Chapter 721: A Lot of Paratroopers

On the battlefield, thick with the smoke of gunpowder, a German soldier with a bullet wound in his leg was slowly crawling. He was only a few short meters from an assault rifle. He knew he would not make it back alive today and could only do his best to drag those despicable enemies to hell with him.

Closer, and closer. He stretched out his arm, and just as he was about to reach the gun, a foot in a black leather boot stepped on the back of his hand. A Soviet soldier in a grass-green uniform stood beside the German soldier, a chilling scar on the corner of his mouth.

A white-painted Stalin tank was parked not far away. The black five-pointed star on its turret made this tank look different from other Soviet tanks. This wounded German soldier had been hit by the hull-mounted machine gun on the tank. There had originally been a dozen or so German soldiers on this position; now they were all corpses that could no longer move.

“Hey, little one! Don’t you dare touch a gun in front of me without my permission,” Wolf King Wolf said with a sneer. The foot on the German soldier’s hand slowly applied pressure, grinding his hand into the mud.

“Ah!” The German soldier let out a miserable scream. But even as he screamed, he did not forget his combat instincts. His other hand drew the bayonet from his side and stabbed fiercely at the ankle of the Soviet soldier who was stepping on him.

The other man had clearly anticipated his move. Without the slightest bit of mercy, he pulled the trigger of the gun in his hand. Two bullets, one after the other, flew out of the muzzle and struck the soldier’s head. The bullets pierced his steel helmet, shattered the skull inside, and sent a spray of blood.

And so, the bayonet in the German soldier’s hand fell to one side, and his entire body collapsed onto the snow-covered ground. The blood spread across the white snow, forming a red patch, so bright it was almost blinding.

“I told you, don’t play with weapons in front of me!” Wolf’s voice was strange due to his scar, but his smile was still as ferocious as ever. He slung the gun over his back, then walked to the corpse of another German veteran, picked up a few unused magazines, checked them, and then put them in his pocket.

Behind him, not far away, a Soviet red flag was being slowly raised, and the Red Army soldiers below the flagpole were singing and dancing around a burning German swastika flag.

…

In a small village next to Malyn, Ukraine, a farmer saw white parachutes descending from the sky and scrambled back into his small hut. He pulled a radio set out from a pile of straw and, looking at a small notebook, began to repeatedly transmit a fixed message. Just outside his house, an officer with a dozen German soldiers and a wolfhound had already arrived at the edge of the village. A local Ukrainian was pointing in the direction of this building in the village, saying something to the German officer.

From the beginning of the war until now, the work of pacifying Ukraine had been ongoing. Sometimes it was very effective, and sometimes they would encounter some stubborn resistance fighters. However, because the policy of dividing and conquering Ukraine was very timely, these problems were gradually being resolved. The number of people who were hostile to Germany and helped the Soviet Union was decreasing, while the lives of those who were hostile to the Soviet Union were getting better and better.

From the window of his room, this farmer, who had just finished sending his telegram, saw the surrounding German SS. Among them were several local Ukrainian youths. They were swaggering in their black SS uniforms, as if they were the most skilled soldiers under the Führer’s command.

The barking of the wolfhounds grew closer and closer, and the German soldiers, holding their rifles, gradually surrounded this inconspicuous little wooden house. The surrounding Ukrainian onlookers pointed and whispered, the only thing missing from their gazes being pity and anger. They hated their countrymen who helped the Soviets, feeling that these people were traitors who were harming the Ukrainian nation.

Crack! The farmer inside the house fired a shot, and a Ukrainian soldier fell to the ground. His body contorted in a heap. The pain from being hit clearly made him convulse a few times before he finally died. But with the sound of the gunshot, his comrades also pulled their triggers. Bullets flew everywhere, and the surrounding onlookers all ducked into houses further away.

Crack! It seemed that this local Ukrainian farmer, in addition to being pro-Soviet, also particularly hated the Ukrainians who had betrayed him. When he fired, he aimed at the local Ukrainian soldiers who were wearing uniforms without epaulets, not at the more neatly dressed German soldiers.

As the gunfight progressed, the Germans finally got close to the house. The farmer’s ammunition was almost gone. Not long after, this farmer was shot and killed in his own bedroom. Behind him was a completely burned codebook and a smashed American-made radio set.

