On April 30, 1937, just three days after bombers belonging to the German Condor Regiment bombed the small Spanish city of Guernica. An old friend of the Soviet people, a good friend of Comrade Lenin, a close friend of Comrade Stalin, Ludwig . Feng. Senior General Heinsberg-Hersmann visited Moscow.

He arrived on a Junkers Ju.90 passenger plane, a passenger version of the Ju.89, which was very comfortable and smooth. When he stepped off the plane, two Soviet children wearing red scarves presented flowers to him and Chloe. Another of his "friends", Marshal Tukhachevsky, who was likely to be shot in a little more than a month, then stepped forward to shake hands with Hersman and hugged him.

Neither mentioned the "inhumane" bombing, as if it had never happened.

"Welcome, Your Excellency!" Tukhachevsky spoke fluent German.

"You're a marshal! Mikhail Il. Nikolaevich, congratulations! Hersman replied fluently in Russian.

In November 1935, the Soviet Union introduced a military rank system, and Tukhachevsky became one of the first marshals of the Soviet Union, and also served as First Deputy People's Commissar of Defense and Minister of Military Training.

"It's been a long time coming, it's too late for you to congratulate now." Tukhachevsky half-jokingly said, "Ludwig, you are still a marquis, and I am not as good as you in this regard." ”

This sentence will become a crime in a little more than a month - an attempt to restore the reactionary rule of the tsars in the Soviet Union!

"It's just a name, and there's not much annuity to take," Hersman shrugged indifferently, and then pointed to his wife, "but she likes to be a marquise, and I actually became a royalist for her." ”

"Ludwig. You're kidding me again. Chloe glared at her husband and then went to talk to Tukhachevsky's wife, Nina. Tukhachevskaya shook hands and embraced.

Hersman only glanced at this beautiful woman with sympathetic eyes, and after her husband was shot, she would certainly not survive!

As for the possibility that Tukhachevsky would not die, Hersman felt that it was very slim. Although he did not order the intelligence services to frame Tukhachevsky - Hersman knew full well that the historical Stalin would not have believed that Tukhachevsky was a German spy. Tukhachevsky is a person of this status. In the Soviet Union, there was everything, and how brain-dead it would be to be a German spy again? This kind of thing was nothing more than the need for a power struggle within the Soviet Union......

"Michal Il. Nikolayevich, the general outline of the plan you want to attack Poland has been brought. After the pleasantries, Hersmann got down to business, and Hans, who had just been transferred back to the General Staff from his new lieutenant, had just been transferred back to the General Staff from the post of French military attaché. Lieutenant Colonel Speidar beckoned, "Hans, give the documents to Comrade Marshal." ”

It is impossible to bring all the texts of the Black Scheme, and there is no need to bring them. All the Soviets wanted to know was an approximation. When to fight, from where to attack, what tactics to adopt, of course...... And how to deal with the aftermath - this needs to be resolved through negotiations between the Soviet Union and Germany.

……

"Why not mechanized units for a large-depth assault? Didn't you do that in that exercise in 1935? ”

The next day, when Hesman met Tukhachevsky again at the People's Commissariat of Defense at 19 Znamenka Avenue in Moscow, he suddenly asked this question.

"Why isn't it mechanized warfare?"

He asked this in Russian, because there were three other marshals of the Soviet Union who did not know German, Alexander who looked very strong. Ilyich. Marshal Egorov. He was Chief of the General Staff of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army; Semyon. Mikhailovich. Marshal Budyonny, who had a Cossack beard. It doesn't look very smart, he is now the deputy People's Commissar of Defense, in charge of cavalry work; The last one with a "Hitler-esque" mustache, which looked a little sluggish, was none other than the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR Krement Murphy. Yevremovich. Voroshilov.

According to Hesman's information, the four Soviet marshals were actually divided into two factions. Tukhachevsky and Egorov are so-called "military experts". He was born as a full-fledged officer in Tsarist Russia and joined the Bolshevik Party after the August Revolution.

Budyonny, on the other hand, was born as the "chairman of the soldiers' council" and was a veteran before joining the revolution. Voroshirov, on the other hand, was a professional revolutionary born as a child laborer, and after the February Revolution he entered the military as a representative of the Soviet Engineer and a local leader of the Bolshevik Party.

