Siegerkranz - Germany's Place in the Sun

Caspian, thanks. Aral seemed wrong, but Google Earth doesn't display the names of bodies of water by default. I'll fix it when I have a little longer.

And Mod33 includes mobilization events; it just happened that I was more than six weeks into Soviet territory before literally 150 divisions deployed to Moscow. After that came long and boring advance livened by occasional agonizing battles.

101. Bryansk - The Last Tank Fight


The first stages of what would become known as the Battle of Bryansk evolved out of two separate operations: Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock's drive on Moscow, coordinated with Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt's Army Group Center and Generaloberst Oskar Prinz von Preussen's Guards Army, and the newly-promoted Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manstein's Army Group South. During this phase of the war, there was little involvement in either Army Group Caucasus - as the Kluge-Busch-Rommel group had hastily been called after the obvious failure of the Sultan's soldiers to act aggressively on their own borders - or Army Group North, under Generalfeldmarschall Paul Hausser, who was actively involved in sealing off Leningrad or St. Petersburg (depending on whose maps one consulted).

The Battle of Bryansk was technically a misnomer; the actual battlefield stretched from roughly Tula in the north to roughly Rossosh to the south. A better name would perhaps have been "The Battle of the North Don," but "Bryansk" was more poetic, and therefore the name stuck despite its geographic imprecision. The German forces involved totaled some forty divisions all told, including both the elite Garde-divisionen and the cream of Germany's new mechanized forces. On the Soviet side, after the mass encirclements of May 1944, there were far fewer forces available: corps-sized packets to the south, badly mauled in May but still fighting, and an armored reserve which had heretofore been held back at Moscow by Stalin's order. This last peculiarity has bothered historians for years; if Stalin intended, as the declaration of war made quite clear, to invade the German bloc, why did he hold back nine divisions of the Soviet Union's best tanks in reserve?

In any event, their unleashing proved to be the decisive test between the Soviet-designed T-34 and the German response, the Panzerkampfwagen V "Panther." Bloodied and harassed from a month of steady German advance, the Soviet forces turned for one more confrontation almost at the gates of Moscow itself.

---

501. Schw.Pz.Abt.
Outside Rossosh, Occupied Russia
0430 27 May 1944

The engines started with a whump and rumble, covered by sleepy radio chatter. The 501st was part of Manstein's spearhead force, one of several heavy tank battalions concentrated to turn the Reds out of Rossosh and stab northwest into Kursk with the goal of trapping and breaking yet another Bolshevik force. Johann Volkmann had sat through the briefings, taken careful notes, asked his questions - and at this early hour, he could barely open his eyes. Michael Wittmann, who had taken over 2. Kompanie, appeared to have no such problems, by the sprightly way he conducted his radio checks.

The Tigers had a simple mission today: find and engage the suspected Red armor on the north side of Rossosh. Rossosh itself lay in the center of a bowl-shaped valley, roughly east-west, with one long ridgeline running north-south almost into the town's heart. This ridgeline, and a broad east-west ridge to the south, defined the town's waterways, with the Rossosh itself, a minor tributary of the Don, running to the east of the northern ridge, and the Black Kalitva to the north of the southern, so that the town sat roughly at the confluence of the two rivers. Manstein's armor had taken control of this southern ridge, up to the Kalitva, and the scouting battalions had located likely fords over the past three days. Today, before dawn, they were going to try to breach the Kalitva below the fork, rushing up the east bank of the Rossosh to engage the Soviets on the northern ridge.

Manstein's plan was to bypass Rossosh itself, leaving the town to wither on the vine like so many others, with the ultimate goal being Kursk and a possible encirclement or simple overwhelming of the Soviets between here and there. It relied on the Russians' inability to mobilize an effective flank attack along the Don while Army Group South's main armored component - 8. Armee under Manstein himself - engaged the Reds and the various independent corps operating to the south pushed into the Don Bend toward Stalingrad. Johann Volkmann's opinion of this plan was mostly bewilderment: why the rush? They weren't going to be in at the death at Moscow, why rush around like madmen? Campfire strategizing generally leaned toward Manstein desperately trying to show that he deserved the Kaiser's recent largesse. "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away," as Wittmann had facetiously intoned halfway through a bottle of captured vodka.

The company commanders, to their credit, all knew their jobs, and the battalion rolled down toward the river from the shelter of a draw to the south of Hill 150, the ridgeline commanding the south side of Rossosh. They were guided along by paths marked out by the pioneers, white engineers' tape fluttering slightly in the engine exhaust as they passed the stakes. The Tigers rumbled down toward the river, passing the dug-in batteries of Manstein's self-propelled guns. They had been the first of many innovations that Erich von Manstein had contributed - self-propelled guns, amphibious tanks, the grenadiers first found in the Garde under his watch - and Manstein seemed unaccountably attached to great batteries of them. Johann, standing astride his command tank, saw one of the gunners, bone-white in the dark, grin and give him a thumbs-up on the way down to the river. He replied with a wave, then focused on the approach to the Kalitva.

