Starting with the smashing of Dunkirk

Chapter 190 The Eve of the Battle of Kyiv
The plan, after Lelouch's final adjustments, was quickly approved by Marshal Rupprecht.

The entire southern cluster of Demacia was also operating at full speed, just as he had envisioned.

Of the methods he mentioned, the first step that needs to be implemented is to allow the navy to enter the Sea of ​​Azov and to bring the supply convoy to the port of Marieupol.
This made the enemy Cossack cavalry realize that it was pointless to continue harassing the railway supply lines behind von Bock and Rommel on the Donbas front.

……

August 11, early morning.

That is, two days after Lelouch finalized his plan.

Marienupol, a port city on the coast of the Sea of ​​Azov.

A dozen or so shallow-draft transport ships slowly entered the port.

The Sea of ​​Azov is very shallow on average, almost forming a lagoon at the mouth of the Don River.

Over millions of years, sediment from the Don River has accumulated here, making the seawater shallower and shallower, with a maximum depth of only 15 meters and an average depth of 7 meters.

Therefore, battleships absolutely cannot enter the Sea of ​​Azov; cruisers must choose those with shallow drafts to reach port cities like Marieupol or Rostov.

If you're hoping to sail close to the coast on ordinary beach terrain outside of ports, then only destroyers can do that.

The ships that transported ammunition and supplies to von Bock and Rommel were also very small, with each ship having an effective cargo capacity of just over a thousand tons.

"We deliberately allowed the enemy's Cossack cavalry to cut off our supplies and wage a war of attrition for several days, and finally we got our supplies back."

Those foolish Cossacks probably still don't know, they probably still think our armored vehicles are running out of fuel and our machine gun ammunition is almost gone. Let's take advantage of their underestimation and give them a good beating.

After receiving fuel and ammunition and refueling all the armored vehicles, Rommel said this with great satisfaction.

The officers standing nearby, including von Bock, also agreed with his view.

In the preceding days, they had advanced too rapidly, becoming somewhat top-heavy. While the vanguard's breakthrough was swift, the railway supply lines behind them were in very poor condition.

After suffering several losses, the enemy Cossack cavalry learned their lesson and stopped confronting armored vehicles head-on.

As soon as the cavalry saw a fully equipped armored vehicle force coming to pursue them, they would use their agility to scatter and retreat. Although armored vehicles could be faster than warhorses, their numbers were simply too small.

The enemy troops scattered and fled, and no one knew who to pursue. Even if they relentlessly chased them to the very end, the results were limited. Therefore, the Cossacks' logistical harassment tactics were quite effective at one point.

However, after Lulu finalized his new plan the day before yesterday, Rommel and Bock, among other generals, changed their approach. For the past two or three days, they have ceased their resistance, allowing the Cossacks to sabotage the railway behind their lines.

They even deliberately spread false information that because of logistical disruptions, many armored vehicles were out of fuel and machine gun ammunition was being used up in large quantities.

The Cossacks weren't stupid; they wouldn't believe such news immediately and choose to launch a probing attack.

Rommel and his men put on a show, never sending too many armored vehicles into the counterattack. They would just use twenty or thirty to launch a counter-attack, repel the enemy, and then withdraw.

The machine gunners on the vehicles were very cautious with each burst of fire. They used to fire randomly from 800 meters away, but now they would only start firing when they got within 300 meters. It was clear that they were trying to save bullets and pursue a more efficient way of fighting.

All of this suggests that Rommel and his men were indeed too deep behind enemy lines, engaged in continuous combat, and lacked supplies.

This phenomenon also excited the Cossack cavalry units in the surrounding area.

These good days came to an end on November 4th.

That afternoon, in a small town along the railway line about 60 kilometers east of Mariupol.

Several Cossack cavalry divisions' Russa troops once again swept south from the north, advancing rapidly and closing in on the area.

They then stormed into the town, which had recently been occupied by the Demacian army, and carried out all sorts of burning, killing, and destruction, setting fire to and razing the Demacians' temporary supply depots and storage yards to the ground.

A few days ago, these Cossacks didn't dare to be so rampant. Even when they came to harass us, they would only damage a few sections of railway track or plant explosives to blow up a train.

Today, their deployment has increased many times over, estimated to involve two cavalry divisions, and they have carried out comprehensive sabotage on a large area along the railway line.

Just as the Cossacks were feeling triumphant, the rumble of armored vehicles came from the east and north behind them.

Two to three hundred armored vehicles formed a large net, roughly blocking the escape routes of the two cavalry divisions to the east and north.

While escaping to the west was an option, it lay in the heart of the Demanian-occupied territory, and the further west one went, the more dangerous it became. As for the south, although there were roads, the coast of the Sea of ​​Azov was only a few miles away.

