Part 56: Turn 53: June 18, 1942
Hey that's a neat present for the last mud turn, our first armored Guards formation.
How I've been using my armor so far really isn't conducive to getting a lot of guards promotions on these brigades. I've been babying them to preserve tank numbers but I probably should have been manually committing them to battles that were guaranteed to win to feed some of them victories. Oh well, live and learn.
The Finns are on vacation apparently, can't say I blame them.
I reinforce the pocket, there's some nasty looking German formations here but I think I will hold it.
And some Romanians get pushed around.
It's over, the mud is finally gone! 
Scattered attacks near Moscow, not much progress is made.
Near Orel a large German force burrows into a thin part of my line but gets nowhere near breaking through.
At Kursk a handful of Germans punish the over-exposed Urals Military District.
At Odessa we lose a hex goddamnit just let me take this stupid city.
OK! The spring mud is finally over and we're officially in the Summer campaign season. If the clear turns of the past month are any indication the Germans are not in any shape for a prolonged offensive and their line is catastrophically weak in a number of key areas.
In the north both sides are heavily entrenched in level 3 forts in highly defensible terrain. It will be impossible for me to make any ground up here without committing significantly more forces up here than I already have, so the summer plan here is to do exactly nothing. If I see an opportunity to attack I'll take it but I'm not going to give this front any extra troops, in fact I'm probably going to strip the reserve armies from this front for elsewhere.
The Finns are not a threat since I'm never going to lose Leningrad and since I can't really make much headway against them without several armies of rifle corps I'm just not going to bother.
Outside Moscow the Germans are much more active than they are up north. I can't really match the German CVs in this area so all I can do is dig in and bleed them as they try to push through my lines. I'll keep some armies in reserve but I don't think the Germans are capable of a major breakthrough here.
Real action! This is by far the weakest part of the German line right now and I'm going to exploit the hell out of it, most of my reserve forces are going to be deployed here. Primary goal is to take the east bank of the Desna and the Dneipr south of Kiev. This will create an enormous bulge in the German line that should be easy to defend since it will be bounded by major rivers and it will be easy to take because it's all clear territory to the rivers. When the blizzard rolls around the marshlands and rivers will freeze over and I can continue pushing west or I can swing south and roll up the line to Romania.
Taking the city of Kiev isn't a primary objective during the summer because I doubt my ability to make an opposed crossing the Dneipr in clear weather. To take Kiev I would very likely have to come up the western bank from the Crimean front and attack it from the south rather the the east.
The Germans have committed enough forces down here that it's no longer worth it for me to make this the primary offensive location this summer. I'm not going to let off the pressure, the Romanians are cracking and I intend to pound into the dust. My primary goal down here will be to shadow the Southwestern front's advance along the Dneipr as far as possible and to push this bulge north to stretch the German line as much as I can. There's only so many Germans and they can't cover every hex here, the more ground I force them to cover the more Romanians and Hungarians get exposed.