The Kalitva lay at the bottom of a draw steep enough that walking down it was mildly disorienting; he had walked the route yesterday for recon purposes. The Tigers were more than capable of handling the slopes involved, especially with paths already partially carved through the lush vegetation surrounding the riverbanks by the pioneers. The paths, of course, went only so far: Stalin was not such a fool as to allow German engineers to cut roads into his territory without at least noticing. Thus when Dietmar, his driver, muttered over the intercom, "Water ahead, sir," he was able to reply, now fully awake, "Full forward, try not to get us hung up." Their tones were both needlessly hushed; the Maybach diesels would have allowed for completely undetected conversation on the outside of the tanks, and they were certainly not outside.

The Tiger grunted and strained forward, churning the silt undertread as it forged into the Kalitva. The river was, in truth, barely more than a creek at this stage, and the tank forded it handily, scattering birds in all directions. On the other side, it began the task of climbing from the river's shallow valley, throwing long plumes of wet silt back at the following vehicles. That was one advantage of being battalion commander - didn't wind up with someone else's tread spray all over your face most of the time, he thought... funny the things that popped into your head at moments like these.

They were across, and into the fields on the east side of the Kalitva. The battalion fanned out from a river-crossing column to a very broad wedge, with Johann's own vehicle at the point of it. The plan from here was to wheel north, cover the six thousand-odd meters to the north ridgeline, and flank the ridge. All in all, it felt very similar to previous operations in England. Johann unconsciously patted the wound badge on his pocket as the armor jolted along, ruining some poor farmer's wheatfields.

Dawn was not far off now - an advantage of fighting in the summer, he thought, smiling. The Kaiser's wars always seemed to be summer wars, though they had fully expected to be drawn into Napoleon's winter hell in Russia. Somewhere in the rear, he expected, there were already coats and what-not waiting for them. Still, there was little chance of seeing the expected enemy, even though he craned and stretched to watch the ridgeline. The battalion was now on the east edge of a low hillock with a lightly wooded crown, and he waved to the following company commanders - wheel left. They waved in acknowledgement and the arrowhead spun from facing north to facing west slowly. This was when they were most vulnerable, which was why he was shifting like this on the lee side of the hill.

Moments passed, and a finger of light broke the eastern sky. He took a deep breath, then leaned down to yell into the crew compartment, "Schmundt, battalion push, general advance, Three four hundred meters back in reserve." The radio operator gave him a thumbs-up and they began to advance on the ridgeline.

The rush up the ridge was an anticlimax. There was no thunder of Soviet fire when they reached the top, and Johann had the feeling that he had broken radio silence to commence the battle only to find he was fighting... no one. The silence was almost eerie as the Tigers rolled down to the Rossosh from the east. Only one thing for it - up the hill into the woods!

... And, now that they were on the west side of the shallow river, into the lion's maw. The ridgeline ignited in a seemingly endless drumline of yellow flashes and sharp, cracking shots. At four hundred meters, the Soviets still contrived to miss, but with so many guns, the west bank of the Rossosh was quickly transforming into a meat grinder. Johann watched in horror through his telescope as 1. Kompanie seemed to disintegrate. The Soviet technique seemed simple enough: a battery commander would apparently point his swagger stick at a Tiger, say "shoot that one," and the Reds would simply bang away at that tank until it brewed up. The Germans, meanwhile, did their best to target single guns and fire the Tiger's long eighty-eight in a businesslike manner, but numbers were starting to tell.

Then came Wittmann.

Trailing out his company's tanks behind him in a ragged wedge, Michael Wittmann slammed his throttle forward toward the Soviet lines, and "Bobbi" Woll was forced to work without the luxury of a still platform. It proved irrelevant, because he could have begun throwing rocks at this point. The Tigers hit the Russian line like a sledgehammer, darting across the four-hundred-meter gap to the base of the hill in the space of ninety long seconds. Wittmann lost three tanks, true, but then came the terrible carnage of a Tiger company atop the ridge, less concerned with his own survival than with running over the offending artillerymen.

Below, Johann gaped for a moment at the madness of Wittmann's charge, then snapped down, "Battalion push - charge, engage at will. Then get on corps and tell them we need every round they can drop here." He watched through the periscope as the Tiger once more jolted forward, bounding in rushes from one flaming 1. Kompanie carcass to the next. Soviet seventy-six rounds pinged and burred off the Tiger's hull continuously, alternating between the metallic pwong of anti-tank rounds and the ineffective but unnerving whump of explosive rounds detonating against the outer hull.

On the hilltop, Wittmann ground to a halt, his company fanned out behind him, and looked down into the draw on the other side. For the first time, his bravado failed him. Laid out below him was a horde of armor, and no German armored officer could mistake that silhouette. The T-34 had finally arrived on the battlefield. "Woll?" Wittmann asked with a grunt, grinning ear-to-ear. "Get to work."

The startled Soviet crews began scrambling to get their own armor up and moving, apparently having planned something very similar to the right hook which Volkmann's battalion had delivered. As turrets began to traverse frantically, Woll lined up his shots, taking such care that anyone who could not hear the chaos outside the tank would have thought they were on a competition range, not on a Russian hilltop turned killing field. Elsewhere on the ridge, the Soviets simply began to abandon their guns. They had accounted for a full eighteen Tigers on the riverbank, and that was more than enough for men who simply wished to keep their skins as the remainder of the battalion hit the ridgeline.

