Female workers like Damara can earn up to ten vouchers, or ten kilograms of potatoes, a day through their hard work. For her and her young son, there is simply no way to eat such a large amount of food!

As for the factory cadres, their food rations are only stable at three kilograms of potatoes per day. These grassroots cadres did not dare to withhold the vouchers, and the workers had the right to report this seemingly minor act of corruption to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and if it was verified, they would be shot.

They don't dare to take risks, and if they want to get better food, they might as well find a way to speed up the production of the workers, and they can also get a commission.

Naturally, women workers like Damara became the mainstay of the textile workshops, and the envy of the abundance of food she received forced other women workers to speed up as well.

The wool weaving work has ended, and the many textile workshops in the blacksmith village are taking advantage of the interval between battles to step up their efforts to repair their clothes. The uniforms of the soldiers were torn and sent here to be patched, and the number of them was so large that the female workers had to work overtime.

At the same time, in all battles, servicemen would take clothes from the corpses of enemy soldiers, even already rags.

After the clothes of the German soldiers were rinsed, all the German and Nazi symbols on them were removed, and they could be distributed. These clothes are first and foremost for the needs of the military, and secondly for the civilian population. However, when a large amount of clothing was dropped, these refurbished and patched clothes gradually became less attractive to the soldiers. Coupled with the fact that this is a "dead man's clothes" after all, the soldiers are generally reluctant to be contaminated with this bad luck.

Civilians don't have so many worries, it's better to have neat enough clothes than tattered clothes!

In the huge settlement of the blacksmith village, the artisans did not absorb much of the working class. There are more than 30,000 soldiers and civilians here, and there are nearly 20,000 pure militiamen and peasants, who are the backbone of the production of the blacksmith village!

The militia battalions, part of which has completed the transformation of the regular army, and part of which are still standard militias. They were soldiers in wartime, peasants in truce, and they also belonged to production groups.

The rains caused the rivers to swell and the collective farms to start a wave of fishing. After all, the catch is not redistributed after compulsory requisition, and according to the regulations, each production group only pays a tax and pays the proportion of the harvest, and the rest is disposed of by itself.

In fact, it is difficult to guarantee whether they handed over the fresh fish in accordance with the prescribed proportions, the grassroots did not bother to report it, and the collective farm soviets did not have the time to investigate in this regard, and this kind of "tax evasion" always existed. Because the city Soviet and even the army have always turned a blind eye to this, they have retained this tacit understanding with each other.

After all, nutritionally speaking, potatoes lack several essential amino acids for humans, and this gap needs to be filled by other sources, such as fresh fish and mushrooms.

Fish and mushrooms are not forcibly collected, and it is up to the villagers to pay how much they want, but the army still gets a large amount of mushrooms and fish from the villagers.

The reason is simple: since the introduction of the vouchers, the original system of pure rationing has been changed, and the vouchers have temporarily replaced the ruble, thus ensuring that the newly arrived refugees and their rubles will disrupt the financial order here, and also making it possible to restore the internal circulation of goods in Novgomel to a limited extent under the supervision and control of the Soviets and the Soviet troops. The villagers exchanged fresh fish and mushrooms for food, and the exchange ratio was not friendly to the villagers, and the villagers had no choice.

The environment in which the guerrilla republic is located is destined to be rich in fishery resources, and a large number of fish ponds have been set up in the control area, especially the group of ponds in Catfish Village, which was blown up by air raids. The ponds are completely controlled by the military, and villagers are only allowed to go to natural rivers if they want to catch fish.

Fortunately, there are many wetlands, and a large number of water nets on both sides of the river are crisscrossed, and a lot of fish can be caught just by means of fishing, not to mention that it is raining now.

The rain meant that the most common catfish in the area would instinctively gather in the silt at the edge of the river, so much so that villagers could skip the fishing rod and bait and pull out the silt with their bare hands.

