Chapter 99: The Commander is Gone
The heavy snow and the battle to capture the city lasted until near dusk. The 133rd Division also paid a heavy price to capture several German defensive positions in the city of Sollechnogorsk. The number of casualties was even greater than when it launched a counterattack in Klin.
By 5 p.m., the last German troops who were resisting stubbornly gave up resistance in the administrative building of the Shaposhnikov Higher Military Academy and surrendered to the Soviet troops besieging the stronghold. At this point, the battle to retake Sollechnogorsk officially ended.
Yuri's jeep drove through the messy snow and mud into the ruined city, all the way to the location of the Shaposhnikov Higher Military Academy. Less than two months ago, he lived here for a while, and he was very familiar with every place here. But now, this place has become a real ruin. His former dormitory now has only a broken wall standing there, and no one knows where the Lenin statue in front of the school playground has been taken to. Only a pedestal full of bullet holes is left lying there, which is indescribably desolate.
During the battle, the German army deployed the largest number of troops in this school, and the Soviet attack was most difficult. In the campus alone, nearly 300 German soldiers surrendered, half of whom were wounded.
The jeep stopped in front of the school's dilapidated administrative building. When Yuri got off the jeep, more than 30 German wounded soldiers were escorted out of the building by Soviet soldiers and gathered on the playground in front of the building. The Western Front Command had ordered that all German prisoners captured in the battle must be sent to the prisoner-of-war camp near Moscow as soon as possible, and in the 133rd Division, this escort work would be personally responsible for by Deputy Division Commander Pitakov.
The military commissar of the division, Cherminov, also had his own work to do. He had to cooperate with the small team of the Internal Guard to register the stranded residents in the city to eliminate potential spies and German intelligence personnel. Of course, these residents who survived the disaster would be investigated by the counterintelligence department of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs for a long time to come, mainly to investigate whether they had done anything for the Germans during the German occupation and what they had done.
Compared to them, Yuri is now free. In the next period of time, he only needs to arrange troops to establish defenses in the urban area to prevent possible counterattacks launched by the German army - although this possibility is not very high.
"Wait a moment," Yuri saw dozens of German prisoners of war walking past him, his eyes fell on the arm of a wounded soldier, he frowned and spoke.
"Stop!" Arseniy was not so good-tempered. Seeing that the group of German prisoners of war did not understand Yuri's words and continued to move forward, he could not help but step forward, grabbed a prisoner by the collar, pulled him out of the team, and shouted loudly.
The Soviet soldiers escorting the prisoners thought something had happened, so they raised their guns and looked at the prisoners vigilantly.
Being pulled out of the team by a Soviet officer, the wounded German soldier looked very nervous. He stared with a pair of light blue eyes, slightly raised his face covered with dust and blood, and said something quickly with trembling lips.
Unfortunately, Yuri didn't understand Russian and there was no translator with him, so he couldn't understand what this guy was saying.
"Take off his wound," Yuri said to Arseni, not bothering to find out what the young German soldier was talking about.
"Yes," Arseni responded, and without explaining to the wounded German soldier, he stepped forward, grabbed the blood-soaked cloth on his arm, and pulled it off with force.
The wound cloth had long been stuck to the solidified blood scar and was pulled off violently. The wounded German soldier let out a scream and then stepped back holding his arms. However, a Soviet soldier behind him hit him hard on the neck with the butt of his gun. He immediately collapsed to the ground and was unable to get up for a long time.
After fighting for such a long time, the hatred between the soldiers of both sides is beyond words. Each side wants to kill the other. The German soldiers will not be soft on the Soviet prisoners, and the same is true in reverse.
However, Yuri was not interested in torturing the prisoners. He just wanted to see how these wounded German soldiers were being treated so as to roughly judge the logistical supply situation of the German army.
The wounded German soldier, whose wound patch had been torn off, sat on the snow, holding his arm and screaming. Yuri took a look and found that a large part of the wounded soldier's forearm from the elbow down had turned black and swollen, and the epidermis was purple and shone with a strange luster. This was caused by the untimely treatment of trauma and frostbite. Even though he had never studied medicine, Yuri knew that the wounded soldier's arm could not be saved, and if it was not amputated as soon as possible, once he had a fever, he would probably not even be able to save his life.
