“Well, comrade commanders, I guess you understand my vision of the situation,” Mekhlis squinted slightly and looked around the assembled officers with a piercing look. “And now Major General Nagulin will explain to you in detail how and where you will attack and in what time frame you must break through the front and reach the steppe regions of Crimea.”
Mekhlis made an inviting gesture in my direction. At the same time, a faintly unkind grin slid across his face.
I went to the desk and pulled out of my briefcase a map with the current situation on the front, marked in advance. For a minute the generals silently digested the new information about the enemy, and their faces reflected a range of feelings, from doubt and mistrust to a grim understanding of what awaited them.
“There will be no offensive,” I said softly in the hanging silence. “The front immediately turns to defense, limiting itself to demonstrative actions imitating continued preparations for a strike in the north.”
“Comrade Nagulin!” Mekhlis's voice soared to high notes, “The Headquarters of the Supreme High Command and Comrade Stalin expect us to succeed decisively! We must mobilize all forces, identify those responsible for the failures of the last month, make the right personnel decisions, and immediately prepare a new offensive!”
“There will be no offensive, Comrade Army Commissar 1st Rank,” my voice was as calm as ever, but there were notes in it, that resembled the clanking of tank caterpillars. “The Germans know about our every move, they are aware of the locations of army and divisional headquarters, outnumber us in field artillery and have overwhelming air supremacy. We have two or three days before their counterattack. And the first thing they will do is an artillery and air strike on the headquarters and communication centers. All army commanders should immediately change the location of command posts and see to it that lower headquarters also execute this order as quickly as possible. You will continue to imitate activity in the previous places. I expect the main enemy strike on the southern flank between the Black Sea and the village of Koy Assan to cut off and block Feodosia and come to the rear of our troops at the Parpachian line. During the night the tank brigades should be withdrawn from the front lines, concentrated near the village of Arma-Eli, thoroughly camouflaged and prepared for a counterstrike on the places of the supposed enemy breakthrough. The Black Sea Fleet…”
“Your authority, Major General, is not given to you to encourage, or even to personally implant, defeatist sentiments on the front,” Mekhlis no longer shouted, but his hissing voice was heard by each of the commanders present at the meeting. “You will have to answer for these actions. I will immediately report your outrage to Comrade Stalin!”
Mekhlis turned around and headed for the exit. None of the generals uttered a word, and I only indicated a slight shrug of the shoulders and said as indifferently as possible:
“As you please, Comrade Army Commissar 1st Rank.”
Chapter 4
“Now, Erich, you and I are real state criminals,” said Richtengden softly as von Tresckow left the room, carefully placing the bundle handed to him in his briefcase.
“Wasn't it like that before?” Schliemann wondered.
“Before that there were words, but now the real thing has begun.”
“I don't think the Gestapo could see much difference,” grinned the Major.
“That's right,” Richtengden didn't argue.
“Von Tresckow turned out to be a valuable acquisition for us, don't you think?”
“Quite valuable,” the Colonel agreed, “and also enterprising, which is just as important. It would not have occurred to me to disguise our goods as liquor bottles.”
“You're just not a connoisseur of this drink,” Schliemann smiled.
“A week later Hitler flies to Poltava to the headquarters of Army Group South. If all goes well…”
“Heinrich, let's not get ahead of ourselves. For our part, we did everything we could. There are competent people in the second division of the Abwehr, so I'm not worried about the technical side. Everything now depends on von Tresckow's equanimity and his ability to convince his acquaintance in Hitler's entourage to bring a package for General Gersdorf on the plane.”
“He will convince. I haven't met such an eloquent man as von Tresckow in a long time. But you're right, let's not get ahead of ourselves; we don't have long to wait.”
We didn't have time to complete our preparations. The German offensive was only days away, and the front's readiness for defense was still unsatisfactory. Lieutenant General Kozlov turned out to be quite a competent commander, but, like many other members of the Red Army high command, he lacked initiative, besides, he was completely incapable of arguing with his superiors. But he proved to be quite good as the executor of clear and unambiguous orders.
Letra pointed out to me the two main problems of the Crimean Front. First, the terrain allowed the Germans to use their air superiority effectively. The open steppes, crossed in some places by long, gentle hills, made it easier for enemy aviation to operate and prevented Soviet troops from taking cover from dive-bombers and attack planes.
Richthofen's pilots were considered the best specialists in the Luftwaffe in supporting the ground offensive, which was what Manstein needed now. The aviation of the Crimean Front and Kudryavtsev's separate air regiment could not be compared with the German 4th Air Fleet, which had 700 aircraft, in number and pilot training.
The dramatic jump in the effectiveness of German anti-tank weapons was the second problem. It seemed that the enemy had decided to concentrate all the innovations in this area right here, in Crimea. Not only the tanks of the 22nd Panzer Division, but also the assault artillery of infantry units received new long-barrel guns. Another dangerous German innovation was the anti-tank gun with a conical barrel. It would seem that its rather modest caliber of 28 millimeters should not have frightened the Soviet tank crews. However, the design of the gun and the tungsten-core projectile allowed this relatively light gun to penetrate armor up to 100 millimeters thick. And the final touch to this unsightly picture were the Henschel Hs 129 attack aircraft, designed to fight tanks, which had been sent to Manstein in considerable numbers before the offensive began.
Taken together, these anti-tank weapons drastically reduced the survivability of Soviet tanks in combat, and Red Army commanders had not yet realized the danger of this qualitative leap in the level of enemy anti-tank weapons; they were counting on the T-34 and KV's ability to relatively easily repel the intended attack.
Despite all the parallels I drew between the situation in Crimea and near Leningrad, there were significant differences. In Leningrad, in addition to the guns of the battleships Marat and October Revolution, I also had at my disposal the most powerful air defense system in the city, which consisted of many hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, and balloons. Under the cover of these forces, warships could feel relatively safe and could fire their major caliber guns in relative peace.
Here the battleship Paris Commune had to operate from the open sea, and in case of enemy air raids it could rely only on its own air defense facilities and on the antiaircraft guns of the escort ships, which was fraught with great problems and a high risk of losing the Black Sea Fleet's only major battleship. Consequently, I could only use heavy ships at night, and this significantly reduced the ability to support ground troops with shipboard artillery.
Letra looked at the prospects of the Crimean front without any enthusiasm. I used the Moonbase computer at the limit of its design power, forcing it to analyze many thousands of scenarios, but if we set aside the unlikely options associated with fatal bad luck for the Germans and spectacular luck for the Red Army, the picture was bleak.
We were going to lose Feodosia in any event. Only the date of its fall varied, but in any case it had to happen no later than a week after the start of the German offensive. Even in the best-case scenarios, we would only have been able to delay the advance of the Germans to Kerch. We could have succeeded in stopping the enemy at least on the Isthmus of Parpachia