Chapter 27 The Rebels Attack
Yuri has matured. To be more precise, Yuri has matured after his rebirth. Facing the threat of the impending war and leading hundreds of soldiers under his command, Yuri has matured rapidly in the past few months and now possesses the basic qualities of a commander.
After throwing the letters from Olga and Julia into the trash, Yuri began to enjoy his dinner. The army's dinner could not be very rich, especially when the camp was stationed in such a remote place. Black bread, mashed potatoes, a small piece of bacon, and a thick red vegetable soup were Yuri's dinner. If it were in the past, he would find this dinner difficult to swallow, but now, it didn't matter.
"Boom boom boom"
I had only taken two bites of the dinner on the table when there was a hurried knock on the barrack door.
"Come in!" Yuri frowned. This was not Arkady's style of knocking on the door.
The half-closed door was suddenly pushed open, and a young soldier in blue trousers rushed in and shouted, "Comrade Captain, Sergeant Lavtilian Borisovich Ivalenko of the communications platoon of the Lutsk radar station reports to you!"
Is it someone from the Communications Platoon? Yuri turned around in astonishment. You know, there is no affiliation between the Communications Platoon and his 209th Battalion. According to the confidentiality level, he has no right to interfere in the daily affairs of the Communications Platoon. Now, a corporal from the Communications Platoon actually came to report to him, so something must have gone wrong.
"What's the matter?" Yuri asked in a deep voice, looking the corporal up and down.
"Comrade Captain, this is the urgent telegram we received ten minutes ago," Corporal Lavtilian stepped forward and handed a translated telegram to Yuri, "Lieutenant Nikita asked me to pass it to you."
Lieutenant Nikita is the current commander of the communications platoon of the Lutsk radar station. As soon as you hear the name, you know it is a woman. However, Yuri has been in Lutsk for a month and has not seen this person yet - this is very normal. Nowadays, all radar stations in the Soviet Union belong to the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Since the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs was divided into two, the radar stations have been under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of State Security. In other words, the lieutenant is a national security lieutenant and is not under the jurisdiction of the army.
Yuri took the telegram and read it hastily. This telegram should be said to be a warning telegram, and the content involved an attack.
Just this noon, the Kalokhov radar station 75 kilometers north of Lviv was suddenly attacked by a group of "Bandera armed rebels". The radar station was severely damaged and there were casualties.
After reading the telegram, Yuri stood up, walked to a map hanging on the wall not far away, and looked at it carefully.
Judging from the map, the Kalokhov radar station is located in the small town of Kalokhov, more than 70 kilometers north of Lviv. The distance from the town to Lutsk is also about 70 kilometers. In this way, it is possible that this group of rebels will go north and continue to attack the Lutsk radar station.
Don't think that the Soviet Union is peaceful these days. That is an illusion. In Ukraine, especially Western Ukraine, since large tracts of territory have just been acquired from Poland and Romania, this area is actually very unstable. Bandera armed rebels, Polish nationalists, and Romanian rebels are all active. They are active in jungles, mountains and other areas with complex terrains, confronting the Soviet people's regime. These rebel organizations are small and even have only a few people, while the large ones have hundreds of people. In 44 years of the previous life, General Nikolai Fedorovich Vatutin, who performed well in the Great Patriotic War, died in an attack by Ukrainian nationalist bandits.
The communication platoon of the Lutsk radar station sent this telegram to Yuri with a very clear intention. Although the communication platoon has an armored personnel carrier, it is only used for transportation, not for real combat. No one expects a communication platoon to resist the attack of the rebels. Therefore, the task of guarding the radar station must be undertaken by the 209th Battalion stationed in Lutsk.
Yuri carefully checked the map. The terrain of Lutsk is quite complex, with dense jungle and swamps. The road from Lviv is not very smooth. The only road is the road from Lviv to Pinsk. Yuri believes that it is unlikely that this group of rebels consisting of dozens of bandits will travel through the road. After all, there are heavy troops stationed in the Chervono area along the road.
Since the rebels could not march along the highway, they could only take the small roads. Although the terrain was complex, there were many small roads from Lviv to Lutsk, including the vast jungles. No one could deny that the rebels might pass through the jungle and attack the radar station from an unexpected direction.
Taking these practical situations into consideration, Yuri believed that the first thing to do was to find out the possible route of the rebels' attack, and this task would inevitably require the scouts to complete.
Of course, the scouts' reconnaissance cannot be aimless. At least one or several key directions must be determined.