The militia marched shirtless and cold to catch fish, and everyone knew that the fish they caught could be legally eaten by themselves. Historically, catches have often been so large that they have to be brought in to exchange for pounds and then potatoes in proportion to the lack of preservatives.

At the very least, the potatoes can be stored for a long time in case they are needed in the future, which is enough to motivate the villagers.

The women, on the other hand, are not as energetic as the men, and they are actively preparing for the mushroom picking, which can grow wildly as soon as the rain hears it. Fresh mushrooms can be stored for a long time by simply slicing them and drying them with some firewood.

In this way, dried mushrooms, potatoes and fresh fish have become the main food of ordinary villagers.

The swamp is large enough to feed more than 100,000 people. If the nearby German forces died down, the guerrilla republics could quickly gather strength.

However, even if the German army remained silent, the Soviet army would not remain silent, and it was a political task to expand the guerrilla movement, and it was the right way to take the initiative to find the German army to fight. Only in this way can the strength of the rebel forces behind enemy lines be steadily increased, and only when the strength is strong and the enemy is subdued, can the guerrilla zone be truly stabilized and finally liberated.

……

The rain swept across eastern Ukraine and also affected parts of Soviet Russia and Belarus. It is raining in a wide area, from the Crimea to the Pripet swamps, and it is the Donbass basin where the rain is most severe, where the Soviet and German armies are fighting each other!

The absence of Yang Mingzhi has led to the butterfly effect, which has changed a certain historical trend, and the macro trend cannot be shaken. He can't change the climate in the slightest, and this butterfly's wings are really limited.

Since May 13, in Barvenkovo, a torrential rain hit, thundering in the sky and mountains, and at one point there was a thumb-sized hailstorm.

According to the history of that plane, on May 12, the Soviet army began a full-scale offensive from the Barvenko River, and the target was really Kharkov, dozens of kilometers away. The geography of this area is plain, which is very suitable for the mobility of mechanized troops.

Timoshenko was not a little worried about his army of more than a million people, because he had a small number of mechanized troops, and in that plane, the Soviets suffered a great loss in this regard.

The situation of Timoshenko in this plane was not very good, and his armored forces were small, and after frequent negotiations with Stalin, Stalin agreed to postpone the attack. Before the arrival of the new offensive time, Timoshenko did not get new armored reinforcements, he got time, so that he had time to arrange his troops well and play this deck of cards in his hand well!

As a result, just like the course of that plane's history, it began to rain on May 13th.

The Southwestern Front experienced huge losses in 1941, and the elite veterans suffered heavy casualties, and the units newly incorporated into the Front Army were all new recruits, so much so that in May, many soldiers were on the battlefield for the first time.

They were mobilized soldiers, and their technical and tactical level was no match for the German troops on the other side of the position, especially the German Sixth Army, which was destined to leave its name in history. But the morale of these Soviet soldiers was particularly high, and even when the hail smashed their helmets crackling, they were still rejoicing, holding aloft their speared rifles and chanting the slogan "Let the storm come harder".

From the rank and file to the majority of officers, they have a strong sense of confidence in the future.

Today's Soviet Union is like a machine, it's fully operational! More than 100 million people are fully mobilized, men of appropriate age are fully enlisted in the army, and even a large number of young women!

The bloody facts of what the Germans had done in the occupied territories were in front of the people, and even those who had suspicions and resentments towards Stalin joined the army one after another.

Before joining the army, they were peasants, workers, or literary and artistic people, and now they all have a common name - soldiers. They became part of the Southwestern Front and were ready to attack.

May 13 was not the day of the offensive, and in fact Timoshenko now ordered the offensive without disobeying Stalin's orders. The leader of Moscow gave Timoshenko a lower limit of May 20, which was the result of bargaining, and if he attacked before 0:00 on May 21, the post of commander of the Southwestern Front would not be able to sit down, and at the same time he would have to go to court-martial!

It was still early on May 20, and Timoshenko was facing this rain, and now the attack was definitely impossible, and when the rain was over, the troops would attack in full force!