IceBreakChron VIII: THE GREATEST IN ALL HISTORY

Started by JasonPratt, May 29, 2020, 06:31:25 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

JasonPratt

June 19, 1941, three days before Barbarossa: eventual Hero of the Soviet Union and Major-General, A.A. Sviridov, is today commanding the 144th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion of the 164th Rifle Division of the 17th Rifle Corps (essentially a mountain corps) of the 12th Army (essentially a mountain army), posted in the Lvov-Chernovits bulge, on the Romanian border.

Sviridov will write later (oddly uncited by Suvorov), "Our division replaced border guards at the river Prut. Leaving the state border, they handed a fortified shoreline to us." They are close enough that "we heard the cries from Romanian villagers: the peasants were being relocated further away from the borders." He draws the obvious conclusion: "All of us Soviet warriors were preparing to fight the enemy only on his lands."

NKVD squads have already forcibly removed Soviet peasants from in front of the Soviet force, dismantling all the mines and barbed wire; June 19th happens to be the bloodiest day of forced Soviet relocations from the White Sea to the Black Sea.

Notice that Sviridov's division is replacing border guards. Neither Zhukov, nor Timoshenko, nor any other military authority has the power to order the guards to leave the borders: the guards aren't under their jurisdiction, but are subordinate only to Beria, the NKVD commissar. On the other hand, Beria doesn't have the slightest authority to order the army units to replace his people on the border! So how exactly did this happen? -- who could give this order? Only one man could have ordered Beria to remove the border guards, and also order Timoshenko to move the army divisions forward to the borders to replace them: Stalin.

Another pertinent, and soon to be disastrous, detail: the river Prut, bordering into Romanian territory, runs parallel to the river Dniester a little farther back into Soviet territory. In order to get to these vacated NKVD posts, the recon battalion has to cross the Dniester (on bridges where the Soviets have totally removed the defensive mines) onto a long strip of land between the two rivers. But they aren't alone; and they aren't really in fortifications. The entire 164th Division will be moving in with them over the next three days! -- not only bringing supplies (both 'soft' like food and 'hard' like ammo), not only bringing headquarters onto this exposed strip of land, but even hospitals. (They will certainly be needing those soon...!)

There are fifteen thousand soldiers in the 164th Division, plus many cannons, many trucks and cars. The "fortifications" are more like wooden border posts; nobody has even dug trenches or foxholes, and no one is doing it now: they don't plan to stay here.

Looking ahead to the bridge over the river Prut, into Romania, Sviridov knows it isn't mined either. The good news is that the Soviet 96th Mountain Division is crammed into this slice of land between the rivers with the 164th! -- another 13,000 troops with all their gear (admittedly more lightly armed for mountain warfare), hospitals, communication groups, and headquarters. The bad news, is that this is one of the places in Romania that the Nazis do intend to attack from.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

June 19, 1941, three days before Barbarossa: Northwestern Front (formerly Baltic Military District) communications commander Major-General Kurochkin has been zooming around up at the still-secret Northwestern Front Headquarters in the Panevyezhis area (while his deputy back in Riga keeps up Baltic MD comms), using landlines to prepare several thousand radio stations in his district to flip over from peacetime to wartime Red Army support, pursuant to expected orders from Moscow.

In his "On the Northwestern Front", p.195, he recalls that today, Northwestern Front Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Klyonov gives him a curious order: "It's a go, per the master plan. You know what I mean?" "'Yes, absolutely!' I declared."

Suvorov suggests that Kurochkin doesn't tell his readers what this master plan was -- perhaps Suvorov is obscuring what Kurochkin says here? But the Soviet generals do have some master plan, one that Kurochkin presents Klyonov as being cagey about even in personal conversation; a master plan now on go.

Kurochkin describes how he goes about implementing his side of "the master plan" (ibid, p.118), "The District Communications Office dispatched documentation on how to set up radio links... to the various army headquarters and to formations subordinate to the District itself. All these documents were to be appropriately adapted as they made their way down through corps, division, regiment, and battalion command levels, ultimately reaching those staffing each radio station. That, as I have already said, would have taken no less than a week."

He is talking about the distribution of top-secret intelligence, of the kind you only distribute and act upon during a war, being distributed out to thousands of end-users to act upon. This will take at least a week, and then after that the master plan which requires these war-time secrets to be distributed, will activate. Once Kurochkin starts this process, those secrets cannot be put back in the safes; they must be used or else totally voided for replacement later.