Wittmann's company backed conservatively, a surprising change of pace, and the battalion took a line just west of the ridgeline, hull-down from the T-34s even as their guns thundered. Here, they were all but invulnerable to the Soviets, and it quickly transformed into a massacre. Johann Volkmann actually went so far as to unbutton and stick his head out to direct fire, and he realized with some shock that all of the morning's killing had been on the river, not against the dreaded T-34.

The Soviets eventually began to withdraw a rump of their armored force, and to their credit, in withdrawal they fought in a surprisingly professional manner. They pulled up the draw to the ridgeline which Volkmann himself held, to the Germans' north, and retreated into the woodline. The Germans saw no chance to follow, despite Wittmann's best efforts. Now, finally, Woll, Wittmann, and everyone else in the battalion began taking count of the hulls below. There had been an artillery battalion on the ridgeline, with a total of forty guns left behind, most ruined now. Down below, there were exactly sixty-four destroyed T-34s with half a dozen divisional markings.

Other elements of Manstein's army relieved them in place, and the tankers, exhausted after what amounted to only a couple hours' real work but a loss of a third their carefully husbanded strength, went to a subdued breakfast. Hot sausage and black bread, black coffee and strong tea, all were available. They all shied away from Wittmann and Woll in awe. By common agreement, their tank had accounted for fifteen of the sixty-four ruined T-34s, a rate of more than one tank a minute of that terrible, brief engagement. Woll sat staring sightlessly at the Tiger's turret, leaning back against a fuel drum with a hand-rolled cigarette unlit between his lips, while Wittmann laughed and joked with the cooks. Volkmann, for his part, went crew to crew, seeing how many men had escaped the tanks in the valley, how many tanks were reparable, and how many letters he would have to write. The final toll was eight total write-offs, the equivalent of ten crews dead, and at most two days to get the ten wrecks back up and running.

They were to take Kursk, and beyond it, Manstein had promised Bock the heavy armor for his assault on Moscow.

---

The Battle of Bryansk lasted two long weeks, engulfing and destroying what remained of the Soviet armored force. Of the eighteen nominal armored divisions and light armored divisions which the Soviets fed into the six-hundred-kilometer salient, one withdrew to the east as the next phase of the German campaign commenced. In the new-built trenches and revetments before Moscow, men nervously checked their equipment, making sure that each man had his alloted forty-five rounds - compared to the German soldier who carried two hundred and more as part of his daily load - and waited for Bock to come.

That's based on the historical penetration figures for the Soviet 76.2mm ZiS-3 at 400m, which was about 60mm, against the top hull armor of the Tiger, which is 40mm assuming perpendicular impact. Figuring a battalion of 40 guns, a fire rate of three rounds a minute, for three to five minutes, that's between 360 and 600 rounds fired. Given the Soviets' bad supply situation, give them a dozen rounds per gun, which would still be 480 rounds. Of those, eighteen kills (including mobility, firepower, and total kills as "kills" for this exercise) gives a shot-to-kill rate of about 4%. It's not impossibly high, in other words, though it'd rapidly narrow down once the Germans begin returning fire, or, in the case of certain hotheaded not-SS officers, charging headlong for no particular reason.

trekaddict said:

True... I forgot that the Soviets had the high ground here.

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The Soviets have a (according to Google Maps) 25m height advantage over a range of 400m from the edge of the Rossosh to the ridgeline north of town, with the slope depending on where on the ridge the Germans advance. Some points are near 1:1 slope, most are shallower.

Kurt_Steiner said:

In the end it's not the machine which decided the fate of battle, but the men who run it.

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That's true only so long as there's not a logarithmic difference between the two.

trekaddict said:

I still think that from the moment guns along the lines of the 17 pounder, the 88 or this Soviet one the concept of the Heavy Tank is pointless. Admittedly I love to play the Tiger I in World of Tanks, but in real life...

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Actually, this was one of the guns that led to the development of the Tiger (in this case, "Henschel Tiger" and "Porsche Tiger" denote Tiger II and Tiger I respectively; the Henschel model is in this universe an evolution of the Panther project). The Russian equivalent of the 88 is the 85mm. I think the answer is "it depends." The IS-2 and the Pershing, for instance, very heavily influenced postwar MBT development, but the Tiger family had so many real-world problems that any sane postwar evaluation would have looked more at its failures than its successes. It was over-heavy for its power plant and drivetrain, or for that matter for the width of tread it carried; about all it really did well was absorb damage and deliver rounds on target. That has its place, but it's possible to do a much better job than the Tiger.

Enewald said:

Unfair. You have every superiority and not even supply problems.

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Have you EVER known HoI to reflect the difficulty of supplying an army in the middle of Russia from Berlin?

Yeah, you note I've got a HoI3 icon under my name, and all my AARs are HoI2.

I have high hopes for DH after a couple brief games, but it'll probably be a couple patches in before it gets where I'm well and truly happy with it, I think. It most emphatically does not take a whole year to train a WW2-era infantry division, for instance.

