Chapter 616 Stalin’s Hammer

The city of Fallujah had been surrounded by groups at this time, but Bashir knew that they, the People’s Liberation Army, could not completely surround the city, because the city was on the west side of the Euphrates River. Bashir stayed in the Soviet Union for a long time, and almost in his mind. Two battles flashed in an instant, namely the two famous battles during the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, the Battle of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad. The two cities were named after two generations of Soviet leaders, and they were all completely surrounded. status. In the end, the Soviet Union, on the defensive side, eventually turned defeat into victory under huge casualties.

“From a normal point of view, it is impossible to capture a heavily defended city without paying huge casualties, but when your Soviet instructor mentioned the examples of the two battles, he also said that it was a regular army dispatch. Right? Do you remember what they said at the time?” Bashir asked, looking at the group of commanders who had learned from the Soviet Union.

“Instructors from the National Security Council said that the most valuable resistance force in a country is people, and if someone has all hope, from the perspective of the two countries, the resisters will often maintain a strong fighting spirit because of the country and the nation. But in In the case of a civil war, this kind of emotion is often not high, and furthermore, although street fighting is difficult to accept in the concept of regular warfare, it can be solved in another way, which is to completely destroy the city, whether it is with fire or heavy artillery. Bombing and killing all the people inside will naturally not become a hindrance.” Someone immediately answered Bashir’s question.

   “Then let’s start, how do we cut off Baghdad’s support on the right bank of the Euphrates, have you thought about it?” Bashir turned to another question, how to cut off Baghdad’s support is still a problem.

   “Maybe we need the help of the Soviet Union for this. If they can persuade the Soviet Union to sacrifice a tanker, then they can help!” This problem is actually not difficult, and people always come up with solutions.

   “The Soviets will definitely help us, there is absolutely no choice for them.” Bashir said calmly that the only port in Iraq is Basra, which is controlled by the Central Committee of the Iraqi Communist Party. This is not a problem as long as the first secretary makes a request to the USSR.

  Bashir ordered a propaganda offensive against Fallujah, hoping to make more residents aware of the danger of war in order to withdraw from the city of Fallujah. In his heart, he had decided to blow up Fallujah with Soviet heavy artillery. Even a type of heavy artillery, famous in World War II, is being brought in from Syria at a slow pace.

   This kind of heavy artillery is the artifact of the Soviet Union’s equipment to deal with heavy fortifications and urban street fighting, the B-4 howitzer, and he has another more famous name, Stalin’s Hammer. The B-4 howitzer has good ballistic performance and high firing accuracy, with a total weight of 15.8 tons. Due to the heavy weight of the gun body, the designers fitted it with a tracked gun mount, which weighed 11 tons and used the chassis of the “Comintern” heavy tracked tractor, which could provide the gun with limited mobility. The B-4 howitzer is a monster on a tractor. The tail of the B-4 howitzer is equipped with auxiliary wheels for traction, and the traction speed is about 15 kilometers per hour. Since most areas of the Soviet Union are in ice and snow in winter, and the ice and snow are often muddy after melting, this is a pair of heavy weights. The artillery maneuverability is very unfavorable. For the B-4 with a total weight of 15.8 tons, the increase in maneuverability after adding tracks is quite obvious.

Iraq did not have the icy and snowy muddy environment of the Soviet Union, but the second batch of military supplies from the port of Osad arrived in Syria later, because the Western military region was advancing very fast. This batch has a total of twelve Stalins. The hammer and heavy artillery are still moving slowly in a place a hundred kilometers away.

For Serov, this thing has been produced by the Soviet Union over a thousand pieces, and because the Soviet Union has completed the mechanization of the entire army, this kind of heavy artillery has been eliminated, but the ammunition and artillery in stock are still there, and the Soviet Union will not face street fighting for the time being, but Knowing the power of this thing, he pulled the heavy artillery directly from the warehouse, transported it to Syria, and sent it to the Iraqi Communist Party on the road.

The place where Stalin’s Hammer can be used in street battles better than other heavy artillery is that this kind of crawler heavy artillery can often follow infantry into the city to fight. The offensive route of the Red Army’s Berlin Reichstag battle was that Stalin’s Hammer advanced all the way. Route, where there are no tiles left.

“Who says the Iraqis can’t fight? Isn’t that a solution? Send a thousand-ton tanker full of fuel and go upstream, sink in Fallujah, and don’t have to give us the job of igniting it. Right? By the way, it’s more dangerous, let the Iraqi crew do it themselves.” Shelov quickly responded to the Iraqi Communist Party’s request for help. After so many sacrifices, what is a tanker? It’s not a giant Oil tankers, the waters of the Euphrates are so deep that big ships can’t get in.

