Chapter 147
4th March 1941
Once again Oberleutnant Kramer was staring through his binoculars over yet another border of yet another country, this time Yugoslavia. His Panzer III was new, brand new and with an equally new crew after the last one had dispersed or killed. Still armed with that small 5cm gun, it was nevertheless a much more deadly weapon than his old one. More armour, a better engine and ammunition that went great lengths in compensating for the small calibre. He was standing on a small hill in what had been southern Austria, and below him the rest of the Panzers in his troop were waiting under heavy camouflage netting. “His” troop. He still could not believe that he had retained this command although he had not exactly fared well against the French Panzers on that day, but here he was, commanding it and having even been promoted and was now second in line to command the Company were it to become leaderless. He shook that particular thought out of his head and decided that it was time to climb back down. He climbed downwards and padded the dust from his black Panzer uniform and walked over to his Panzer where his new crew was waiting. The others had all been killed or transferred away in the aftermath of the Battle of France, and this was to be the first time they saw combat as Kramer was just coming back forward from extended leave. It was still the usual assembly of men, a driver, Private Schultz who was from somewhere in the deepest bowels of central Bavaria, his radio operator who doubled as bow machine gunner, Private First Class Schrader, from Karlsruhe, his loader, Staff Corporal Kammler bespectacled former bank clerk who had proven himself to be capable during the exercises of the last few weeks, despite his skinny appearance and being only two centimetres under regulation height. On the Panzer itself his gunner was waiting, Corporal Menlicher, a poster-boy soldier who had been too short and lacked the needed physical fitness needed for the Waffen-SS, much to his annoyance has he was a devoted party member. “Mount up men, it's almost time.” Kramer said. Over the next few minutes the men finished what work they had to do on the outside and then proceeded to climb back into their Panzer. Once inside the crew proceeded to go over every function again, and even if it had not been in the regulations, Kramer would have insisted on it, because if the Battle of France had shown one thing, functioning Panzers were needed if one was to defeat the enemy. Not that their soon-to-be enemy had anything in the way of modern Armour. The Balkan Kingdom of Yugoslavia had enough ethnic troubles to make the old Austro-Hungarian Empire from which Ashes hit had been born look like a friendly worker's neighbourhood. Yugoslavia was a cesspool of ethnic groups, religions, never mind the fact that the Kingdom was far from really representative.
The Intelligence briefing they had received before moving into their starting positions, in the case of the 7. Panzerdivision near a small village that lay only a few miles from the border. The Division had been in place for nearly two weeks, with the Officers billeted in the empty houses of the Village whose occupants had been evacuated. For many days they had been conducting manoeuvres to camouflage their true purpose and to work up the replacements that had joined the Division since the end of the fighting in France. The Division had taken fearful losses during these last desperate battles with French stay-behind forces as the front had rapidly shifted southwards, and had taken several weeks to get back to full strength. In the meantime the Italians had lost North Africa and the German, Soviet, Hungarian and Czech armies had quietly shifted their units south. No pre-text had been fabricated, at least Kramer did not know of one. In fact as soon as the first shells started flying, Radio stations all over Axis-controlled Europe would broadcast that the Yugoslavian forces had started a surprise attack on Hungarian and German border towns, and that Axis Defence Forces were attempting to apprehend those responsible. But Kramer did not know all this. While they waited, Kramer was reading a letter from his...their status defied all attempts at categorization, but she was the woman he hoped to marry one day. Schultz was snoring away in his cramped seat, while the rest amused themselves with whatever they could fit into the confines of the crew compartment. Suddenly they were all alert and awake when their radio started squawking about mortar shells hitting forward positions. Without a word Kramer and his crew went into action, while roughly a kilometre from the border, a nine groups of German troops belonging to the the Brandenburgers were packing up the 8-cm schwerer Granatwerfer 34 that they had used to shell their own forward positions. They knew that war, that hell was coming to the Balkan Kingdom. Soon enough the Panzers of the Regiment rumbled down the gentle slope towards the border. Kramer looked through