102. Going Ashore

SMS Hindenburg
Germaniawerft Kiel
Kiel, German Empire
3 June 1944

The cadets had shuttled ashore at Rügen, their training declared complete even if the program wasn't, and the arrival of the Hindenburg at Kiel was an unusually somber occasion. Communications from shore had left Peter wondering if he was now the naval equivalent of that American fellow General Mitchell. Raeder's Enigma message had been curt to the point of rudeness: "Return Kiel expect relief."

The Hindenburg's North Sea cruise had been successful: they had pursued the remains of the Red Banner Northern Fleet from the Baltic as they made a desperate bid for escape to Murmansk, with German guns already firing on Leningrad. What was left after the Battle of Gotland was their submarine force, and to their credit, they had not flinched at the dangerous passage of the Denmark Straits. This was perhaps because they knew German aircraft were grounded in those waters, and they could steam on the surface. They also knew what awaited them if Stalin won and they survived in neutral captivity, so they did not do what any sensible German would have done and intern themselves.

In the rush, Hanna and her Drache had been largely forgotten, until it came time to hunt the submarines in the North Sea. That she was remembered at all was her own fault: Peter had eventually let her into the daily briefings, and she had asked whether the helicopter could be of any use in hunting submarines, with its much longer loiter time than the Fieseler biplanes that were their first choice. A few moments of stunned silence later, the ship's engineer had been called up to set his machinists to fitting the Drache with a bomb rack and a release mechanism.

They had caught the first Soviet submarines off Stavanger, where the Reds had clung as close as possible to Norwegian territorial waters. They had been operating on the surface, at maximum speed, and the Germans had simply followed their wakes, launching an air strike as soon as the ships' radar had confirmed the contacts. Had the Soviet submarines had their own radar, it would never have worked out so well, but the Germans had caught them exposed and on the surface, and of the fifteen or so boats estimated to have escaped from the Baltic, three sank in that action. The last of those to go was caught by the Drache, loitering in the area after the biplanes had gone home. Hanna Volkmann had scored the first helicopter-submarine kill in history.

After that, the Reds had become more careful. They had run submerged during the day whenever possible, much like their German counterparts would have anyway, but even a half-century-old converted cruiser like Hindenburg could outpace the submarines when they were submerged, and there were only so many directions for them to flee and still head toward Murmansk. In the end, they had no more contacts north or east of Trondheim, and concluded that the Reds had been run completely to ground. Peter had turned home and begun composing his report. Hanna had done the same, unofficially, for Focke, and had delivered both her unofficial report to Bremen, and Peter's official report to Wilhelmshaven.

So now the ship was nearly silently warping into its slip at Kiel, its flight crews all sent ashore with its aircraft. If it wasn't the end of an era, Peter thought morosely, it certainly felt like one. Despite the warm weather, he was wearing his dress uniform, complete with sword, peaked cap, and blue Pour-le-Merite ribbon. It was strange, the way the Kaiserliche Marine awarded that medal. Unlike the Heer, which awarded it either for winning a battle, or for individual heroism, or the Luftwaffe, which awarded it either for a set number of kills, or for a single spectacular deed, the Kaiserliche Marine awarded its medals based on "points," awarded for tonnage sunk, either directly or as commander in an action. Peter had qualified for it after the British campaign, thanks to Scapa Flow and then the Hebrides. His fingers unconsciously brushed the enamel cross, hanging beside his Red Eagle and his Spanish cross.

Hanna appeared, dressed in as close to formalwear as she had brought aboard, not having expected to be aboard ship for several weeks, and squeezed his shoulder. "It'll work out," she said with a smile, and he nodded tiredly. He had not slept well since receiving Raeder's message. "Besides," she said brightly, "the worst that can happen is that we have to put ashore a while, and I expect that there's a job for you in Bremen if that happens."

Bremen? Why would he go to Focke-Wulf? He had been at sea and at war for almost a decade at this point, and it was in his blood. True, he was no old salt like Raeder, or like Canaris for that matter, but he mattered here. Bad enough serving under Osterkamp, after he had run the training program once upon a time, but to be turned ashore? He was surprised that the thought made his stomach heave; after all, more than once he had wanted nothing more than to quit the sea. It was just... not like this. This was not what he wanted. He smiled over at Hanna, covering all this. "Of course. Though they might want you more." She chuckled, and a shrill bosun's pipe interrupted them. He glanced over. "Ahoy Hindenburg, Kapitän zur See Speidel reporting! Permission to come aboard?" someone yelled out. "Granted," the watch officer replied, then turned to report to Peter. Peter waved away report and salute tiredly before giving Speidel a proper salute upon his arrival.

Speidel was at least more senior than Peter - he looked as if he perhaps had been a lieutenant in the last war - the High Seas Fleet badge on his lower breast pocket was certainly an indicator of that, with its gleaming gold suspension bar saying "BAYERN." The man following Speidel was, however, one of Peter's former trainees, and his presence could hardly be a bad thing. Grossadmiral Ludwig Ferdinand Kronprinz von Preussen looked far more Prussian in uniform than in a suit, even if the uniform was Kaiserliche Marine blue rather than Foot Guards black. It still had an abundance of braid, though the Prince wore only the breast star of the Black Eagle rather than the full suite of his orders.

