don't think the Gestapo could see much difference,” grinned the Major.
“That's right,” Richtengden didn't argue.
“Von Tresckow turned out to be a valuable acquisition for us, don't you think?”
“Quite valuable,” the Colonel agreed, “and also enterprising, which is just as important. It would not have occurred to me to disguise our goods as liquor bottles.”
“You're just not a connoisseur of this drink,” Schliemann smiled.
“A week later Hitler flies to Poltava to the headquarters of Army Group South. If all goes well…”
“Heinrich, let's not get ahead of ourselves. For our part, we did everything we could. There are competent people in the second division of the Abwehr, so I'm not worried about the technical side. Everything now depends on von Tresckow's equanimity and his ability to convince his acquaintance in Hitler's entourage to bring a package for General Gersdorf on the plane.”
“He will convince. I haven't met such an eloquent man as von Tresckow in a long time. But you're right, let's not get ahead of ourselves; we don't have long to wait.”
We didn't have time to complete our preparations. The German offensive was only days away, and the front's readiness for defense was still unsatisfactory. Lieutenant General Kozlov turned out to be quite a competent commander, but, like many other members of the Red Army high command, he lacked initiative, besides, he was completely incapable of arguing with his superiors. But he proved to be quite good as the executor of clear and unambiguous orders.
Letra pointed out to me the two main problems of the Crimean Front. First, the terrain allowed the Germans to use their air superiority effectively. The open steppes, crossed in some places by long, gentle hills, made it easier for enemy aviation to operate and prevented Soviet troops from taking cover from dive-bombers and attack planes.
Richthofen's pilots were considered the best specialists in the Luftwaffe in supporting the ground offensive, which was what Manstein needed now. The aviation of the Crimean Front and Kudryavtsev's separate air regiment could not be compared with the German 4th Air Fleet, which had 700 aircraft, in number and pilot training.
The dramatic jump in the effectiveness of German anti-tank weapons was the second problem. It seemed that the enemy had decided to concentrate all the innovations in this area right here, in Crimea. Not only the tanks of the 22nd Panzer Division, but also the assault artillery of infantry units received new long-barrel guns. Another dangerous German innovation was the anti-tank gun with a conical barrel. It would seem that its rather modest caliber of 28 millimeters should not have frightened the Soviet tank crews. However, the design of the gun and the tungsten-core projectile allowed this relatively light gun to penetrate armor up to 100 millimeters thick. And the final touch to this unsightly picture were the Henschel Hs 129 attack aircraft, designed to fight tanks, which had been sent to Manstein in considerable numbers before the offensive began.
Taken together, these anti-tank weapons drastically reduced the survivability of Soviet tanks in combat, and Red Army commanders had not yet realized the danger of this qualitative leap in the level of enemy anti-tank weapons; they were counting on the T-34 and KV's ability to relatively easily repel the intended attack.
Despite all the parallels I drew between the situation in Crimea and near Leningrad, there were significant differences. In Leningrad, in addition to the guns of the battleships Marat and October Revolution, I also had at my disposal the most powerful air defense system in the city, which consisted of many hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, and balloons. Under the cover of these forces, warships could feel relatively safe and could fire their major caliber guns in relative peace.
Here the battleship Paris Commune had to operate from the open sea, and in case of enemy air raids it could rely only on its own air defense facilities and on the antiaircraft guns of the escort ships, which was fraught with great problems and a high risk of losing the Black Sea Fleet's only major battleship. Consequently, I could only use heavy ships at night, and this significantly reduced the ability to support ground troops with shipboard artillery.
Letra looked at the prospects of the Crimean front without any enthusiasm. I used the Moonbase computer at the limit of its design power, forcing it to analyze many thousands of scenarios, but if we set aside the unlikely options associated with fatal bad luck for the Germans and spectacular luck for the Red Army, the picture was bleak.
We were going to lose Feodosia in any event. Only the date of its fall varied, but in any case it had to happen no later than a week after the start of the German offensive. Even in the best-case scenarios, we would only have been able to delay the advance of the Germans to Kerch. We could have succeeded in stopping the enemy at least on the Isthmus of Parpachia in the very rare and rather exotic branches of the forecast, related to mistakes and miscalculations of the German command, which, of course, happened regularly, but it would be strange to count on them in the basic scenario.
In the end, I came to the conclusion that it made no sense to seek a solution by limiting myself to the means of the Crimean Front alone, and gave Letra a new assignment. Now I was looking at a map of the entire Soviet-German front. In the time remaining before the German strike, almost nothing could be changed, with one very important exception, and that exception was the planes.
The giant front, which drew an intricate line across the country from north to south, stood in unsteady equilibrium, somewhere mired in the mud, somewhere stabilized by the complete exhaustion of the parties, and somewhere, as in the Crimea, frozen for a while before exploding into a whirlwind of fire and steel. We clearly should not have expected significant events anytime soon everywhere, and I gave Letra the task of calculating how much and from what places it would be possible to take off air power without causing critical damage to the stability of the respective defense sites.
In the evening I used the authority of a representative of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command to send a long telegram to Moscow, stating my view of the situation in the Crimea. Judging by the fact that Mekhlis did not touch me during the day, having gone to his moral and political affairs somewhere in the army headquarters, Stalin had not yet reacted in any way to his cries about my arbitrariness, and I could only guess what the Chief would do after receiving both our telegrams. The Supreme Commander trusted Mekhlis, if not unconditionally, then very much, but I had never failed to live up to his expectations. In any case, I had only to wait.
I haven't seen Lena in almost 24 hours. She went to Vice-Admiral Oktyabrsky in company with Lieutenant General Zashikhin. After learning what I needed people and equipment for, the commander of the Leningrad Air Defense Corps asked me a simple question:
“Comrade Major General, in the Crimea do you personally plan to organize a unified system of fire in the image and likeness of what was done in Leningrad?”
I thought for a few seconds, quickly figuring out what the Lieutenant General was getting at. Lena, of course, knew very well what had to be done, but her low rank would hardly have allowed her to negotiate properly with the Black Sea Fleet command.
“I planned to take part in this case only at the initial stage, and then counted on your people and Senior Lieutenant of State Security Nagulina.”
“Uh-huh,” Zashikhin nodded, “and they will rest on the first technical or organizational problem that requires someone at the top of the command staff to solve. I assure you, there will be a ton of these problems in setting up non-standard interactions between the Army and the Navy. You know it very well yourself – you've seen it before.”
“I think you're right, Gavriil Savelyevich,” I nodded, looking with interest