his viewing optics towards the border, where he could see the Infantry attacking the meagre Yugoslav defences. When they passed the burning wreckage of several trucks with dead German soldiers lying around, they did not know that they had been sacrificed in order to sell the invasion to the world. Kramer was thankful when they wandered out of his field of vision and stared ahead. They were advancing down into a valley that contained several small creeks, shadowed by the mountains in the distance and a heavily wooded area to the west. When he looked closer, he could see the yellow flashes of light Field Artillery pieces exploding in the woods and all over the valley to their front, interdicting the roads that led up to the border. When they crossed into Yugoslavia, the men were alert, and the usual remnants of war began to come into view. The first dead bodies were lying about, mostly wearing the uniforms of the Royal Yugoslav Army. Wounded men were limping backwards, prisoners were moving in the same direction. They walked, marched, limped in the mud at the side of the road so that the Panzers going forward could advance without hindrance. The job of the Division was this time not to force a breakthrough, as the lay of the land favoured that job being done by the Infantry. The Division would instead just exploit it and race for it's strategic objective, the city of Zagreb, and then later, in order to destroy the Yugoslav 11th Army for the coast and then the city of Split. Normally that would have been the job of the Italian Second Army, but the Italians were in no shape to conduct any sort of offensive operation at the moment. For that very reason the Division had been moved from southern France to Austria and put under the command of the German Second Army. At the same time the Hungarian First Army would would attack towards Belgrade, while the Romanians would do the same from their border. This attack would also be the first act of the Kingdom of Bulgaria as a member of the Axis, as their westernmost Field Army would attack towards Albania in order to capture Skopje and cut the Yugoslavs from Greece and easy Allied reinforcements through the ports of the latter country, something that the German General Staff had discounted but what Stalin apparently saw as a plausible enough option.
Kramer did not know all this and as his Panzer rolled down the road towards Zagreb, he also did not see any combat. It seemed that the Infantry and the Stukas had smashed most of the Yugoslavian border defences to pieces. So far no enemy FT-17s or R-35s had been seen, and Intelligence had placed the one of the two battalions in the area they were advancing through now, so Kramer was understandably worried. But not as much as he was when he had advanced against the British counterpart of his own Division. No, the British at least had a grasp of Panzer warfare and their Crusaders were at least on par with their own. They were fearsome enemies, motivated, expertly trained and equipped, albeit using conservative tactics, and fought with a tenacity that forced the German and Soviet troops to admire them for it. The Yugoslavs on the other hand were not exactly a warrior people, as they spent more time fighting each other over petty rivalries than they did actually preparing to defend their country. Their Army was Serb for the most part, as was the higher Officer Corps, something that did not endear it with many of the other groups. It was largely organized in three Army Groups, and Kramer and his men were currently driving through the northernmost one, smack in the middle. So there had to be some enemies around, as it was inconceivable that the enemy commander would leave his centre so unguarded. They advanced down the road into a small village that was mostly on fire. It had evidently seen lots of fighting, and when they saw the wreck of a FT-17 outside when they passed through the outer houses, their pulses quickened. Before Kramer could say anything, a German soldier stepped out from behind it to halt the advancing column of German vehicles. “Great, a Kettenhund[1], what does he want?” Kammler said. Kramer opened the commander's hatch and climbed up so that he could talk to the man. “What is it, Sergeant?” he asked. A brisk Prussian salute later the other man said: “Sir, the forward scouts have sighted Yugoslavian tanks near here, about a kilometre down that road there,” he indicated the direction, a grassy dirt track that went roughly south-east, “and we have had to halt the advance.” Standing orders for Kramer and his men were that they were to engage enemy armour , and from that direction he could hear the rumblings of a heavy fight even over the revs of his Diesel Engine. Kramer read the written orders that the Field Policeman had handed to him. They seemed genuine enough and bore the signature of the Colonel, so Kramer was inclined to follow them. They buttoned up again and the four Panzers of his troop moved down the dirt track past a last burning house.