Speidel approached the low bump that served as the ship's bridge, on the starboard side of the flight deck, and entered, ducking his head. The Crown Prince, meanwhile, appeared happy to speak to sailors and officers without approaching Peter directly. He suspected this was to give Speidel his moment. The older officer appeared discomfited; Peter was, if nothing else, marked as a rising star by his orders and his career progress. That it was stalled was not all his fault. Peter noted that Speidel lacked the pilot's qualifications that carrier commanders were supposed to have. They were at a protocol impasse: Speidel was the senior officer, but it was Peter's ship. Eventually, Speidel yielded his seniority, offering his hand first. "Kapitän Volkmann," he said formally, stiffly. "Kapitän zur See Jacob Speidel. My orders." He presented an envelope, and Peter read through them, forcing a smile.

"Of course, Kapitän Speidel. I understand, would you like to do the ceremony this evening? That's the soonest the ship's company can be assembled properly." Speidel grunted, looking uncomfortable, and Peter waved vaguely at the ship. "Can I give you a tour before you take over?" Speidel coughed once, shaking his head. "No, thank you. I was a midshipman aboard Hannover, before the conversion. I'm sure I can find my way around."

"Suit yourself." Peter shrugged and poured a cup of coffee, glancing at Speidel to see if he, too, wanted one, and the older man nodded gratefully. It seemed they had that much in common at least. "If I might ask," Peter began carefully, "you're not an aviator, why are you taking command of the Hindenburg?" Speidel shrugged and considered before offering his reply. "Because there aren't enough ships to go around for the number of captains. Especially at our rank. To move up, you need sea time." What he left unsaid was ... because men like you have been hogging the ships. Peter certainly didn't feel that he had been; he had merely been the best tool available. The remainder of their conversation was similarly light and essentially meaningless, until Speidel sat up and blinked. "And is Frau Volkmann available?" he asked suddenly. "I have special orders where she is concerned."

The "special orders" turned out to be that she was to report in flier's leathers to the flight deck, where a Nachrichtendienst photographer and the Crown Prince stood by beaming as Speidel pinned the ribbon of the Iron Cross, 2nd Class, into her buttonhole - "for contributions above and beyond expectations to the war effort, and for personal valor in the pursuit of enemy submarines." Truth be told, hunting Red U-boats was hardly valorous, but then, who expected an elfin woman, especially a married one, to be out hunting submarines in the first place?

Peter watched with a mixture of pride and jealousy. It was clear that his wife would emerge from this whole thing a new kind of hero, and he was happy for her, but what would it all mean for him? She beamed ecstatically, both because of the award, and because of the presence of the Crown Prince, and saluted exactly, Peter thought, like one of those silly new-minted Lichterfelde lieutenants on their first assignment. After so long associated with the various arms of the Kaiser's military, you'd think she'd be at least a little cynical, or at least starkly professional, like Speidel, but she meant that salute!

The change of command ceremony was unusually subdued. The ensign under which they had sailed for the past two years was hauled down, a new one went up, and Speidel saluted and spoke the formal words: "Sir, I relieve you." And just like that, Peter Volkmann went from captain of the Kaiser's first aviation cruiser to a shored officer, with little to show for it but a beat-up ensign. He headed for the gangway, and only peripherally noticed the Crown Prince fast-walking to catch up with him. Once he realized, he came to a halt, and turned to await the Prince.

"Volkmann," the Prince started, opening his mouth before thinking better of whatever it was he was going to say. Finally, he continued. "I'm sorry. Apparently the training ships weren't supposed to get involved, that somehow got lost. But there's a silver lining. Can we walk?" Ludwig Ferdinand gestured at the bare, empty flight deck, the ship's company dispersing already. Peter shrugged. "I don't see why not." He almost forgot himself in his momentary depression, then added, "Highness."

They paced silently up and down the flight deck before the prince spoke again. "You're not going to sea again in the foreseeable future, Volkmann. That's the bad news. The good news... I happen to need an aide-de-camp." The prince smiled thinly, fingers tapping his pilot's badge. "And I'm fool enough to think I should keep this up to date. Means moving to Berlin, but lots of travel." Peter snorted quietly. "Sir, I've been at sea for... I don't know, feels like forever now. Travel's nothing new. I... thank you, sir. It's better than reporting to Wilhelmshaven and smiling at whoever's handing out assignments."

"So you'll accept?"

"I see no better option, sir. Thank you, I'll let Hanna know, I'll be ashore soon as I gather her up."

---

The first two weeks of June, 1944, saw the most shocking collapse of any nation's ability to resist in the history of warfare. Never before had any nation sustained as great a series of blows as those sustained by the Soviet Union in those two weeks.

The first of those blows fell at Leningrad, thanks to the anger of a parachute marshal at the retention of his troops as line infantry.

Kurt_Steiner said:

And Stalin shouted: "Hey, why me?"

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See Trekkie's response.

trekaddict said:

Because this time the boot kicking in your front door is worn by a sane person who listens to his Generals?

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And the generals who rose to the top were men like Bock, not men like Keitel.

Enewald said:

I cannot imagine a small force conquering Leningrad... But neither could I imagine one goddamn big Red Army to fall within a month, that is what happens often enough in pdox games.

and:

But Stalin was a General himself, so he needs only to listen to himself?
Even better, he was later a Generalissimo!
Others better listen to him!

