Chapter 823: God Bless

The retreat of the German paratroopers and the remaining two tanks was not very smooth. It wasn’t that the frantic Soviet attack was hindering their retreat, but that they didn’t need to retreat at all. Truck after truck of German grenadiers had joined the battle. The Soviet offensive began to collapse, and the German army began to systematically expand the defensive circle of the bridgehead. In the furthest places, some Panther tanks had already advanced to a distance of 40 kilometers from the railway bridge.

Rein returned to the riverbank where he had started, riding on Markus’s tank. A huge crater there was already filled with river water. This crater was very close to the railway bridge; it was the one created by the shell from that Soviet cannon.

This exploding shell had destroyed half of the bridge. The railway on the bridge was completely scrapped, but fortunately, the bridge had not completely broken. The German tanks and trucks were orderly crossing the remaining half of the bridge, appearing on the other side of the river.

These German troops, who had routed the Soviet forces and had fought their way to the bridge, had arrived in time. With four Tiger tanks as their vanguard, they had cut through the surrounded Soviet forces and had firmly taken control of this crucial railway bridge. A continuous stream of German troops was crossing this bridge, beginning to advance into the heartland of the Soviet Caucasus, while the frontline Soviet forces, under high pressure, were rapidly collapsing.

“It seems we were lucky after all,” Rein said, looking at the bridge, half of which had collapsed, the other half having been secured by German sappers with many iron plates and other equipment. He spoke to Alice, who was standing beside him. “I’m sorry for rushing you guys into such a risky situation.”

“It’s alright! Taking risks is a daily routine for us, isn’t it? I’m your radio operator. Without me, you’d probably have to adjust those radio switches yourself,” Alice said softly, watching the grenadiers singing military songs as they drove across the bridge in their trucks.

Behind these grenadier trucks, one after another of the 75mm field guns were being towed. Most of the men in their arms were holding G43 semi-automatic rifles and Mauser 98k bolt-action rifles. The production of German weapons had never been able to keep up with the expansion of the frontline forces, so most of the army was, in fact, still using not-so-advanced conventional weapons.

Since Rein’s unit had been able to reach the bridge on the same night, Guderian’s forces could complete the encirclement of the Soviet forces the next morning, sending subsequent troops to the vicinity of the railway bridge to complete this massive campaign.

With a good deal of luck, the Soviet artillery had ultimately not completely destroyed this bridge, allowing the main German forces to cross the river at a relatively high speed. With this bridge as a foothold on the upper reaches of the river, the German sappers were now building a pontoon bridge at the fastest possible speed.

Once this pontoon bridge was completed, the German army would be able to cross this river at an even faster speed and get one step closer to the distant Stalingrad. Guderian’s plan to “buy some time to speed up the encirclement of Stalingrad” seemed to be preliminarily completed.

On the bridge, one truck after another drove past. After the logistics units of the 1st Wehrmacht Panzer Division had crossed, the units that followed made even Rein feel a little unusual. This unit was wearing the black uniform of the SS, but the difference was that their cuffs had an artistic decorative strip on them, on which was written a word that sparked the imagination: “Das Reich.”

“Which unit is this? How come I’ve never heard of them before?” Rein asked, looking to the side at a soldier who had just been relieved from directing traffic.

The soldier wiped the sweat from his forehead, threw the two traffic signal paddles at his feet, unscrewed his canteen, and, while drinking, replied to Rein, “Let alone you, probably the entire G Army Group has only just learned this news in the last few days.”

He pointed to the SS soldiers who were pouring across the bridge in trucks and said to Rein, “The SS commander, General Heydrich, feels that the loyalty of his troops is higher than ours in the Wehrmacht, so he has ordered the formation of a new batch of even more loyal SS units. These units are different from you guys who are incorporated into the Wehrmacht. They no longer use numerical designations, but each division uses a special name.”

After he had finished drinking, he tightened the cap of his canteen with his hand. “See? This division is the ‘Das Reich’ division. Soldiers personally selected and trained by General Reinhard Heydrich. I hear they even have a standard for height. They say it’s to set a standard for the future Waffen-SS. I think they’re just bored.”

“Actually, they don’t just have this one division. There’s also a ‘Führer’ division, a ‘Totenkopf’ division… all established together. I hear one division has more than 20,000 men, formed according to the most elite standards,” the man directing traffic, who seemed to be a guy like Markus, said, his gossip being quite on point.