After checking the conditions of several wounded soldiers, Yuri found that their injuries had one obvious thing in common, that is, they were not treated with any disinfection or sutures. They were often just wrapped with wound cloths, which was considered as treatment. Now it is winter, and the temperature is so low that it is fatal. It is estimated that these German military doctors have no medicine to stop bleeding. They can't do effective hemostasis for the wounded, so they let the low temperature freeze their wounds to achieve the effect of stopping bleeding. However, although this method of stopping bleeding is effective, it is fatal. Bad blood is frozen in the wound, which often causes large-scale necrosis, and even infection, and even sepsis and other serious diseases.
A modern mechanized force was not even able to supply enough medicine to treat its soldiers. This shows the lack of logistical supplies in the German army.
After getting the answer he wanted, Yuri signaled the escorts to take the German wounded away. He knew why the front command wanted to concentrate these prisoners of war in the suburbs of Moscow. The reason was very simple. The Supreme Command decided to parade all the German prisoners captured in the Moscow counterattack in Moscow. This was because Stalin had done so in Yuri's previous life, and now history was repeating itself.
Of course, Yuri had no interest in sympathizing with these German soldiers. After all, they were invaders and the party that took the initiative to provoke the war. Not to mention that they had no choice, let alone that they were just following orders. It was the same as in the case of incitement to murder, the murderer could not be innocent.
After letting the escorts take away the German wounded soldiers, Yuri went straight into the school's administrative building.
This Stalinist building, which was built less than five years ago, has almost become a "relic". All the windows in the building have been destroyed, and the wooden window frames were taken down by German soldiers during the German occupation and burned as firewood. Yuri walked around the building and saw more than 20 bodies of German soldiers that had not yet been carried away, as well as a large number of traces left after burning firewood.
After inspecting the building that he was very familiar with, Yuri gave up the idea of continuing his journey. He drove directly back to the division headquarters and began planning the next part of the city's defense. In addition, he also compiled the battle report and submitted it to the army headquarters.
As predicted before, the division headquarters did not receive any new combat missions in the two days after the recapture of Sollechnogorsk. The counterattack of the 133rd Infantry Division stopped in the city, and did not advance any further westward until Yuri was ordered to leave.
In the last few days of December, the Soviet counterattack in the entire area near Moscow went very smoothly. Katukov's troops, which advanced the fastest, even pushed the front line 250 kilometers westward in seven days, which was simply unstoppable.
While other troops were fighting, the 133rd Division was recuperating. All Yuri could do every day was to inquire about the troops' situation, make a routine report, and then hide in the division headquarters to chat with several commanders, including the military commissar and the deputy division commander.
On the third day after the recapture of Sollechnogorsk, Yuri got a large screen and several rolls of film tapes from the old cinema in the city, and then began to show movies on the playground of the Shaposhnikov Higher Military Academy. Every night, a large number of idle soldiers and wounded soldiers would brave the severe cold to come here to watch movies. Unlike the commanders' helplessness, for ordinary soldiers, these less than ten days were probably the happiest days since they joined the war.
This leisurely life lasted for more than ten days. On January 5, Yuri received a call from the Army Chief of Staff Malinin. During the call, Malinin asked Yuri to report to the Army Headquarters that afternoon, saying that the front headquarters had issued a new combat mission.
Yuri mistakenly believed that his 133rd Division was finally going to return to the front line. After receiving the call, he ran happily to the army headquarters without even packing his luggage. As a result, he found out after arriving that the new task was not assigned to the 133rd Division, but to the 16th Army Headquarters.
In this order issued by the new chief of staff of the front, Lieutenant General Sokolovsky, the 16th Army Command was required to temporarily transfer the existing troops to the command of the 9th Army. Then, all members of the army command, including Yuri, the combat staff, were immediately transferred to the Sukhinichi area 150 kilometers away from Kaluga, to gather the scattered Soviet troops in the area, launch a counterattack against the German troops occupying the Sukhinichi railway station, and retake this important area as soon as possible.
This new order made all members of the 16th Army Command, including Rokossovsky, very depressed, and Yuri even more so, because according to this order, not only would he have to leave the main battlefield in front of Moscow, but he would also lose the command of the 133rd Infantry Division. He had been the damn division commander for less than a month.
