Chapter 257
The commentary in Izvestia also specifically mentioned Yuri's previous warning to the Allies. The article believed that McNerney's attitude was too arrogant and he completely ignored the well-intentioned reminders of the "Soviet Red Army", which ultimately led to the current passive situation.
Of course, Izvestia and Red Star were only newspapers targeting the Soviet Union, so neither Americans nor British could see such news and comments. However, the fact that Westerners could not read Soviet newspapers did not mean that the news could not be leaked. At least Shapiro, the chief war correspondent of the Allied Forces, had leaked the news to the BBC, which released it.
The release of this news brought McEnany a lot of trouble. Not only did the British media criticize him, but even the American media accused him of being arrogant and prejudiced. It was precisely because of his arrogance and prejudice that tens of thousands of Americans shed their blood in vain in the Ardennes region.
Corresponding to McNerney, Yuri became famous again in the Western world. Time magazine put him on the cover again. However, this time it was not only him but also McNerney. The cover picture was divided into two parts at a 60-degree angle. The upper half was a picture of Yuri riding a white horse and saluting the camera. This should be a picture from the Moscow Prisoner of War Parade, while the lower half was a picture of McNerney with his head down.
The weekly magazine's caption on the cover was this sentence: "If we look at his age, General McNerney is indeed qualified to be arrogant in front of Yuri Arkipovich. Yes, he is indeed old enough."
Westerners are never reluctant to mock their own people. Whenever a president makes a mistake, he will inevitably be ridiculed by the newspapers.
The breakfast was very sumptuous, but Yuri had no appetite. He just drank a glass of milk, ate two fried eggs and put down his cutlery. He felt very bored these past few days, so bored that it felt like grass was growing on his body.
As the war entered another intermission, the fighting on the entire Eastern Front came to a halt. On the front that stretched for thousands of kilometers, both the Soviet Union and Germany were rushing to redeploy their troops. Everyone was waiting for the rainy season to pass before starting a new round of competition.
Of course, Moscow may have had more sinister plans for stopping the war at this time. Despite their alliance relationship, Comrade Stalin was still happy to see the British and American allied forces shed more blood and pay a higher price.
In this way, the war on the Eastern Front came to a standstill, and the Germans had the energy to create more trouble for the Americans and British on the Western Front. Comrade Stalin very much hoped that the Germans could transfer more troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front to relieve the pressure on the Soviet army.
However, this hope was obviously very slim, because the Germans knew very well that after years of war, the hatred between the Soviet Union and Germany had long been difficult to resolve. If any German unit fell into the hands of the British and American Allied Forces, it might still have a chance to survive, but if it fell into the hands of the Soviets, even if it did not die, it would be badly injured. Therefore, they always deployed their main forces on the Eastern Front to resist the attack from the Soviets.
But even so, the German defense on the Eastern Front, which stretched for thousands of kilometers, had become extremely weak. Out of desperation, they even gave up the encirclement and suppression of the National Liberation Committee of Yugoslavia and instead transferred their main forces to the Drava River line to resist the Soviet attack on Hungary.
Among a series of countries in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia is a very special one. Unlike Czechoslovakia and Poland, which were directly destroyed, during the German occupation, Yugoslavia always had a strong anti-German armed force, namely the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army and guerrillas led by Tito. When the Soviet army turned to counterattack on the Eastern Front, the Yugoslav National Liberation Committee headed by Tito had already established a large-scale liberated area in its territory, controlling more than half of the population of Yugoslavia.
Therefore, when the German army gave up the encirclement and suppression of the liberated areas of Yugoslavia, the National Liberation Committee led by Tito immediately began large-scale conscription. In a short period of time, they recruited 250,000 Serbian recruits, established a large-scale army with the existing Liberation Army and guerrillas as the backbone, and quickly launched an attack on the German army.
Just when the war on the Eastern Front was stagnant, the fighting in the Balkans was in full swing. The German army was defeated by the Yugoslavs and Belgrade was almost undefendable.
Whenever a war takes a turn for the worse, political issues always come to the surface, and this is certainly the case with Yugoslavia.
In order to consolidate the results of the struggle, Tito sent representatives to Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, hoping to obtain recognition from the three countries and abolish the legal status of the Yugoslav government-in-exile and the royal family. However, neither Britain, the United States, nor the Soviet Union supported Tito's proposal, but hoped that he could cooperate with the government-in-exile to establish a coalition government and invite King Peter to return home.