Bashir meant to ignite a tanker full of fuel by sinking it, turning the Euphrates into a fiery serpent, and stopping reinforcements from Baghdad, and Sherov had to figure out what kind of tanker would be the most suitable, and it was best not to block the Iraqi communist attack, Otherwise, Fallujah has conquered it, and the fire dragon blocking the opponent has become an obstacle blocking his own side, which is not good.

But at present, Shelov has one more thing, and that is the military exercises in Turkestan, the North Caucasus and the Caucasus. There are only a few countries that can be fought in the entire Middle East. Syria and Egypt are still staring at Israel, and the rest The only two countries that can intervene in the Iraqi civil war are Turkey and Iran. Turkey is the second largest armed force in NATO in terms of the number of troops, after the United States. Iran is the most pro-American Middle East country in this era, and its friendship with the United States is even higher than that of Saudi Arabia. It is also the Middle East police that the United States has always supported.

Iran is equipped with all-American equipment, and Pahlavi is also very good to the army. Today’s Iran is not the Iran that played with the crowd after the religious revolution. The thing about taking chestnuts out of fire? After Nixon took office, Pahlavi announced yesterday that he was worried about the situation in Iraq.

Since this is the case, let Pahlavi’s anxiety be even greater. Marshal Andrei Grechko, Minister of Defense of the Soviet Union, announced that military exercises involving the three military regions of Turkestan, North Caucasus and Transcaucasus will begin soon. In addition, the Black Sea Fleet and the Caspian Squadron will start a week of military exercises to deter Turkey and Iran from acting rashly.

   As for the country of Saudi Arabia, it is not that the Soviet Union looks down on him. At present, this country is just beginning to rise. As for military power, Serov believes that this country that cannot even be defeated by the Houthis has never risen at all.

The exercise, chaired by the Minister of Defense, Marshal Andrei Grechko, with more than 60,000 participants, completed the maneuvers between the three military regions, as well as the landing exercises of the Black Sea Fleet, the Caspian Squadron and the Soviet Navy infantry, involving The entire Caucasus and the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Once the news was released, it caused strong pressure on Turkey and Iran, and they raised the alert status of their border areas. Once the Soviet Red Navy came over, the U.S. Navy would not even have a chance to rescue.

   So the two countries did not hear the US’s request for the two countries to intervene, and expressed their own difficulties. The international economy is not good, the armament is insufficient, and the personnel are not neat. Simply put, it is impossible to intervene in the war in Iraq.

  The two countries believe that the United States itself is not going to go up, and it is unrealistic for them to go up and fight the Soviet Union. To know that both Turkey and Iran border the Soviet Union, what is the strongest Soviet Union? Army tanks calculated in ten thousand, really do not know the severity of the disaster for them, so no matter what support the United States provides, the two governments are unlikely to agree.

   “What are you kidding, provide weapon support? Let’s deal with the Soviet Union? Can the Soviet Union be dealt with with weapon support?” Pahlavi muttered to himself after sending off the American envoy. Don’t say it’s a real fight, even the current drills have tightened a string for the Iranian military.

In the past few days, the Iraqi Communist Party and the Kurdish armed forces in the north have continued to attack, approaching Baghdad from both the north and the south, but overall the front line is still stable. After all, the Iraqi military government has fought for so many years to stabilize the front line. It is not difficult. At the same time, Baghdad has begun to seek foreign aid, indicating that this is a subversive action by the Soviet Union against Iraq. I hope the international community will support it, but the international community is currently busy.

  Brezhnev was negotiating with Bugera and the Federal Republic of Germany, and his words revealed, intentionally or unintentionally, that there were indeed strong hardliners in the Soviet Union, and he was even quite dissatisfied with the policy of relaxation between himself and Western Europe. As for the hardliners, they are probably all except for himself and Kosygin.

After several days of preparation and shouting, Bashir finally made all the preparations. More than 300 artillery pieces were lined up in Fallujah. He estimated that 90% of the residents of the city had been evacuated. , the remaining people are either not afraid of death, or are die-hard supporters of the military government. At this time, there is no need to keep their hands.

At dawn on January 25th, when the sky was just dawn, the artillery positions of the Iraqi Liberation Army made a loud noise, and artillery shells were fired one after another. An American-flagged tanker was hit and the entire Euphrates River turned into a fire dragon.

The shelling lasted for six hours and more than 10,000 tons of shells were fired. The entire Fallujah was unrecognizable in the binoculars. As the last shell bombed into the city, at the same time, the Iraqi Liberation Army’s T54 tanks had rushed out of their positions, behind them. The soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army followed closely, and behind them was the slow-moving crawler-type heavy artillery, Stalin’s Hammer. (To be continued~^~)