I Became Stalin?!

Chapter 9

“Don’t you think so too?”

“How dare… How could we possibly know the intentions of Comrade Secretary General? We just follow his orders.”

His voice was completely hoarse. 

He was still shaking his hand with missing fingers, a sign of the torture he had endured. 

He squinted one eye as if in pain and bowed to me in a servile manner.

Rokossovsky, one of the best generals of the Soviet army and a man of misfortune who was abandoned by both his homeland of birth and his homeland of faith. 

He was born in Poland and devoted his loyalty to Russia and the Soviet regime. 

But the Soviet Union threw him into a prison camp and forced him to confess to an unproven conspiracy.

Eventually, he was released and reinstated after the country faced a crisis, but then he was sent to Poland as a military governor, because he was of Polish descent, and made him hated by the Polish people. 

He never considered himself Polish, but everyone thought he was. 

Even the Poles who hated Rokossovsky.

There was nothing he could do about what he had done. 

The only thing left was to get him out of the prison camp as soon as possible.

Rokossovsky was at least a field army commander. 

Considering his experience in the Civil War or the Soviet-Polish War, he could have replaced the weak Soviet military leadership as a front army commander or even a chief of staff, but… 

To be honest, I doubted his loyalty. Could someone who had been tortured until a few days ago have no hatred or resentment for the regime?

Stalin seemed to be clicking his tongue all the time. 

He said he would get a good slap on the back of his head someday.

Anyway, Stavka agreed to bring him back to the military. 

In actual history, he was a corps commander, and in the defense of Moscow, he was a field army commander, but for now, I decided to postpone his command position.

I gave Rokossovsky an unofficial rank of deputy chief of staff and assigned him the role of coordinating two front armies in the northern front: Konev’s Northern (=Leningrad) Front Army and Bagramyan’s Northwestern Front Army.

That’s why Rokossovsky came to my office and summarized the reports from the two front armies, received my instructions, and drew up a blueprint for the future.

“You can sit down and report from now on. If you need it, I’ll make you a special chair.”

“Thank you, Comrade Secretary General!”

‘Special chair’ sounded like a torture device somehow… But I meant a wheelchair. If his toes were so mangled that he had to wear specially made boots, a wheelchair might be more comfortable.

In actual history, after this point, several more front armies were added to the Soviet army.

In the northern front, there were the Karelian Front Army that was responsible for the Finnish direction, and the Volkhov Front Army that had the mission of liberating the Leningrad siege ring, in addition to the Leningrad/Northwestern Front Army. 

In the central and southern fronts, there were front armies that changed their names constantly, such as Kalinin Front Army, Crimean Front Army, etc.

To exploit the rivalry between Zhukov and Konev and make them compete with each other, I had to raise them to similar ranks, so I planned to give Konev the command of the northern front, and promote some more people to fill in the front army commanders as they increased. 

One of them was obviously Rokossovsky. 

I had to make him familiar with the situation in the northern front as soon as possible.

These administrative reports were terribly boring compared to some battle reports that I had marked.

The Soviet generals that I knew of, especially those who rose to the highest ranks such as Soviet Marshals or equivalent later on, were assigned to command combat units from division commanders to field army commanders depending on their careers in places where fierce battles would take place. 

Rokossovsky was still recovering from his aftereffects -and I didn’t trust him completely yet- so I called him to my staff office for now…

Malinovsky and Tolbukhin, who would play an active role in Stalingrad in 1942 -here it might be more likely Kiev battle since the southern front didn’t seem to be pushed back so much- were given hints under Zhukov’s command to play pivotal roles in counterattack operations. 

They would be the commanders of new shock armies.

Ivan Bagramyan, Vasily Chuikov, Ivan Chernyakhovsky and others who were not high enough in rank yet were given corps or division commands and entrusted with leading the vanguard of the battlefields to build up their merits and opportunities for promotion. 

And I read their reports carefully, so the commanders of all ranks would take good care of them. 

Who do they think they are, to ignore those who were marked by me?

The most interesting report among those that came up was undoubtedly Pavel Rotmistrov’s.

He might not be well known in Korea, but Pavel Rotmistrov was one of the highest-ranking military officers who rose to the Soviet Marshal after the war. 

At the time of Operation Barbarossa, he was the chief of staff of a mechanized corps under the Northwestern Front Army and rose through the ranks to command the 5th Guards Tank Army in the Prokhorovka tank battle at Kursk.

It was Rotmistrov who fought a bloody battle against Manstein’s spearhead in the south of Kursk and prevented the cutting off of the salient. 

In front of his 5th Guards Tank Army were legendary units such as the 1st SS Panzer Division LSSAH, 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf and Wehrmacht Panzergrenadier Division Großdeutschland, which Nazi Germany had scraped together and deployed. 

He fought a desperate battle against them and eventually won!

In the meantime, he was a front army commander who personally rode a tank and charged into enemy tanks, destroying them with ‘close combat’.

“This is like Romance of the Three Kingdoms… Ahem, never mind.”

This was supposed to be the era of World War II, right? 

Instead of fighting each other, the generals were writing their own Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

The reports that came up through cross-checking also clearly stated ‘Colonel Rotmistrov, charged with a KV tank and destroyed two enemy tanks’…

He looked like a gentle old man, but when he entered the battle, he became a berserker?

“Charge! Chaaaarge!!! *Tear off the heads of those filthy fascists!!”

