Starting with the smashing of Dunkirk

Chapter 239 Landing in Batumi
August 4, early morning.

"Da da da~ da da da~"

The sound of MG08 heavy machine guns roared around Akhtubinsk, 80 kilometers southeast of Tsaritsyn.

This small town on the banks of the Volga River had been captured a day earlier by the Demanian army that had infiltrated and advanced there.

General Nikolai Nikolayevich Yudenich, the newly reorganized commander of the Southern Front of the Russo, was greatly alarmed upon learning of the fall of Akhtubinsk.

(Note: The Southern Front was reorganized from the former Caucasian Front and joined the lower Volga River defense zone centered on Tsaritsyn. It also incorporated newly recruited reserve forces from the Volga and Kazakh regions. General Yudenich, the former commander of the Caucasian Front, remained as its commander.)
General Yudenich believed that the Dmanians were trying to cut off Tsaritsyn's connection with the southern regions, preventing reserve troops from the lower Volga region and the Kazakh steppe from reinforcing Tsaritsyn.
So he immediately ordered the reserves deployed in those rear areas to rush forward and reinforce the defense, launch a counterattack on Akhtubinsk, and try to reopen the roads along the Volga River.

Kazakh nomadic cavalry, Tatar troops, and several reserve divisions from Astrakhan, which came from the Kazakh steppe, surged against the Demanian positions like a tide, but to no avail against the Demanians' steadfast defense.

The town of Akhtubinsk was defended by only one of the main divisions under Lieutenant General Delmensingen of the 2nd Corps of the German 6th Army, which, after reinforcement, numbered about 20,000 men. These mere 20,000 men held out tenaciously on a makeshift defensive line 20 kilometers wide around Akhtubinsk, withstanding a counterattack by the Russa forces, which outnumbered them by more than five times, and doing so with remarkable ease.

After a winter of hunger and cold, the Lusha people's fighting strength had deteriorated to an alarming degree.

In an effort to salvage the commander's image, Lieutenant General Delmensingen personally visited the Akhtubinsk front to oversee the battle, hoping to make a good impression before the commander returned to the Kievan Rus' theater.

Through the artillery telescope, he observed swathes of Kazakh and Tatar soldiers falling within a two-kilometer radius of the heavy machine gun positions, while countless other soldiers were disoriented and torn apart by the barrage of mortars and field guns.

Most of the soldiers did not have rifles; they were forced to charge forward with only spiked clubs. When their comrades in front of them died, they would pick up the dead soldiers' rifles and continue fighting.

The artillery firepower of the Lusha reserve forces was also extremely weak. Those divisions from the Kazakh and Tatar regions basically had no artillery, not even 76mm field guns. Relying on pure infantry with not even enough rifles for a counterattack was practically suicide.

While Delmensingen was relentlessly blocking and wearing down the Lussar's reserves at Akhtubinsk.

Lieutenant General Richthofen's cavalry corps had already dispatched its three cavalry divisions to infiltrate and sabotage along the lower Volga River, creating chaos wherever they encountered Russa settlements. Lieutenant General Richthofen was still quite honorable; he didn't engage in indiscriminate killing, nor did he have the time for such things. He simply wanted to create chaos, setting a few fires to distract the enemy's rear forces.

Then, the Demanian cavalry advanced towards Astrakhan, the mouth of the Volga River.

Along the way, we encountered many villages and towns inhabited by Volgamanians, where the locals lived in dire straits.

These people were originally considered to be natives of Lusa. They were all immigrants to Lusa from Demanian nobles who had married into the country. Some of them had been there for over a hundred years, dating back to the time of Catherine the Great.

When the war first broke out, the Lusa people did not have a strong sense of national identity and did not have the view that "those who are not of our race must have different hearts" towards these Volgademanos.

But the fierce famine and cold that struck last winter finally ignited ethnic hatred among the Russa people towards the Demanians. Since people would starve to death if they didn't rob them, the Russa's cavalry, whether Cossacks, Kazakhs, or Tatars, ravaged and forcibly levied grain throughout the villages and towns of the Volga Demanians.