Later, the self-taught Voroshilov fought with the equally self-taught Stalin in Tsaritsyn. Because they all hated "military experts", they groped for blind commands on their own, and actually won the war, but lost 60,000 people. As a result, he was criticized by Lenin at the Eighth Congress of the Bolsheviks, Stalin was transferred back to the Central Committee, and Voroshilovk was sent to the post of army commander to Ukraine, and as a result, he became a political commissar in Ukraine and worked with Budyonny, the commander of the First Cavalry Army. Then he and Budyonny became iron buddies again, and through his connections, Budyonny and a group of people in the First Cavalry Army - that is, Zhukov, Timoshenko, Rokossovsky (these were all soldiers and did not enter the Tsar's military school, and Comrade Stalin hated the people who came out of the Tsar's military academy the most), and so on, all became Comrade Stalin's military team.

Both Tukhachevsky and Egorov were born as "military experts", and these "military experts" were highly valued by Trotsky during the Russian Civil War. Therefore, the purge of the Soviet Red Army can also be seen as Stalin's purge of "military experts" and "suspected Trotskyists" from the former tsarist army.

After the growth of a large number of reliable young officers who entered military academies after the end of the Civil War, it is understandable that Stalin purged some unreliable "old men......

As for how much the purge damaged the combat effectiveness of the Soviet Red Army, in Hersman's view, the main problem was that the German army was too capable of fighting, as if it had been opened. France and Poland, which have not undergone the Great Purge, will not be able to withstand it when they encounter Germany? The British didn't have a channel to block it, and 40 or 41 years would be almost over.

If Tukhachevsky and Egorov had led the Red Army, which had not undergone a purge to trample on Poland, France and England, it would have been swept away? It is simply impossible, just look at the Zhang Gufeng incident in late July and early August 1938 in history, and the Far Eastern Front under the command of Blyukhel fought very hard against the Japanese Kwantung Army.

……

"Because we don't have enough national strength to mechanize the entire army." Hersman greeted several Soviet marshals, and then everyone sat down at a conference table covered with a green velvet tablecloth and began to discuss the Black Plan.

"The entire army must be mechanized?" Egorov shook his head, "According to the French military theorist Charles de Gaulle, a small number of mechanized troops as sharp knives are enough to tear through the enemy's defenses. ”

"That's the experience of the First World War," Hirschman said, "and if you meet the army of the First World War, you can succeed." But we are now dealing with partially mechanized infantry, and even the poorly equipped Polish army, which has several hundred tanks and a much larger number of armored vehicles. And those tanks and armored vehicles can be equipped with 20mm guns and 37mm anti-tank guns.

This is tantamount to mechanizing and armoring anti-tank fire...... If we had anti-tank firepower that could move quickly in the last world war, the tanks of the Entente would have been massively destroyed by us. After the Iron Fist 1935 exercise, we also conducted a number of confrontation exercises between armored divisions and infantry divisions equipped with mechanized anti-tank firepower, and the results were disastrous victories. In our opinion, an infantry division capable of having dozens of self-propelled anti-tank guns that can move quickly will be enough to block the surprise attack of the armored division in a preset position. ”

Hersmann was not entirely fooling the Soviets either, in fact the Wehrmacht had been conducting similar exercises for the past two years. Moreover, a motorized rifle division equipped with a type 1 assault gun battalion can indeed cripple an armored division. Unless the attacking armored division can be supported by a strong tactical air force.

Compared with the Ju.89 and Do.19, which were used to scare people, the Ju87 dive bomber, the Hs-123 attack aircraft, and the Ju.88 medium bomber under development were the key to Germany's sweep of Poland and France.

Tukhachevsky and Egorov glanced at each other, both nodded slightly, and the Soviet Red Army actually conducted similar exercises. It is also difficult to prove that the concentrated tank forces will be able to defeat an infantry division equipped with a small number of tanks and a large number of anti-tank weapons. Unless the attacking side has a great advantage in tank performance, or has overwhelming air superiority!

Moreover, the Red Army of the USSR has recently also noticed that they may have some problems with the seizure of air supremacy. This was the alarm bell that the Spanish Civil War sounded for them! The German Bf-109, Fokker D.31, and even the old Fokker D.21 all had an overwhelming advantage over the Soviet Union's I-15 and I-16 series in terms of performance.

And without air superiority, the tank units of the USSR were quite likely to be hit from the air! Even such an archaic aircraft as the Hs-123 (Hs-123 made its first flight at the end of the 20s) could still pose a significant threat to the Soviet ground forces.

So after the defeat of White Poland, the USSR must be quite wary of Germany! (To be continued.) )