across a channel, so I'm not too concerned.

We begin to fall back out of Kowel, losing 5000 troops to the 4000 German losses. A bunch of Italian bombers are shot down, however.

Turkey:


1700 25 April
Italians pushed out of Turkey.

0900 26 April
Kowel and Siauliau are abandoned, and the German forces move in quickly enough to stop us from totally destroying the provinces. They're mostly gone, though.

0000 27 April
A welcome moment of quiet...

2000 27 April
...destined not to last. Tarnopol, at the south end of the front, is under attack. This is one that would be great to win, both for my morale and to prevent this force of German armor from opening an avenue for exploitation.

0100 29 April
Tarnopol is looking good. Lvov (which I neglected to mention earlier) is holding, but not likely to win.

0600 30 April
The north is in danger of a collapse. Jekapilis and Pinsk come under attack. The former is lightly-defended and, in my current arrangement of troops, a gateway to the north. I don't have the troops to hunt down penetrating units and still hold the line. If we lose the latter, some thirty divisions (ETA 7 May through 13 May) are in danger of encirclement and defeat. This is absolutely unacceptable, and would probably end up spelling defeat.

Jekapilis and Pinsk are both currently defended by token forces of four divisions each. I've set Victory or Valhalla (hold at all costs) on both of them until reinforcements arrive.

(Note: this is where my notes get sparse. It got very tense.)

30 April - 7 May
Jekapilis is reinforced by units from nearby provinces, and from units redeployed from Persia, which are beginning to arrive.

The original defenders of Jekapilis hold out for a full week against 3-1 odds, but take terrible losses. A corps of four divisions was reduced to a strength of just over two before reinforcements finally arrived to relieve them.

Battles in Pinsk are ongoing. The leading edge of the units from the Brest-Litovsk salient are arriving, allowing me to rotate the defenders that took the worst of the fighting out. I'll keep doing this until our thirty divisions are safe (and hopefully redistributed somewhere they can be useful).

At some point in all this, we won another decisive victory against the Americans in Khabarovsk, which means I can probably afford to pull a few more units off that front to deal with the Germans. On the other hand, the Americans are reinforcing.


Below: Victory in Jekapilis, with some potential consequences marked up in blue and my current relevant move orders marked up in red. Bear in mind that most of the casualties we sustained were suffered by four divisions.


That's where we stand.

Spoiler: Unit updates (click to show/hide)

Zhukov's 6th Corps (Taricus) - En route to the Western Front. His planned arrival is mid-June.
Bondarev's 1st Corps (Zrk2) - Participated in the defense of Tarnopol, a key victory along the Kiev axis.
Malinin's 16th Corps (Barbarossa TSG) - Fought in the counterattack to relieve Tarnopol, the first Soviet offensive action against the Germans in which the Red Army took fewer casualties than it inflicted.
Bulganin's 48th Corps (Elfeater) - Participated in the defense of Jekapilis, a key victory along the Leningrad axis which prevented a German strategic breakthrough.
Rokossovsky's corps (EuchreJack) - Still on the Black Sea coast in northeastern Romania, pinning a force of infantry there.

[Fishbreath]

I drastically pared down the opening post, since nearly all of the metagame stuff hasn't been going on of late.

[Heron TSG]

Go Malinin! Reverse-Barbarossa those durn Nazis!

Things are looking tense. Any possibility that the Germans will cross the river?

[Fishbreath]

Things are looking tense. Any possibility that the Germans will cross the river?

I remain optimistic, but at the same time, I wouldn't put money against it. It really depends on what the Germans do. There's a big push going on along the Moscow axis, but we're thinner in the north than we are in the center, so we'll have to keep an eye out for them to shift priorities.

In other, related news, the game was presenting me with some inconsistent intelligence information, so I loaded the game as Germany to see what was up. Apparently, my spies report the total size of forces under Germany's control, which includes huge expeditionary forces sent by the Axis Minor Allies. Germany is in control of some 400 to 425 divisions at the moment per my spy reports, but only 300 of those are actually German, and only 200 or 250 German divisions are on the Western Front. This jives with my experience, as other parts of COMINTERN (Tannu Tuva and Mongolia) have sent me token expeditionary forces to help out in wars.

In the course of fighting defensive battles, I noticed also that Germany has a bunch of absurdly good commanders: every attack so far has been led by a skill 4 field marshal. I think I have one of those (Zhukov).