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The forces at Leningrad aren't just Student's parachutists. However, the decision to take the city NOW was Student's, and no one else on-site is senior enough to argue with him. He's just fed up with what he sees as bureaucratic ineptitude - first that idiot Zander can't organize planes, so he has to make an amphibious assault, then once that mission's accomplished, Keitel says they're perfectly good infantry. In Student's mind, this is reaching the level of ridiculous.

As for the collapse of the Red Army and the fact that six weeks of fighting puts the Germans on the Volga... I'm not even certain that's reasonable on 1940s Soviet roads in peacetime conditions. The peculiar geometry of HoI2 Paradox Earth (it's got a 10,000-mile circumference, for instance...) is one reason I've got such hopes for DH.

103. St. Petersburg

Kriegslazarette 506
The Winter Palace
St. Petersburg, Russia
12 June 1944

"Is he awake yet?" Generalfeldmarschall Student demanded impatiently. Everything about the past month made him impatient - Zander, then Keitel, then telephone calls, over the first line completed, from Hippel. If Hippel hadn't had someone's ear in Berlin, he'd have hung up. Instead, he was down here, checking on one more major. It was at least better than the morning's ceremonies.

They massed on the south side of Leninsky Prospekt at half-past four in the morning. Wilhelm had volunteered to lead a replacement battalion, men returned to duty but not yet to their units. He had volunteered his battalion further, to sprint across the Prospekt and try to establish a position on the far side. The only other man who had wanted it was Skorzeny, in the Pioneers, who had, as usual, flashed a grin and offered to flip a coin. Volkmann had refused the coin-flip and instead just agreed on a joint attack.

The Reds had the manpower, that was absolutely certain. Every factory worker, every clerk, everyone who wasn't enfeebled or already dead had a rifle, and enough of them knew how to use them that the Germans couldn't totally relax. Wilhelm had shaken hands with Skorzeny gravely, the big Austrian winking in reply. Somewhere, he'd picked up a Cossack's cavalry sword, and was brandishing it as his own personal trademark. "Otto..." Wilhelm had begun, hesitating. "After this is over, if you don't mind, I'd like to speak to you about... your earlier request about the Brandenburgers." Skorzeny had whistled, then shook his head. "After, if you make it that far, Willi."

Student had spent the morning at the retaining wall between the Winter Palace and the ersatz dock of the cruiser Aurora. The ancient protected cruiser was in drydock at the moment, badly damaged by the Luftwaffe and captured without irreparable damage on the explicit orders of Admiral Raeder by a marine battalion. In the Aurora's place, the cruiser Deutschland rode at anchor, its guns distinctly pointed out from the city. At the water's edge, the paratroopers had formed up, such of them as could, to welcome ashore His Imperial Highness Vladimir Kirillovich Romanov, Grand Duke of Moscow, the Grand Duchess Kira Kirillovna, and Kira's husband, Crown Prince Ludwig Ferdinand. Another of the interminable line of Volkmanns had been with the Prince - Peter? Paul? Probably Peter, Student vaguely remembered him being a promising prospect before the fleet air arm stole him.

The assault across Leninsky Prospekt kicked off inauspiciously. Someone rattled, probably one of the Heer grenadiers. They were brave enough, and competent fighters, but they were so used to riding into battle that they were terrible light infantry. The parachutists, almost universally covered in rag-topped helmets now, rolled their eyes at the sharply outlined Stahlhelms of the grenadier divisions, and sneered at their new machine carbines - "spray and pray," they called the grenadiers' marskmanship. In any case, the Reds responded as they always did, with five minutes of irregular, un-directed firing, until someone on their side of the street called a halt, his tone audible despite the language barrier. Wilhelm had spent a few weeks listening to those commands, so he understood "cease fire," and a handful of profanities, and what he suspected was "don't wake me up again."

They held back for ten minutes to let the Reds shake off their alarm, then the battalion commanders nodded back at their radiomen. Far back, towards Strelnya, came the dull whump-whump of the mortar batteries going into action. It was a peculiarity of airborne units that they lacked integral artillery heavier than the mortars or a handful of quick-breakdown anti-tank guns, but they made do with what they had. The twelve-centimeter mortar was man-portable by courtesy; that was enough for Student's men. They whuffled and whumped for several seconds, the rounds cascading down on the opposite side of the Prospekt, at which point Wilhelm and Skorzeny both stood up and roared out their order to charge, each company given an apartment block to take.


The Russians' - as opposed to Bolsheviks, Reds, or Communists - "general" was a newly-promoted popinjay named Field Marshal Andrei Andreievich Vlasov, a former Bolshevik general captured somewhere in the Ukraine. Why they'd picked Vlasov was a total mystery. He was unlikeable, a thin-faced, arrogant-looking man even by Prussian standards; where Bock and Vlasov differed in that regard was that Fedor von Bock had already entered the history book as Blücher reborn, marching into France to avenge a historic wrong, where Andrei Vlasov's great accomplishment was to declare "I die with my men!" then get captured rather than face either a bullet or Stalin... same thing, really, Student reflected. A moment's further thought finally dredged up the resemblance that had been bothering him this whole time. That movie of Murnau's, back in the '20s... Nosferatu. Put a wig on the vampire and give him thick-lensed glasses, and he'd be Andrei Vlasov. Right down to the leeching.


