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 at the Lieutenant General, who received a new rank for our joint operation.
I need to fly with you, Zashikhin stated categorically. That's when we'll get things up and running quickly and without problems. And we should definitely take someone from Admiral Tributs' staff it will be easier for the sailors to agree with each other. Will you be able to get the approval of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command?
* * *
Stalin sat at his desk, sucking on the mouthpiece of an unlit pipe, and thoughtfully looked over the documents in front of him. On top of the other papers were two telegrams. One came early in the morning from Mekhlis, and another, signed by Nagulin, arrived late in the evening.
The proven communist Mekhlis, whose unquestionable loyalty and honesty aroused no doubts in the Chief's mind, behaved quite predictably. Stalin did not doubt for a second that he and Nagulin would not work together, but he believed that their competition and the mutual dislike that quickly arose would serve as additional incentives to solve the complex tangle of problems that the situation in the Crimea increasingly resembled.
Mekhlis branded the command of the Crimean Front with bad words, especially pointing to the complete inconsistency of Lieutenant General Kozlov and his Chief of Staff, Tolbukhin, to their positions. He claimed that they perceived trips to the troops as punishment, and led the front from afar, preferring to sit out most of the time on the other side of the Kerch Strait. He also demanded an urgent reinforcement of the front with infantry and tanks, since many equipment and personnel had been lost in the botched offensives undertaken by the Crimean Front in recent weeks. According to Mekhlis, Kozlov completely failed in his preparations for a decisive offensive, and he was in principle incapable of organizing it effectively.
He naturally criticized Nagulin as well. Mekhlis accused him of arbitrariness and total disregard for the task set by the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, and, finally, of direct sabotage of offensive preparations, which was expressed in an order to the troops to switch to defense and limit themselves to imitation actions, aimed at misleading the enemy about the allegedly being prepared for an attack in the north of the peninsula.
Stalin frowned involuntarily. In the morning, immediately after reading the first telegram, this order of the young representative of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, unexpected and not coordinated with anyone, caused him indignation, which, apparently, Mekhlis hoped for. Nevertheless, the Commander-in-Chief remembered that the advisability of Nagulin's actions had been questioned more than once in a variety of situations, and almost always these doubts proved unfounded. Therefore, he preferred to wait a while and not make hasty decisions. In the end, this approach turned out to be correct.