The commanders of those Cossack cavalry divisions who encountered the enemy were all greatly alarmed:

"That's impossible! The Demacians' armored vehicle units aren't short of fuel and ammunition, and I've heard that many armored vehicles have had their transmissions damaged by grenades and are stuck without repair parts, so how could they suddenly gather so many armored vehicles again?"

If the Cossack cavalry had known that the Demanians had so many armored vehicles at their disposal, they would never have dared to so openly infiltrate enemy territory to carry out sabotage.

At this point, resistance was futile; the only option was to try to disperse and break out, minimizing losses by escaping as much as possible.

After fighting for so long, the cavalry have learned their lesson. They simply don't have the guts to charge into armored vehicle formations like they did at the beginning.

But where should they escape to? To escape to the east or north would mean charging through enemy vehicle formations, while to the west would lead them further down the wrong path.

After a chaotic breakout and massacre, thousands of cavalrymen were killed in the melee like headless flies.

After paying a heavy price for trial and error, a cavalry division commander finally came up with a new way to break out:
"Run south! The south is a soft beach, and the armored vehicles will definitely get stuck. Armored vehicles are not as good at traversing terrain as warhorses! Let's go south first, then break through to the east and find an opportunity to circle back to our rear!"

Large numbers of Cossack cavalry units, like ants trying to find a way out, spontaneously turned around and broke out to the south.

But they hadn't run far, just reached the coast of Azov, when they witnessed an astonishing scene.

Some Demanian destroyers equipped with 88mm naval guns actually came as close as less than two kilometers from the coastline. When they saw cavalrymen trying to retreat south along the coastal route, they immediately unleashed a barrage of rapid-fire shells.

Fortunately, Demania's destroyers are much smaller than other ships, lacking even 105mm guns, let alone 120mm guns.

They could only rely on their ancestral 88mm cannons to fire rapidly, one shot every 3-4 seconds, with a small amount of explosive, so each shot couldn't kill many people.

But this continuous, one-sided slaughter dealt a devastating blow to the morale of the Cossack cavalry. Countless soldiers began to suffer psychological breakdowns, realizing they had fallen into an enemy trap. "This is impossible! How could Demanian warships have entered the Sea of ​​Azov? Didn't they say the Sea of ​​Azov was completely sealed off with mines?"

Some mid-level officers were all having such wild thoughts and cursing.

The Cossack cavalry division commanders, however, had even more to think about. They knew it couldn't be a naval defection revealing the minefield plans to the enemy, because they hadn't even left any safe passages—what could they possibly leak? The enemy must have cleared the mines themselves to get in!

But there's no point in dwelling on these issues now; let's think about how to escape first.

Several Cossack cavalry divisions were thrown into complete chaos, fleeing without organization or discipline. Vast numbers of cavalrymen were blown up and mowed down by the 88mm cannons on the sea and the machine guns of the armored vehicles behind them.
The corpses of cavalrymen and their horses lay strewn across the beach, staining the craters submerged in seawater with blood.

Large numbers of Cossack cavalrymen, driven to despair, chose to surrender, abandoning their weapons. However, a small number managed to break through the encirclement amidst the chaos and escape back in disarray.

This is merely a microcosm of the eastern front after Lelouch ordered the opening of the Azov Sea route and the restoration of sea routes to Marieupol.

Similar situations will continue to occur in the coming days at other similar locations. However, the intensity will certainly not be as great as today's battle, and the details will differ.

In short, across this vast terraced steppe stretching from Melitopol-Dnieper in the west to Donbas-Mariupol in the east, the attempts by the Russa army to sabotage the logistics of the Demania Railway were visibly diminishing and eventually fading into silence.

The Cossack cavalry, who had originally planned to flank and harass the enemy, finally dared not come again after suffering repeated losses.

After these few days of counter-harassment battles, Rommel and Boccelli tallied the results and found that they had annihilated at least two enemy Cossack cavalry divisions and severely damaged even more (each cavalry division only had a few thousand men).

They also took advantage of the situation to uncover some local militias in the occupied areas who were cooperating with the Cossack cavalry, achieving considerable success.

This move not only solved the problem of enemy logistical harassment in the occupied eastern coalfield areas for a considerable period of time, but also...
It also made more and more people in the Lusa army realize that "the reason why the Demacian navy was able to successfully break through the minefield and launch a surprise attack on our army was not because of the betrayal of an internal traitor, but because the Demacians had mastered high-tech weapons that the Lusa army was unaware of."

These ideas will inevitably spread further and further within ten days to half a month, ferment and resonate more and more, and eventually become the mainstream consensus of officers and soldiers of the Southwest Theater Command.

Rommel, Bock, and others were already preparing to withdraw after another large-scale counterattack against the Cossack cavalry on November 6.

Marienupol Port, evening of November 6.

