Chapter 200: Not A Single One Gets Away
“Rat-tat-tat~”
On an unnamed field somewhere along the Kyiv-Poltava railway line, the sound of MG08 heavy machine guns came from all directions, weaving into a loose fire net that swept down batches of Lushan infantry attempting to break out.
Crimson blood converged and flowed, becoming fertilizer for the winter wheat that had just been planted a month ago.
The Germanic machine gunners were nearly pulling their triggers to the breaking point, wishing they could wear finger marks into them, but the enemy was still endlessly trying to break through the defense line.
This was the morning of December 8, the day after the Kiev Encirclement had fully closed, a scene on an unnamed field dozens of kilometers west of Poltava.
The encirclement had closed, but the temporary defense line was still very loose, and the trenches had not been dug in time. For now, there were only some short, disconnected simple trenches and scattered foxholes.
The Germanics had considerable total forces, but to defend along the more than 200-kilometer-long northern blockade line, even throwing in nearly 200,000 men of half an Army Group, each kilometer of position would only get a few hundred men.
Breaking it down, arranging 3 to 4 companies per kilometer meant only seven or eight heavy machine guns and two or three 77mm field guns.
No kilometer could get even one 105mm or 150mm howitzer—of course, in actual combat, cannons wouldn’t be placed singly on the defense line, but rather the artillery groups in every 5 to 10 kilometer sector would be concentrated into an artillery battalion position of 8 to 12 guns for centralized use.
Wherever the enemy was breaking out and the defenders needed to call for artillery support, the cannons would use their range advantage to concentrate bombardment.
Meanwhile, the Lushans attempting to break out could twist all their forces into one rope and concentrate as much as possible for a breakthrough.
Thus, even though the Germanics held absolute terrain advantage, using preset heavy machine gun positions to crazily sweep and kill the enemy, and able to call in some artillery fire, they still couldn’t hold back the Lushan soldiers charging from weak points in the defense line.
Right at this moment, defending this several-kilometer-wide defense line, the Germanic Army had only one infantry regiment. But the Lushans attempting to break out had concentrated a corps, or even more. They had assembled and maneuvered in advance at night, evading reconnaissance, and launched their breakout just before dawn.
The Germanics hadn’t had time to concentrate forces specifically to plug the gap; despite achieving over 20 times the casualties in fierce fighting relying on absolute terrain and fire net advantages, some Lushans still broke through.
The breakout fierce battle lasted a full 3 hours; the Germanics suffered over 400 casualties, while the Lushans had over 10,000 casualties, with several thousand successfully breaking out and even more about to rush out.
Just as the gap-plugging battle reached its most intense point, rumbling sounds finally came from the western side of the battlefield.
The Germanic defenders, who had been bitterly holding on with dry mouths and tongues, heard the sound and immediately had their morale greatly boosted, their fighting spirit soaring.
“It’s Division Commander Lelouch’s tank troops coming to reinforce! Brothers, hold on, kill all the Lushans back!” The Germanic regimental commander responsible for guarding this sector immediately shouted the order, and officers at all levels amplified it layer by layer, making the officers and soldiers vow to hold to the death.
Dozens of tanks finally arrived at the battlefield at over 15 kilometers per hour, their engines running at full power nearly overheating.
In early December in northern Lusha, it might already have cooled and frozen. But the Kiev Rus Black Soil Plain was relatively farther south, with slightly warmer weather; it would likely not freeze until mid-December at the earliest, or as late as late December if unlucky.
This meant that the muddy period of this early winter wouldn’t fully end until then.
The standing water on the vast Kiev Rus Black Soil Plain couldn’t be fully drained; the mud from autumn rains didn’t end by draining dry, but by freezing.
Before the mud fully ended, tanks traveling in such low-lying flat terrain were still somewhat slow, at most 15 km/h. Armored cars were even slower, probably under 10 km/h.
As the tank group arrived, the dense machine gun fire from their tops quickly swept down thousands of Lushan soldiers in swathes.
