Chapter 137:
Chapter 137
The German army, which had been barely holding out against the Allied offensive, had to face another new enemy.
The guardian god who had protected Russia for hundreds of years.
The general who had dethroned Napoleon, the conqueror of Europe, and led Tsar Alexander to enter Paris!
“The Eastern Marshal is here! Hahaha!”
Everyone was happy to see me finally burst into laughter. They must have felt really good. This winter was not as bad as the last one, but it was still cold enough.
“The Fascist pigs are still not prepared for the winter. They seem to have trouble with their supplies because they waste their resources on the wrong places.”
“Ah, ah. How hard did we work for that?”
Borosilov nodded with a good mood. He had been a failure as a regular commander, but he had a decent talent in military administration.
He trained the Spetsnaz units, which parachuted into the enemy’s rear at night.
With the meager supplies we barely delivered, they endured the harsh winter and continued to disrupt the German supply lines.
They cut off the railways, blew up the roads, sniped the vehicles, and cooperated with the partisan units to raid the supply convoys.
Thanks to the exploits of the Eastern Marshal and the Spetsnaz operations, the German supply situation was getting worse.
The German prisoners who were interrogated said the same thing.
“We don’t have enough food. The frozen transport horse was the last meat I ate! Well… unless you count the Soviet boots we looted…”
“I’m not a coward. I just became a prisoner because I was ordered to fight without bullets…”
The results of examining the corpses on the battlefield after the battle were similar. Malnutrition, frostbite, and various diseases were tormenting the German army.
They were clearly at their limit.
“The modern army is an offensive army. And the Red Army is the modern army!”
So I ambitiously ordered an attack.
***
“You can’t push this? This?”
Walter Model was the lion of defense! He added a brilliant record to his name with the lives and injuries of countless Soviet soldiers.
What would our soldiers who sacrificed themselves to advance a few kilometers say…
Of course, now the German losses had started to exceed ours. The exchange rate, which had not exceeded 1:1 except for a few large-scale encirclements, finally began to tilt in favor of the Soviet side.
“Still 1 to 1 against those rabble? Comrade Lenin, have mercy!”
Taking advantage of the defender’s advantage, Model thoroughly blocked the Soviet army from breaking through the defense line and minimized the losses. He saved every single soldier he could and retreated them to the next defense line. His brilliant defensive tactics made the Soviet army bleed too much unnecessary blood.
“I’m sorry… Comrade Secretary…”
“We have no face…”
My neck was stiff. Ah… Ouch…
As I grabbed my neck and grimaced, many attendees rushed to me in horror. I could tell even in my fading consciousness.
Ah… Is this how I go?
***
“Comrade Secretary!”
“Dad!”
“Koba!”
When I opened my eyes, there were about ten people filling the room around me.
My usual doctor was annoyed by the people’s fanatical? reaction, but calmly told me my condition.
“You’ve been lying down for about a day. It is estimated that it was a result of excessive stress-induced cardiac neurosis and accumulated fatigue. From now on, please reduce your alcohol and cigarettes and pay attention to your health…”
“I got it, I got it…”
Whew… I took a deep breath and looked at the people around me.
It wasn’t intentional, but this was a kind of opportunity. An opportunity to see who was at the core of power.
The closer they were to me, who seemed to drip power, the more they could suck the juice of power.
And the one who was closely attached to the place where the juice flowed was the powerful one.
The man who was kneeling at the edge of my bed and sobbing with tears and snot, that Beria, was the one who would become the next Soviet power.
“Beria… Borosilov… Molotov… Zhukov…”
The closest ones to me, except for my daughter, Svetlana, were those four. If Budenny had been alive, he might have replaced Zhukov, but anyway.
Svetlana was shocked that her father woke up and didn’t even look at her or call her name, but that wasn’t important.
If I die soon, will they be able to lead the Soviet regime well?
Will this victory I made be shattered miserably?
Ha… I had another worry. The ferocious Model who became the commander-in-chief of the Eastern Front and devoured our soldiers, and these tigers who coveted power. Zhukov was glaring at Beria, who was whimpering, and it felt like a bad prelude to me.
“How is the front… How is the front?”
“It has entered a temporary lull. The enemy Model seems to know well that he is in an absolute disadvantage, and he chose to retreat and reorganize his tactics rather than launch an active counterattack.”
“I see…”
As Zhukov answered that, the eyes of the people in the room shifted to him.
Now that he had surpassed his senior enemies and became the de facto leader of the military, Zhukov confidently briefed me on the front situation.
It was a relief that there was no big trouble on the front.
Zhukov was getting the spotlight alone, and Beria was jealous, so he suddenly whispered in my ear.
“Comrade Secretary, we… succeeded in the experiment.”
“Really?”
I suddenly felt much better. No matter how much Model was the lion of defense and a great general, he couldn’t stop a bomb carried by a flying bomber.
Beria smiled with a face covered with tears, snot, and secretions, as if he wanted me to reward his merit.