Perhaps Chief of Staff Klyanov expects a Nazi invasion? If so, he must suffer a brain embolism between now and three days later, because he adamantly dismisses the possibility of Nazi invasion while it is happening and refuses to do anything about it. Klyanov wasn't a big fan of defense anyway; back in 1940 he had berated Zhukov himself, with Stalin watching, about how Zhukov (of all people) wasn't being competent enough for Klyanov's standards, at understanding how to prepare and deliver a surprise attack!
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

June 19, 1941, three days before Barbarossa, Zhukov telegraphs Kirponos, the current commander of the Kiev Special Military District, "The People's Commissar of Defense [Timoshenko] has issued the following orders: the command should leave for Ternopol by June 22, 1941, leaving the subordinate district commander in Kiev... The selection and transfer of front command is to be kept top secret, and the district staff personnel should be notified of said secrecy." (From the Central Archive of the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation, Fund 48, Index 3408, Case 14, Sheets 442-44.)

Zhukov also sends out similar telegrams today to Baltic MD Commander Kuznetsov, and to Western MD Commander Pavlov. Kuznetsov should be arriving at the newly established Northwestern Front HQ at Panevezhis on June 22 or 23; and the same should be happening for Pavlov and his staff at Obuz-Lesni.

There's a very good reason why creating a "front command" like this should be kept secret: in Soviet Doctrine, "fronts" and their headquarters only exist when the Soviet Union is at war!
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

#33
June 20, 1941: Chief of Staff Major-General Zakharov, picks up most of Odessa MD's officers today, and rolls them over into 9th Army's HQ.

Odessa MD commander Cherevichenko is still on the way back from the Crimea, having gone over to pick up 9th Special Corps (formed in the Caucasus as an amphibious assault group, intended and trained to operate from Soviet Black Sea Fleet ships), to bring them back to his new Southern Front HQ, also at 9th Army. They're still training for their "Special" role of being the Soviet Union's first amphibious assault Corps, so he's had some understandable delays returning with them -- not even counting the congested Soviet transportation network! He'll be caught on the trains when Hitler invades two days from now.

As Zakharov takes over 9th Army HQ, and sets up Southern Front HQ for Cherevichenko's expected arrival, he raises 9th HQ to combat alert status.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

#34
June 20, 1941, two days before Barbarossa: Lieutenant-General A.I. Yeremyenko (also spelled in English Eremenko, later a Marshal of the Soviet Union), having arrived in Moscow after a hard day's travel all the way over from commanding 1st Army (i.e. over in the Far East where it was created), recollects (in "When the War Began", 1964, p.109) that on this day 13th Army Headquarters was ordered to relocate command of the Western Military District from Mogilev to Novogrudok.

This isn't the same as the conversion of MD high command into Fronts -- that's already happening. This is the movement of the Military District HQ remaining behind the (secretly created) Front, up closer to Front HQ.

Remember, Military Districts in Soviet doctrine (per Suvorov) are meant to be staging areas for offense, with only a secondary mission of temporary defense. In defense, the MD command should stay back some distance, not only to be safe from the threat of attack, but also so that they can organize big-picture defensive deployments and re-deployments more easily in the backfield.

Even on offense, the whole point to having a second deputy-commander of a MD, is to take over duties of the original commander and his first deputy, acting as military governor of the District and helping organize the logistic supply of its relevant Front HQ. Now the Western MD HQ is being called forward, out of its great defensive structures, and even more importantly out of its previously established command-and-control network, to set up governorship and logistic duties in an area not suited for either defense or for the MD's logistic support of the Front.

A Military District command headquarters would be suicidal, even on a normal offense plan, to move closer to the front -- unless they're the ones expecting to attack with such overwhelming power that the MD HQ would be under no threat of disruption from the enemy's defenders. Then it makes perfect sense to be closer to where the action is going to be, in order to make up-to-the-minute adjustments, especially for the deployment of reserves into critical portions of the attack, and to start creating network extensions into the newly conquered regions.

So, who will be left in charge back at the original well-developed MD HQ, for collaborating with the new forward position of the MD officers? No one at all!

From Yeremyenko's hindsight recollection, of course, this order will pave the final stone of disaster for the Western Front two days from now. He's arriving in Moscow today to receive secret orders about something, but he's about to get very involved unexpectedly in the fate of Western Front...

[Next up: The Day Before that disaster...]
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!