Chapter 35:
Chapter 35
As the weather grew colder, the muddy ground began to harden.
It was a battlefield where tanks could maneuver.
It was still November, so it was not too cold for the infantry to move.
The clash began in earnest.
The southwestern front, where the biggest collision was expected.
Commander Kirponos was pondering over his conversation with Secretary Stalin.
“Be very careful when launching an offensive. The enemy commander of the Southern Group of Forces has been replaced, and your opponent is the best general of the German army! If you attack rashly, you might end up throwing our soldiers into their meat grinder!”
The secretary was extremely wary of the enemy commander, Model.
He emphasized several times that he should be cautious when launching an offensive.
Kirponos, who was known for his prudence, had no intention of pushing his soldiers into the enemy’s mouth either.
Most of the 2 million troops, who were the core of the force, moved to the southern front under Zhukov’s command.
The Soviet army had a lot of numbers, but they were far behind in skill.
If they made a mistake, they could suffer a huge loss.
“Then, Comrade Secretary, would you be satisfied with weakening the enemy’s combat power rather than encircling and annihilating them? If a tank is damaged and immobilized during combat, the enemy has to abandon it when they retreat, so we can inflict the same loss as destroying it if we limit it to when the enemy retreats.
We can reduce their combat power in this way with armored units… But for infantry units, the proportion of losses in combat is limited, so it is not as effective as encirclement and annihilation.”
“Do as you please, I respect your judgment. But… there’s no need to throw our soldiers into their meat grinder.”
“I understand, Comrade Secretary. Do you have anything else to say?”
“That’s all. The general on the battlefield knows the battlefield best.”
In fact, Germany had already lost before they even fought.
What else could they call it but defeat if they had to give up the land they occupied and run away, leaving behind tanks that couldn’t roll in the mud?
What decided the battle was how many fascists they buried in Mother Russia’s soil.
Secretary Stalin kindly reminded the soldiers that they didn’t need to be obsessed with expanding the front while risking too much damage.
“Start the offensive as planned!”
“Enemy tanks at 10 o’clock! Four new tanks included!”
Nikolai’s unit had received orders to advance, but they were not able to carry out those orders at all.
Rather, they were pushed back by the seemingly overwhelming enemy forces.
The artillery fire that had supported their advance seemed to have decreased a lot.
The Stukas, which had been hard to find in the sky for a while, came back and tore through their ranks.
Machine guns rattled and wherever they passed, there were only fragments of friendly soldiers or vehicle wreckage left.
Nikolai looked at Sergeant Bolozha.
The most experienced sergeant in his squad was assigned as the gunner of the newly distributed rocket launcher.
The squad members who were waiting in the temporary shelter dug a little deeper in the shell crater wondered when Sergeant Bolozha would fire the rocket.
Among the weapons of their allies, the only ones that could bite against the new tanks that the fascists brought were also new weapons: rocket launchers or Kabe tanks with 76mm 39-caliber guns, or heavier guns than that.
The problem was… as the platoon leader lamented, the artillerymen were busy fighting among themselves and the tank forces were transferred further south for Zhukov’s offensive.
The remaining infantrymen were given rocket launchers.
And a pile of grenades. The company commander said this about the pile of grenades.
“If any of our company’s soldiers takes this and charges to destroy a tank, he will be a hero of the people! I guarantee that his remaining family will be well treated and live well!!”
Political Commissar Semol said this after hearing that.
“The party is a reasonable place and does not demand impossible courage from its soldiers. You can be a hero if you can, but unnecessary… dog death… death should be avoided.”
And he added faintly. If you want to be a hero so much, do it yourself.
“Sergeant…?”
Sergeant Bolozha was intensely focused.
The drawback of rocket launchers was that they had a strong backblast and were difficult to shoot from inside shelters.
They had to be fired from a place where the back was open, but then they had to leave shelter that protected them from infantry fire.
And they could be torn apart by machine guns mounted on heavily armed tanks. Just like Ivan Mikhailovich Sergeant, who was the squad leader of second squad.
Sergeant Bolozha had changed anyway. After seeing the civilians massacred, he had turned from a crazy senior to a demon burning with revenge after passing through that sticky season.
He was usually quiet, but at times like this, when the battle was approaching…
“Count to three and charge, just buy me some time.”
“Yes? Yes, yes…”
He always volunteered for the most dangerous mission.
The fascists were not fools, so they concentrated their fire on the soldiers with the rocket launchers, who were obviously more dangerous than the riflemen.
Sergeant Bolozha had performed that mission four times, and survived all four.
Nikolai had to cover him with extra ammunition, and lost half of his right ear to the fascists’ bullets.
“One, two… three!”
The squad that had been ambushed crawled out of the crater and started running.
While the enemy tank hadn’t noticed yet, Sergeant Bolozha fired the rocket launcher.
“Nikolai, give me another one!”
He handed a rocket to the impatient Bolozha, and Nikolai started shooting at the fascists who began to look this way.
“Ura! Uraaa!”
Damn it, he hit an old light tank instead of the new ones. The tank soon burst into flames with a loud noise, as if there was an explosion inside.
But the new tanks’ machine guns started to aim this way.
The squad cheered at the destruction of the tank, and also shouted to request support from other squads.
“We destroyed a tank! Long live the Red Army!!”
But while Sergeant Bolozha was preparing another shot, the squad members were being mowed down by machine gun fire.