Normally, I would have been disgusted, but now Beria looked very competent and excellent.
“Hahaha, good. Now! Molotov, Zhukov, Basilievsky, you three and you stay, and the rest get out!”
“Dad…?”
“Svetlana, go out for a while, the adults are talking.”
The guards escorted the people out. Svetlana too.
‘Is there a bug in this room?’
Beria laughed and said, seeing me looking around in case.
“Don’t worry, Comrade Secretary. There is no safer place than this.”
“I see. So, you said the experiment was successful?”
***
In the outskirts of the Kazakh desert, there was a huge secret nuclear test site.
Some of the Soviet leaders, including me, secretly headed to Semipalatinsk, where the nuclear test site was located, under the pretext of ‘a vacation for health’.
The chief of the Soviet nuclear development, Igor Kurchatov, seemed to sense that he had a chance to show off his research achievements in front of the Soviet top brass.
“This reactor turns natural uranium into plutonium through nuclear reactions! To make a nuclear weapon with uranium, you have to enrich uranium-235, which is less than 1% of the total, but if you react it, you can produce much more efficient plutonium!”
He also gave a conventional thank-you note, saying that all these achievements were thanks to the command and full support of the honorable Secretary, and showed us the reactor.
Molotov, Zhukov, and Basilievsky looked curiously at the reactor that glowed faintly blue with the Cherenkov effect.
“Be careful! Inside there is a massive nuclear reaction that spews out energy. This reactor alone can supply the power needed by several cities!”
The experimentally built nuclear power plant supplied power to the refining of light metals such as aluminum, which the Soviet Union had not been able to produce due to lack of electricity.
As a result, the aluminum production increased by more than three times since a while ago, and most of it was used for military aircraft production.
The generals who didn’t know where all this aluminum came from nodded their heads.
“How powerful is the bomb you can make with this?”
Basilievsky asked cautiously, and Kurchatov scratched his chin and tilted his head, as if it was an interesting question.
“Hmm… that depends on how big you make it. Under the command of the Secretary, we made one with about ten kilograms of plutonium…”
Just? Beria and Molotov also looked strange, as if to say what they would do with a 10kg one. But I remembered well.
The plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, ‘Fat Man’, had about 6kg of plutonium. And yet the firepower was over 20 kilotons of TNT. That is, it was equivalent to exploding more than 20,000 tons of TNT.
“By calculation… it would be about 30 kilotons of TNT?”
“30 tons? Not very powerful, is it?”
Zhukov said bluntly. Then Beria and Kurchatov laughed together.
“General Zhukov! It’s not 30 tons, it’s 30 kilotons! A thousand times, a thousand times!”
“Really?”
“General Zhukov, if you make a bomb with that… it’s the same as dropping 30,000 tons of TNT.”
The ‘shock bomb’ that we used on the Fire Bear fighter was a 500kg one with a high explosive filled with 300kg, so it was 0.3 tons of TNT.
It was the same as dropping 100,000 of these.
It could have been misunderstood. With various safety devices attached, the size of the body would increase to about 5 tons, but… with one shot, it was no joke that you could delete a city.
“We have already succeeded in a 22-kiloton explosion experiment. We made two prototypes of a 30-kiloton nuclear weapon by increasing the size a little, and if we succeed in expanding and operating the reactor… we can supply plutonium that can make dozens of such bombs. If you give us a little more time and budget…”
“Is that so? Take as much as you want.”
Kurchatov continued to endlessly tell the people who held the money how they could use this weapon system.
“If you attach this warhead to a torpedo and send it near the enemy fleet and detonate it, the waves alone can disable the fleet! Even if it’s just an enemy ship moored in the harbor, you can shoot and run away from a distance…”
Nuclear torpedoes, nuclear cannons, super-powerful nuclear bombs, etc. Zhukov and Beria listened with great interest to Kurchatov’s ideas.
Of course, the era had not yet witnessed the use of nuclear bombs, and they seemed to have no idea of the horrors they could create.
Destroying a city meant not only destroying the production facilities and manpower there, but also killing the civilians, from children to the elderly. Tens of thousands of people died and were injured, and their descendants suffered from radiation exposure.
Of course, nuclear weapons can be used.
Already millions of Soviets had died. Soldiers were killed by bullets or died of abuse in the brutal German prisoner camps, and civilians were massacred helplessly.
The atrocities committed by Germany were worse than the actual history.
If only they could stop that madness, nuclear bombs could be used as much as they wanted. And to Japan, which was also raging and ferocious across the continent.
If only to reduce the sacrifice of millions of Soviet soldiers who would have to die to reach Berlin because of Model’s defense…
“I am death… the destroyer of the world…”
“Huh? Comrade Secretary? What did you say?”
It is said that Oppenheimer, who led the US nuclear development, said that when he saw the result of the nuclear test. He became the destroyer of the world.
And next to him, a scholar named Kenneth Bainbridge who participated in the nuclear development said.
Now we are all bastards.
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