Chapter 590: Same as Usual

On the small road at night, the chirping of insects was everywhere. However, the tranquility of nature was broken by the clamor of humans, especially during a war, when that serene atmosphere would vanish for all sorts of reasons.

This was a tank processing factory in Kiev. Although it could not help Germany produce advanced tanks, it could provide a very good place for modifying and repairing them. And so, some of the tasks of adding thicker frontal armor plates to the German tanks were deployed here.

The tanks traveled on the small road, one after another. Because they were traveling at night and under a blackout, this transfer was exceptionally slow. The drivers could only rely on the faint light from the slits in their headlight covers to advance. With the shaking of the terrain, all the tank crews were lulled into a drowsy state. But after a command, all the tanks slowly came to a stop.

“Hey! Rein! Why did we stop?” Marcus’s voice came through the headset. Their tank unit had been ordered to Kiev to be fitted with new, thickened frontal armor plates. This was also a kind of vacation in disguise, so everyone had cheered at the news. But no one had expected that the journey from the front to Kiev would require night driving training, which had made the tankers a little bit frustrated before their holiday.

“Is your radio operator carsick?” Marcus asked, holding his intercom and teasing Alice with a wicked grin.

“Shut up, Marcus! If you don’t want the first thing I do when I get off this tank to be kicking your ass!” Without waiting for Rein to answer, Alice’s fierce voice immediately came through the headset. Her voice was very pleasant, and she was clearly very popular among the lecherous frontline combat units. A wave of catcalls, cheers, and whistles immediately followed through the headsets.

“Marcus, if you think the battalion commander’s order is bullshit, then I give you permission to continue on your own,” Rein said, pressing his throat microphone. “Everyone else, dismount. Prepare something to eat. Let’s have a good meal. Tomorrow morning, at dawn, we will enter the vehicle repair factory on the outskirts of Kiev. Then we will have a holiday, for about seven days.”

“Long live the Führer!” the commander of tank 114 said with a grin. He then pushed himself up with both hands, swung his legs out of the tank, and a grand midnight snack began. The treatment of the tank crews was relatively good. Because of the recent harvest and the abundance of supplies, they were sometimes even able to eat dried sausage and various fresh vegetables.

But today, they clearly did not have this treatment. After all, it was a blackout drill, and lighting a campfire to heat food was not allowed. They used can openers to open their cans, then, chewing on bread, they poured the contents of the cans into each other’s mess tins. This was their moment of happiness, a brief moment of warmth and tranquility on the battlefield.

“Rein, I heard from the guys in the 504th Battalion that they took out a few of the new Soviet tanks in an ambush. They looked very sturdy, and like our tanks, they used a sloped armor design. These few tanks destroyed a StuG III and also took out a Panther,” Marcus said while eating, his motormouth clearly unable to rest, constantly chattering about the news he had just heard.

The uncle from tank 115 clearly preferred to tease Marcus. “Forget it, Marcus. If you had put the energy you use on those few young ladies in the divisional logistics department into sucking up to that monkey in the reconnaissance company, we wouldn’t have gone three weeks without firing a single shot.”

“How can you blame me for that? If the deputy commander of the reconnaissance company hadn’t tried to get handsy with Alice and had been almost crippled by our Miss Alice’s kick, would we not have gotten any intel?” Marcus said with a pout, clearly very displeased that Alice had not used her charms to increase their kill count.

“Shut up,” Rein said softly, eating with his rifle in his arms. He then continued to eat. The habit he had developed in school was not to speak while eating, and to eat very quickly, to minimize the time spent on meals so that he could use more time to kill people.

Marcus immediately shut his mouth tactfully, because he knew that on that day, Rein had coincidentally gone to the battalion headquarters for a meeting and was not in the company. If Rein had been present that day, the fate of that poor new deputy commander of the reconnaissance company, who had gotten handsy, would probably have been broken hands and broken feet. Of course, it was more likely that his neck would have been broken, and he would have become just another number on the German casualty list.

Recently, the atmosphere in the German panzer forces on the Eastern Front had been very heavy. The Soviet Union had deployed a new type of tank to launch a probing attack on the German army, in an attempt to break the stalemate at the negotiating table and to gain more bargaining chips. This was also part of Zhukov’s plan to attrite the effective strength of the German army through small battles.

The appearance of the T-34 had made some of the anti-tank weapons in the hands of the German infantry slightly obsolete. For example, the unmodified, short-barreled 75mm StuG III, which had originally been almost usable as a tank, now seemed a bit stretched when facing the T-34. A few days ago, the 504th Heavy Tank Destroyer Battalion had encountered this Soviet tank, which was similar to the German Panther, in a local counter-attack.

