Chapter 595: The Record

Akado put down the phone and looked at Anna at his side. “I am not a good person, so for the sake of my own ideas, I have killed many good people. Sometimes I see them in my dreams, standing before me one by one—former enemies, former friends.”

As he spoke, he walked over and held Anna tightly. “There is not much I can leave for the living. Germany is no longer my ideal and wish alone; it belongs to countless people. It is a home for you and Mercedes, a fortress to keep you safe.”

“I know, my dear. You have done enough for this country, and you have done enough for me and Mercedes. Both of us know, and we will both support you. None of us are good people. If anyone dares to hold us back, we will send them to hell!” Anna said softly, crying in Akado’s embrace.

In a subordinate department of the Berlin weapons design bureau, two female NCOs were idly filing their nails. The topic of their conversation was not the day’s news, but the new styles of clothes in the new department store that had just opened in Berlin.

“The perfume your husband bought back from Paris is really something. It’s a good thing you remembered me, your friend, and had him bring a bottle back for me,” one of the female NCOs said, looking at a rather crude magazine. “That useless husband of mine has no skills in the factory, and he has to abide by some secrecy regulations. He can’t say anything when he comes home, sigh.”

“Your man’s job is a good one. At least he can come home four days a month,” the other female NCO, with short blonde hair, sighed in agreement. Her husband was a captain who had been rotated to France with his unit. He enjoyed a high subsidy, but he hadn’t been home for almost half a year. A woman, as they say, is like a wolf at thirty and a tiger at forty. She was right in that age range and naturally envied her friend who had her husband by her side.

Click. The office door was pushed open. The two of them looked up at the same time and saw a young soldier at the door, holding a stack of files. He pressed the top folder with his chin and with difficulty walked to the desk, placing the stack on it. “New statistics. Please record them.”

“The moment you come, we immediately get busy. It’s really annoying,” the female NCO with the short blonde hair complained. Opposite her, the female NCO who had been flipping through a magazine helplessly put it away.

This small department was responsible for collecting and compiling the improvement suggestions from frontline soldiers regarding the weapon systems. Although not as prominent as other departments, it was a very important one. The soldiers’ opinions were varied, and most of them were useless, but an occasional flash of inspiration could improve a weapon that was not entirely suitable for the battlefield into an excellent battlefield killer.

“Ms. Braun, don’t tease a little soldier like me. I didn’t write these things; I’m just responsible for delivering them,” the young soldier, clearly not for the first time being teased by the two women in the office, said with a smile. He had a row of neat, white teeth, and his smile was quite handsome.

Looking at this big boy who was not yet 17, the two women, who were already over thirty, clearly did not have much interest. To rapidly expand its army, the German military had absorbed a large number of women and young people into its service. In the army, especially in the high-level command departments, the proportion of women was already quite large. It was common for everyone to flirt a little, but it was still a minority that it would escalate to the point of something actually happening.

In these departments, everyone still maintained a degree of clarity and restraint, just teasing each other and taking verbal advantages. On the contrary, the lives of some of the female soldiers at the front were more decadent. The high-intensity combat, the constant hovering between life and death, would make a person instantly degenerate into a demon in human skin. These women who had gone to the front did not cherish their bodies at all, because they had seen their rotting comrades, had seen the bloody mess after a bullet had passed through a chest. They knew that in the face of death, there was no distinction between men and women.

Female soldiers like Alice, who were assigned to tank units, were slightly better off. And lucky ones like Alice, who had met Rein, were even rarer. War is like an evil double-edged sword; while it harms the opponent, it is also subtly harming oneself.

“Put it here. Would you like some coffee?” the female NCO who had put down the magazine asked, extending a hand to flip through the top few files while inviting the boy.

“No, thank you. I still have to deliver other documents to the casualty statistics verification department upstairs. I won’t stay long,” the soldier said with a nod of thanks, then backed to the door, turned, and closed it behind him.

The female NCO with the short blonde hair spread out a file and grinned wickedly. “What’s the hurry? Look how you’ve scared the little boy away. He doesn’t even dare to come near. Are you that eager to eat him up?”

“If you’re thinking it yourself, don’t push it on me,” her colleague on the other side said with a light laugh. “If you’re really that lonely, the few officers on the third floor are much more interesting than this little boy. Why don’t you give it a try?”