The other squads’ rocket launchers mostly missed the new tanks, and even those that hit didn’t seem to do much damage.
How did he know? Because they kept shooting this way!
To make matters worse, the fascists’ half-track armored vehicles with infantrymen started to charge along with the tanks.
“Nikolai! Nikolai! Bolozha!”
Somewhere in Asrahi, he heard someone calling him and the sergeant.
Nikolai grabbed the sergeant’s neck, who was aiming at the tank, and started running back.
Let go of this! Let go of this!
The sergeant shouted, but someone was clearly calling from behind.
He couldn’t stop.
He couldn’t just die like the other squad members.
Soon Sergeant Bolozha also started running with him.
“You… we’ll see when we get back.”
He would have trembled at that remark normally, but this time he wasn’t that scared.
Damn it, kill me if you can!
He had to retreat now.
He saw friendly tanks coming from afar, maybe they had received a report of the tanks’ appearance.
‘Please, please… Mother Mary, God… Secretary… Mother… Mom!’
His hope was dashed when one of the friendly tanks was hit by a Stuka’s machine gun from the sky and stopped with smoke.
The remaining three fired a few shots, but one of them was penetrated by two shots from the enemy’s counterattack.
The friendly tanks also took two hits, but the enemy’s new tanks seemed to not care at all, bouncing off both shots with a clang of metal.
“Retreat! Retreat!”
It looked like the company commander.
He was far away, shooting his Tokarev pistol at the fascist tanks meaninglessly.
His face was pale with fear.
We can’t stop them with rifles, retreat! Not far from him, a bunch of bombs were rolling on the ground.
There were bloodstains and corpses of soldiers who used to be there.
Did he really order them to charge? Did they die like that?
“Nikolai, over here!”
Sergeant Bolozha ran with his loaded rocket launcher clenched in his hand until it turned white.
He ran behind a friendly tank that had been destroyed. No one came out of the tank that was still spewing smoke.
The fascist tanks didn’t seem to care much about this side either, thinking it was completely destroyed.
“No, sergeant! What are you doing! You said we had to retreat!”
Bolozha hid behind the tank and aimed his rocket launcher at the enemy tank.
He glanced at him briefly.
‘Doesn’t that bastard have any fear?’
He seemed to be smiling to Nikolai’s eyes. His eyes were burning brightly.
“Then leave it behind. Your grenades too. I gave you some last time.”
Nikolai dropped not only what Sergeant Bolozha had given him before but also his own share of grenades on his feet as he aimed his rocket launcher in case he asked him to stay.
“What are you going to do with this? Those metal monster bastards…”
“Shh!”
One, two, three. His mouth was counting the numbers.
‘Fuck! Fuck! Please save me, sir… I knew that bastard was a real asshole. Please save me!’
Nikolai, who had been serving the secretary-general by picking up his name from the adults he had known but couldn’t remember, opened his eyes slightly when he heard the roar of the rocket launcher and saw the trajectory of the warhead.
The launched rocket hit the track of the new tank, and the tank finally stopped.
“One more shot…”
“Are you crazy, sergeant? We have to run away now, or else…”
“Or else what, we die?”
Nikolai tried to stop him, but Bolozha’s eyes glared at him fiercely.
Yes, we die.
Damn it, do you think you’ll survive?
We’ll end up like the other squad members, bloody messes!
He couldn’t say it out loud, so Nikolai tried to convey his feelings with his eyes as much as possible.
“Damn it, then you run away. I’m already a dead man anyway.”
“Don’t do that…”
“Get lost if you want to get lost!”
Bolozha was already aiming for the next warhead.
The target was the tank that had stopped with its track destroyed.
The rocket launcher could destroy the front armor of that monstrous metal lump if it hit well.
At least that’s what the top told them. They had to hit it…
The tank was still a metal lump even if it stopped, and the soldiers were flesh and blood whether they had rifles or rocket launchers.
The tank was sturdy and humans died when they were hit by machine guns.
Nikolai cursed inwardly as he picked up a grenade.
“Mom…”
Bolozha’s third rocket launcher finally succeeded in destroying the new tank.
The sergeant threw away the sight after firing the rocket and grabbed his rifle.
He started shooting, screaming like a madman.
The Pashos’ gunfire began to focus on this side.
Bolozha didn’t care and threw grenades and counterattacked with his rifle.
One grenade, two…
At some point, the ammunition ran out.
There was only one grenade left for each of them.
Nikolai was trembling so much that he couldn’t throw his grenade yet. Bolozha snatched the grenade from Nikolai’s hand with a smirk.
“Hey, are you scared of dying?”
He couldn’t answer.
‘Yes, I’m scared. I want to go back alive. Please!’
He didn’t care whether he read his mind from his eyes or he wasn’t interested in the first place.
Bolozha threw the grenade he was holding with all his might and started running towards the bomb pile far away with only one last grenade.
“If you’re scared, pretend to be dead!”
He couldn’t bear to watch. Nikolai heard him say that and started to pretend to be dead.
He hid his body in the space under the tank, hoping that it would be okay.
What happened to Bolozha? He was too scared to lift his head.
‘Mother, mother…’
Amidst the explosions and noises that shook the heavens and earth, Nikolai hid and trembled.
He pretended to be dead as best as he could until he lost consciousness for real.
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