The Rise of the Third Reich

On April 30, 1937, just three days after bombers belonging to the German Condor Legion carried out a major bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica. General Ludwig von Heinsberg-Hersmann, an old friend of the Soviet people, a good friend of Comrade Lenin, and a close friend of Comrade Stalin, visited Moscow.

He arrived on a Junkers Ju.90 passenger plane, which is the passenger version of the Ju.89 and is very comfortable and smooth. When he got off the plane, two Soviet children wearing red scarves presented flowers to him and Chloe. Another of his "friends", Marshal Tukhachevsky, who was likely to be shot in more than a month, then stepped forward to shake hands with Hessmann cordially and then hugged him.

Neither of them mentioned the "inhumane" bombing, as if it never happened.

"Welcome, General!" Tukhachevsky said in fluent German.

"You are the marshal! Congratulations, Mikhail Nikolayevich!" Hessman replied in fluent Russian.

The Soviet Union implemented a military rank system in November 1935, and Tukhachevsky became the first Soviet marshal. He also served as the First Deputy People's Commissar of Defense and Minister of Military Training.

"I have done it a long time ago. It's too late for you to congratulate me now." Tukhachevsky said half-jokingly, "Ludwig, you are still a Marquis. I am not as good as you in this regard."

This sentence will become a crime in more than a month - trying to restore the reactionary rule of the Tsar in the Soviet Union!

"It's just a false name, and there isn't much annuity to get," Hersman shrugged nonchalantly, then pointed at his wife, "But she really likes being a marquise. I actually became a royalist because of her."

"Ludwig, you are making fun of me again." Chloe glared at her husband, and then went to shake hands and hug Tukhachevsky's wife, Nina Tukhachevskaya.

Hessman only glanced at this beautiful woman with sympathy. After her husband was shot, she would definitely not survive!

As for the possibility of Tukhachevsky surviving by chance, Hersman felt it was very slim. Although he did not order the intelligence services to frame Tukhachevsky - Hersman knew very well that Stalin in history would never believe that Tukhachevsky was a German spy. A person of Tukhachevsky's status had everything in the Soviet Union. How stupid would he be to become a German spy? This kind of thing is nothing more than the power struggle within the Soviet Union...

"Mikhail Nikolayevich, the general outline of the plan to attack Poland you want has been brought." After the greetings, Hersman got back to business. He was his new adjutant and had just been appointed as the French military attaché. Lieutenant Colonel Hans Speidel, who was promoted back to the General Staff Headquarters, waved, "Hans, give the document to Comrade Marshal."

It is impossible to bring the entire text of The Black Project, and it is not necessary. What the Soviets wanted to know was just a general idea of ​​when to attack, where to launch the attack, what tactics to adopt, and of course...and how to deal with the aftermath - this needed to be resolved through negotiations between the Soviet Union and Germany.

…

"Why not use mechanized troops to carry out large-scale deep assaults? Isn't that what you did in that exercise in 1935?"

The next day, when Hersman saw Tukhachevsky again in the People's Commissariat of Defense at No. 19 Znamenka Street in Moscow, the other party suddenly asked this question.

"Why isn't it mechanized warfare?"

He asked this in Russian, because there were three other Soviet marshals present who did not understand German, including the very strong-looking Marshal Alexander Ilyich Yegorov, who was the Chief of Staff of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army; Semyon Yegorov. Marshal Mikhailovich Budyonny, he has a Cossack-style beard and does not look very smart. He is now the Deputy People's Commissar of Defense and is in charge of cavalry work; the last one has a "Hitler-style" mustache , looking a little slow, is the People's Commissar of Defense of the Soviet Union Krement Yefremovich Voroshilov.

According to the information learned by Hersman, these four Soviet marshals were actually divided into two factions. Tukhachevsky and Yegorov were so-called "military experts" who were genuine military officers in the former Tsarist Russia and joined the Bolshevik Party after the August Revolution.

Budyonny was a "Chairman of the Soldiers Committee" and was a veteran before joining the revolution. Voroshilov was a professional revolutionary who was born as a child laborer. After the February Revolution, he entered the military as a representative of the Soviet workers and soldiers and a local leader of the Bolshevik Party. He was a self-taught military strategist.

