Part 41: Turn 38: March 5, 1942
Motorcycle guards, what will they think of next?
I love all the different mustaches.
Starting now we have the ability to fuse 3 airborne brigades into a Guards Rifle division. I'm not really desperate for more rifles right now so I'm just going to hang off and not do this. Airborne brigades can be turned into something much better later and I can't make more airborne units if I use them all up now.
A new ToE for our rifle divisions. We pick up more rifle squads, more mortars more artillery more machine guns and more AT rifles. This is a pretty big upgrade to their effectiveness in combat but it'll be awhile before most of the divisions switch over.
This front looks very different from where it was at a few turns ago, it's very dramatic.
We only launch a few attacks up here, mostly we're just continuing to rotate beaten up divisions off the line and settling into the new routine.
The 7th independent army pulls back from the Finnish border. I'm going to be reforming this army into something that's actually capable of fighting and use them to start bleeding the Finns.
More of the same, our armies are in pretty poor shape and they need to be refit.
Extremely limited attacks on this front. The formations are getting back up to size but they're still exhausted, maybe we'll be able to launch a few more attacks next week.
Pulling more armies off the line, now that the Germans can attack again we need to have reserves. It also gives us a chance to get some armies refit to go on the offensive if an opportunity presents itself.
This front is way overstaffed for the amount of land it's covering so we're pulling a bunch of armies off to form reserves and to ship down south.
You can start to see my double line forming up here. Eventually we're going to have a hardened frontline with a weaker line trailing 10-20 miles behind it in areas where I'm afraid of German attacks. There's no reason to give the Germans free victories by forming a carpet defence right now, in the Summer I might have to resort to that but I doubt it.
While pulling the 1st shock off the line I caught a glimpse of what they're using for light tanks and thought you guys might enjoy it. There's basically 4 choices for light tanks right now. Most units are using T-60s (which are garbage,) a few really lucky units have already upgraded to the T-70 which just started showing up this month and a handful of formations are using the Stuart like the 1st Shock here but there aren't a lot of Stuarts to go around. Finally a bunch of exceptionally unlucky units are still using T-26's ranging from 1931-1937 models. The 88th Tank brigade on the Volkhov front must have really pissed someone off because they're the only unit left in the entire Soviet Union that's still using the 1931 model T-26.
Well the one front where we can still launch a bunch of attacks. A panzer army has shown up so I wonder if the Germans are going to try to hurt me here.
We beat up the line with impunity until we get down to here. There's a bunch of Germans reinforcing the line here and I honestly don't have the strength to dislodge them right now. I could bring in a cavalry army for this but I'd rather concentrate on attacking further south.
The southern front takes a break from beating up Romanians. Most of them are exhausted so a week of is a welcome break.
The transcaucasus front has no such mercy though and opens up. I'm curious how much farther we can advance down here before the Germans dig in enough to stop us. I have a suspicion that it will be the mud and not the Germans that stop our advance down here.
The largest concentration of attacks is around Leningrad, but the Germans fail to gain much ground.
Near Moscow there are scattered attacks on the weaker parts of my line, forcing some formations to retreat.
This turn we launched 33 attacks with 28 succeeding and the Germans responded with 43 attacks with 12 victories. The Germans seem to be struggling to make any headway right now, we'll have to see how they fare after the mud.
