Tuapse

It advanced rapidly some 20 kilometers and successfully captured Madagalbek.

As List had requested the previous week, Yolo visited List's headquarters at Stalina on the 7th, though Yolo came away thoroughly convinced that the 49th Mountain Corps was simply incapable of reaching Sukhimi as originally envisioned, and would be far better employed instead supporting the advance on Tuapse.

Yolo, however, would have no way of anticipating what his subsequent report to Hitler would unleash.

Naturally, Hitler received this contradiction of his stated wishes with calm, measured reasonableness.

On the 8th, Hitler quietly dropped his previous offensive demands concerning the 4th Mountain Division specifically, though without ever formally abandoning his broader underlying position on the matter.

Halder recorded at the time that, quote, De Fura declined to issue an order, on the question of the mountaineers one way or another.

This tacit concession nonetheless allowed Liszt to transfer the bulk of the mountain corps away to help support the ongoing Tuapse operation instead.

Then on the 9th, Liszt formally reported his intention to shift over to the defensive around the Terek bridgeheads for the time being.

The 17th Cavalry Corps, meanwhile, had already been elevated to guard status at the end of August, becoming the 4th Guards Cavalry Corps.

Further east along the approaches to Tuapse, de Angelis' attempt to encircle the Soviet 32nd Guards Division ended in failure.

The guards counterattacked the encircling Jäger forces on the 30th, managed to trap an entire German Jäger regiment in turn, forcing Distel to abandon his own encirclement plan in order to rescue the surrounded unit.

List met with Hitler on the 31st in a conference that began tensely but gradually warmed, thanks largely to List's calm demeanor and his careful explanation of the situation on the ground, including the use of aerial photographs to illustrate the daunting terrain confronting the mountain corps.

This fragile confidence evaporated almost the moment List returned to his headquarters.

Meeting with Rolf and Konrad at Krasnodar to reconsider the situation, the three generals concluded that the best available option was to leave only a small battle group of five battalions to hold the mountain passes in a deliberate economy of force effort.

The remaining mountain battalions would be withdrawn to ease the crushing supply burden and concentrated instead under the 1st Mountain Division, which would then join the main offensive towards Tuapse.

With this revised plan settled, List asked Jodl to visit his headquarters at Stalina to once more thoroughly discuss the question of the employment of the mountain corps.

Ukraine bombed.

Major Russian ports of Tuapse and Novorossiysk.

And Tuapse, it burned the storage capacity for Russian grain, so they cannot load it onto the ships.

And Russia bombed a major Ukrainian ports of Odessa and Nikolaev.

so that Ukrainians have hard time to export their grain.

Deeper within the mountains, the SS Viking Division, together with the Slovak Fast Division, found themselves tied down by persistent flanking attacks launched by the seventeenth Kuban Cossack Calvary Corps.

And as a result, the crucial drive towards the key objective, that being Tuapse, was handed over instead to the ninety-seventh and one hundred and first Jager Divisions.

The one hundred and first had already achieved a notable success by outflanking Soviet positions to capture Apsheronsk on the fifteenth, but its subsequent arrival near Karazhinsk on the sixteenth coincided almost exactly with the arrival of the fresh Soviet thirty-second Guards Rifle Division.

The Guards had ample time to entrench themselves thoroughly by the time the one hundred and first Jager Division began mounting its deliberate attacks on the eighteenth.

Our long-range capability is slashing their profits.

Thousands of our strikes have already been seen by Moscow, Tuapse, Tula, Ryazan, Olenivka, Omsk, and dozens of other locations reached by our Ukrainian justice.

Russia must see more of such justice.

Flamingos should not be a rare species, but birds arriving en masse.

There are currently no shipments from Ukraine's Black Sea terminals.

In Russia, the only grain terminal not officially shut is a small terminal in, I don't know how to pronounce this, Tuapse, Tuapse? Uh, in, in this small town with a capacity of a hundred and sixty thousand tons per month, officials and trade sources say.

The shutdowns represent a loss of more than ninety-seven percent of grain export capacity compared with last season.

Yikes.