Vlasov's "army" - officially the Russian Liberation Army, or according to the sleeve patches they wore on their mostly German-issue uniforms, "POA" - were armed with whatever the German war machine could spare. In theory this meant that their armored "division," still forming around Warsaw, was equipped with T-34s and BT-7s; in practice, it meant Panzer IIIs; their infantry divisions, of which only one was in marching order near Smolensk, were equipped with a horrifying mixture of Mosin-Nagants and Mausers, the limit of standardization being the issue of bayonets; and their uniforms, nominally green to call up the memory of Marshal Suvorov, were mostly field-gray with POA patches and Russian rank markings. In any case, "Marshal" Vlasov was a stone around Student's neck already, trying to proclaim Russian control of the city even as the only armed and uniformed forces in it were Fallrschirmtruppen.

Wilhelm slammed up against the wall, breathing hard and his own footsteps across the Prospekt still loud in his ears. The Reds in this building were stunned, unable to react at the moment, but he already heard the vague "Za Rodina!" and "Urrah!" yells beginning. He brought the MP40 up as he crouched beside the blown-out double door, then glanced side-to-side trying to find what he had to work with in the dark. Encouragingly, most of his scratch force had made it across. He saw three or four men - not bad in a makeshift battalion of three hundred or so - lying in the road, a weird mix of field-gray grenadiers and hunter-green camouflage smocks. "Sani!" he roared, and a head popped up. He gestured at the men in the street, then bellowed, "Aid station in the lobby! Raus!" The medic nodded and sprinted, weaving to increase his chances. Poor bastard would wear himself out; no one else was grabbing bodies to help him.

He pushed the thought from his mind and pulled the string from a stick grenade, taking and releasing a deep breath to burn off most of the fuse before tossing it in the doorway. A wall-shaking boom resulted, and he followed into the smoke, charging without bothering to think about his surroundings consciously. If it moved in here right now, it was a Red. He scrambled in, hunched over and gun up, vaulting across the wreckage of the door and skittering against the wall. "Lobby clear! Advance!" he yelled back, superfluously as it turned out. Behind him, men were already starting to boil in the door, hoping that the building would be safer than the Prospekt. He smiled grimly - he knew better.

Student had been accosted by an unwontedly shy Peter Volkmann after the ceremony, both of them wearing a freshly issued diamond-studded Russian order. He had been told that his was the "Order of Saint Andrew" or somesuch. It truly didn't matter. He had a baton and a blue enamel cross, and suspected a Black Eagle was coming. Some Russian dust-collector was irrelevant. This naval captain, then, had approached him, remarkably diffidently given Student's interactions with the rest of the Volkmann family. "Sir, do you remember me? Peter Volkmann. We met in '34, in Berlin, sir." It was of course accompanied by salutes and all due respect, but this apparently successful naval officer - a very young captain, with a Blue Max and a handful of other neck orders - turned into a bit of a mumbling schoolboy in Student's presence. The memory had come back, and he'd smiled, reaching out to brush Peter's own House Order. "See you got one of your own, eh, Volkmann? Good for you. So..." At least the Volkmanns had no problem walking and talking; Kurt Student was a busy man. They walked back toward the Winter Palace.

"Sir, I was told that my brother was here? Wilhelm, sir?" Peter blushed slightly. "I don't mean anything inappropriate, I was just hoping to see him..." Student grunted in amusement. "Well, let's see if he's gotten out of bed yet." Thus, among the official party around the bed, there was a marshal, a naval captain, and the surprisingly unobtrusive form of Student's massive orderly Schmeling. The next bed over, there was a gloomy, long-faced Red artilleryman, still wearing his mustard-colored tunic, black hair poking out in places from under the bandage wound around his head. The clipboard at his feet said "Solzhenitsyn, A.I."

Everyone who was on the second, third, and fourth stories was dead. It was only a matter of time: Wilhelm controlled the ground floor, and the breach across the Prospekt was open. The fighting above him was only a matter of time. He himself was on the Red side of the building, gazing across the canal at the Winter Palace in the sunrise. They had come so close - he could taste the fall of Leningrad, and when that happened, it would mean the corps could return to Stendal and he could get some proper selection done.

He leaned out the window, stretching, acting against type and exposing himself to fire without any hope of reward. His helmet was resting on a wobbly table, and his MP40 was combat-slung across his chest. It was a glorious morning, and it promised to be one of the last Red mornings in the "cradle of the Revolution." He smiled and glanced upward - just in time to hear a shout of alarm somewhere upstairs and see a body fall out the window with a loud thump. There was no uniform, so a Red. Still - that was enough exposure, time to pull back. Time, in fact, to head upstairs, see if the building was clearing.

It was... mostly. The Soviets had in fact holed up well on the third floor, in what looked to have once been a reading room. Copies of "The ABC of the Revolution" and "Das Kapital" littered the floor, the bookshelves piled up high enough to provide a man-height barrier. The obvious solution - grenades - never worked, the lieutenant on-site explained, because the Reds had already shot five men in the arm or hand in the past few minutes for attempting that very trick. Someone on the other side was a very good shot.