Moreover, tanks were unaffected by fixed positions, rushing to wherever the crisis was to plug it, attacking the breakout enemy groups fiercely at near face-to-face distances within 200 meters.
The Lushans were finally killed into utter rout, completely abandoning their escape attempts and retreating in all directions like a tide.
Scenes like this occurred at least several times on December 8 alone, and not every place could get timely rapid support from mobile troops.
In total, at least over 10,000 escaped, but far more were killed in the breakout process.
There were also over 10,000 severely wounded Lushan wounded soldiers; the Germanics didn’t have that many medical resources to treat these diehards who had no choice but to break out, so let them lie on the battlefield to fend for themselves.
……
The breakout and encirclement-blocking battles on December 8 went fairly smoothly overall.
Human war history had never before blockaded such a large encirclement, so many new problems were encountered for the first time.
Lelouch, von Bock, Rommel, and other mobile troop commanders adapted on the fly, each showing their strengths, groping forward and improving, quickly iterating tactics.
At the same time, thinking globally, Lelouch suggested to Army Group Commander Duke Rupprecht to negotiate with the Austrians to make the assisting Austrian 3rd Army step up from the Southern Front and accelerate the offensive.
Because the intensity of the Lushans’ breakout attempts showed that only now had they belatedly pulled almost all their main force to the north, so the south was definitely very weak.
Therefore, the Austrian Army, which had been mutually pecking at the weak Russian Army in a stalemate, should switch to a full-scale attack to quickly compress the enemy’s living space and shrink the encirclement.
Only when the encirclement became smaller could the troops used for containment be reduced, freeing up large amounts of manpower and equipment, making the defense line increasingly solid.
Duke Rupprecht adopted this suggestion after hearing it.
Originally, he hadn’t wanted the Austrian Army to suffer too many losses, so he hadn’t let them launch deep offensive campaigns, at most advancing 20 or 30 kilometers along the control line before stopping. Now that the situation had changed, the Austrian Army naturally had to adjust as well.
……
That evening, on the Southern Front along the Krivoy Rog-Sofiyivka line,
Lieutenant General Hermann Kusmanek von Burgneustadt, who had just been appointed commander of the Austrian 3rd Army before this campaign, quickly issued orders to the troops to prepare for a full-line general offensive the next day after receiving orders from friendly Marshal Rupprecht and private advice from Chief of Staff Lelouch.
That’s right, this Lieutenant General Hermann Kusmanek was the general who, over half a year ago, had held the Przemysl Fortress until ammunition and food were exhausted before surrendering on orders, and was then rescued by Lelouch from the Lviv prisoner of war camp.
At that time, over 40,000 Germanic Austrian prisoners of war and over 40,000 Bohemian prisoners of war were rescued with him. Later, these rescued soldiers all became subordinates of Lelouch and Lieutenant General Karl, forming an extra-divisional independent corps of the German 6th Army Group. Lieutenant General Kusmanek even served as the commander of that independent corps for a time, before it was replaced by Karl Ludport.
Later, some of the Germanic elite backbone from that group were taken by Lelouch to form the “Greater Germania” Armored Training Division.
However, as Lelouch commanded that force longer and was promoted to brigadier general himself, he gained more confidence to command directly without needing the original old leadership’s support.
But Lelouch was always on good terms with people, so through Marshal Rupprecht, he suggested to the Austrian General Staff Headquarters before this campaign to return Kusmanek to the Austrian Army sequence as commander of the Austrian 3rd Army, which also counted as a promotion for Kusmanek.
He had held the Przemysl Fortress for over half a year, fighting to the death without yielding, making him a resolute and bold famous general among Austrian Army commanders, fully capable of commanding a main force Army Group.
And since the Austrian Army’s military strength was truly inadequate for major use, relying almost entirely on the Germanic Army on the battlefield, and Marshal Rupprecht’s prestige was growing ever higher, even the Austrian Emperor didn’t dare reject his suggestion, so the Austrian General Staff Headquarters went along with it.
