Chapter 191: Blind Man Riding A Blind Horse, Charging Toward The Cliff
November 8, 1915.
That is, the day Chief of Staff Lelouch had Rommel receive tanks and begin organizing the armored troops to intensify practical training in tank driving skills.
In Krivoy Rog City, 150 kilometers southwest of Dnepropetrovsk and 350 kilometers southeast of Kyiv—that is, the city with the largest iron mine in Lusha territory.
The Lusha Army, which had been in decline for a long time, was now launching a counterattack. A counterattack that surprised even the Germanians with its courage.
From the start of the campaign on September 23 to November 8, a full 45 days, the Lusha Army had suffered defeat after defeat on the Kievan Rus’ Great Plain battlefield, losing troops and territory.
The 6th Army Group was surrounded and annihilated 350,000 men south of Zaporizhzhia on the south bank of the Don River, and later lost nearly 100,000 more troops piecemeal, including in the Donbas and other eastern areas. Plus the 110,000 annihilated in Sevastopol and 80,000 in Kerch,
All in all, in the past 45 days, the total Lushan troops annihilated on the Southern Front had exceeded 600,000.
Under such circumstances, they actually managed to organize a counterattack, which truly astonished both sides.
If the news reached the West and was heard by Lusha’s allied friendly nations in the Entente, they would probably be utterly shocked.
But no matter what, the Lushans had launched a real counterattack.
The direct cause of this counterattack was probably the execution a few days ago of Aleksei General Evert, former Romanian Front Army Commander and current 6th Army Group Commander,
After which the Lusha Army from top to bottom temporarily believed that “the Germanians’ armored cars are immobilized due to mud and lack of logistics maintenance. As the Lusha Army fighting on home soil, they must overcome difficulties in the muddy season, desperately counterattack, first seize back the large iron mine, and then plan further.”
Whether they truly believed it or not, they had no choice but to believe. Anyone who dared not believe might be the next one executed.
Southwestern Front Commander General Pavel Pleve also mustered twelve parts spirit and organized this counterattack with trepidation. He placed the Front’s main force, the 4th and 7th Army Groups, in the inner area of the great bend in the middle Dnieper River.
Among them, Lusha 4th Army Group was placed on the western wing, that is, the route thrusting straight south from Kyiv toward Mykolaiv and Kherson.
While the 7th Army Group was placed on the eastern wing, that is, following the Dnieper River downstream from Kyiv toward Dnepropetrovsk, and along the way using the numerous tributaries on this section of the Dnieper south bank for infiltration and penetration, leveraging the Lusha Army’s water transport advantage in this area to cut up the Germanians’ occupied zones.
（Note: Above Dnepropetrovsk on the upper Dnieper River, the water transport advantage is exclusively held by the Lusha Army, so this counterattack tactic is sound. As mentioned earlier, the Dnieper River hydroelectric power station has not yet been built in this era, and ships coming upstream from the Black Sea reach Zaporizhzhia but cannot proceed further due to excessive elevation drop and numerous rapids.
The river section between Zaporizhzhia and Dnepropetrovsk is impossible to navigate, comparable to the Sanmenxia on the Yellow River or the Three Gorges on the Yangtze. Above Dnepropetrovsk, only the Lushans have ships.）
Meanwhile, the Germanians had focused their attention further east during this time, leaving too few troops to guard the inner area of the Dnieper great bend, with weak forces, so General Pleve’s counterattack actually pushed them back some territory.
On November 9, the Lusha Army counterattacked into the urban fringes of Krivoy Rog City! Lusha and German armies engaged in fierce urban warfare inside Krivoy Rog City!
The Germania Army seemed to cherish this city capable of producing tens of millions of tons of high-quality iron ore annually and was unwilling to lose the victory fruit it had already obtained.
Two full divisions of garrison troops engaged the Lusha Army in bloody building-by-building combat, contesting every inch of ground.
Especially around the mining fields and ore processing plants north of the city, and the dedicated train station for transporting iron ore, the fighting between both sides was particularly intense.
The Germanians deployed tricky machine gun fire through every tunnel in the mines and makeshift anti-artillery caves, and called in long-range artillery support, inflicting massive slaughter on the charging Lusha Army.
The attacking Lusha Army could see that the mining area had changed dramatically in less than a month since being seized by the Germania Army. Many facilities destroyed by the Lusha Army during their retreat had been rebuilt by the Germanians.