The sound of the fighting grew louder, and as they moved around a bend in the road at the feet of a small hill, they saw a Comany's worth of German Infantry battling a group of Yugoslavs, but no enemy panzers were anywhere to be seen. Still, the Yugoslavian Infantry withdrew in disorder when the Panzer IIIs began to spray the battlefield with machine gun fire, and made for the treeline that was about a kilometre away. From there suddenly about a dozen R-35 emerged, and it was now clear for Kramer that they had been lured into an elaborate trap. Still, so much the better, he thought as Menlicher began to pick off the targets. “FIRE!” Kramer yelled, and the 5cm Anti-Tank shell raced to close the distance. It slammed into and through the forward armour of the French-made tank, exploding on the inside and setting off the ammunition in it. The next died an equally impressive death as the shell from another German penetrated the engine compartment, setting fire to the petrol in the engine. Four more of their number died before they were even in range of the German Panzers, and at this point their attack faltered, and the Germans prepared themselves to press the attack home, but then the rest of the battalion broke from the tree line and Kramer called a retreat, much to the annoyance of his gunner who in this instance kept it for himself. The four German Panzers and the Infantry withdrew, with the Armour acting as a rear guard, towards the village while Kramer called it in on the radio. The rest of the Division prepared itself to make a stand there, and what units were not in the village itself raced towards it at their best speed. The Yugoslavs took their time to press their attack home, and by the time they had traversed the roughly 2 Kilometres to the village, the Germans had managed to set up several of the new 5 cm PaK 38, the towed variant of the gun that armed his very own Bertha.[2] Schultz placed her behind the smoking remnants of some sort of barn, ready to dash out onto the road and fire the gun at the enemy. Kramer still had to get used to having a gun with a muzzle break mounted, but the increase in accuracy during rapid fire more then offset the increase in noise, something that did not matter for the Panzer crews. No enemy artillery fire was incoming, and Kramer decided to take a risk. He opened the hatch of his turret and climbed up, just high enough to be able to see over the collapsed roof of the barn, and to the south he saw a broad line of enemy Infantry advancing, with several R-35s and FT-17s dispersed among them. He opened his mouth to call in whatever Artillery and Air support was available, but before he could talk, a group of about twenty Soviet aircraft swooped down on the enemy. The new Il-2s were part of the Soviet contribution to this campaign, as there were now Soviet ground troops in the area. Aircraft showered the advancing Yugoslavs with rockets and cannonfire, and the enemy infantry was cut down as if the grim reaper himself had gone through them with his scythe. Many of the tanks were also destroyed, and those that had survived attempted to retreat, followed by shells from the German anti-tank guns and at last, some artillery fire. Kramer looked at the scene of destruction that the Soviets had created and thanked god that he was not on the receiving end of it. He climbed back down and said to the others: “Gentlemen, it seems we are on the attack again, Ivan has really come through this time.” The four Panzers, and with them the entire 7. Panzerdivision moved towards Zagreb. For the rest of the day almost no organized resistance was encountered, only a few pockets here and there, all of them low on anti-tank weapons. Eventually they reached and crossed the river Drava, and from there drove towards Zagreb against virtually no opposition at all. It became clear that the Yugoslav Army, although almost fully mobilized ever since the Italians had entered the war, was plagued by one fundamental problem, at least in this particular area: Many of the soldiers that were responsible for the defence of this area were of croat descent, and some greeted the Germans as liberators. Overall however the Yugoslav Army resisted where it could, but it was not even close to enough. The Axis armies simply ripped them apart, and by the end of the day, they had even exceeded their planned objectives in all areas except towards Belgrade where the Yugoslavs had concentrated most of their most loyal units and in the area around Zagreb, where the Serb units of the Yugoslav 7th Army held until they were encircled by the Hungarian and German units on the fifth day. At the same time down in the south, the Romanian and Bulgarian troops were driving towards the Albanian border, putting themselves between what little forces the Yugoslavs had in the south and Belgrade which in turn suffered massive attacks on it's industrial districts.