“Call the head of the intelligence department, Commander Kommandeur! Hurry! Just say that our military operations in the vicinity have been discovered by the Soviets!” The German officer on the scene did not look very good. He frowned, looked at the corpse on the ground, then at the body of a Ukrainian soldier lying outside the window, and shouted in a rage.

…

Just as the Germans were furiously reporting the problem they had discovered to their superiors, in the Soviet general headquarters in Minsk, an officer ran into Marshal Zhukov’s command post.

After Zhukov had issued the order for the entire army to continue its southward attack on Kiev, the next morning, Stalin had convened an emergency meeting in Moscow. At the meeting, it was decided to promote the frontline commanders, Zhukov and Timoshenko, to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union, to encourage them to continue to contribute their strength to the motherland.

So now Zhukov’s rank was Marshal. Although the specific uniform had not yet been delivered to the front, the news of his promotion had already been announced to the entire army by radio. Zhukov was now in high spirits. After all, he had become one of the first military generals to be awarded the rank of Marshal since Stalin had launched the Great Purge. This was enough to show Stalin’s trust in him, and also enough to show that Zhukov’s command was without any flaws.

“Comrade Marshal! Comrade Marshal!… Something terrible has happened! The intelligence department has sent a message. They have discovered that the Germans have deployed a large number of paratroopers near Malyn by plane in a short period of time!” The officer who ran in knew how serious the problem was. This could be said to be a devastating piece of news for the southward-advancing Soviet Red Army.

“What?” Zhukov was taken aback. Then, without taking the document from the officer’s hand, he guessed its accuracy. The enemy had been waiting for the moment he would go all-out to the south, waiting for the moment he had decided to take Kiev. Now that he had walked into the Germans’ trap, the Germans had finally reinforced the originally very fragile trap in a way he had not expected.

To confirm that the Germans were not hiding any large-scale forces behind List’s Army Group E, almost all the Soviet spies deployed in Ukraine had been working at full capacity to investigate the movements of the German forces. Zhukov had repeatedly confirmed it before he was certain that there would be no large-scale reinforcements in a short period of time.

But he had calculated everything, except that the Germans would use a highly mobile branch of the military like the paratroopers to fill the seemingly fragile defense line. And the way paratroopers had always been used behind enemy lines had also obscured their true nature—”highly mobile elite infantry.” It was only after the Germans had thrown out this plan that everyone suddenly realized: so paratroopers can not only be dropped on the enemy’s territory, but also on one’s own!

“Do you know the scale of the airdrop?” Zhukov’s heart was already bitter. He took the document from the officer’s hand and read it carefully, only to find that the number of paratroopers mentioned in it was very vague, only saying that there were “a lot.” Zhukov knew that many of the Soviet spies in Ukraine were low-quality temporary workers. For these farmers, a thousand men was “a lot,” and ten thousand men could also be described as “a lot.”

But now that he knew the Germans’ final trump card, and a very threatening one at that, Zhukov could no longer optimistically assess the advantage of the Red Army on the battlefield. He had to consider the consequences if the 2nd Guards Front, commanded by Rokossovsky, and the 3rd Guards Front, commanded by Vasilevsky, could not tear open the defense line of List’s Army Group E.

If that were to really happen, then the assets that the Red Army had accumulated over such a long period of time would once again be completely lost, and they would also lose all of Belarus and Smolensk. They might even have to hand over Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Moscow. This result was clearly not something he, Zhukov, could bear.

The earlier determination to commit troops was based on the premise that the German defense line was already crumbling. Now the situation had fundamentally changed. An unknown number of German paratroopers had already reinforced List’s defense line. If these key points could not be captured in a short period of time, then the only outcome awaiting the Soviet troops was annihilation.

“Take a risk? No! I cannot take this risk! Even if I myself die here, I cannot lose the last bit of the Soviet Union’s strength! But if I give up the whole plan now, how can I explain the losses we’ve suffered?” Zhukov muttered, then gritted his teeth and looked at the huge operational map.

For a moment, he even envied those German commanders. The cards in their hands were simply too many, and often these cards had unexpected effects. Even with such careful preparation, the Soviet offensive still had not achieved the desired outcome, and the price paid had already been very high.

Published: 2025-09-22T03:31:03.000+00:00
Last Edited: 2026-03-11T16:19:47.000+00:00
URL: https://www.patreon.com/caleredhair/posts/mtr-c721-lot-of-139443700

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