More than 200 armored vehicles that were still operational were loaded onto ships at the dock here, and were then prepared to be transported back to the western front—this so-called western front was at least west of Kyiv.

Because in the final battle, two iron pincers are needed to form a pincer attack.

One strategy involves advancing upstream along the Dnieper River from the east to the west, launching a pincer attack on Kiev from behind.

The other line is to attack Kyiv from the west and east along the Lviv-Vinnica line.

The Donbas battlefield in the east has been stabilized, and armored vehicles are no longer needed. These armored vehicles, along with von Bock's troops, will be sent to the Lviv and Vinnytsia fronts. After a brief inspection and maintenance, they will be deployed to the final offensive campaign.

Meanwhile, the first batch of tanks transported from the Porsche-Skoda factory in Prague has just arrived in Dnipro in the last two days and will soon be handed over to Lelouch and Rommel to serve as the other pincer in the final attack on Kiev.

As the fleet was about to set sail from Marieupol, Lelouch personally came to the port to see off von Burke and the others.

He and Rommel acted like hosts, shaking hands with von Bock, Lundstätter, Paul Hausser, and Günther von Kluge one by one:

"I hope you will perform well under Marshal Leopold after you arrive in Vinnica, and bring honor to our 6th Army."

von Bock also wore an expression of unwavering determination:

"Don't worry, even though you're about to be equipped with tanks, the road from Vinnytsia to Kiev in the west doesn't have as many rivers and streams, and the terrain isn't as low-lying as the Dnieper Valley in the east."

Even if I use armored vehicles, I might not be any worse off than you with tanks! We'll see who prevails on the battlefield and who can penetrate deeper into enemy territory.

"Alright, it's a deal then." Lelouch and von Burke high-fived, signifying a gentleman's agreement. The other generals exchanged knowing smiles, displaying a tacit understanding.

……

The transport convoy departed from Mariupol on November 6 and was expected to disembark in Odessa early on November 9. Then, trains would carry the armored vehicle convoy northward to Vinnytsia.

They will arrive in Vinnytsia on November 10th, and after some final maintenance and repairs, they can be deployed for the final battle of Kiev around November 12th.

All aspects of the campaign preparations have been arranged in full swing, and other infantry units are also preparing for battle with renewed vigor and ready for action.

The Demanians' characteristic punctuality and meticulous planning were once again demonstrated and showcased.

A massive campaign, requiring the deployment of two army groups and spearheaded by two fully-equipped and reinforced armored divisions, is about to begin.

On Lelouch's side, after seeing off von Bock and Lundstätter on November 6, he took the train back to Melitopol and then headed north to Dnipro, arriving in Dnipro early on the morning of November 8.

In Dnipro, he finally saw the first tanks in human history to be used in actual combat, which were built under the supervision of Dr. Porsche.

The light machine gun tank weighs only 7 tons, features wide tracks, and leaf spring suspension. It is equipped with two forward-facing heavy machine guns and one machine gun with a rotating mount on the roof.

This third machine gun was obviously added hastily after learning from the latest lessons learned on the front lines of Kievan Rus'.

Because the machine gun's firing arc is relatively limited and cannot rotate 360 ​​degrees, it is vulnerable to danger when the enemy gets close. If necessary, it is better to install a rotating machine gun, operated by the tank crew by leaning out from the waist up, to better protect the crew's safety.

The machine gunner operating the roof-mounted machine gun would also be equipped with a specially made, thicker steel helmet and a bulletproof steel plate breastplate. This would save the trouble of adding a bulletproof shield to the machine gun itself and reinforcing the gun mount.

The new custom-made helmet has a similar structure and shape to the M15 helmet (equivalent to the M56 helmet on Earth), but it is thicker and covers a larger area, about the same thickness as a level 3 helmet in a game like PUBG. It would be too cumbersome for ordinary infantrymen, but it would be fine for tank crewmen.

Another heavy artillery tank also features a 16-caliber 57mm main gun, a forward-facing machine gun, and a roof-mounted machine gun, with a combat weight of 10 tons.

The roof-mounted machine gun was also a temporary addition, and the other configurations were the same as those of the 7-ton machine gun tank.

Touching the cold steel plates of the tank, Lelouch felt a sense of time travel. After silently reflecting for a while, he ordered Rommel to immediately organize the entire division's armored troops to train and familiarize themselves with the new equipment.

All the armored soldiers have been driving armored vehicles for several months and have considerable experience in armored warfare. Now it's simply a matter of switching equipment on the spot, from armored vehicles to tanks. In a few days, they should be able to get used to driving them.

"We're launching our final assault on November 12th. You have four days to get those hundreds of drivers and commanders familiar with the new equipment as quickly as possible."

Lelouch simply dumped the task on Rommel and became a hands-off manager.

(End of this chapter)