After analysis, Yuri believed that the most likely direction for the rebels to attack was the Puska Forest. This forest was located in the south of Lutsk, away from the road from Pinsk to Lviv, but the deviation was not very far, only less than 10 kilometers away. Considering that the rebels had no transport vehicles and no logistical supplies, their route could not be too far away from the road.
Yuri planned to arrange four groups of reconnaissance personnel to conduct reconnaissance in the area south of Lutsk. The focus of the reconnaissance was on several collective farms along the way. As long as there were strangers entering and leaving any of the collective farms recently, it was very likely that the rebels had passed through the area.
In addition to conducting reconnaissance, Yuri focused his defense on the radar station itself. He planned to set up two lines of defense with the radar station as the center, using temporary fortifications built with sandbags as basic firepower points and allocating two companies of troops to implement defense.
Neither pure attack nor pure defense is an effective way to attack the enemy. Yuri prefers to combine the two. If the scouts cannot confirm the route of the rebels' attack, or cannot figure out their location, then the radar station can be protected from damage by having troops defending near it. If the scouts can gain something, Yuri will quickly mobilize troops to encircle and suppress them, hoping to wipe out all the rebels.
Yuri had to be thankful that he was reborn relatively early. At that time, the soldiers in the Soviet army were still relatively combat-ready. Unlike after the first phase of the Soviet-German War, the experienced soldiers were all lost in the first phase of the battle, and the troops were filled with newly recruited recruits with no combat experience.
Although the 209th Battalion was established not long ago, most of the soldiers in the battalion are not new recruits, but veterans transferred from other units. They are rich in combat experience, and some of them are scouts themselves.
Yuri backed up his plan and passed a rough outline of the plan to Lieutenant Nikita of the communications platoon, and then began to arrange the battle.
Just as the communications platoon had worried, the rebels who had previously attacked the Kalokhov radar station actually chose the Lutsk radar station as their second target.
The scouts sent by Yuri discovered the traces of this group of rebels on the afternoon of July 23 and conducted a preliminary investigation of their strength. According to the information fed back by the scouts, this group of rebels has expanded in size after attacking the Kalokhov radar station, and their number has reached hundreds.
Even in western Ukraine, where separatist organizations are active, such a large-scale rebel organization has rarely been seen in the past two years. Yuri suspects that such a rebel organization must be supported by foreign forces. Judging from the current international situation and the political situation around the Soviet Union, there are too many forces that may provide support for the rebels, such as the Germans and the Romanians.
The rebels are supported by his own people, and it has nothing to do with Yuri. What he needs to do now is to defeat, crush, or even annihilate this group of rebels. If he can fight a beautiful encirclement and annihilation battle, maybe he can leave this damn place of Lutsk before the real war comes.
Although there were only more than a hundred rebels, Yuri did not take it lightly. This was also an opportunity for him to train his troops.
With one battalion facing more than a hundred enemies, it seems to have an absolute advantage, but it is actually not easy to fight a beautiful encirclement and annihilation battle, because the enemy does not need to defend a certain stronghold, and the flexibility of combat is much higher than Yuri's 209th Battalion. And what about Yuri? He has to guard the radar station, and he needs to devote a considerable part of his troops to defense.
Previously, there were two companies guarding the radar station. If one of them was not used, Yuri could only mobilize one company plus a machine gun company. In terms of manpower alone, he did not have much advantage. If one of the companies was mobilized, the mission of guarding the radar station would be risky. Once the rebels took advantage of the loophole, the consequences would be disastrous.
As this was the first battle he commanded, Yuri did not dare to take any risks. After comprehensive consideration, he gave up the impulsive idea of encircling and annihilating this group of rebels on the external battlefield. He decided to first ensure the defense of the radar station and then look for opportunities to annihilate the enemy in battle.
In order to achieve this operational objective, Yuri transferred a platoon from the machine gun company under his control and added it to the battle sequence guarding the radar station. He kept the superior forces as mobile, ready to be deployed into the battlefield when the opportunity arose and to inflict heavy damage to the rebels with absolute superiority in force.
War is very unbearable, but what is even more unbearable than war is the time spent waiting for war to break out.
On the afternoon of the 23rd, just after the scouts first discovered the rebels' whereabouts, after communicating with the radar station's communications platoon, Yuri moved his battalion headquarters into the radar station's base, where he would command the battle - the first battle he personally commanded.
