Chapter 23: Inescapable Fate
There is no democracy in the army, let alone in a Soviet military academy. Faced with the students' discussions, the instructors present used the simplest and most effective method - they scanned the room with a serious look, and the originally chaotic classroom instantly became quiet.
No one explained why Yuri's group won, and won by a large margin. These things will not be announced until all the exercises are completed and the summary is made. So, even if everyone has questions at this time, they can only keep them to themselves.
The exercise continued, and Yuri was very excited for a while, until the third group of students started to compete, and his energy returned from the excitement. At this stage of the exercise, his interest in military command had been fully mobilized. He found that military command was the purest confrontation, a confrontation between people. This confrontation included many aspects: the confrontation of intelligence, thinking, physique, national strength, etc. In short, all kinds of competition and confrontation in human society can be reflected in military command.
To describe it with an old saying, war is an art, an art of killing, an art of how to kill people more effectively and quickly. Once caught up in this art, anyone will become obsessed with it.
Unfortunately, there were obviously few outstanding commanders among the students of this class, at least their talents were not very good. The subsequent exercises were boring, without any unexpected classic tactics. The students were rigid in their minds and their technical and tactical skills were rigid and stereotyped, so that the subsequent exercises could hardly attract people's attention.
After the second round of exercises, it was time for lunch. In order not to affect the continuation of the exercises, lunch was eaten in the classroom. Each student had only ten minutes to eat. After ten minutes, the exercises continued.
The exercise continued in this way until four o'clock in the afternoon, when the results were finally announced by the review panel. Unsurprisingly, Yuri and his trio received an "excellent" evaluation.
Don’t underestimate this excellent evaluation. When this period of training is over, the students’ performance in school will directly affect their positions after returning to the army.
At the end of the exercise, the results were announced and the review team also commented on the tactical arrangements of each group. Undoubtedly, the tactical arrangements of Yuri's group were highlighted. In the words of Colonel Petrovsky, "War is not about bravery, it is a kind of wisdom. You need to use your mind to arrange every detail, and every detail may determine the success or failure of the war."
A seemingly insignificant military academy exercise brought Yuri, who had been in a confused state since his rebirth, into a whole new realm. For the first time, he began to develop a genuine interest in the skill of military command.
Of course, before this, Yuri also paid great attention to the cultivation of his personal military qualities, but at that time, his main goal was to survive in the upcoming war. Starting from this exercise, he gradually began to regard military command as a personal interest.
“The basic method of strategic action is offense. The essence of military science is to attack the enemy directly at the most vulnerable part of the enemy, rather than approaching the enemy indirectly and in a roundabout way.”
"The basic principles of tactics are: observation, speed, and fierce attack, and the main purpose of war is to destroy the enemy's vitality. 'To repel the enemy is a failure, while to destroy the enemy is a victory.'"
“There are no unchanging and permanent principles in war; everything depends on the characteristics of the enemy and the unpredictable and ever-changing conditions.”
In his peaceful campus life, Yuri began to systematically come into contact with and learn real military command ideas, including the military ideas of many world-renowned military leaders such as Suvorov, Winfield Scott, and Horatio Kitchener. However, his starting point was a bit low after all, and he had never participated in real combat. These things could only be stored in his brain as a kind of knowledge, and they could not become his own things.
And as Yuri immersed himself in military studies, the chakra of the entire world was sliding towards the abyss of war.
In March, the Soviet-Finnish War came to an end. With Timoshenko's arrival in Leningrad and the establishment of the Northwestern Front, the Seventh and Thirteenth Armies launched a full-scale attack on the Finnish Army's entrenched positions in the Karelian Narrows. In February, the Finnish Army's Viipuri Group was surrounded by the Soviet Army. The Finnish Army surrendered after less than two weeks of being surrounded. Almost on the same day, the Soviet 13th Army crossed the Vuoksa River and launched a powerful offensive against Kekisalmi. The Finnish defenders ran out of ammunition and food and were eventually forced to surrender.
By mid-March, all of the Finnish defense lines had collapsed. In order to avoid losing the capital Helsinki, the Finnish government finally chose to surrender. The two sides agreed to sign the final contract in Moscow on the 12th, and the Soviet-Finnish War, which had lasted for several months, ended.