Later, Voroshilov, who was self-taught, and Stalin, who was also self-taught, fought together in Tsaritsyn. Because they both hated "military experts", they fumbled around and directed blindly. They actually won the battle, but lost 60,000. people. As a result, he was criticized by Lenin at the Eighth Bolshevik Congress, Stalin was transferred back to the Central Committee, and Voroshilov was transferred to Ukraine as a military commander. As a result, he became a political commissar in Ukraine, working with Budyonny, the commander of the First Cavalry Corps. . Then he and Budyonny became close friends again. Through his relationship, Budyonny got to know a group of people from the First Cavalry Army - Zhukov, Timoshenko, and Rokossovsky (these were all soldiers Born, never entered the Tsar's military academy, Comrade Stalin hated people who came out of the Tsar's military academy), etc., all became Comrade Stalin's military team.

Both Tukhachevsky and Yegorov were "military experts", and these "military experts" were all figures valued by Trotsky during the Soviet-Russian Civil War. Therefore, the Great Purge of the Soviet Red Army can also be seen as Stalin's purge of "military experts" and "Trotskyist suspects" who came from the former Tsarist Army.

After a large number of reliable young officers who entered military academies after the end of the civil war grew up, it is understandable that Stalin eliminated some unreliable "old people"...

As for how much the Soviet Red Army's combat effectiveness was damaged by the purges, in Hersman's view the main problem was that the Germans were too capable, as if they were cheating. Wouldn’t France and Poland, which had not experienced the Great Purge, still be unable to withstand Germany? It’s not like the British were blocked by a strait, so it would be almost over in 1940 or 1941.

If Tukhachevsky and Yegorov were to command the Red Army that had not gone through the purges and trample Poland, France and the United Kingdom, would they be able to sweep them all? It is simply impossible. Just look at the Zhang Gufeng incident in history at the end of July and beginning of August 1938. The Far East Front Army commanded by Blucher had a hard time defeating the Japanese Kwantung Army.

…

"Because we don't have enough national strength to mechanize the entire army." Hersman greeted several Soviet marshals, and then everyone sat down at a conference table covered with a green woolen tablecloth and began to discuss the "Black Plan" .

"The entire army must be mechanized?" Yegorov shook his head. "According to French military theorist Charles de Gaulle, a small number of mechanized troops can be enough to tear apart the enemy's defenses as sharp knives."

"That was the experience of World War I," Hessman said eloquently. "If we encounter the army of World War I, we can indeed succeed. But what we are facing now is partially mechanized infantry, even the Polish army with backward equipment. It also has hundreds of tanks and a larger number of armored vehicles, and those tanks and armored vehicles can be equipped with 20mm machine guns and 37mm anti-tank guns.

This is tantamount to mechanizing and armoring anti-tank firepower... If we had anti-tank firepower that could move quickly in the last world war, we would have destroyed a large number of Allied tanks. After the "Iron Fist 1935" military exercise, we also conducted many confrontation exercises between armored divisions and infantry divisions equipped with mechanized anti-tank firepower. The results were that the armored divisions were victorious. We believe that if an infantry division can possess dozens of self-propelled anti-tank guns that can move quickly, it will be enough to block the assault of an armored division in a preset position. "

Hessmann was not completely deceiving the Soviets. In fact, the German Wehrmacht had been conducting similar drills in the past two years. And a motorized infantry division equipped with a Type 1 assault gun battalion can indeed cripple an armored division. Unless the attacking armored division could be supported by a strong tactical air force.

Compared with the Ju.89 and Do.19 that are used to scare people, the Ju87 dive bomber, Hs-123 attack aircraft and the Ju.88 medium bomber under development are the keys to Germany's sweep of Poland and France.

Tukhachevsky and Yegorov looked at each other and nodded slightly. The Soviet Red Army actually conducted similar exercises. As a result, it is difficult to prove that a concentrated tank force can definitely defeat an infantry division equipped with a small number of tanks and a large number of anti-tank weapons. Unless the attacking side has a huge advantage in tank performance, or has overwhelming air superiority!

Moreover, the Soviet Red Army has recently noticed that they may have some problems in seizing air supremacy. This was the wake-up call the Spanish Civil War gave them! The German Bf-109, Fokker D.31, and even the old Fokker D.21 all have an overwhelming advantage in performance over the Soviet I-15 series and I-16 series.

Without air superiority, the Soviet tank troops are likely to be attacked from the air! Even an aircraft as old-fashioned as the Hs-123 (in this time and space, the Hs-123 first flew in the late 1920s) can still pose a major threat to Soviet ground forces.

Therefore, after defeating White Poland, the Soviet Union must remain quite vigilant towards Germany!