The tank crew was almost crazy. 

He opened the hatch and fired his pistol into the sky, shouting loudly for the charge. 

He was our division commander.

The fascist army’s tanks could not penetrate the armor of our KV tanks, but they could still shred people with machine guns or anti-tank guns. 

But the general was shooting at the enemy’s barrage with his machine gun.

“11 o’clock anti-tank gun! Fire a high-explosive shell at the muzzle! Hahaha!”

“Yes, sir!”

Rotmistrov was receiving ‘special attention’ from Stavka. 

Maybe he was crazy enough to deserve it… Anyway, Bagramyan of the Northwestern Front Army gladly scraped together all the armored forces of the front and gave them to the 5th Armored Division.

Most of the tanks that could be called ‘tanks’ were KV tanks and T-34 tanks, and they were assigned to the 5th Armored Division led by Rotmistrov. 

The remaining armored units were disbanded or reduced to brigade level, and only a few dozen tanks that were too embarrassing to call tanks were left.

The 5th Armored Division became the strongest fist of the Northwestern Front Army. 

The remaining light tanks and mediocre ones were not even worthy of being called offensive means, so it was fair to say that it was the only fist. 

Rotmistrov, who wielded this fist, led the charge himself from the front line, spraying machine guns.

Of course, he was not a mindless berserker. 

He recalled the operational plan and terrain map that he had prepared before the battle.

There was a swampy area about 30km east of Pskov, where it was difficult for armored units to maneuver. 

After that, there was a brief plain, but if you went a little further east, there were hills and forests that made it difficult for armored units to move, and it was still an area occupied by the Soviet army. 

The German armored units had to bypass the city and swamp and try to encircle and annihilate them by going behind our lines. 

They had to pass through a narrow corridor between the swamp and hills -Bagramyan predicted that.

Rotmistrov was fighting them in that corridor.

The opponent was the spearhead of the Northern Group Army, the 56th Panzer Corps under the 4th Panzer Group. Rotmistrov didn’t know it, but his opponent was Erich von Manstein, who was famous as a designer of blitzkrieg and scythe operations and a great general.

Rotmistrov didn’t care about that.

“Fire! Don’t worry about friendly fire!”

Boom! Boom! 

The Soviet army’s pride, 152mm howitzers fired in unison at the radio command. 

The operation itself was simple.

He divided his tank unit into two parts and ambushed them on both sides of the exit of the corridor between the swamp and hills, waiting for them to pass through the corridor. 

When the German army’s armored units were caught in the crossfire from both sides, he mobilized his division’s artillery regiment and a third tank unit to strike at their rear!

Germany had a ridiculously low tank production rate. 

Nazi Germany started the war too early after an adventurous diplomatic operation and could not provide enough equipment to each division. 

Especially for their tribute army, the Northern Group Army. 

The 56th Panzer Corps had four divisions, but only one of them was an armored division.

Even in an armored division, most of them were Panzer II or III tanks, and there were only a few dozen Panzer IV tanks that could be called real main battle tanks.

“Damn it!”

Clang! A Panzer IV tank’s shell bounced off the armor of a KV tank.

There were sparks and flashes, but Rotmistrov cursed and then burst into laughter.

“You dirty fascist bastards! *Pierce them through! Fire!”

“Yes! Fire!”

The Panzer IV crew that hit the KV tank and rejoiced did not escape. 

The 76.2mm tank gun penetrated the Panzer IV tank. 

The ammunition exploded or something, and with a heavy bang, the turret flew off. Destroyed!

They could not stop them with the German army’s ‘gentle door knockers’, the PaK 36s. 

Only the 15cm heavy guns that belonged to the divisional or corps artillery, or the famous 8.8cm anti-aircraft guns, could halt the mad bears that were the Soviet tanks.

But the German howitzers had no time to aim at the Soviet tanks. 

The Soviet artillerymen relentlessly targeted the German medium howitzers with direct fire, and the German howitzers had to respond to them. 

Artillery was the god of the battlefield, but as the old joke went, the gods were too busy with their own affairs to meddle in trivial matters.

The German soldiers had a chance to experience the Soviet weapon development firsthand.

And it was not a pleasant experience at all. 

The 56th Motorized Division was like a flock of sheep attacked by three angry bears, panicking and being hunted one by one. 

The Germans, who thought they could pass through easily, encountered an unexpected ambush from the Soviets and were hit hard.

“Hey, hey!”

“Hahaha! Eat this, you *s!”

The division commander bit off the pin of a grenade with his teeth, as if they were made of steel. 

He had a strong arm, and his grenade flew towards the enemy infantry who were approaching. 

A few of them fell to the ground. 

Out of his four divisions, one was an armored division and the rest were infantry divisions. 

They were motorized, but they were essentially infantry.

The infantrymen hid behind the shadows of destroyed tanks and fired their guns, not knowing what to do. 

They prioritized people like Rotmistrov, who exposed his body outside.

Whether he received some divine protection, or rather the protection of the secretary-general since socialism did not acknowledge God, the bullets did not hit him. 

He did not care even when his glasses broke and blood dripped from his cheek that was scratched by a fragment.

“Soviet Ura! Ura! Blow up their heads, you *s!”

“Uraaaa!!”

The Soviet tankers shouted ecstatically. 

The Germans had never faced proper resistance until then, but they had to struggle against the Soviets who came close with their superior equipment as if they were possessed.