Chapter 115:
Chapter 115
The massive advance of the German army finally began.
The Northern Army Group started to move towards the city of Leningrad, the city of desire.
We must capture Leningrad! Field Marshal Manstein issued a strict order to the whole army.
He had already been involved in one ‘unpleasant’ incident and he was hysterically urging his subordinates to regain the favor of the Führer.
“Start the offensive!”
The machine guns installed at the front line of the Soviet army spewed fire. Dozens of trenches hidden among the dense forests and bushes opened fire at once.
Tutatata tatatata!!
The soldiers at the front fell one by one. The rest of the soldiers crawled forward to protect themselves from the crossfire.
Just as the Soviet army learned the German tank tactics, the German army also learned the Soviet anti-tank gun operation.
While the front-line soldiers advanced under cover, the anti-tank gunners who calculated the coordinates of the enemy trenches fired heavy shots one by one.
The forward base that was hit by the anti-tank shells went silent.
The pre-bombardment had already cleared some of the mines and barbed wires, so the German infantry could advance relatively easily.
The ground was pitted in places, but it was not a swamp that made it hard to take a step.
The soldiers who wore helmets and carried machine guns walked carefully not to slip in the holes.
The ground was somewhat solid, but there was enough muddy water in the holes where the shells had fallen. Was it from the damp soil?
Anyway, no one wanted to bury their face there.
A familiar siren sounded and planes crossed the sky.
Peeeeeek kieeeeeek!
“Stuka! Stuka!”
Small exclamations erupted among the soldiers. The iron birds attacked the anti-aircraft guns that supported the Soviet defense.
Bang!
After the explosion, what remained were debris that spewed flames and smoke.
The Stukas that flew in a flash flew away in a flash, leaving behind the cheers of the soldiers.
The Soviet machine guns occasionally aimed at the sky and scattered ammunition, but they had little effect.
Without fighter jets to protect the airspace, there was not much that light machine guns on the ground could do.
They just burst out.
One by one.
The special points that they had built were suppressed, and the barbed wires that they had worked hard overnight were turned into rags by pre-bombardment.
The soldiers clenched their weapons.
They hid their bodies behind cover and only stuck out their heads to fire machine guns and new rifles at the Soviet soldiers who were eliminated one by one.
By anti-tank guns, air strikes, or blind bullets or grenades.
The survivors soon followed their comrades.
A firm order came from above.
‘Do not take prisoners’
The soldiers did not refuse that order. There were no longer those who thought that the Soviet army had horns on their heads and were minions of the devil.
Nor did they want to spare those damned Untermenschen who turned their comrades into chunks of meat with machine gun bullets.
“Die! You bastard, die!”
“Huk… ak, ak…”
Shovels, swords pierced through the chests or necks of Soviet soldiers.
Warm blood spurted out and soaked their uniforms, but they did not care.
Or maybe it would be more appropriate to say that they could not care.
The next moment, they were counterattacked by Soviet soldiers who were with them and killed.
The soldier who collapsed like a puppet with a cut string fell into a damp trench.
The private who had just stabbed a Soviet soldier’s face several times with a trench knife realized that it was not a Soviet soldier but a corpse only when his colleague stopped him.
He shook off his grip on his neck and wiped his trench knife on his uniform.
Bang!
The soldier who stopped him fell down with blood flowing from his head as he got up from cover.
He collapsed like a rag doll into a wet trench.
The private who had just been stopped by him shouted and kicked off cover and charged.
“Sieg Heil! Germany man?…!”
Bang!
A mine exploded and his right leg shattered into pieces, creating a red spray of blood.
He fell to the ground and searched for his mother, but only for a moment. Soon his last struggle stopped.
The earth of the battlefield drank up the blood as much as it wanted.
It did not distinguish between German and Soviet blood, and young blood was endlessly spilled on the ground for nothing.
As the bloodbath continued, the Soviet trenches were swept away one by one by the gray waves.
***
The German army enjoyed a numerical superiority on the battlefield for the first time in a long time.
At least on this battlefield, they seemed to have more soldiers than the Soviets.
Usually, when the Soviet army broke through the trench line, they poured out their reserves. But all that was left on the battlefield were a few machine gunners who ignored death and fired their last bullets from the trenches.
A heavy roar of engines began to sound from afar.
“Artillery! Take cover!”
As the sergeant shouted, the soldiers hid in the trenches dug by the Soviets like ants.
It was not a pleasant experience.
Some unlucky soldiers were greeted by corpses that still bled sticky blood where they threw themselves.
They did not know what stories they had when they were alive, but now they were just corpses.
The soldiers closed their eyes and lowered their heads in the trenches to prepare for the falling shells.
“Uuuuuu…”
Shell shock.
This term was firmly embedded in the heads of even the low-ranking soldiers.
‘They say you go crazy if you hear too many loud noises from exploding shells.’
The soldiers whispered that in the barracks.
The officers explained it with difficult words that sound was also a shock and that the blast damaged the brain… something like that.
