The decisive battle against the Third Reich

These artillery fires were urgently summoned by Alexander, and some of them were even Soviet M1910 howitzers. Since their range was only 7.7 kilometers, they had to risk deploying them in Stalingrad to provide artillery reinforcement for the sandbar.

They came in time, otherwise the sandbar where Qin Chuan and others were stationed would have been lost under this charge.

"What's the situation?" Alexander asked anxiously on the phone.

"Very bad!" Qin Chuan replied: "We have suffered 33 casualties, and now only 132 people are combat-ready. What's worse is that because of the battle just now... our MP43 ammunition is almost exhausted!"

This is indeed a very serious problem.

Because the reason why Qin Chuan and others were able to stop the Soviet charge with more than 100 people was largely because of the MP43... Its range was 350 meters, and the east coast was only more than 300 meters away from the sandbar. This allowed the MP43 to suppress the Soviet cover fire on the east coast while shooting at high speed at close range to kill the charging Soviet army, which gave the German army a great advantage. If it was replaced with the Soviet PPSh submachine gun, it would not be able to do this.

After a pause, Qin Chuan continued: "If we don't get supplies and reinforcements, the Soviets will attack again tomorrow, and we may not be able to resist!"

What Qin Chuan said certainly makes sense.

Although the German army may still rely on artillery fire to blow up the pontoon bridge tomorrow, the problem is that the Soviet army can temporarily suppress the German artillery with artillery fire. Then, as long as the Soviet army has enough pontoon bridges, it will take one or two times... Each time it only needs to consume dozens of German troops or some ammunition, then it won't take a few times for the German army to be wiped out.

"But we haven't opened the passage to the Volga River yet!" Alexander replied regretfully.

Alexander meant that if the German army reached the Volga River, they could cross the Volga River to reinforce the sandbar.

But in fact, this is unrealistic... Let's not talk about the fact that this channel has not been opened. Even if it is opened, the Soviet army will deploy firepower along the coast to block the river surface. This can only be done if the German army has almost cleared all the Soviet troops along the coast of Stalingrad and even at the central ferry.

"You can use Soviet weapons, Major!" Alexander comforted.

"Yes, we may have to do this!" Qin Chuan replied helplessly.

Everyone knows what the result of doing this is... The gap in firepower will make the already insufficient commando team even worse.

After hanging up the phone, Qin Chuan stared at the map in a daze.

What to do? Neither troops nor ammunition can be obtained!

The reason why the Soviet army is not attacking now is simply because they do not have enough pontoon bridges.

Tomorrow, when they have built enough pontoon bridges, they will obviously launch a more fierce charge!

Landmines?

In this case, I am afraid they are useless.

Fighter planes?

The role they can play is probably very limited, especially since the Soviets will deploy more and more anti-aircraft firepower on the east coast, and the German fighter planes will not be able to attack the target with confidence.

Qin Chuan was right. Yelyomenko, who was anxious to capture the sandbar and rescue Stalingrad, even transferred a flying squadron to the east coast.

This flying squadron did not want to compete with the German air force, but hoped to harass the German air force to cover the Soviet army's pontoon attack on the sandbar.

Artillery?

This may be useful, but even as mentioned before, it may be suppressed by Soviet artillery.

So, after thinking about it, Qin Chuan thought that the only way to defend the sandbar was to get troops and supplies.

But this seemed impossible... It was difficult to drop supplies to this small sandbar by airdrop, and the same was true for airborne troops. Helicopter transportation was blocked by anti-aircraft fire.

It was even more impossible on land. The sandbar was almost surrounded by the Soviet army, and there was almost no other gap except the Volga River.

Wait, the Volga River!

Thinking of this, Qin Chuan jumped up from his chair and immediately asked the communicator to call Alexander.

"Colonel!" Qin Chuan said, "I need you to send me a reinforcement!"

"But...how?" Alexander asked in confusion.

"We have been blowing up many Soviet transport ships, especially in the past few days, right?"

"Yes!" Alexander replied, "To be precise, during the time you occupied the sandbar, the Soviets even opened several temporary ferry crossings in the upstream industrial zone, but they were all destroyed by our air force!"

After a pause, Alexander asked, "But what does this have to do with our reinforcements?"

"I think..." Qin Chuan said, "There must be a lot of floating objects on the Volga River, so they won't have any suspicion of floating objects, such as oil drums!"

"Uh-huh!" Alexander asked back, "Why would they be suspicious? We also blew up a transport ship carrying fuel yesterday. You know, there are still some factories in Stalingrad that need to be operated, and the Soviets have dozens of tanks! There are oil drums floating everywhere on the river..."

"That's the point, Colonel!" Qin Chuan interrupted Alexander.

"What?" Alexander still didn't understand what Qin Chuan meant.

"Colonel!" Qin Chuan said, "What if the oil barrels contain people or ammunition instead of oil?" Alexander said, "Oh!" and then said, "Great idea, Major! Great, I understand what you mean, I'll do it right away!"

With that said, Alexander immediately hung up the phone.

But after a while Alexander called again, obviously he remembered something.

"How do they know they have reached their destination?" Alexander asked.

"We will launch flares!" Qin Chuan replied: "In addition, you have to roughly calculate the time, so do we, and then we will send people to respond on the shore!"

"No problem!" Alexander replied.

The method is actually very simple, that is, put people and supplies in oil barrels and float them down the river to the sandbar.

As for where to put down these oil barrels... of course it was the Lenok area occupied by the Germans upstream.

This can also be said to be a coincidence, because on the other side of the world, the same thing is happening between the US military and the Japanese army on the Pacific battlefield at this moment: the Japanese army is blocked by the US military on Guadalcanal and cannot receive supplies. So the Japanese army came up with a way: use destroyers to transport supplies to the vicinity of Guadalcanal, and then throw the oil barrels containing the supplies into the sea. The tide would bring these oil barrels to the island. The Japanese military called it the "Tokyo Express".

Now, Qinchuan used the same method on Shazhou.

The only difference is that the Japanese used tides, while Qinchuan used the flow rate of the Volga River.