Less than half a month after the Soviet Union and Finland signed the treaty, the Germans launched a surprise attack on Denmark. Denmark's weak army faced an invading force of 1,000 German soldiers and gave up the front after only a weak resistance. Then, the old and frail Danish king announced his surrender, and Denmark fell.
After occupying Denmark, the Germans launched an invasion of Scandinavia in early May, and Norway became its next target for annexation.
During the invasion of Norway, the German army exchanged fire with the so-called Allied forces composed of the British and French armies. However, no one could have imagined that during the invasion of Norway, on May 10, groups of Stuka dive bombers suddenly launched a large-scale air raid on France and low-lying countries such as Belgium. A few hours later, with the influx of a large number of German troops, Luxembourg was the first to perish, and the Ardennes Mountains in Belgium also fell into the hands of the German army.
When the news spread, the whole world was shocked, and just two days later, the fall of the French Meuse River defense line made the whole world speechless.
The passivity of the French battlefield reminded Moscow that the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact signed at the beginning obviously could not make the Kremlin feel at ease. No matter what the history textbooks of the previous life said, at least in Yuri's opinion, Moscow was not without defense against the Germans. On the contrary, from the moment the German army broke through the important French town of Sedan, Moscow had been preparing for the war that might come at any time.
As soon as the Germans launched their attack on France, Comrade Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, who had performed outstandingly in the Battle of Nomonhan and was highly regarded was promoted to General and then appointed Commander of the Kiev Special Military District.
At the same time, in order to build a complete "Eastern Defense Front", the Soviet army entered Estonia and Latvia in early June. The governments of Pats and Ulmanis fell one after another, and the two countries immediately joined the Soviet Union. Together with Lithuania, which was later incorporated into the Soviet Union, they formed the northern front of the Eastern Defense Front.
The shadow of war began to spread over the entire European continent. At the turn of spring and summer, the wind blowing from the west seemed to carry the smell of gunpowder. Various military mobilization orders were passed back and forth. Moscow even imposed martial law twice after June in order to capture spies engaged in sabotage activities.
Even before May, the military school where Yuri was studying became busy. First, an order came down from the superiors, requiring the academy to select a group of students to participate in the May Day parade and receive inspection by Comrade Stalin and other leading comrades.
As a recipient of the Order of the Red Banner, Yuri, who is tall and handsome, was naturally selected as one of the participants. However, he did not participate in the parade as a student soldier representative, but as a member of the battle flag formation. As for the military flag he carried, it was the flag of the Leningrad Military District.
I don't know if it was because he was too handsome or because of bad luck, but less than a month after the May Day parade, in early June, Yuri received an order from the higher authorities forwarded by the academy, saying that 20 students, including him, would be transferred to Kiev in mid-June and report to Korosten, where the Ninth Army Headquarters was located. Their personnel files would also be transferred there. In other words, Yuri's training in Moscow ended ahead of schedule, and he was transferred from the Leningrad Military District to the Kiev Military District.
The appearance of this transfer order struck Yuri like a thunderbolt. His memories of his previous life were so clear that he certainly knew what it meant to be transferred to the Kiev Military District at this time. You know, in the space of his previous life, the Battle of Kiev was a large-scale encirclement and annihilation battle in the early days of the Soviet-German War. More than 700,000 Soviet troops were annihilated by the German army in this battle, which seemed to include the damn Ninth Army.
Life is full of drama. After being reborn into this world, Yuri racked his brains and tried every means to stay away from the war as much as possible, but in the end, after all his efforts, he got closer to the war.
Now, with only one year left before the official outbreak of the Soviet-German War, he received an order to be transferred to the Kiev Military District. Not only him, but also Belik and August received the transfer order.
Finally, rumors came out that Moscow was strengthening the military strength of the Kiev Special Military District, which urgently needed a large number of middle and low-level commanders. After considering various factors, the academy recommended 20 outstanding students to the higher authorities, and Yuri and others were on the recommended list.
It turns out that the root cause is here. Everything was caused by themselves. Yuri wanted to give himself two hard slaps in the face.