But the soldiers knew it more intuitively.
“Uaaaaaaa!! Heil Hitler!! Aaaaaa!!”
“Damn it, Hans!”
They go crazy, they lose their minds.
The Soviet shelling had not ended yet.
A soldier who had gone mad ran out to the no-man’s land between the trenches where shells rained like rain.
Shrapnel from high-explosive shells covered the unfortunate Hans like snowflakes.
All that was left in his place was something similar to a front-line art piece that had been smeared with red paint on clay.
The soldiers who witnessed that scene with their own eyes clenched their eyes shut.
That was shell shock.
A guy who was fine would gradually lose his mind, either pull the trigger on his own head or shoot at his comrades who refused to go to the battlefield, or just run out like that.
The soldiers who had once been comrades passed by him and advanced.
“Charge! Charge forward!”
The officer’s voice sounded somewhat weak.
He fired two shots from his Walther pistol into the sky and ground, and then the soldiers looked at him briefly as if they did not care.
They just moved forward silently one step at a time.
Nothing seemed to stimulate them.
“Budenovka!”
“What?!”
A loud noise of engines came from far ahead.
“Ura! Ura!”
Faintly mixed with Soviet battle cries.
The faces of the soldiers who were frowning and stiffened changed color.
Some turned pale, some turned black.
“Budenovka tanks! Budenovka is here!”
“Damn it… Panzerfaust gunners! Gunners!”
The soldiers quickly hid their bodies between the trenches dug by the Soviets and shell holes.
Dangdang, dangdang, it was useless and everyone knew it.
They could not stop a 46.5-ton steel steed with mere rifle bullets.
“Kiyatho!”
“Whirr, whirr, kiyoooooot!”
“Ura, ura!”
Bang! Bang!
The huge guns of the medium tanks spewed flames.
Among them were strange battle cries.
The Soviet counterattack began.
It was not light machine guns that were given to infantry squads or so, but real heavy machine guns that sounded.
The anti-tank guns mounted on trucks and armored vehicles also spewed fire.
The infantrymen who had no proper way to deal with armored vehicles just shivered.
“Watch out behind! I’m going!”
A brave soldier with a new weapon, the Panzerfaust, which was made after seeing the Soviet rocket launcher, aimed at the Budenovka tank that had approached within a few hundred meters.
He fired the Panzerfaust even as machine gun bullets flew around him.
“Waaaaaa!!”
“Hooray! Hooray! Charge!”
The Panzerfaust that flew with smoke and flames hit the Soviet tank precisely.
Soon, the tank stopped and the crew escaped, staggering.
With this little stick, we can fight against that huge and powerful tank!
Of course, our tanks could also explode from a single rocket launcher, but that was not important to the infantry.
Some bounced off, some pierced through the armor of the tank.
The soldiers who fired the Panzerfausts died soon from the concentrated fire of machine guns, but their morale was higher than when the tanks appeared.
“Attack!”
A young lieutenant shouted and climbed onto a stopped tank.
He held a machine gun and screamed like a madman.
Attack! Attack!
His scream was matched by the Stukas that flew again.
They made that terrible horn sound.
It sounded horrible to the Soviets, but to the Germans it was like a trumpet of salvation blown by a savior.
The Stukas attacked the Soviet armored units this time.
“Those bastards!”
The anti-aircraft machine guns on the tanks and the anti-aircraft armored vehicles that had been spewing fire at the unlucky Germans turned their barrels towards the Stukas.
One soldier cursed and turned his machine gun quickly.
A Stuka was exactly in his sights.
He held his breath and fired dozens of bullets.
“I got him!”
Sparks flew and the dive bomber swayed. It plunged towards a Soviet tank, then spun around for a few seconds with its wing torn by an anti-aircraft machine gun.
Blood and metal splashed and the tank and plane collided.
***
The layered defenses absorbed most of the German offensive.
Some elite units, some brave units succeeded in breaking through the Soviet trenches and advancing to their target points. But they had to retreat again because other units that should have been next to them fell behind.
The German army that had advanced by shedding thousands of lives was hit hard by the Soviet counterattack.
“This is bullshit. Where are our tanks?”
Most of the Germans had to retreat from the Soviet counterattack led by Budenovka medium tanks.
They just gave up the trenches they had captured with so much blood.
They received plenty of Stuka support, but it was not very useful in front of tanks that they should have caught with tanks.
The ‘flower of the battlefield’, the tank units, were all dragged somewhere, and what they threw at them was a little Panzerfaust.
It was quite effective and they managed to take down some Budenovka tanks, but…
‘Where are they?’
Manstein, who had been waiting for the right moment while listening to the reports from the front line with half-closed eyes, finally made a decision.
He opened his lips that had been clenched.
“Deploy two armored corps now.”
“!!!”
The staff who had been tense with negative reports finally smiled brightly.
Manstein of ‘Sickle Cut’ showed another sickle cut.
Of course, the Soviet army was not that pile of straw anymore.
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