So it would come down to his fortifications. A thick belt of them covering his left flank. It was a strange irony that the French were criticized for building the Maginot line yet the Germans had spent more on steel and concrete fortifications before the War than the French had - and the French had done a better engineering job. Model's own fortresses were modeled on the Maginot line, deep bunkers in a mutually supporting web. Most of New Schwabia's concrete production had gone into those bunkers.
There was a deep opening belt, dense enough to require a major attack, thin enough to conserve manpower. That would blunt an attack, define its axes and buy him time. Then there were the serious fortifications, the anti-tank guns and artillery and the new anti-tank missiles, all in massively built bunkers on the reverse bank of the Don River. Backing the whole system was the mobile reserve of the panzer divisions, ready to counter-attack and fill any holes in the system. If they could just hold out long enough, it might be enough. Russia was tired, desperately tired after almost 20 years of war. If he could hold them and break their attack, they might give up, accept that they were not going to get back this last piece of what had been their territory and offer terms.
There was a quiet knock on the door and one of Model's Russian women brought in his breakfast tray. Tea and black bread and cold meat and some fresh fruit. The woman placed the meal on the table and backed away. Like any good officer, Model was adept at reading body language and he could sense her fear and then her relief when she made it to the door. That was good, it was fine to have one's people love their ruler but it was much better to have them afraid. Frightened people didn't change their minds.
It would be decades before New Schwabia would be properly established as a new German country. An entirely new generation of new children had to be born, fathered by Germans and brought up as Germans. A new society had to be created for them to grow up in. Model had taken the first step there, in the selection of his title. He liked the rolling sound of Baron, Rittmeister sounded like something out of a circus and Graf was a title best used for engineers. But Baron Model had sounded good, impressive. In New Schwabia, there was no higher authority than Baron. The SS had got the message early. A Priest had posted a list of the Ten Commandments and an anonymous SS officer had added had added “The above only valid when approved by Baron Model.”
Model poured a cup of tea and placed it on the window ledge beside him. Then looked out again, in the east the sun was just rising, its leading edge just showing above the hills. And, as it came into sight in the east, from the west Model heard a long, quiet sustained thunder. It could have been a far-off storm except the weather was good and no roll of thunder was ever sustained like that. Model looked at the cup of tea beside him. The surface was rippling with concentric waves forming on the surface. It wasn't thunder then.
The God of War was speaking.
Belaya Kalitva, Primary Objective, 69th Guards Rifle Division, Second Ukrainian Front
A few minutes to go and everybody had their mouths open. Not from shock or surprise but to equalize pressure and save their eardrums from the hell that was passing over their heads. The numbers were awesome. The total strength for 2nd Ukrainian Front was 550,000 soldiers, 336 tanks, 1270 of the deadly JSU-152 assault guns, 7136 artillery pieces and heavy mortars, 777 multi-barreled rocket launchers and 500 aircraft. The thrust on Konstanthovsk was taking place on a 160 km wide front with a first wave of 30 Rifle Divisions. The main attacking Rifle Divisions had attack sectors that were only 1.5 km wide on the primary threat axis. That meant there was one gun or rocket launcher for every 20 meters of front. They were all firing, as fast as the gunners could thrust rounds into the breech or stack rockets on the rails.
Further to the east, the First Ukrainians were attacking towards Kalachna Don and driving towards the Don-Volga Canal. In 24 hours time, even further east, the First Kazakh Front would launch its assault towards the Volga River at Kapustin Yar and Akhtubinsk. That left the First Byelorussians, but Nikolai Fedorovich Lukinov didn't know where they were going. Head on into Stalingrad he supposed. That would make sense but it would be the devil's own battle. It still made as much sense as anything, if anything could make sense in this hell of noise and shock. The ground underneath him wasn't just shaking, it was moving in waves as the sheets of shells and rockets poured into the German positions in front of them.
Lukinov would have liked to have lifted his head to look at the earthquake enveloping the German fortifications but he knew better than that. Three years fighting the Germans, clearing their gangs of bandits off the soil of Mother Russia had taught him never to lift his head until he had to. And, if he forgot that lesson, Klavdia Efremovna Kalugina was laying down just a few meters away to remind him. She and her spotter, Marusia Chikhvintseva, were one of five sniper teams attached to his battalion. Even now, in the middle of the artillery storm, her rifle was rock-steady.
A few days earlier she'd dropped a German message-runner at a range of 1,200 meters. Lukinov knew that the Germans had snipers also and there was no reason to believe they were any less capable than Kalugina. Well, that wasn't true. There was the greatest reason all to believe that Kalugina was one of the best. She was still alive.
They'd need every edge they could get to take the fortress in front of them. It was called a “block” and was shaped like a hand spread on a table. The fingertips were the front bunkers. Three were anti-personnel with two turrets each housing a pair of machine guns. The other two were anti-tank with a single turret housing an 88 millimeter gun and a single co-axial machinegun. The palm was the artillery bunker, with two turrets each holding a single 105 millimeter howitzer. Intelligence said the turrets were taken from old tanks, that might be so but it made little difference.
The weak point in any fortress was the entry point; here the only one was at the rear of the artillery bunker. The infantry would have to overrun the fortress before they could get to an access point. Of course, the whole ground area of the block was thoroughly infested with landmines, anti-tank and anti-personnel. As a final touch, the block wasn't isolated, there were other blocks either side and behind it that could sweep it with machinegun and tank-killing fire.
This was the front edge of the battle zone; the fortifications at the main line of resistance along the Don would be much heavier.
The raving of the artillery barrage doubled in intensity and a new sound was added, the howl of fighter-bombers streaking across the sky to dump their loads onto the defenses. The ground-attack pilots were taking a terrible risk, diving through the artillery barrage to dump their loads on the enemy.
The screaming, sky-ripping noise of air-to-ground rockets terminating in the vicious flat crack of their explosions, the dull roar and wave of evil-smelling heat from napalm.
Nikolai Fedorovich Lukinov silently blessed the Americans who'd supplied their Russian allies with napalm, the one weapon that terrified the Germans beyond sanity. Jellygas, the fascists called it. If the bunkers had been old-style with firing slits instead of turrets, the napalm would have eliminated them by sucking out all the air but that didn't work against the ones they faced today. Still, napalm would burn off all the cover, let the attacking Frontniki see what they faced. And now the last act of the fighter-bombers, the heavy dull boom of the big bombs with fuze extenders, the plan was that they would detonate or destroy the landmines. Most of them The rest, the Frontniki would find the hard way. Then - silence. Sudden, eerie and complete.
“Follow Me! Urrah! Urrah!”
The cheer was answered along the jump-off line as the Frontniki surged forward. Their mortars, the 82 millimeter ones that went everywhere with them, started yapping, dropping smoke rounds all around the Block that was Nikolai Fedorovich Lukinov's target. Isolate it, try to deprive it of support from the other blocks. Also, try to deprive the artillery observers of lines of sight so the Germans couldn't call in their own artillery support.