Moreover, it was clear that the Germanians’ reconstruction was serious, truly aimed at holding this large iron mine indefinitely to provide the Empire’s war machine with a steady stream of steel.
With the Germanians defending so resolutely, the attacking Lusha troops naturally fell right into the trap without suspicion, becoming even bolder in committing forces to the attack. Even as weapons and ammunition were consumed at a flying pace, soldier casualties were enormous, and morale and energy were depleted fiercely, the Lushan generals remained entranced by the immediate gains, heedless of everything.
Lusha 4th Army Group attacking from the west side of Krivoy Rog City had several divisions directly crippled in days of continuous siege. The 7th Army Group attacking from the east was no better off, with at least two divisions crippled.
If one were to precisely calculate the casualty exchange ratio between attackers and defenders, under the Germanians’ mine tunnel network and long-range support artillery coordination, the Lushans probably suffered more than ten times the casualties.
Yet the Lushans stubbornly held on with the temporary morale boosted by General Evert’s execution, with no one knowing when they would truly reach the end of their strength.
Southwestern Front Commander General Pleve fought very hard; he knew his two most elite fresh Army Groups had already been committed to the attack,
And to further expand gains across the army and secure what had been achieved, he needed the Tsar to provide more replacement troops and material support.
But getting men and materials wasn’t achieved by empty talk or a few tearful phone calls.
Well-versed in the current Lusha Army’s bureaucratic ways, General Pleve knew he must produce results and propaganda to convince his superiors and make the Tsar willingly open his purse.
So what he could do was further press the troops to counterattack while dispatching large numbers of battlefield reporters to photograph and report for rear newspapers, propagandizing the rare “Krivoy Rog great victory.”
Thus, on November 9, while fierce fighting was still ongoing in the Krivoy Rog urban area, General Pleve had reporters from《New Era》 and《Lusha News》—the newspapers with the greatest influence representing the ‘Conservatives’ and ‘moderate opposition’—come to Krivoy Rog City under army protection,
And General Pleve himself came there to pose for the reporters.
At the time, fighting was still raging in the main urban area, but the mining area battles had basically ended, with the remaining Germania troops having withdrawn.
Amid his busy schedule, General Pleve personally climbed to the mountaintop of Krivoy Rog’s main mine, striking a commanding and majestic pose while enjoying the reporters’ “click click” shutter sounds.
Afterward, he delivered a victory speech to the interviewers from《New Era》 and《Lusha News》, expounding on the great significance of the Krivoy Rog great iron mine to the Empire, saying he had recaptured 70% of the Empire’s iron ore output.
And with His Majesty’s wise rule and firm support, the Southwestern Front would surely secure grain production, recapture coal areas, and let the Empire remain secure and stable.
These photographs appeared in newspapers distributed on the streets of Petersburg and Moscow the next day, November 10:（《New Era》circulated in Petersburg,《Lusha News》in Moscow）
The successful counterattack on the Krivoy Rog great iron mine was hyped by media across Lusha as a great victory, mega-victory, epic heavenly victory, symbolizing the turning point of the war.
And with this opportunity, the resources General Pleve wanted were soon supplemented in the following days.
General Aleksei Evert’s 6th Army Group had been battered to the point where it couldn’t even muster a full strength army; after recent rounds of emergency supplements, it had only managed to replenish 2 armies.
But after seeing the Krivoy Rog great victory, approvals at all levels accelerated, more new recruits were hastily conscripted and stuffed into units. The Tsar and military high command specially approved General Pleve to forcibly conscript large numbers in the Kievan Rus’ region.
Because recently the Tsar had already forced the administrative systems in the Kievan Rus’ region to accelerate grain collection. Grain that was originally collected by winter was now required to be fully gathered by November.
Around Kyiv, across hundreds of kilometers of fertile black soil plains, human tragedies unfolded daily in recent times. Kievan Rus’ peasants, smallholder farmers, and farmstead owners were all evading the Tsar’s accelerated taxation. Many peasants hid grain, trying to play poor and get by.
But under General Pleve’s harsh measures, countless peasants caught hiding military rations were directly tortured, treated as thieves and conscripted on the spot into the 6th Army Group.
The number killed in the surroundings reached tens of thousands, and over 100,000 grain hoarders were forcibly enlisted.