After several months of brutal conflict, the Volgademans finally lost all hope in the Rusha Empire, replaced by deep hatred. Their population, which had just exceeded two million, was drastically reduced to only 1.7 to 1.8 million in just four or five months of fierce fighting, a loss of approximately 15%.

In this situation, the Demanian "royal army" finally came to their rescue, and the Volga Demanians, mainly living along the line from Akhtubinsk to Astrakhan, naturally took the initiative to join them.

However, they themselves were so impoverished by the suffering that they could not even afford to provide food and drink, and could only offer the royal army some water.

Lieutenant General Richthofen's cavalry corps, operating behind enemy lines in the lower Volga region, was able to receive tens of thousands of Volga Manians every day, and the pace of this migration, with families in tow, was accelerating. Initially, many were unaware of the news, but as they heard, even more people, unable to survive, would pack their valuables and come to join them, preparing to migrate westward.

Moreover, I heard that Chief of Staff Lelouch has already made a promise. With the massive casualties caused by the war on the Eastern Front and many places becoming uninhabited, the local ethnic groups will definitely be allowed to exchange land in the future. As long as they go now, they can be given temporary jobs to make a living, and will also be given the first year's rations, as well as fields or pastures so that everyone can have land to cultivate and livestock to graze.

Such events occurred repeatedly in Earth's world after World War I and World War II. The Ottomans and Greeks on Earth repatriated each other's peoples after the wars. Later, the meddling of the Burma Kingdom and its proposed division of Pakistan and India also incited both sides to expel each other's peoples from their own territories.

With the eastern front in such a state, it's certain that the Rus will eventually migrate eastward back to the open eastern regions, and that the Demanians from the east will be moved to the west.

The only problem with this plan is that Lieutenant General Delmensingen needs to hold out at the key hub of Akhtubinsk for more than half a month, preferably more than twenty days, to give the vast majority of Volgademanos time to migrate.

Lieutenant General Richthofen's cavalry corps was also to persist in guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines for twenty days to ensure the dispersal of the Lusa mobile forces that wanted to come and obstruct them.

However, both lieutenant generals were very confident, believing that their troops had the combat capability, and that the biggest weakness at present was actually logistics.

Akhtubinsk is more than 150 kilometers from the Don River. The last part of the journey will be supplied mainly by land. In April, the Don and Volga bends are still a bit muddy. The two corps commanders used almost all the mules and trucks for logistical transport and also borrowed some from other corps.

During battles, generals carefully instructed officers and soldiers to conserve ammunition as much as possible, while rations and clothing were entirely obtained through local requisition, thus reducing logistical pressure. Generally, the Demacian army was relatively restrained in plundering supplies, but in this special situation, they could not afford to be so.

In any case, when the Kazakhs and Tatars robbed the Volgamadmanians, the Tatars in turn robbed the Kazakhs of their livestock, leather, and dairy products.

The Kazakhs still had some livestock, including cattle and sheep, and many villages and towns along the Volga River and the Caspian Sea had fishing households. Because the catch was difficult to preserve, it was hard for the Tsar's court to requisition it, so most of it remained locally as a supplement to their food supply. The Dmanian army simply seized the fresh fish, which also reduced the amount of rations they had to transport from the rear.

With Tsaritsyn in complete chaos, General Yudenich, the commander-in-chief of the Southern Front, had no time to attend to the situation in the southern Caucasus.

……

While Lieutenant Generals Delmensingen and Richthofen wreaked havoc in Akhtubinsk.

On the Black Sea west of Batumi, Georgia, a fleet was quietly approaching the port under the cover of dawn.

Of course, Batumi Port also has coastal defense batteries. Although they are not important military fortresses, there are at least eight 240mm heavy guns, mainly deployed on the mountainous highlands south and east of the port to protect the port area. There are also a bunch of 152mm smaller guns, totaling about several dozen.

To ensure the element of surprise, Lelouch did not prepare for a bombing raid on Batumi Port beforehand, lest he alert the enemy and alert them to the Demacian army's impending landing in Batumi.

Furthermore, the bombers of this era had too small a bomb load, making them only able to scratch the surface of the coastal fortresses. Airships were also too large targets, and daytime attacks would definitely be countered by anti-aircraft guns.

