"It's 0:30 and the Western, Northern and Southwestern Fronts should have already begun shelling" On the outskirts of Tbilisi, the capital of Stalin's hometown of Georgia, the headquarters building of a large divisional military airfield, the lights were also bright.
Major General Alexander Yevgenievich Golovanov, commander of the 8th Long-Range Bomber Aviation Division of the Soviet Red Air Force, was speaking in rusty English with a colonel of the U.S.
Army Air Corps.
The colonel had a Slavic square face and a burly build, and looked like an air force general.
He was Curtis Emerson Lemay, commander of the 305th Bomber Wing in the United States.
At Stalin's request, from April 1942, part of the wings of the US 8th Air Force began to be secretly stationed in the USSR.
By the end of May, six bomber wings, the 91st, 92nd, 93rd, 100th, 303rd, and 305th, had been stationed.
The organization of the American bomber wing is different from that of Germany, Britain, and the Soviet Union, not that there are several bomber groups under a bomber wing, but that the functional brigades under the wing, such as the combat group, the ground service group, and so on.
There is only one combat group under a wing, and there are usually 35 flying squadrons under the combat group, and a squadron usually has 2,224 aircraft.
Colonel Li Mei's 305th Wing had only recently completed training on the mainland of the United States, and it was also very well established, with a total of 88 B17 bombers in four groups.
Now the 305th Wing is stationed at this airfield outside Tbilisi.
The 88 B17 heavy bombers belonging to the 80th Long-Range Bomber Aviation Division of the Soviet Air Force were neatly lined up on the airport's oversized tarmac and were ready to take off "In an hour and a half before we get out," Colonel Li Mei said, taking a sip of his coffee and then taking a puff on his cigar, "if all goes well, we should fly to the Kirkuk oil field at six o'clock in the morning." ” Comrade Stalin, of course, did not forget about the bombing of the Kirkuk and Khuzestan fields.
The two large fields now produce more than 2 million tonnes of oil per month, all of which are sold to the Wehrmacht Reserve Agency, which is then distributed by the German High Command as needed.
If these two large oil fields were blown up, then the German war machine would be half-paralyzed, if not paralyzed, and the Soviet Union would be quite sure that it could win the war.
So Stalin took out 2 valuable bomber aviation divisions this time, plus 6 American bomber wings, a total of 240 Pei-8 and B17 were ready to be dispatched, and there would also be 72 51 and 150 Soviet MiG-5 fighters of the American fighter wing as escorts.
The total number of sorties was as high as 982, which was almost a thousand bombing "Are you sure of blowing it up," Rear Admiral Golovanov asked with some uncertainty.
Although he was confident when he drew up his plan, he believed that 760 bombers dropping three or four thousand tons of bombs at a time would be enough to destroy two large oil fields.
But the Luftwaffe has also played a great role in recent years, and it looks difficult to deal with.
"It's impossible once," Li Mei shook her head and said, "The Luftwaffe is not easy to deal with, especially at medium and low altitudes, and the Fokker Zero and FW190 are very powerful, and the 51 may not necessarily have a chance of winning." ” The 51 can deal with the Fokker Zero and the FW190, but the 51 deployed by the Americans to the Soviet Union is a high-altitude model with a Grayback Falcon 60 engine.
The aerodynamics of high-altitude aircraft are different from those of low-altitude models, and these 51s can play at high altitudes, and when they go down to low altitudes, they are certainly not the opponents of the Fokker Zero.
After the 51 went to the high altitude, it was not at a disadvantage to the high-altitude model of the FW190.
And the B17 is very strong and has strong self-defense firepower, as long as there is 51 cover, even if it encounters the blocking of FW190, it will not lose too much.
What really worries Li Mei is that the HE219 has appeared recently, this kind of aircraft has too much firepower, and the speed at high altitude is fast, once it bites the B17 and bombards it with 30 and 20 cannons, it can be shot down.
However, the Americans were still prepared to do anything regardless of losses, even if the loss ratio was more than 20, in Roosevelt's view, it was bearable, as long as it could destroy the Germans' Middle East oil fields.
But Li Mei was still a little worried that the Soviets would not be able to bear it, he said: "Our B17 and 51 can fly very high and drop bombs at an altitude of 11,000 meters.
But your Pei-8 can't fly high, and the MiG-5 is a twin-engine aircraft, so it's not flexible enough."
What he means is that you Soviets can't bear it, don't go, just let the American planes bomb it.
However, Major General Golovanov misunderstood him and said that the Soviet planes were not good, which is not good.
"The MiG-5 is a good aircraft," said Rear Admiral Golovanov with confidence, "it can fly up to 680 km, with a range of up to 2,800 km, and it can also hang 800 kg of bombs, and even carry out long-range bombing missions alone." ” Li Mei nodded noncommittally, he knew that the MiG-5 aircraft, this kind of aircraft received technical assistance from the United States during the development of this aircraft, and the engines used were all imported from the United States, so it was more successful than the historical MiG-5 and met all the design requirements.