"We got a 'werfer team?" he asked, dreading the possibilities that would come with setting the inside of a building they had to occupy on fire, but knowing that the reading room was a breaking point. The lieutenant gulped, running downstairs to check, and moments later, the distinctive heavy thump of a man with a flamethrower tank on his back came up, the operator panting heavily. Wilhelm didn't even bother explaining, just whipped his finger toward the bookshelf barricade. The 'werfer man nodded, steadying himself - Wilhelm smelled the distinctive smell of exceptionally cheap Russian vodka, but he could hardly blame the man given what he was carrying - and pushed the muzzle of the flamethrower into the exposed hallway, depressing the trigger and hosing the hallway with roaring fire. The barricade burned, and alarmed shouts quickly transformed to screams. Wilhelm clapped the 'werfer man on the shoulder, making a mental note to have him transferred to some better duty than 'werfer punishment.

Student gazed out the mostly-intact windows of the Winter Palace at the Deutschland, the ship called the Kaiser's yacht. Peter looked down at the form in the bed, head shorn and scalp plastered. It was vaguely horrifying to Peter, who was used to his brother having somewhat longer hair, but to Student, who had always known Wilhelm to have infantry-short hair, it was... a haircut. He saw the elder Volkmann's vaguely green face and raised an eyebrow. Obvious aviator, no experience of life on the front. He understood, but at this point was beyond sympathy. This kind of thing was just part of the job.

He heard a commotion at the other end of the ward. Turning, he saw Vlasov pushing past the protesting doctors. Vlasov saw him turn and brightened immediately. "General Student!" he exclaimed, neglecting that Student, too, had a baton. "I hear - heard? - that you are in this hospital! I speak to you about our recruiters working here, yes?" Vlasov had an unduly expectant look on his face, and Student growled deep in his throat. The Russian backed off half a step, giving a slow, fish-like blink behind his thick glasses. "You talk to the walkers, Vlasov. You leave the bedridden alone." The Russian gabbled a quick thank-you and beat a retreat.

They set up a bucket brigade to fight the fire as soon as the guns had died out. Not much point in capturing a building just to have it burn out from under them. Wilhelm took his position in the chain, flinging water from hand to hand. It was exhausting, back-breaking labor that went on and on, as the fuel from the 'werfer just kept burning. All they could do was contain it until that fuel burned out. Finally the fire died down, and a runner came forward to ask him for a status update.

He made a second stupid decision for the day. Bone-tired, arms aching, he turned to follow the runner. As they headed out the door, he stepped in a puddle and slid, arms pinwheeling frantically. As he fell backwards, he overcompensated, instead pitching forward. The last thing he remembered was his head cracking against the curb of the Leninsky Prospekt.

Wilhelm groaned, and under the bandage, his eyes fluttered open. "What the...?" Everyone fell silent, looking at Student as the seniormost. He cleared his throat. "Volkmann. General Hippel has ordered you back to Stendal. You are to select... no more than ten officers of the rank of Hauptmann or below... and no more than one hundred and fifty other ranks... to travel with you."

"Yes sir..." Wilhelm unconsciously started to salute, wincing when his hand brushed the plaster. "But this...?"

It was Schmeling who answered; he had spent a short period as a hospital orderly before Student had rescued him, and he was the only one who had been able to puzzle out the handwriting on Wilhelm's charts. He spoke slowly, deep, thick voice matching his size. "The runner panicked and reported a Russian sniper had shot you. They found it was a bad concussion, and you were brought here. You were out for a little over thirty hours. Exhaustion, according to the chart." He held it up, gesturing to an arcane squiggle.

"And Peter?" Wilhelm asked in further confusion. Peter smiled, offering his hand. "I was in the neighborhood. Thought I'd drop in on you. Least you could do is get out of bed." Wilhelm nodded, then gasped as his head throbbed. Still, he swung his legs over and tried unsteadily to stand. Schmeling and Peter both moved to help him; he waved them away. "Sir," he asked Student, "has Skorzeny been promoted yet?"

"Not yet, no. You want him?" Student grunted in a mix of amusement and consternation that anyone who had dealt with Hauptmann Otto Skorzeny would instantly understand. "You can have him." Wilhelm nodded gratefully, weaving slightly as he looked out the window at the Deutschland. "The Aurora looks... bigger... than I remembered it."

---


In any normal war, the transformation of Leningrad, by the actions of a hundred-thousand-odd German soldiers, into St. Petersburg would have been a feat on the order of Sedan. This, however, was not a normal war, and to the south, near Serpukhov, General Gotthard Heinrici's K5 guns, manhandled at great difficulty onto carriages fitted for Soviet-gauge rails, had already been firing into the center of Moscow for six days when the Grand Duke arrived. Behind them, Bock waited until Manstein's heavy armor was available to cut behind the city, forcing the Soviets to retreat northward and hoping to capture Stalin himself.

It was a vain hope. Josef Stalin outlived both the Soviet hold on Moscow, and the Soviet hold on the city named after him, though not by long.