It is now April 1916, and the air defense capabilities of both sides have undergone tremendous changes compared to a year ago. Any airship bombing operation would be suicidal.

Since bombing is not an option, the only remaining solution is to bypass the port and land. Launch the first wave of landings on the plains beach about 15 kilometers north of the port, followed by a ground assault to capture the coastal artillery fortress.

Because that landing site was just outside the maximum range of all the enemy's coastal artillery positions, the landing process would not be interfered with by the Lusha artillery. The disadvantage was that the beach landing was relatively slow, and small boats had to be used for ferrying, as large ships could not reach the shore.

However, when launching a long-distance raid for a landing operation, the number of small boats that can be gathered is relatively small, so the enemy rarely guards against small boat landings.

This is similar to the Normandy landings in later World War II in Earth's timeline, where hundreds of thousands of troops could be deployed at once. However, this was because the Boulevard Strait was very narrow, allowing all landing craft to sail directly from the southern coast of Boulevard to the northern coast of Frankish territory.

However, during the Pacific War, when attacking those islands held by the Japanese pirates, even with thousands of ships deployed each time, only two or three divisions could be transported. This was because landing craft could not cross the vast Pacific Ocean, and large ocean-going transport ships such as landing motherships had to be used to transport them to the vicinity of the islands before launching the landing craft, which greatly limited the deployment capability.

Lelouch will theoretically face the same problem today. If he cannot solve the problem of the scale of a single deployment, resulting in too few troops being deployed in each wave when he first lands, he will soon be wiped out by the Rusa army that is launching a counterattack on the shore.

At 5:00 a.m., the battlecruisers Moltke and Goben, the pre-dreadnoughts Wichelsbach, Mecklenburg, and Swabian, along with 6 old-fashioned protected cruisers and 14 destroyers (5 of which were provided by the Romanian Navy and the rest were Ottoman destroyers).
A fierce shelling attack was launched on the town of Kobrej, 15 kilometers north of Batumi, and the beach on the southern outskirts of the town.

All the former dreadnoughts and patrols opened fire on the makeshift positions and outposts on the town and beach.
The two battlecruisers used the range advantage of their new large-caliber main guns to launch a firepower attack on a 150mm coastal defense artillery position in the mountains further east and inland.

Of course, this kind of behavior of taking advantage of the range to cause damage can only be used against 150mm gun positions, and it is not allowed against 240mm gun positions.

Even if the Moltke-class main guns were 280mm 50-caliber, they might not have a range advantage against the 240mm shore guns positioned on higher ground, so it wasn't worth taking the risk.

The fierce artillery fire completely stunned the sleeping Lusa people. The garrison and civilians in the town of Kobrej were almost wiped out in the first wave of indiscriminate bombardment.

These areas were not heavily fortified zones, nor did they contain concrete fortifications; they consisted only of civilian houses and a makeshift network of trenches. "Landing immediately! Launch the small boats!"

After observing the artillery barrage for only 15 minutes, Lelouch immediately ordered the troops to launch a landing operation.

Soon, more than 200 small boats carrying at least six or seven thousand marines rushed toward the ruins of the town of Kobrej and the beaches around it.

Although many of these small boats have wooden hulls, they are all powered, making them essentially motorized sailboats.

Some might wonder: Lelouch only mobilized about 20 warships for this mission, plus some large transport ships. Even if the warships were packed like sardine cans when they set sail, how many soldiers and small boats could they possibly carry?
If all small boats had to rely on large ships for transportation and sail thousands of kilometers across the Black Sea, the transportation efficiency of the large ships would inevitably be greatly reduced.

Originally, a large ship could carry three or four thousand people directly; if it were changed to large ships carrying smaller ships, and smaller ships carrying people, a single large ship might not even be able to carry a thousand people.

After all, a small boat that can carry 20 people weighs at least 15 tons, while if people are transported directly, 20 people, including equipment and supplies, would weigh at most 3 tons. This means that the large boat-within-a-small boat model wastes 8% of the transport capacity, effectively reducing it by 2%.

Lelouch's 20-plus warships and their accompanying large vessels could not possibly provide the amphibious transport capacity to bring half a division ashore at once.