The 76mm cannon equipped on the other side was very intimidating and could penetrate the frontal armor of some German tanks, such as the StuG III, which was widely equipped on the front, and the early models of the Panther. Moreover, this tank used heavily sloped armor, which further improved its ballistic protection. This had shortened the effective range of the German firepower and had made the Soviet tanks easier to aim and to counter-attack with.

Of course, what the grassroots soldiers did not know was that the Soviet Union had already developed an even more powerful tank, which posed a very serious threat to the Tiger and the Panther. So the High Command had decided to first re-equip the frontline tank units with thicker armor to temporarily deal with the threat of the T-34 and the possible appearance of the IS tank.

And another matter fully illustrated Akado’s partial understanding of weapon systems. At a meeting, he had ordered the tank units to be re-equipped with the L/71 tank gun, that is, the 71-caliber long-barreled tank gun. However, after the meeting, Krupp had immediately brought his technicians to give the Führer a lesson, letting Akado know that re-equipping was also a major project.

Germany now had over 1,100 Tiger tanks, over 7,900 Panther tanks, 400 remaining Panzer IIIs, and about 500 other models. This brought the total number of tanks in the German army to nearly 10,000. And of these, apart from the 1,000 obsolete tanks that were just for making up the numbers and did not need to be modified, the remaining 9,000 all needed to have their tank guns replaced.

And then there was an endless wait. It was estimated that the entire re-equipment plan would be completed before June 1939. The cost would be enough to equip 900 future King Tiger tanks. The barrel life of this new L/71 gun was only half that of the L/56 tank gun currently equipped on the Tiger, and the ammunition was not compatible.

Thus, the production of the new cannon, plus the preparation of the ammunition production line, would almost double the cost of the German army’s ammunition. So Akado immediately rejected his own idea and decided to use a combination of the L/56 cannon and new types of shells to deal with the enemy’s new tanks.

After all, up to now, there had been no situation where a German tank could not penetrate the enemy’s armor at a distance of 1,000 meters (not counting solid iron blocks like the KV-2). So the soldiers, the generals, and even the designers all had great confidence in the L/56 cannon. Of course, because of its combat record, they did not have the same fanatical obsession with the L/71 as in the previous life.

In the middle of the night, Rein’s unit began to advance towards Kiev again. As they approached dawn, the blackout was lifted, and all the tanks increased their speed a little. This allowed them to soon see the huge city in the distance.

Just as the sky was beginning to turn a fish-belly white, Rein and the others were ordered to halt their advance, because they had already reached the vicinity of the battalion headquarters. The entire armored battalion was stopped on the road, waiting for new orders to enter the Kiev vehicle factory.

The roar of engines filled the sky. Two German Air Force Ta-152 fighters flew over the armored unit, one after the other. The bellies of the two planes were painted a sky-grayish white, and only the two black Iron Crosses on their wings shone dazzlingly in the light of the rising sun.

“Hey! Long-nosed Fw-190s!” Marcus shouted, pointing at the sky. This type of aircraft was appearing more and more frequently on the Eastern Front, allowing the German pilots to maintain their technological advantage in the skies here. Unlike tanks, for various reasons, it was easier for aircraft to maintain a technological advantage, which could be seen from the performance levels of the two sides’ aircraft.

However, the pilot in the Ta-152 clearly did not see the cheering armored unit soldiers below. He was concentrating on flying his plane, as if he were controlling his own body. Flying was a sacred thing for him. In his sky, only his friendly forces could leave safely.

On the left side of his cockpit, dense black Iron Crosses were arranged in several rows, one next to the other. That was his proud combat record.

“Hartmann, you already have 97 kills. Today, the squadron and I will escort you to 100. Be careful not to have any accidents,” the squadron commander, who had always been Hartmann’s wingman, said.

“Squadron Commander, I’m not in a hurry to get that many kills. On the contrary, I just love to fly, to soar freely in the sky. Those enemy planes that want to stop me from flying, I will shoot them down one by one. It’s as simple as that,” Hartmann said sheepishly.

The two planes, one after the other, flew towards the rising sun. The radar showed that 40 enemy planes were rapidly approaching. A new day was about to begin, new slaughter was about to begin, a new battle was about to unfold, and a new legend was waiting to be written.

As the two planes continued to climb, one after another, German fighters burst out of the clouds and joined them. In the end, there were a full 30 of them. They flew in a pack, same as usual.

Published: 2025-09-08T03:38:33.000+00:00
Last Edited: 2026-01-10T17:44:42.000+00:00
URL: https://www.patreon.com/caleredhair/posts/mtr-c590-same-as-138391187

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