I Became Stalin?!

Chapter 10

Erich von Manstein, the commander of the 56th Panzer Corps, clenched his teeth.

He had fallen into the trap of the damned Jewish-Bolsheviks. 

And with his precious tank units!

He had argued that the German army should quickly advance to Leningrad. 

The Führer wanted to crush Leningrad and rename the city Adolfstadt.

“Leningrad is their former capital and the birthplace of the revolution. The surrounding industrial area is where the Reds have their factories. Why do you think the revolution happened there? It was because the workers from those factories were incited by the Reds!”

Manstein regretted his argument a little.

The people of the Baltic states had a grudge against the Soviet Union, and when the German army set foot on Soviet soil, they rose up in armed rebellion and joined the Germans. 

The German army, which had conquered Lithuania and Latvia, was able to replenish more troops than it had lost, thanks to the Baltic volunteers.

Only Estonia remained in the far north. The remnants of the Soviet units that the German army thought they had annihilated began to resist and delay the German advance to Tallinn.

The commander of the 4th Panzer Group, Hoepner, was torn between whether to conquer Estonia and reach Tallinn, the northernmost port city, or to focus on breaking through the Pskov defense line. 

Manstein supported the latter, and Georg-Hans Reinhardt, the commander of the 41st Panzer Division, also agreed.

“Capturing Leningrad is a way to achieve both goals.”

Reinhardt said that to persuade Hoepner. Hoepner trusted his two generals. 

He had served as a tank division commander under Manstein’s command in the invasion of France, and he fully supported Manstein’s strategic vision. 

Or maybe he wanted to capture Leningrad as the Führer wished.

“We have to take Leningrad to shatter the Reds’ will to fight. It was the capital of the Russian Empire and the capital of the revolution, and it bears the name of their leader. Taking this city will have more than just one city’s worth of effect.

“Also, we can destroy their war-making capacity. Taking their Baltic fleet and war material factories hidden in Leningrad, that’s why we have to march to Leningrad!”

“Deploy anti-tank guns on both wings! Aim for their tracks and stop their movement!”

Manstein blamed himself for underestimating the Soviet military capability. 

For the first one or two weeks of the war, the Soviet army showed a pathetic face. 

Their defensive tactics were sloppy, and their commanders lost their precious forces as if they were leaking them.

But after a few weeks, things started to change. 

Manstein, a veteran soldier, could tell.

“Fuckers! 2 o’clock direction, enemy tank! Fire!”

“Sir! Retreat order!”

Rotmistrov gritted his teeth. 

He threw his last grenade and fired his machine gun at the sky where Stukas were diving down with sirens. 

He also cursed profusely.

“*Bastards! *Fucking *bitches!”

The order from the 5th Panzer Group’s superior command, the Northwest Army Group, was quickly relayed. 

The Soviet tank units had to retreat under a hail of fire.

One by one, more and more.

The casualties increased as they retreated. 

The 5th Panzer Division, which should have been the strongest fist of the Northwest Army Group, was now half destroyed. 

Silence returned to the plain where burning tanks of both sides were scattered.

“You did well enough.”

“Yes. Thank you, commander.”

Batutin read the report summarizing the losses and praised Rotmistrov. 

He didn’t know what he had been doing, but he couldn’t hide his blazing eyes with a white bandage wrapped around his shoulder.

“The German attempt to bypass Pskov was thwarted by the struggle of the 5th Panzer Division. In the meantime, our allies in Estonia and Narva were able to reinforce their defenses.”

“That’s good news.”

The Germans didn’t know how much more tank power the Soviets had hidden. 

The 56th Panzer Corps and the 41st Panzer Division, which had bled heavily against the 5th Panzer Division, gave up on advancing further after their victory, thinking that they couldn’t afford any more losses.

Pskov had escaped the encirclement. Although it had lost almost all of its available tank power.

“Tanks can be produced more. But if we lose a stronghold, it will cost a lot of blood to reclaim it. I’ll report this to Stavka. Well done!”

“Thank you! Your Excellency!”

Now it was time to show off his achievements and request reinforcements. 

The chief of staff told the frontline commanders to buy time. 

The Soviet army would grow stronger with time.

Tens of millions were being conscripted. 

Thousands of tanks and tens of thousands of artillery pieces were being produced and deployed. 

The recruits needed time to train and master their weapons. 

It was the duty of the units that were deployed first to buy that time.

Batutin evaluated that the Northwest Front had done its job well enough. 

He didn’t know exactly how many troops the Germans had, but they wouldn’t be able to try to bypass Pskov again. 