“Alright, alright. No more joking. Let’s get to work,” the female NCO with the short blonde hair said, spreading out a record book and beginning to copy down the improvement suggestions mentioned in the files, one by one. These suggestions were all based on battlefield experience. Behind each one were blood and wounds, representing the world’s most authoritative summary of battlefield weapon use.

“The design of the left-side closure buckle on the tactical vest is unreasonable. This is the second time this improvement has been suggested,” the blonde female NCO muttered to herself as she wrote. All of this content would be marked accordingly in the record book. For example, ‘A’ referred to individual weapons, ‘B’ to artillery, ‘C’ to armored vehicles, ‘D’ to tanks, ‘E’ to fighters, ‘F’ to bombers… And within these major categories were countless subcategories. For example, ‘DA’ referred to improvements to a tank’s main gun, ‘DB’ to problems with a tank’s sights, and so on.

When the number of requests for each improvement in the record book reached 50, the issue would be sent to the weapons research and development headquarters to be discussed at a weapon improvement meeting, and a solution would be proposed. The German weapons were, in this effective cycle of proposing and solving problems, gradually perfecting their weapon systems, bit by bit.

These problems were varied, including the gas tube of the MP-44 assault rifle being too long, which reduced its reliability. The final result was that the MP-44 was released with a new improved model, the MP-44P, which had greatly improved reliability and was more suitable for the harsh environment of an intense battlefield. The position of every electric button on a tank, a two-centimeter improvement in the length of an aircraft’s control stick, and even the improvement of the ammunition loading system of a naval warship. There were countless such problems, some important, some trivial.

Some were theoretical, such as conducting training courses in the frontline units to teach tactics and professional skills, and selecting outstanding soldiers as reserve talent to be transferred to suitable units for continued service. This measure had provided Germany with more grassroots command talent and had also provided a large number of logistics and maintenance personnel for the air force and the panzer forces. Many infantrymen had learned to drive and repair cars, and some cavalrymen had even become experts in trench engineering, capable of commanding a platoon of engineers to construct professional defensive positions.

Last time, because a naval gun design engineer had had a sudden inspiration and had designed a new type of automatic loader, after simulations and tests, this automatic loader for a 203mm main gun had turned out to be surprisingly effective and very reliable. So this engineer had received a personal commendation from the Führer and had also been awarded a Second Class Iron Cross.

This loader, combined with a new German 203mm main gun, formed the classic weapon platform for the German Navy’s large-caliber artillery. This was the first naval gun in the German Navy to use an automatic loader. The gun’s elevation and traverse were electrically driven, and it could be loaded at any angle. The gun alone weighed 16.7 tons, had a rate of fire of 11 rounds per minute, and a maximum range of 28,000 meters. The ammunition output of a single gun was 12.95 tons per minute. When using high-speed armor-piercing shells, it could penetrate 130mm of armor at a range of 26 kilometers. Due to the installation of the automatic loader and thicker armor, each turret weighed a massive 451 tons. How good was this naval gun? So good that the German Navy was preparing to build a new class of cruiser for it.

The new German cruisers would adopt a standard 2-forward, 1-aft gun layout and would use 150mm secondary guns and 88mm anti-aircraft guns. This heavy cruiser would become the core of the fleet’s air defense, accompanying the carriers as their close escort. Because the main guns of this cruiser were so outstanding, it could simultaneously perform both anti-aircraft and anti-ship gunnery missions.

These improvements were just a small part of the German army’s improvement records. Some improvements were proposed from a professional perspective and were highly technical in nature: including the thickness of boot soles, the high-top design of boots, the plan to phase out the paratroopers’ 75mm short-barreled anti-tank gun, improvements to the method of replacing the engine filters of the Afrika Korps’ tanks, and so on. The German army, because of these one-by-one suggestions, had become stronger, more feared by the enemy.

“The cost and failure problem of the P-38 pistol, that’s the 50th one. It seems we have something to do this afternoon,” the NCO opposite said with a helpless shrug. She stood up, took the notebook, and walked to a compartment behind her, where it said “Archive.” She walked to a filing cabinet and began to search through the various related records inside.

“All the relevant documents have to be handed over to Colonel Demont in a little while,” she said as she searched. “Come and help! There’s a lot of material on the P-38 pistol problem!”

Published: 2025-09-09T03:28:52.000+00:00
Last Edited: 2026-01-12T19:49:53.000+00:00
URL: https://www.patreon.com/caleredhair/posts/mtr-c595-record-138475391

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