“It looks like they’ve never been to the battlefield. Apart from their seemingly good morale, their weapons are not very good either,” Rein said, looking at the tall SS soldiers sitting on the trucks and armored cars. About ninety percent of them were carrying the Mauser 98k rifle that the army didn’t want, and their uniforms were even the black SS uniforms that were not very suitable for frontline combat.

“Isn’t that the truth,” the soldier nodded and, while adjusting the metal nameplate that was unique to traffic control personnel and railway troops on his chest, chimed in, “I hear the generals don’t take these new recruits seriously, so they naturally don’t provide them with any good weapons and equipment. And there aren’t many in the SS high command who have been to the front, so they’re easy to fool. They only care about being loyal to the Führer. Who cares about the lives of the men below?”

Rein didn’t say anything. He himself was also from the SS. Apart from him, in fact, when the SS had attacked Poland at the beginning of the war, they were no different from these newly formed units. Most of them had never fought a battle and were either problem individuals or peasants who had never seen the world. But now, including the dozen or so newly formed SS units, these old SS units had almost all become the main force in the hands of the Wehrmacht, brave in combat, tenacious, and experienced.

Everyone needs to grow. No one is born a cold-blooded warrior. It’s just that this growth is sometimes too cruel. To have experienced the death of a comrade on the battlefield, to have cried hysterically with your head in your helmet, to have escaped through a hail of bullets, to have smashed the enemy’s head like a watermelon… this is how all veterans have come to be. There are no shortcuts. This is a path to the depths of hell, a path of slaughter.

“Heh, Das Reich, Totenkopf, Führer? That sounds a lot more impressive than our 3rd SS Panzer Division,” Rein said with a smile to Alice beside him as he turned and walked down the gentle slope of the bridgehead.

“I don’t care about that. All I know is that our tank is destroyed. It looks like we can go on leave, a nice, long leave,” Alice said, stretching lazily and speaking in a coquettish tone that was almost a moan. “I need a good sleep. That’s not easy on the front line.”

“Rein! Captain Rein! Which one is Captain Rein?” a signals runner shouted, holding the document bag behind his waist as he ran along the riverbank.

Rein looked at Alice with a bitter smile and then walked up to him with resignation. “I am Rein, Captain Rein Hardt. May I ask what you want with me?”

“Captain Rein! The headquarters of the 502nd Battalion has already moved to the other side of the river. To commend your outstanding performance in this campaign, your company is to be personally visited by General Guderian. I am here to inform you and to ask if there is anything you need the army group headquarters to help you prepare in advance.”

“You’ve come at the perfect time. They’ve just lost their tank. You don’t want General Guderian to see a group of ragged beggars without a tank when he inspects his armored forces, do you?” Markus said sarcastically, stroking his chin from behind the signals runner.

“I’m just a signals runner. I can’t make that decision. I can only report these problems to my superior and have him write them into a report,” the young signals runner said, clearly startled by Markus’s extortionate tone. He answered with some hesitation.

Rein glanced at Alice beside him, then pointed to Markus and said to the signals runner, “I need a rest. You can talk to him about it. At least on this matter, he can represent me.”

Alice, with her hands behind her back and her lips pursed, suppressed a laugh and followed Rein down the riverbank. After bypassing the crater full of river water, she walked towards the temporary bivouac of the 1st Company. There were only eight tanks left there, each one covered in scars, like ancient and solemn sculptures.

“This operation, with the special forces as the vanguard, was an operation to buy time,” Guderian said to his adjutant, looking at the map with the arrows marking the rapid advance of his troops. “The time we’ve bought is for the assault on Stalingrad, and also for the occupation of the Caucasus oil fields.”

“The fact that the bridge was not destroyed has increased our speed of advance by more than a little. This is truly God’s blessing,” Guderian said, his mouth full of praise. “My original plan was to build a pontoon bridge at the fastest speed and to repair this broken railway bridge, but I never expected that the frontline combat units would actually manage to save this bridge.”

“Your Excellency, General, half of this bridge has been destroyed. For safety, only a single line of vehicles and tanks can pass at a time. Strictly speaking, we have not completely saved this bridge,” the chief of staff reminded Guderian from behind him.

Guderian nodded, but the excited expression on his face was still plain to see. “This is the best-executed multi-branch coordinated operation in human history! The multi-branch coordinated operation that the Führer spoke of is indeed a great revolution on the battlefield! Only God could have completed such a delicate coordination!”

Advance chapters at Nightjar Reads · nightjarreads.com