Boulder City ( Las Vegas ), Marxist Union of Pacifica, UAPR
The city had been a centre of crime and vice in the old United States. Now it was a military city. The APA and the APAF had taken possession of the remains of the city and turned it into one giant military base, fuelled by the nearby Boulder Dam. No civilians remained, the entire population of ten-thousand were members of one branch of the Military or another, and if not they were working for one of the many government agencies. In the centre of the town a massive building was rising where the St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church had been before the war. Now it was demolished and a seventeen storey concrete monstrosity was rising in it's place. It was on the whole a building that belong to the freshly named People's Security Service, or rather it's second Division. The PSS had recently undergone a massive reorganization after it's chairman had died of nothing but old age[3] and the new one had insisted that the different branches be reorganized. Now the Second Division was external security whilst the First Division was internal Security. Third Division was a special one as it specialized on spying on foreign Diplomats on UAPR Soil, while Fourth Division was the American Equivalent to Britain's Q Branch. Most of the service was housed in Washington, but here in Boulder City the PSS maintained a massive training facility for mainly the Second Division. No one really knew what was going on in the walls of this building. The soldiers claimed it was a weapons research facility aimed at either the Japanese or the British or the Soviets or the Germans, depending in who you were talking to and what day it was. The Government bureaucrats of the other branches of the Union's People's Representative Government claimed that it was nothing more than an extensive storage building for the ever increasing mountains of files, and the PSS men simply said that it was an administrative building and none of their buissiness. What they all knew was that if you asked too many questions, the First Division might come knocking on your door. With a for American unusual tidiness the Building's levels had been given categories. The ground, first and second Floors were accessible with standard security clearance as you had it when you worked as a clerk for any of the Divisions. The cellars needed higher clearance because there the most sensitive records of the Second Division were stored. For the third floor you needed even higher clearance, and that one was lower than the one you needed for the fourth and so on, all the way up to number seventeen, where only a few select members of the Central committee, the Chairman of the Service, the local administrator and his closest Staff and sometimes specially cleared members and Agents of the Service that needed to go up there due to some mission or other. Most of the floors between the elusive top and the 'freely' accessible second Floor were filled with training rooms, rooms for the trainees to sleep in and kitchens to feed them. With this arrangement any Agent or Operative that was trained here, and they could train up to almost a hundred at any given time, never had to leave the building and could always be kept under tight control.
On the sixteenth floor a select group of such operatives was preparing itself for embarkation. They did not talk to each other just yet, as it was an open secret that all the rooms were bugged, but had they done so they would have spoken French with an accent that was not from Metropolitan France, in fact from none of the Free French colonies either. It was dark outside, as it always was when a group left the building and without a word, the ten men gathered their things and entered the elevator that would bring them down to the parking dock on the ground floor. There and again without speaking, they entered the two lorries that were waiting for them there and drove off to a nearby Military Airfield situated at the shores of a dried out salt lake.[4] From there an aircraft that would bring them to a village near the border of Canada from where they would individually go to their destination, each with a carefully arranged route that only he himself knew about. In that case no one could compromise the others if they were captured. Once at their destination they would go accomplish their mission and hopefully return home in a few months. At least that was the idea. The Chairman of the Second Division was watching from a blacked out car nearby with his second in Command sitting opposite him. “Do you think that they will make it, Comrade Chairman?” the younger man asked. “We will see. Personally I think yes, they will make it. After all, we trained them and the methods for conspirational operations in enemy territory haven't changed much over the last fifty years.” The younger man had his doubts but at the same time he was not so stupid as to publicly question his immediate superior, but the older man saw it on his face. “You may speak freely, Comrade. This is not the British Parliament.” “Yes, Comrade. With all due respect, I believe that this mission isn't worth the risk. What if we are discovered? What if our men are caught before, or even after they have done what they were ordered to do?” “All good points, my good Jonathan. However, the Imperialists will not be looking for our men, as there will be a distraction in place that we did not even have to set up.” “I see.” No more was said, and no more talking was needed. In the meantime the two lorries were driving through the massive military city, heading out towards the airfield where a T-108 Armed Transport was waiting.
T-108 Armed Transport Aircraft[5]
The plane was packed with the men and their few possessions when it took off, but more than one aircraft would have been somewhat conspicuous even for such a remote airfield, so they had to make do. Once they disembarked they went their own ways into Canada, in order to fulfil their mission, whatever it was.
[Notes: How does fewer but longer updates grab you?]
[1] Not so nice nickname for the German Military police because of that metal thingy they had hanging from their neck.
[2] In TTL the Germans faced more and better equipped armoured opposition in Belgium and France. As a result of this, the vehicle variant of this gun that was first used in April 1941 in OTL finds it's way onto the current variants of the Panzer III earlier, with the older ones retrofitted as they cycle through depot-level maintenance. While this means fewer towed guns for the Infantry, ze Führer himself has ordered it to be done.
[3] sometimes people die of natural causes, dont'cha know.
[4] Yes, the base that doesn't exist.

[5] In OTL the Americans built the C-108 Flying Fortress Caro plane.