Part 8
The recon reports show that the Red Army has fallen back forty miles to the south. They also have a rung of troops protecting Leningrad.
16th Army moved to engage them, but for the most part, the Russians have retreated faster than we can advance. The 30th Infantry Division has a good day of it, routing three enemy divisions and clearing a decent sized hole in the enemy line.
The rest of the army clears some more of the Red forces, and frees up the 1st Panzer Division.
The 18th Army shatters the enemy in front of it, and the 11th Infantry Division marches forty miles closer to the centre of Leningrad.
The Finns cut off and annihilate two Divisions of Russian troops, and then move closer or up to the no attack line their commanders have drawn on my map.
Finally, 4th Panzer Group moves, they strike north, avoiding the enemy strong point south of Ilmen lake, and punching past Novograd.
Once more, we look at the recon reports to plan our advances.
Moscow is in sight, and the Red Army has thrown up another line of men, but it is obvious our first moves should be to eliminate the pocketed troops.
9th Army moves forwards, they eliminate several units, and trap two more.
2nd Army, which will be reinforced by three more divisions soon enough, also clear out some of the pocket.
The 4th Army moves forwards, the gapes between our units are getting larget down here, but the enemy are not advancing, and our men should be able to hold. With a large part of the pocket remaining, I am forced to us 3rd Panzer to help eliminate it.
They clear the north, and still manage to advance twenty kilometres closer to Moscow. He main thrust comes from 2nd Panzer, who form a new pocket around Zanoznaya – which includes a large number of Cavalry divisions (the / units in there) – six of them that we know of – this is a large bulk of the Soviet rapid response unit, and is a major coup!
Only 100 Kilometres to Moscow. And the enemy ranks are thinning fast. 28 enemy units have been eliminated her this week, and 31 so far – and we still have the AGS reports to look at.
Here are the casualties at this point.
We have taken out a quarter of a million Russians, and we still have the large pocket to liquidate.
The recon shows that the enemy have no real line in front of us – we real have cut their balls off and taken a huge number of their core units.
The Romanians march forwards, they clear several enemy units from the area, but with no panzers in the area, their advance is slow.
11th Army also pushes forwards, I need to move these guys south towards the Crimea soon, I'm not sure that the Romanians are going to be able to take Sevastopol.
6th Army begins to eliminate the balls, and it goes very well.
Kiev holds out – that 19 there means 190 CV on the defence. The rest of the units collapse when we advance on them.
17th Army moves forwards and begins to spread out – they will move south as well soon, but for now, I use them to pin open the lines for 1st Panzer Groups advance.
They are, like so many of our units, low on fuel, but they cross the Depnr and ready themselves to strike south east along it. I may move towards Kharkov, but Sevastopol and the Crimea is now my main goal.
In the north, the main pcoket holds, the Red Army seems to have retreated another 20-30 kilometres.
The main news is that the Ruski's have gone hell for leather surrounding the 3rd Motorized Division, our spear – point unit. I have the Totenkoph SS Division to their south, so I'm sure I shall be able to retrieve them with no difficulty.
I'm not sure whats going on in the centre – our cavalry pocket has been broken, and apparently two Panzer Divisions, the 10th and 4th, are low on supplies, if not cut off. They have about 45% fuel and more supplies, so they are in no danger.
The south is boring – there are no new Russian units we can see, and none of our advances are being threatened.
A nice week for losses, we continue to suffer less than 10,000 casualties a week, while the Russians have lost nearly half a million men this week. They have lost more tanks, men and guns in a week than we have in the entire war.
Add to that 58 units destroyed, including the prizes of 12 armoured, 7 Motorized and 5 Cavalry Divisions – all these are modern units, we can chew up the Russian infantry divisions easily, its these units that give me pause.
Our numbers stay stable, while we chip 300,000 off the Russian army, as well as 10,000 guns and 1000 tanks. All looking good – if we can keep doing this.
Our supply levels are stabilizing a bit now, but not dropping.
The number of men flowing forwards are also steady.
The factories continue onwards at pace. I would like them to be building more than they are, but I will have to make do. I spend some of my AP to replace leaders, the only notable one being that 11th Army in the south is now under the command of Model, which should kick them into gear.
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As you can see, were still moving forwards, but nowhere near as quickly as we were before.
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This is interesting, I seem to be ahead in some places, behind in others – overall, I am advancing on a broader front - Moscow wise, I am actually about the same as historically. Lets hope I've done more damage to the Red Army than in reality, or this could be a much closer thing than I had hoped,