Chapter 20 Collateral Damage

Sitting on a stone on the lawn nearby, he took the linen handed over by Kirill and wiped off the mud and dirt on his face. Malashenko, who had never thought that the German air raid would come so quickly and so fiercely, sighed and asked.

"What are the casualties of the troops? Have you counted them?"

After hearing the question from Malashenko, they looked at each other in surprise. After thinking for a while, the mechanic Nikolai finally decided to tell Malashenko the truth.

"Sir, our armored unit tanks lost 8 BT7s and a T34 tank, and another T34 tank was overturned by the shock wave of the German bomb and fell on the side of the road. The casualties are still being counted, but most of the crew members who have been completely destroyed are estimated to be"

After hearing the report from Nikolai, he frowned, and Malashenko, who was obviously suppressing his inner emotions, continued to speak.

"What about the infantry? How many casualties did the accompanying infantry of that company suffer?!"

In the Soviet Western Front in 1941, the armored forces were actually used more as an infantry support weapon rather than an independent group of arms.

From this point of view alone, the Soviet army's armored combat thinking is actually roughly the same as that of the British and American Allied Forces of the same period. Both use armored forces as an infantry support weapon to assist infantry forces in combat.

Compared to the German army, which has already used armored forces as an independent group of arms and has applied blitzkrieg tactics to perfection, the Soviet army is indeed one level behind in the combat thinking and strategic concepts of armored forces.

The reason why the high-performance T34 medium tanks and KV series heavy tanks are used as infantry auxiliary support weapons is that in addition to the fact that the German army's new blitzkrieg tactics have just been born, other powers with armored forces in the world have not yet realized that this unique tactic will lead the trend of future armored forces' combat thinking.

More importantly, General Pavlov, the then commander-in-chief of the Soviet Western Front, had a wrong and extremely stubborn view on the application concept of armored forces.

This commander-in-chief of the Western Front, who was even called the "Soviet Tank Godfather" at the time, had extremely high prestige and popularity within the Soviet Army at the time, and was highly respected and trusted by the Soviet Supreme Leader Comrade Stalin, so much so that the Soviet Union's Western Gate to Europe and the Western Front, the most powerful combat effectiveness of the entire Soviet Army, were handed over to him for the important task.

In addition, during the Great Purge period when the Soviet military and political leaders were in turmoil and panic, Pavlov relied on Stalin's trust and reuse of him without any damage, and even rose step by step to become the leader and instructor of the Soviet armored forces.

However, in the process of leading and building the Western Front, the most elite army group of the Soviet Union, this Soviet general who had participated in the Spanish Civil War as a Soviet military adviser and had actual combat experience, contrary to his usual practice, directly reversed the history of the development of armored forces.

Pavlov mistakenly believed that armored forces would only participate in future wars as an infantry support and auxiliary weapon, and the dominant land arms of future wars would still be traditional infantry and artillery, just like in World War I.

Under his leadership, the army-level armored forces under the Soviet Western Front were disbanded, and only the division-level tank forces were retained as independent organizations.

In addition, the wrong armored tactics and combat concepts advocated and studied by Pavlov also made the Soviet Union's most powerful Western Front, even with KV series heavy tanks and T34 medium tanks, which were superior to the Germans for a whole generation of quality advantages, still divided and surrounded by the German armored forces that had led the entire era in overall strategy due to advanced blitzkrieg tactics, and were defeated and retreated repeatedly.

It is no exaggeration to say that the reason why the Soviet Union's most elite Western Front was defeated and lost its armor after the German invasion of Barbarossa was that Pavlov, the commander-in-chief of the Western Front, had poor command and wrong guiding ideology for the construction of armored forces, which occupied a very critical position in the causal loop.

It was precisely because of the guiding ideology of armored force construction promoted by General Pavlov, the commander-in-chief of the Soviet Western Front at the time, that another Soviet motorized infantry unit accompanied Malashenko's troops in this air raid, and the total force was the same as the armored force commanded by Malashenko.

In order to travel light and keep up with the rapid mobility of the armored forces, this Soviet infantry riding on a truck or even directly "hanging" on the engine compartment of the T34 tank did not carry too much heavy equipment.

The Soviet motorized infantry divisions originally had a large number of 37mm and 76mm anti-aircraft guns, but they naturally did not carry any of them because of their large size and inconvenience in transportation. They only carried some quadruple Maxim anti-aircraft machine guns on the base of trucks, which was better than nothing, thus laying a hidden danger for the rampage of the German Stuka fleet.

The Soviet infantry, who were originally unprotected and riding in dense formations on tanks and trucks, became the focus of the German Stuka fleet during the air raid because of the scarcity of anti-aircraft firepower.

Whether it was the 50-kilogram small fragmentation aerial bombs that rained down like bullets, or the two 92-mm aerial machine guns on the wings of the Stuka.

These Red Army soldiers who were exhausted in the sudden air raid and bombing suffered heavy casualties in less than half an hour.

Although Pavlov's view that tanks are infantry auxiliary weapons is a wrong historical reversal, from another perspective, it is an indisputable fact that tanks need infantry to cover them in group combat. The relationship between the two is like the lips and teeth are interdependent.

Without the support of infantry, tanks with narrow vision and looking back and forth can easily be destroyed by anti-tank grenades or even Molotov cocktails in the hands of infantry in close combat.

On the contrary, infantry without tank cover will also face extremely difficult situations in battle. The result of being shot into sieves by various light and heavy anti-infantry weapons is a foreseeable final outcome.

Because of this, Malashenko, who had just recovered from dizziness after a short rest, immediately thought of the casualties of the infantry unit.

If these accompanying light infantry units suffered heavy casualties or were even completely wiped out, it would undoubtedly be a further blow to the operations that Malashenko would carry out next.