This question had been raised during the campaign preparation phase. Lieutenant General Hollo, commander of the 3rd Army, and Lieutenant General Lister, commander of the Independent Army, were both seasoned veterans who would not make such a basic mistake. They both hoped that Chief of Staff Lelouch could plug this loophole.

Fortunately, Lelouch did come up with his own solution.

"We don't need to gather so many small boats from Odessa or Sevastopol and sail across the Black Sea on our own. We can set sail directly from Odessa on large ships carrying only people, and before arriving at Batumi, we can transfer some of our landing troops to smaller boats controlled by our forces at Osmantrabzon."

I had already communicated with the Ottoman military beforehand, asking them to procure several hundred civilian boats and small vessels for our use. The journey from Trabzon to Batumi is only 150 kilometers, a relatively close and calm route. If we time it right with good weather, those small boats carrying a few dozen people can safely navigate the last 150 kilometers.”

When Lelouch presented this plan, both Lieutenant General Hollo and Lieutenant General Lister were immediately convinced.

That's brilliant! Why didn't we think of using a friendly-controlled port closest to the war zone for a final transfer of ships right before the battle?

Those small boats certainly couldn't cross the Black Sea, but they could definitely make it 150 kilometers from Trabzon, a port on the northern coast of the Anatolian Peninsula near the front lines, to Batumi.

This "Pegasus Operation" will inevitably maximize the secrecy and surprise of the operation.

The enemy did not anticipate this move, and therefore could not have foreseen that "the Demanian army would land in Batumi, and could land directly on the beach, out of the reach of the coastal artillery, instead of in the port area."

The kung fu is real, even off-screen.

When the Demanian landing fleet appeared in this form near the northern beaches of Batumi, and the Lusa people were caught off guard, the outcome of the battle was already decided.

……

"Brothers, get off the boat quickly! Rush ashore immediately! The enemy hasn't laid much defense on this stretch of beach! The garrison in the town has been completely wiped out by our sudden artillery barrage!"

As a bunch of small boats, weighing only a few dozen tons, came to a stop in the shallow waters near the beach, the Demacian landing soldiers immediately jumped into the water from both sides of the boats and then continued to wade forward in water that was waist-deep or chest-deep.

An experienced lieutenant colonel, sitting aboard a large motor-driven sailing ship of over 100 tons, calmly directed the various small boat convoys to dive for the beach, while also instructing each battalion and company to make minor adjustments based on the actual sea conditions.

This lieutenant colonel was Falkenhorst, who was transferred by Lelouch from Marshal Mackensen on the northern front at the end of last year.

Last August, Falkenhorst was just a captain, participating in "Operation Moonlight," a landing operation on Shiuma Island at the northern entrance to the Gulf of Riga, which Lelouch had prepared for Marshal Mackensen. Falkenhorst was quite talented in amphibious warfare, learning quickly, and was promoted to major and battalion commander after the Gulf of Riga campaign. He was then seconded by Lelouch to the Kievan Rus' theater.

Later, he followed Student in the Battle of the Isthmus of the Zankoy Peninsula, leading a landing squad to circle around to the other side of the Crimean Peninsula, capturing the bridgehead of Troicchik, securing the bridge across the sea, and ensuring that Lelouch's armored vehicle troops could successfully enter the Nogai steppe on the first day. The enemy's Cossack cavalry division tried to come to reinforce and block the breach, but they were too late.

After the landings on the Chancoy Peninsula, Major Falkenhorst was promoted to lieutenant colonel for his outstanding performance in organizing the landings, and then this year he was brought in to participate in the Batumi landings.

When it comes to experience in amphibious warfare, the Demacian army is now the most experienced on the planet, even though Demania's naval strength is still inferior to that of the United States and the United States.

Under Lieutenant Colonel Falkenhorst's forward command, the first landing regiment's soldiers, following the pre-battle instructions, raised their Mauser rifles or submachine guns high above their heads. While this might appear as a sign of surrender, it was actually to prevent water from entering the weapons and increasing the likelihood of malfunctions. Raising their arms above the water also ensured less resistance during forward movement.

Without dedicated landing ships, the vulnerability of the landing phase increases dramatically. If Lusa forces arrive on the beachhead to intercept them immediately, these Demacian soldiers will certainly suffer heavy losses.