Lelouch also took this opportunity to plant a bigger nail in the Austrian Army, laying groundwork for postwar spoils division in the future.
He needed more pro-German senior officers in the future Austrian Army to unite in the coming stormy times.
Lelouch was Kusmanek’s lifesaver, personally pulling him from the prisoner of war camp; if he gave him a few more merits to rise to the top of the Austrian Army, why worry about him not repaying the favor in the future.
To help Kusmanek familiarize himself with the troops quickly, before the campaign began, Lelouch convinced Marshal Rupprecht to reassign the over 20,000 Hungarian ethnic soldiers trained from prisoners of war who had originally been incorporated into the 6th Army Group’s independent corps back to the Austrian 3rd Army, so Kusmanek would have enough direct subordinates when taking office.
As for the originally rescued Germanic and Bohemian soldiers, of course they couldn’t be returned; they were already Lelouch’s core team. The Hungarian soldiers could be returned because they were rescued in the final stage of the Hungarian Campaign in the Carpathian region, not personally by Lelouch, making it easy to do a favor.
As for Kusmanek’s own stance, he was very eager to prove himself again, so upon receiving the attack order this time, he quickly became hot-blooded and eager to contribute.
……
As Kusmanek launched the offensive on the Southern Front, the encirclement’s area shrank rapidly by a large chunk in just two or three short days.
Before the offensive, the Austrian 3rd Army’s front line in the great Dnieper bend area was still holding along the Krivoy Rog-Sofiyivka railway, which extended eastward all the way to Dnepropetrovsk.
On December 9 and 10, Kusmanek broke through dozens of kilometers forward.
The Lushans’ troops on the Southern Front had mostly withdrawn, and the remaining rearguard troops were demoralized. Caught off guard by the Austrian Army’s sudden resolute offensive, two corps of Lushan rearguard troops were subdivided, encircled, annihilated, and surrendered within two days.
On December 10, Kusmanek’s Austrian 3rd Army advanced to the Kremenchuk-Kropivnitsky line—readers unfamiliar with these place names can roughly understand it as Kusmanek pushing the front to the railway line in later times connecting Poltava to Moldova’s capital Chisinau.
In other words, the Southern Front was pushed forward over 80 kilometers entirely, occupying all the vacant Lushan areas, and trimming the entire encirclement from its original trapezoid into a triangle.
The shortest top side of the original trapezoid’s four sides was directly cut off; the two points of the trapezoid’s top edge were originally Poltava and Dnepropetrovsk. After two days of Kusmanek’s push, Dnepropetrovsk had become deep rear.
The Russian Army was ultimately squeezed into a triangular area with vertices at Kyiv-Poltava-Uman, and the encirclement’s area compressed from over 30,000 square kilometers to over 20,000 square kilometers.
……
While Kusmanek was quickly squeezing water out of the enemy-occupied area on the Southern Front, Lelouch and von Bock weren’t idle on the Northern Front either.
On December 9 and 10, the Northern Front’s blocking battles also showed quite a few new tactical innovations.
After the Lushans’ breakout on the 8th didn’t go well, dragged on too long, and were driven back by Germanic mobile troops reinforcing whenever and wherever needed, they learned their lesson and pondered countermeasures.
That evening, General Plehve and Lieutenant General Misyailo gamed out breakout tactics on the sand table, deciding to have frontline breakout troops pre-deploy heavy cannons forward at night to blast a gap in the enemy blockade line with heavy artillery—
In the previous 8th’s breakout battle, the Lushans hadn’t concentrated artillery much, not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t have time to deploy.
Artillery positions of this era required at least half a day of deployment to be usable, unable to deploy on demand. Large-scale artillery assembly was also easily detected by the enemy in advance, predicting the breakout direction, so the Lushans feared exposure and had to use pure light infantry for breakout, leading to heavy casualties.