He slowly dictated his report to the typist, which he would send to Stavka.

‘We suffered severe losses in the artillery exchange. The command skills of our tactical commanders were also not as refined as the Germans’. It’s something that time will solve, but there’s too much blood to spill in the meantime.’

Click, click. 

The sound of the typewriter seemed unusually loud. 

The young commander analyzed the weaknesses of the Soviet army coldly. 

The Soviet army was far superior to the German army in terms of equipment and manpower. 

But that alone was not enough to break the Germans. 

It would take too much blood if it did.

The Germans skillfully coordinated their troops and vehicles, and weapons to precisely strike at the Soviet weaknesses. 

They knew how to use their available forces more than they had by deploying them in the right places. 

And…

“Damn air force…”

“Yes?”

“No, never mind.”

The damn air force bastards. 

The Soviet pilots were hopeless in terms of skill and equipment. The German air force shot down several Soviet planes every day and produced new aces by the dozens. 

The morale of the Soviet squadrons plummeted day by day. 

Only German planes roamed freely in the empty sky.

The loss of air superiority severely hampered the ground operations. 

The Stukas, which delivered attacks that were several times more accurate and lethal than artillery fire, tipped the balance of the battlefield in favor of the Germans.

He finished his report roughly and leaned back deeply in his stiff field chair. 

Most of the field commanders probably had similar stories to tell. 

About the horror that came from the sky. 

The higher-ups said they would produce and deploy more anti-aircraft guns and heavy anti-aircraft cannons, but anti-aircraft guns alone were not enough.

There was a fundamental limit to ground weapons. 

If there was an area densely packed with anti-aircraft guns, then the air force simply avoided it and passed by. 

They couldn’t plant anti-aircraft guns everywhere, so they picked out weak spots and hit them and returned safely.

They needed fighters to stop them. High-performance fighters that could fight on par with German fighters. 

Until then, they would have to fend them off with anti-aircraft guns and soldiers’ blood.

“Air force…”

“Yes, Comrade Chief of Staff. I hear that our air force is inferior on the front line and causing great damage.”

As in real history, the German army used ground attack aircraft extensively for ‘blitzkrieg’. 

It was a concept similar to aerial artillery. 

They used attack aircraft like Stukas to support rapid advances where artillery fire couldn’t reach everywhere. 

As long as Germany had air superiority, there was nothing the Soviet army could do.

The Soviet Union succeeded in rapidly expanding its industrial capacity, but it showed its limits in the aviation industry, which was the epitome of high technology. 

They deployed 20,000 aircraft, but only a few were all-metal aircraft, and some were even made entirely of wood.

They were researching the technology to boost the output by attaching superchargers, but they hadn’t yet developed a proper product. 

They also lacked facilities for refining light metals like aluminum.

Everything was scarce in the real history of the German-Soviet war, and the Soviet Union was inferior in air power until it reached Berlin. 

The resources scraped together were used to support the ground forces that shed blood directly. 

The Allies had an overwhelming air force in the Western Front, which forced the Luftwaffe to be transferred there, so they could breathe a little.

“Did you hear? Molotov?”

“Yes, Comrade Chief of Staff. I will succeed and return.”

Molotov was about to leave as the head of the delegation.

His destination was the United States. 

He would go to Washington, half a world away, to meet Roosevelt and get Lend-Lease to fight against the fascist army.

Roosevelt was a friendly person. 

Unlike many other leaders of the free world, he had been wary of fascism’s rise early on and advocated for cooperation with the Soviet Union to contain it. 

He also championed state interventionism in economic policy and called himself the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’.

The materials that the United States provided in the German-Soviet war made a decisive contribution to reversing the course of the war. 

From high-octane aviation fuel and bomber engines to thick winter socks and spam. 

The Soviet Union was able to fight against Germany until the end, even after losing its major industrial areas, thanks to the tremendous sacrifice of the Soviet people and the American aid.

In real history, Lend-Lease only started to arrive in the Soviet Union in 1942 and 1943, but Molotov wanted to get support as soon as possible. 

He went to America.

One hour earlier would save one person’s blood. He had to quickly scam them and get them before they got used to the wartime support system and realized what they could and couldn’t give. 

The precision machining machines that the Soviet Union couldn’t develop on its own, which were extremely scarce, should not be given to other countries easily, but did they know that? 

The oil refinery plants that could produce fuel for vehicles, jet engines that were still in development, copper for radios and telegraph lines for communication between front-line units, and seeds for grains and livestock to feed the people!

There was so much we could get from America.

And there was ‘that thing’ that we didn’t have yet, which would save millions of lives.