The problem was that the bombardment from the three pre-dreadnoughts and six old-fashioned patrol boats had already killed almost all the sentry troops in the town. Moreover, these troop transport boats were advancing towards the beachhead during the ongoing bombardment, and the naval bombardment of the shore only stopped when the soldiers were thrown into the water.

At just 5:30 a.m., after a tense few-minute lull, Falkenhorst's first company stormed into the ruins of the town of Kobrej. Subsequently, the second and third companies each took control of a section of the beach and began to advance deeper into the area to build beachhead positions.

In the town of Chankoy, the original sentry unit only had one radio. They immediately notified the garrison at Batumi port after the shelling.

Batumi's garrison command received the telegram at around 5:15 a.m. and completed the translation. It took a few more minutes to relay and hand it over. Around 5:20 a.m., the garrison command confirmed that the Demanians had shelled and landed on the beach north of the city, and the Luftwaffe immediately decided to send reinforcements.

The Batumi city defense commander was, after all, a corps commander in the Lusa Army, Major General Ramzan.

Although Commander Ramzan's entire army was not deployed in Batumi, but was responsible for the defense of several surrounding cities, at this moment only one division remained in Batumi.

But he still decided to immediately reinforce the counterattack and strangle the Demacians on the beachhead.

"The 3rd Division will split into two regiments and immediately launch a counterattack against the enemy on the beach! The enemy has crossed the sea from the rear and chosen to land on a beach without a pier. They certainly can't bring many small boats! At the beginning, there won't be many people landing. We can push them all into the sea!"

The colonel commander of the 3rd Division and several lieutenant colonels of the regimental commanders under him agreed wholeheartedly and immediately carried out Commander Ramzan's order. The two regiments rushed to the town of Kobrej, striving to push the enemy, who had just landed and were not yet firmly established, back into the sea.

At the same time, Ramzan immediately mobilized his troops, which were stationed in other coastal cities on both the north and south sides of Batumi, to reinforce Batumi.

He also simultaneously telegraphed the army group headquarters in Tbilisi, instructing Lieutenant General Kadev, the army group commander, to send reinforcements immediately. The situation was critical; they didn't want to waste time arguing with the Ottoman forces on the Lesser Caucasus front.

However, just over ten minutes later, the two regiments dispatched by Major General Ramzan had just reached the outskirts of the town of Kobrej,
The two regimental commanders immediately cursed inwardly, repeatedly yelling "Damn it!"

"Holy crap! Didn't they say the Demacians crossed the Black Sea and couldn't bring more than a few small boats? Didn't they say their large ships could dock at Batumi and couldn't just find any beach to unload their people? The enemy probably has at least tens of thousands of men, right?"

Before the two regiments of the Lusa anti-landing forces could switch from their marching formation to their battle formation, they were suppressed by Demanian machine gun fire. The Demanians were also able to accurately call in naval artillery support and fire fiercely into the Lusa reinforcements.

Battles like this, where you rush in to push the enemy into the sea, can only be fought with an overwhelming numerical advantage.

If we misjudge the number of the enemy's first landing force and find that the two sides are roughly equal in number, and the landing force even has the advantage of naval artillery support, then what's the point of fighting?
In just a few exchanges, less than 20 minutes later, the two regiments sent by Commander Ramzan to push back the landing zone were completely decimated. One lieutenant colonel regimental commander was killed by 240mm naval guns, and the other was so frightened that he led his team to flee.

The speed at which the enemy landed on an ordinary beach without a port or dock was beyond their wildest imagination. Faced with this inexplicable situation, Lusa's army retreated with a clear conscience.

The battle continued until 6:15 a.m., when the number of Demacian troops who landed exceeded 10,000. After completely controlling the town, Lelouch was ready to push directly towards Batumi Port city.

Meanwhile, fighter-bombers from the Ottoman-controlled port of Trabzon, 150 kilometers away, also flew over to the battlefield.

Demanian air support has arrived, ready to cover the ground forces' assault on the mountainous highlands and coastal artillery fortresses surrounding the port. Once these targets are cleared, the remaining main force can quickly land in the deep-water port – a textbook example of a amphibious assault.

(End of this chapter)