It was successfully put into production at the beginning of 1942 and is now a trump card in the hands of Soviet long-range bomber aviation, and it is indeed a good aircraft.
But the Germans obviously have a killer weapon to restrain it, and the mosquito killer HE219 must also be a MiG killer "Commander, commander, the Soviets began shelling us, and the war with the USSR broke out" The headquarters of Rommel, the commander of the German Middle East Front, was in Kirkuk, which was the most heavily fortified place in the Middle East, along with Abadan in Huzestan.
There are more anti-aircraft guns than in Berlin, there are also state-of-the-art anti-aircraft search radars, and several large airfields have been built nearby.
In addition, General Rommel's own headquarters and the commander of the 4th Air Force, General Alexandre Lehr, sat separately in Kirkuk and Abadan and watched the oil fields firmly When the Soviets started the war, Rommel was sleeping soundly, he was woken up by his adjutant, and then put on his military uniform, sleepily walked into the war room, and found that the chief of staff of the Middle East Front, Lieutenant General Bismarck, was already there, talking to someone on the phone.
When Lieutenant General Bismarck saw Rommel, the call had already been made.
He hung up the receiver and said to Rommel: "It was General Lehr who had called from Abadan and asked to send planes to bomb the Soviet oil fields of Baku, Batumi and Grozny. ” The Soviets want to bomb the Middle East, and the Germans naturally want to bomb the Soviet Union's Caucasus oil producing areasAlthough the second Baku in the Urals has been developed, the Caucasus oil producing areas still contribute more than half of the Soviet oil, and if the Caucasus oil producing areas are destroyed or occupied by Germany, then the Soviet war machine will be greatly damaged.
However, it will not be easy to destroy the oil-producing regions of Baku, Batumi and Grozny.
Since the French did it once in 1940, the Soviet Union has now strengthened its air defenses in that area, deploying high-performance fighters such as the MiG-3 and La-3.
In addition, after the bombing of Batumi in 1940, Stalin, realizing the vulnerability of the Batumi Oil City, began to transfer oil refining operations to the Ural industrial region.
With the support of a large number of oil refining equipment provided by the United States, the construction of the second Baku oil industrial zone is progressing rapidly.
According to the estimates of German intelligence, by the end of 1943 at the latest, the Soviet Union would be able to get rid of its dependence on the oil city of Batumi.
"How many planes does the 4th Air Force plan to dispatch" Rommel walked to the map table with his hands behind his back and looked down at the situation map of the Middle East theater.
The situation was still good, Muscat, the last stronghold of the British in the Middle East, was not so long ago captured by the 26th Army under the command of General Alfred von Goerz.
Now that the route from Abadan to the Suez Canal has been opened, and the Abadan refinery, the largest oil field and refinery in the Middle East, has been repaired, it is now finally ready to continue supplying fuel to the German Empire's war machine.
Moreover, before the opening of the Persian Gulf shipping lane, the large oil fields and refineries in Abadan have resumed production one after another.
There are now as many as three to four million tons of crude oil and refined oil products stored in Abadan, which are unplanned fuels for the High Command to meet the needs of operations on the Eastern Front.
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"The 4th Air Force is preparing to dispatch 96 DO217s and 64 Fokker Zeros to bomb the Baku oil fields; 72 JU288s and 32 HE219s were dispatched to bomb the Batumi refinery. ” The oil wells in the Baku oil field are scattered, so there is no dense anti-aircraft artillery fire cover, so DO217 and Fokker Zero, which have better performance at low altitudes, were sent to bomb.
The facilities of the Batumi refinery are quite concentrated, and there is a large number of anti-aircraft artillery cover around it, so the high-altitude vehicles of JU288 and HE219 were used to destroy them with wire-controlled glide bombs.
"What about the Navy," Rommel asked again, "when will the Mediterranean Fleet be dispatched?"
The navies of the European countries, which were now on the side of Germany in the war, had formed a combined fleet, known as the Combined European Fleet.
Several theater fleet commands were also established under the Combined European Fleet, namely the Atlantic Fleet Command, the Baltic North Sea Fleet Command, the Mediterranean Fleet Command, and the Indian Ocean Fleet Command.
Among the commanders of these four fleets, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet was Marshal Guntherrytzens, commander of the European Combined Fleet.
The commander of the Baltic North Sea Fleet was also German, and now Admiral Rolfkars.
Admiral Laporte of France, commander of the Indian Ocean Fleet.
And the commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, of course, was the Italian admiral Inigo Campioni.
According to the provisions of the "Blue Plan", the Mediterranean Fleet, with Italian naval ships as the main force, would enter the Black Sea through the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles after the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, and then use naval guns to Batumi, a major Soviet oil town on the Black Sea coast. t1706231537: