Chapter 130:
Chapter 130
I watched as the Germans tried to flee from the gray city that they had turned into ruins.
At first, they had asked the Finns for help.
The victors of the Winter War who had launched a joint offensive with the Germans in the north of Leningrad!
But the president and commander-in-chief of Finland, Mannerheim, was ruthless.
[Our Finnish army is not ready for a full-scale offensive right now.]
He refused to join the Germans in another attack. If the Germans tried any ‘dirty tricks’, he seemed ready to turn his guns on them.
Mannerheim knew what the German special forces had done to Salazar and Horti, and he didn’t want to be the third victim.
When the German units, half-isolated in the northern region, tried to retreat to the Baltic area through the port of Helsinki, the Finns guarded the direction of the Germans more strictly than that of Leningrad.
The Germans had no idea what to do as they gritted their teeth.
“Damn those Finnish bastards…”
“We shouldn’t have allied with them.”
Of course, the Finns would have said the same thing. They had joined hands with the Germans, boasting that they would crush the Soviet Union in no time, and this was the result?
Now, the red monster was looking around with bloodshot eyes, seeking revenge. Mannerheim hoped that Finland wouldn’t be the scapegoat, and tried to appease the Soviet Union and Stalin.
***
“Fight! Fire back! Fire!”
The German soldiers who were left behind to ‘cover’ the retreating allies resisted desperately against the Soviet army that surged like a wave.
Tatata tatata tatata!
They sprayed machine guns with a sound like frying beans, but the T-34 tanks didn’t care about that and aimed their huge barrels at the second floor of the building.
“Get away! Shit…”
“Goodbye, you filthy fascists!”
The Soviet soldier cursed at the fascists who had trampled on the city named after Lenin with their dirty feet, and pulled the trigger.
A bright red flame burst out of the T-34’s muzzle and hit the second-floor window where the Germans were hiding.
The Germans were engulfed by the firestorm, burning and suffocating to death. Just like the countless buildings of Leningrad that they had burned down.
“Tank battalion, forward!”
Kwakwakwakwa kwang… The sound of hundreds of medium tanks’ engines echoed like a stereo, dominating the Leningrad where the German heavy weapons had stopped.
The T-34 tank battalion, modified for urban warfare with flamethrowers, swept through the buildings one by one, slowly pushing the Germans’ escape route.
The Germans, who had lost most of their heavy weapons due to poor supply, had no way to counter the Soviet armored forces, relying only on machine guns or rifles as they retreated on foot.
“Shit… Where are our anti-tank guns? There are so many lives here!”
The Germans were furious, but there was nothing they could do.
It was true that the urban warfare, where buildings collapsed and there were many obstacles vertically and horizontally, was a good environment for anti-tank guns to ambush, but they couldn’t drag the anti-tank guns into the building ruins by manpower when they were short of fuel.
The Soviet special forces snipers infiltrated the buildings with various means, took the high ground, and monitored and pressured the Germans.
The Germans, who thought they had occupied the buildings and let their guard down, were killed by the Spetsnaz grenades that entered through the roof.
The Germans who were pushing and hiding the anti-tank guns were shot by the snipers and fell to the ground, spitting blood from their sides.
The Luftwaffe’s fighters had disappeared from the sky, and the Soviet’s flying bears flew.
The debris of the collapsed buildings was swept away, and the T-34 tanks advanced.
Between the alleys and the cracks in the walls, between the buildings and the buildings, the Soviet troops, who had been trained hard and became masters of urban warfare, roamed.
Tutata tutata, they fired their automatic rifles at everything that didn’t look like an ally, and the Germans fired back a few shots with their old Kar98 rifles, but eventually gave up.
[Surrender or die, choose!]
The surrender broadcast that promised ‘the best humane treatment’ had now changed to a threat to choose between surrender or death.
The German soldiers realized that the situation had turned around, even the most clueless ones at the bottom.
On the other hand, even the most thoughtless Soviet soldiers knew that the German defeat was near.
“Reclaim Leningrad! Reclaim the capital! The heart of the revolution, we have come!”
“Ah, my hometown… My hometown Leningrad!”
The soldiers rejoiced and sighed as they reclaimed the old monuments and buildings that had been trampled by the Germans.
The beautiful glory of Rus, the city that had been visited by countless artists and writers since Peter the Great built it, had become a ruin under the bombing and shelling.
It was back in our hands, but we couldn’t find the old glory in the city that had turned into a pile of rubble. The soldiers burned their will as they looked at the city.
“Red Army! Drive out the fascist invaders!”
“Ura! Ura! Ura! Long live the Soviet Union!”
The Soviet troops who reclaimed Leningrad became more cruel.
Even though they had taken out everything that mattered, from the citizens to the Hermitage’s artworks, and the city’s factory equipment.
“Just shoot.”
“Sir? Aren’t they surrendering?”