Learning the lesson, before midnight on the 8th, Russian Army artillery began assembling, selecting the western suburbs of the small town of Lubny along the Poltava-Kyiv railway line as the planned breakthrough point.
Then, in the dead of night, they frantically rushed several corps’ field guns there, and during the few hours before dawn, urgently deployed artillery positions, finally beginning fire preparation half an hour before dawn on the 9th.
The opposing Germanic Army indeed couldn’t concentrate forces in time specifically; facing the enemy’s local artillery advantage, the line-filling troops had to abandon the first-line trenches, withdraw across the railway line to the second temporary simple trenches in the rear, and frantically dig extra foxholes on the spot.
Half an hour later, the Lushans launched their charge with the first ray of morning light.
Because the defensive depth was greatly compressed, the Germanic defense line was soon in dire peril.
The previous day, the Lushans had tangled with them for a full three hours before barely breaking through, then dragged on until armored reinforcements arrived to save the day, causing the Lushan side to fail at the last moment.
Now, the Lushans prepared artillery overnight in advance, concentrating fire for quick victory. General Plehve himself estimated they could tear open a gap in over an hour, and tanks wouldn’t arrive in time.
But just as General Plehve thought he was about to succeed, a new twist quickly shattered his illusions.
A faint buzzing came from the sky—it was dozens of Germanic fighter-bombers arriving.
In the past two days after closing the encirclement, Chief of Staff Lelouch had the engineers work overtime to build field airports with temporary runways on the front line, and transferred a batch of airplanes and ammunition from the rear.
The number of planes wasn’t large; air forces of all countries in this era were small-scale, with low bomb loads, hard to harm large-scale infantry clusters.
But against hastily assembled artillery groups, they could achieve outstanding focused suppression.
The Lushans’ pre-dawn fire preparation had already alerted the Germanic Army to their breakout direction.
Although this offensive would be much faster, with tanks likely too late, the planes made it in time. Ground crew prepared urgently before dawn, and with the first morning light, the pilots took off; in just half an hour, they found the Lushan artillery group deployed overnight behind the defense line.
Then a barrage of 5-kg small bombs and machine gun fire rained down, and the Lushan artillery fire went briefly silent.
Though cannons were hard to destroy directly, the artillery casualties were enough to prevent the Lushans from recovering firing efficiency for an hour or so. This time gap was enough for armored cars to rush to the battlefield as reinforcements.
In the end, General Plehve’s another breakout attempt was also strangled.
Moreover, after these two battles’ consumption, the most diehard breakout core elements among the Lushans suffered massive losses, and most survivors no longer had the will.
The encirclement’s total area was shrinking at a rate of ten to twenty percent per day.
Every additional day, the Germanic blockade line’s troop density could increase by another ten percent over the previous day. The later it got, the slimmer the Lushans’ breakout hopes.
Even worse, Lelouch learned from the setback and, after the December 9 battle, offered Duke Rupprecht another new suggestion.
Starting from the 10th, expand the depth of reconnaissance aircraft penetrating Lushan-controlled areas daily, at least 50 kilometers deep.
Previously, reconnaissance aircraft were too few, and temporary airfields still under construction, so coverage was too small, missing the enemy artillery assembly in advance.
After increasing reconnaissance depth, Lushan cannons couldn’t complete ultra-long-distance transport and relocation in one night, so any concentration trend would allow the Germanic Army to warn immediately and predict the enemy’s rough breakout direction in advance.
Thus, the Lushans’ local artillery concentration advantage like on the 9th no longer existed.
Sure enough, on December 10, General Plehve tried switching locations again but kicked an iron plate, losing another artillery group for it.
The surviving Lushan troops left in the encirclement couldn’t even assemble their cannons anymore, and breakout hopes were thoroughly crushed.
Troops’ morale plummeted to the extreme. Voices of not wanting to fight anymore, only seeking surrender to survive, spread increasingly in the Lushan Army, finally reaching even Front Army Commander General Plehve’s ears.
Even General Plehve himself was thoroughly shaken.
