The decisive battle against the Third Reich

Cavalry does have the advantages of fast speed and strong impact on the battlefield, but this is only true before cold weapon combat or machine guns appear.

Once machine guns appear... cavalry's weaknesses such as high targets and poor survivability are exposed.

War horses seem to be able to block a few bullets, but the problem is that war horses are living creatures. They will be injured, in pain, or even die after being hit by bullets. What's worse is that the result of horse injuries often causes the rider to be injured, lose combat effectiveness, or even die.

Therefore, this type of soldier that has dominated the battlefield for centuries is destined to be eliminated from the battlefield.

Just like now, at the command of Colonel Slaine, the German army poured a rain of bullets at the 63rd Soviet Cavalry Division.

Instantly, shells exploded in the Soviet cavalry, and the shrapnel flying in all directions made the horses scream sadly. Riders kept falling off their horses. It was not known whether the horses were frightened and threw their masters off, or were hit by shrapnel... The shrapnel of the shells spread from low to high, and the Soviet soldiers on horseback would be hit by shrapnel exponentially because of their higher positions.

Occasionally, a few large-caliber artillery would hit hard and blow up the Soviet cavalry, including the horses.

Rows of bullets flew in front of the position, and a string of soil flowers was raised on the soft land, and then extended to the horses behind...

There was a scream, and the horses shed blood and fell to the ground. Because of the extremely fast running speed, the horses almost turned over and fell to the ground, and of course the cavalry was thrown out fiercely. Even if he didn't die, he would be trampled into meat paste by the heavy hooves that followed.

The most tragic was the Katyusha rocket launcher... The Soviet model of this rocket launcher at this time was the BM13 multi-track rocket launcher (Note: the early model used tracks instead of tubes). It has a total of 8 parallel launch rails, and can fire 16 rockets of 132MM caliber in one salvo... The track is similar to the "I" shape of a railway track, with one rocket on each side, and can fire rockets in 7 to 10 seconds. The German army found 10 such rocket launchers in the Soviet warehouse. At this time, they fired 160 rockets in one breath, and a wall of fire was instantly blown up in front of the position. But the Soviet cavalry still did not retreat. They still shouted and charged forward, and they also needed to show their horsemanship to jump over or avoid the bodies of the war horses lying on the ground. Even so, the Soviet cavalry's charge was still in trouble at about 200 meters... The speed of advancement was basically the same as death, and they could not move forward half a point. The reason why it was 200 meters, Qin Chuan thought it might be because the German soldiers used a large number of PPSh submachine guns... The range of this thing can barely reach 250 meters and it is much less powerful than the intermediate bullet of MP43.

In other words, the German army has not yet exerted its full combat power, otherwise the Soviet cavalry would not be able to rush into this distance.

In fact, even if these cavalry could rush into the city, it would still be a dead end... There was a tank parked in the middle of the street for defense. Unless their horses could hit the tank, there was basically no room for the horses to move.

So, under the light of almost uninterrupted flares, one horse after another fell in the hail of bullets, and soon the battlefield was full of horse corpses and the cries and struggling figures of injured horses.

However, what puzzled the German army was that the Soviet army did not seem to care about these, and soon launched a second wave of attack after the failure of the first wave of charge.

"Are they crazy?" Eberhard observed with a telescope for a while, and sighed: "What's the difference between them and suicide?"

"Maybe!" Qin Chuan said: "They thought that if the first time didn't work, the second time would work, so there might be a third and fourth time..."

Qin Chuan was right. After the second wave of charge was repelled, there was indeed a third wave of charge.

But the third wave of charge was a little different: the Soviet infantry rushed up right behind the cavalry.

This is a very creative way of charging, because the tall figures of the cavalry would block the infantry behind them. If the flares were not fired far away, the German army would not have been able to find the infantry for a while.

On the other hand, these infantry can use the corpses of war horses as cover when charging...The corpses of war horses in front of the position have been piled up to a distance of more than 100 meters in front of the German trenches. They are stacked and intertwined like trenches, and the blood on the ground can provide a natural protective color for the Soviet army, which will indeed cause some trouble to the German army in this dark night.

So the Soviet cavalry charge finally came to an end, after all, the scattered infantry on the battlefield would hinder the cavalry charge.

But the battle did not stop because of this, and it immediately turned to infantry combat mode... In fact, it is much more difficult to deal with infantry than cavalry, because infantry knows how to hide themselves and also has some flexible tactical moves, which makes the German soldiers suddenly unable to adapt.

The 9th Mountain Division that charged towards the German army... In fact, it cannot be simply called the 9th Mountain Division, because it is mixed with other troops that have withdrawn. Because it is difficult to organize in the dark, they were all sent up at once.

The 9th Mountain Division was an early mountain division formed by the Soviet Army.

The Soviet mountain divisions were actually not professional, and because the frontline troops suffered heavy casualties and were in urgent need of troops, they often organized the mountain divisions into infantry divisions and put them into the front line. The 9th Mountain Division was not disbanded partly because of the importance of mountain operations in the Caucasus and the It has not participated in combat... The Soviet army has a tradition that units that have suffered several defeats on the battlefield are likely to be disbanded.

The 9th Mountain Division in history was disbanded due to poor performance in the Caucasus Campaign... In fact, this cannot be blamed on the 9th Mountain Division, but the training of the German Mountain Division is very good. The German Mountain Division has a team composed of professional rock climbers. They always used ropes and other tools to climb over dangerous peaks and suddenly appeared behind the Soviet army's checkpoints, thus defeating the Soviet army time and time again.

The result of this was that the 9th Mountain Division was demobilized and converted into an infantry division, and the designation was given to the 20th Mountain Division, which performed reasonably well.

Of course, the battle situation at this time is a little different.

Because the German army bypassed the Caucasus Mountains, the 9th Mountain Division was used as an infantry division before it could demonstrate its mountain skills.

Compared with other Soviet troops, this unit obviously has some combat effectiveness... Although it has no combat experience, it is well-trained, which can be seen from their charging tactical movements and mutual coordination.

But even so, what the Soviet army did was still in vain.

Because, on the other side of them, Manstein had led the main force to launch a general attack on the Soviet front.