Especially the soldiers who drove the T-34 tanks, the former cavalrymen, were more so.
The T-34 commander, whom they had respected so much, had died miserably at the hands of the Germans.
They remembered the shame every day as they drove the tanks with the commander’s name on them, and they had to face the ruined city as well. How could they have mercy?
The tank commander, who had a contemptuous expression, looked at the fascist soldiers who waved the yellowed white flags and gave an order.
“Damn it, who cares. Just say you didn’t see it.”
“…Yes! Understood.”
The German soldiers who tied their underwear to a stick and waved it saw the barrel rise up towards them and seemed to give up.
But they had no means to resist.
The supplies for the 4th Army were absolutely insufficient.
The capacity of the railway line that came back from the Narva River direction was barely enough to maintain the army.
And the supplies were not even delivered accurately to the front-line soldiers.
The soldiers who waved the white flags felt the same way.
They had no food or ammo to fight, and the only thing they got from the supplies was a few boxes of condoms that they had no idea what to use for.
“Shit… Hey, I can’t even use this until the end…”
Some of the German soldiers who had lost their will to fight tried to surrender to the Soviets.
Of course, all they got in return was the roaring sound and the firestorm of the T-34 tanks.
***
“Why don’t we do an air drop? An air drop!”
“My Führer! It’s impossible to maintain such a scale of air drop! I will not send the Luftwaffe pilots on such a suicide mission!”
“That’s right… My Führer, there is no proper airfield in Leningrad! Even if we send supplies there, we can only do a parachute drop at best.”
The Führer clenched his teeth and ordered his generals. But when the Luftwaffe commander-in-chief G?ring, and the commander of the air fleet of the Northern Army Group, Wolfram von Richthofen, started to dissuade him, the Führer began to gasp.
“Did you just say Leningrad? Didn’t you say you would rename it to Adolfburg after you captured it?”
“Forgive us, my Führer!”
Richthofen turned pale and begged for forgiveness. But G?ring, who had lost weight and ‘came to his senses’ after quitting morphine, still tried to stop the Führer, who was rubbing his temples and fuming.
“My Führer. Please reconsider. It would be better to give up the supplies and evacuate as many troops as possible… or focus on counterattacking where the Soviets have broken through!”
“Leave hundreds of thousands of men there?”
‘You were the one who stuck those soldiers there!’
G?ring felt like he was shouting that in his mind.
Of course, as the Führer said, there was no future for the German army after leaving hundreds of thousands of elite soldiers in Leningrad.
They had already suffered nearly two million casualties.
If they included those who were isolated in Leningrad, it would be over two million.
Of course, they had inflicted almost twice as much damage on the Soviets, but the Soviets had basically three times more population than them.
On top of that, the German army had already exhausted most of its offensive capacity.
Even if the defense side was tactically advantageous, strategically speaking, they had to go on the offensive to force the enemy’s losses, but they had no choice of offensive anymore.
‘It’s nothing but a war of attrition.’
Now, not only the army or the navy, but also the Luftwaffe, the air force, had a soaring casualty rate. If the army retreated one step, the pilots who fought in the sky would fall into the enemy territory.
How many pilots had buried their bones on the Eastern Front? G?ring gritted his teeth.
If only they could inflict several times more losses in the war of attrition, it might be worth it, but at a ratio of 1:2, or even worse, it was not profitable at all.
G?ring looked at some empty seats.
“…”
Rommel, Model, Manstein, Guderian. Rommel was exiled, Model was dismissed from his position as the commander of the Southern Army Group and was sitting in a corner, his mouth shut, looking at the conference room.
Manstein was in the north, Guderian was in the center, and they had no way to intervene in the grand strategy from here.
The new commander of the Southern Army Group was Erich von Kleist. He was a man who was lacking in one way or another, in terms of ability or background, to receive the Führer’s trust.
The Führer had no way to stop it now.
“If we summarize the reports from the front… the situation is not good. My Führer, we need to come up with a special measure.”
The one who the Führer favored from the staff side spoke quietly, with a soft voice.
He was right. Except that there was no such thing as a ‘special measure’. Of course, he was not the only one who couldn’t come up with it, so it wasn’t necessarily the chief of staff’s fault.
“Send reinforcements to Manstein. At least make the… what was it, the detachment army? Make that offensive succeed.”
The Führer leaned back in his chair, his strength or his drug gone, and closed his eyes. Pervitin, that damn pervitin. G?ring felt a tightness in his chest.
He had made such a fuss about him quitting morphine, and then he took that pervitin and became like that? T
he oratory skills of the Beer Hall Putsch era, and the prophetic-like ability that he suddenly showed and suddenly disappeared a while ago, were all gone.
‘Was it the power of the drug?’
People were losing their trust in the Führer.
There were plenty of people who had nothing left to believe in, but they still had an infinite faith in the Führer.
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