The attitudes of the three countries angered Tito. The strongman no longer paid attention to the attitudes of the three countries, but directly declared the exiled government illegal and warned King Peter not to return to Yugoslavia, otherwise he would be executed.
In some respects, the situation in Yugoslavia is actually very similar to that of a certain large Eastern country.
As the war progresses and his status rises, Yuri no longer limits his focus on the war at hand. His attention begins to expand and he begins to pay attention to more international issues.
For example, he has recently begun to pay attention to the war situation in the East and the Pacific, and he has asked the General Staff to regularly summarize relevant intelligence to him so that he can get timely information from there.
In recent times, special envoys from Chongqing and Yan'an in China have arrived in Moscow, and special envoys from Tokyo are also in Moscow.
As the Germans suffered successive defeats, the Japanese felt a clear threat. In order to renew the friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, Tokyo even gave up some rights and interests in Manchuria, but it was obvious that Moscow had no intention of making any deal with them.
Since the end of the Belarusian Campaign, over the past month or so, the border guards of the Far Eastern Front have had more than ten armed conflicts with the border guards of the Japanese Kwantung Army. These conflicts were initiated under the instructions of the front commander Purkayev and were entirely provocative acts by the Soviet army.
What is certain is that Moscow did not issue a corresponding order to Purkayev. This was all his personal decision. For this reason, the People's Commissariat of Defense issued telegrams twice to reprimand this restless guy. However, it is obvious that this reprimand did not have any effect. Comrade Purkayev still did his own thing as always, and the People's Commissariat of Defense did not have any good way to deal with him.
Comrade Purkayev is a direct descendant of the deceased General Apanasenko, who was one of Stalin's most trusted pre-war generals. That year, just after the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Apanasenko was sent to the Far East. In the following years, he was the de facto "Tsar" of the Far East. He could almost do whatever he wanted to anyone. If he couldn't do anything, he would send a telegram to Comrade Stalin, and Comrade Stalin would take action personally.
Apanasenko served as the "Tsar" in the Far East for nearly three years, building thousands of kilometers of roads and expanding the Soviet defense depth in the Far East by hundreds of kilometers. At the same time, he also built a large number of military factories in the Far East, which could produce not only guns and artillery, but also tanks and even aircraft.
When he took over the Far Eastern Front, the entire Far Eastern Front had 700,000 troops, no organized tank units, and only a small number of aircraft in the air force, no more than 200. In the following three years, the Far Eastern Front successively sent 17 infantry divisions, 2 cavalry divisions, 3 tank divisions, plus dozens of bomber and fighter regiments to the Eastern Front. Even so, when he left the Far East for the Eastern Front, the Far Eastern Front still had more than 1.3 million troops.
Such a large combat corps stationed in the Far East almost suffocated the Japanese Kwantung Army. It can be said responsibly that this was also the most direct reason why the Japanese Kwantung Army always retained hundreds of thousands of troops in Manchuria and dared not move.
Now that the war on the Eastern Front has been reversed, there is no need to draw troops from the Far East to replenish the troops. Therefore, Comrade Purkayev, who commands millions of troops, has become a little anxious and wants to take action against the Japanese.
But unfortunately, the Japanese today are no longer as arrogant as they were during the Battle of Nomonhan in 1939. They have become cowardly. Faced with such frequent provocations, the Kwantung Army Headquarters only protested and never intended to use force .
In fact, the Japanese today are really not tough anymore, because not long ago, the Japanese Combined Fleet, which was called the pride of the Japanese, suffered heavy losses again after the Battle of Midway. They were defeated badly by the US Pacific Fleet in the Battle of the Marianas and almost ended up being wiped out.
In particular, the huge loss of fighter planes and pilots caused the entire Japanese Combined Fleet to almost lose its combat capability, and the remaining aircraft carriers became decorations and were completely useless.
At this moment, what Japan needed was definitely not another war with the Soviet Union. If possible, they even hoped to start peace talks with Chongqing and temporarily stop the war in China so that they could fully deal with the threat from the Americans.
Purkayev didn't know the situation the Japanese were facing because he was only the commander of the Far Eastern Front and relevant intelligence would not be delivered to him. But for Yuri, he was very clear about the current situation, and he had reason to believe that if the Soviet army launched a war against Japan now, it would not be difficult to win.