Weapons and equipment were also squeezed out from the rear as much as possible and sent to the Southern Front; Saint Petersburg arsenals ultimately supplied over 200,000 Mosin-Nagant rifles to the Southern Front in early November, just to ensure more new recruits had guns.
Additionally, the Tsar issued two orders: Have a reserve Army Group originally training in the Kursk area move south to the Kharkiv area to support defenses and counterattacks west around Kyiv.
At the same time, have the Western Front Army in Belarus detach Lusha 13th Army Group—stationed in Minsk and other places as an important rear support for the Western Front Army—and move south to Kyiv to assist in defending the Kyiv periphery, transferring under Southwestern Front command.
In this way, on paper, the Lusha Southwestern Front’s forces received unprecedented expansion.
Now nominally under it were the offensively postured 4th and 7th Army Groups counterattacking Krivoy Rog,
As well as the 6th Army Group left defending Kyiv,
Plus the original Kursk reserve Army Group left defending Kharkiv, renamed 9th Army Group upon arrival in Kharkiv—and the original 9th Army Group had been annihilated after the Crimea campaign, this one newly rebuilt.
Plus the 13th Army Group transferred from the north.
Theoretically, General Pleve now had 5 Army Groups under him: 4th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 13th. Of course, aside from the nominally full strength 9th and 13th, the other 3 were all more or less depleted from prior battles.
The Southwestern Front actually still had 26 armies, 74 divisions, plus 11 independent Cossack Cavalry Divisions, for a total of 85 division designations and nearly 1.5 million men.
Northern reinforcements and supplies were rushing south in a desperate gamble, but the railways to Kyiv and Kharkiv were not very smooth,
Recently the Germanians deployed many airships, heading north at midnight and searching for targets to quickly bomb at dawn.
Specifically targeting the railway lines from Kyiv to Minsk or Kharkiv to Kursk, causing all sorts of damage. Trains had major or minor accidents daily due to railway issues, with tens of thousands of personnel and equipment jammed on the roads.
Southern grain and coal did have small amounts shipped north, loaded on northbound trains emptied after unloading reinforcements and equipment. But with the railways continuously bombed and damaged, this transport became extremely difficult and inefficient, actually achieving little effect.
Yet the Lushans gave no thought to the true purpose of the Germanians bombing the railways; they only saw it as the Germanians fearing the Lusha Army’s southward transfer of reinforcements and equipment to launch a larger counterattack in the muddy season. So the main purpose of bombing railways was definitely to stop military trains and weapon/ammunition transports.
Throughout early November up to December 12, the continuous railway bombing also cost the Germania air raid units some losses.
Even with the air raid plan refined to avoid strongpoints and strike weak ones, 3 airships were still shot down. And these air raids were deep into enemy rear hundreds of kilometers; the crews on those 3 airships couldn’t return and basically all sacrificed, with a few surviving by hiding incognito, barely clinging to life for now.
Germania’s nationwide remaining airship inventory further dropped from 45 to 42. Going forward, they probably wouldn’t organize airship bombing actions anymore, even against enemy rear railways; they should develop long-range professional bombers instead.
Once this era’s bombers achieve a combat radius over 500 kilometers, reliance on airships will diminish further.
Photographs of the wreckage from those 3 downed airships were immediately taken by General Pleve’s men and sent to《Lusha News》 and《New Era》 reporters for publication, showing the Southwestern Front’s recent operations were very effective.
The Germania airships being shot down was interpreted by the Lusha military as “Germanians unskilled in muddy season warfare, so fearing Lusha Army reinforcements and counterattacks. In desperation, they sent expensive airships deep into the rear to bomb railways. This despicable cowardly act cannot change the Lusha righteous army’s counterattack on the main battlefield!”
Some Germania generals would, in unexpected circumstances, occasionally see Lushan newspaper propaganda, and many would indignantly want to refute it.
But within 6th Army Group, all refutation voices were suppressed by Chief of Staff Lelouch. The 6th Army Group Headquarters’ requirement was:
Do not refute recently; let the enemy rave for a few days.
The more they rave, the more they will deceive superiors and conceal from subordinates, causing disconnect between front and rear, underestimating the enemy and advancing rashly, getting stuck and exhausted of combat effectiveness.
When the day comes that the enemy finishes raving, it will be Lelouch’s turn to rave.
