Chapter 122:
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Chapter 122
“Our glorious army has conquered Leningrad! Long live the German nation!!!”
That was how Goebbels shouted over the radio. This chapter made its debut appearance via N0v3lB1n.
Between the ruined buildings of the city, soldiers marched and the Nazi swastika flew over the Hermitage Museum, once the palace of the tsars.
All these scenes were filmed and sent to Berlin. Countless newspapers reported as if the Soviet Union would surrender by tomorrow.
[The Red Dragon of the Apocalypse with a Torn Heart]
One newspaper used this headline and drew a caricature of a dragon with Stalin’s head, bleeding and dying from a wound in its chest.
The popular caricature soon appeared in the Nazi party’s journals and Goebbels’ speeches, and posters with it were plastered all over the place.
In the university district, at the crossroads, there were placards cheering for the imminent conquest of the Soviet Union.
Now that Leningrad, once the heart of the revolution, was torn apart, no matter how giant the beast was, it would eventually fall and die.
That was what the newspapers made people think.
The broadcast, the press, and all the media repeated only dreamlike stories about the great victory of the German nation and the world domination.
Of course, reality was a bit more cruel.
***
“Damn it, why do they keep popping out from there?”
“Your Excellency, this place is not safe either. We have to retreat immediately...”
Bang, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. The 116th Division, which had advanced its headquarters, was engaged in an unexpected urban warfare with the Soviet troops that kept pouring out from somewhere.
Leningrad was a huge city.
It was much bigger than Pskov or Smolensk, which the air force could turn into ashes.
Not only the main city of Leningrad, but also the several satellite cities connected to it were twenty or thirty times larger and the buildings were much denser.
The Soviet troops hid in the communal apartments on the outskirts of the city and as soon as the shelling stopped, they quickly hid back into the city.
And they adapted much better to the complex terrain than the Germans who were not familiar with it.
“Is artillery support impossible?”
The division commander had to blame himself for his foolishness as soon as he said it.
The enemy was tangled up messily and all kinds of debris from the buildings blocked the movement of the heavy equipment.
After a storm of fire and gunpowder swept over, only the ruins of the broken city remained. But those ruins became a huge maze for the soldiers.
A labyrinth full of deadly enemies everywhere.
“How the hell are we supposed to fight here? What the hell!”
The staff officers had no idea, but the division commander exploded with anger.
Artillery or air support was realistically impossible.
Only an endless maze-like battlefield where people and people clashed.
As soon as they entered the city, the Germans followed the Führer’s order and held a grand ceremony instead of suppressing the ‘remnants’.
While the Germans hurriedly occupied the major landmarks such as the Hermitage for the event, the Soviet troops quickly infiltrated into every corner.
Bang! This gunshot was too close.
The temporary tent set up in the field did not provide any protection against firearms.
The sound of the machine guns firing like raindrops was heard, but it did not reassure him.
“Your Excellency, the sniper is causing a lot of casualties among the officers. We have to retreat right now.”
“Yes. They have a much more suitable armament system for urban warfare.”
Tanks were not needed in urban warfare.
It was lucky if they did not explode from the Molotov cocktails thrown by the enemy hiding in the buildings.
Weapons such as artillery or aircraft were also much less useful than in the field.
It was much harder to catch the enemy hiding in the buildings using the verticality than the trench warfare where they dug and hid on the flat ground.
The Soviet infantry also had a lot of weapons that were useful in urban warfare.
“Our soldiers need more grenade launchers. Rocket launchers to destroy the machine gun nests and...”
“Also, there are additional requests for weapons such as mortars and grenades.”
“Those damn rocket launchers, rocket launchers!”
The division commander snapped.
The Soviet troops hiding in the ruins of the buildings fired a rocket launcher and ran away, causing a lot of damage to the Germans.
But the order to get inside the building somehow sounded more convincing. For the German nation, for the Führer!
They shouted and charged.
The adjacent company also issued a charge order, seeing their assault.
The soldiers who carried the heavy flamethrowers, which had been used to clear several buildings, followed them safely from behind.
In fact, it did not take long to realize what this was between an honorable death and a dog’s death.
“Mother...”
A soldier who was torn apart by a machine gun fell to the ground, looking at the sky and searching for his mother.
He did not think of the glory of the German nation and the grace of the great Führer that he had been shouting until a moment ago.
He only thought of his mother and father who would be waiting for him at home.
Fortunately, the assault route was a well-paved flat land.
That meant that at least the infantry’s most feared mines were not buried.
But the unfortunate thing was that the assault route was a well-paved flat land.
It was a tragedy for the soldiers who had to charge towards the building where several machine guns were waiting, which was the second most feared thing by the infantry.
Hundreds of corpses were added to the road leading to the building during the assault.
Fresh blood was sprinkled on the rotting corpses of the soldiers who had died attacking the building for several days, and new corpses piled up.
Passing by the German tanks that were left next to the building with their turrets blown off, dozens of soldiers tried to enter the apartment door.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, and from inside, the sound of firing that had made the Germans learn a lesson for the past few days welcomed them.
It was a grenade launcher!
A quick-witted soldier shouted that, but his reaction was not as quick as his wit.
A shower of shrapnel passed by and the soldiers near the entrance fell.
There were few survivors, and even fewer who had the will to fight.
A few brave ones tried to throw grenades into the windows on the upper floor.
“Ah, fuck...”
But when a grenade bounced off the window sill and came out, the soldier who threw it cursed. It was the last word he could say in this world.
In an instant, the personnel of the two companies were reduced by more than half.
And half of them again were bloodied and unconscious or unable to walk a single step forward.
The remaining hundred or so who could still run stepped on their comrades’ corpses, splashed in the puddles of blood, and bravely rushed into the building.
“Up the stairs! Quickly!”
There was no one on the first floor as expected.
The bullets always came from the second floor or above, so they must be there.
The soldiers thought so and followed the order of the sergeant who had survived so far, and ran quickly to the stairs leading to the second floor.
“What... what is that?”
A sharp-eyed soldier pointed to a square barrel that was quietly placed in the corner with his hand.
It was a khaki color that looked like a Soviet uniform, and it was in a dark corner that no one noticed, but there were similar barrels placed in various corners.
And there were wires attached to each barrel, connected to the upper floor.
The soldiers felt a chill and hesitated for a moment.
“Do svidaniya, gryaznyye fashisty.”(Goodbye, you dirty fascists)
They heard a voice from the Soviet soldier on the upper floor.
Until the bomb exploded, the Germans had to wonder what that meant. It didn’t matter much, though.
Boom! Boom!
The bombs exploded in various corners, and a storm of shrapnel flew towards the Germans. Six bombs, called <Claymore> by the Soviets, exploded in various corners and sent 4,200 steel bearings and iron balls to the Germans.
In just a few minutes, between the explosions and the gunshots, two companies disappeared and the German soldiers were terrified.
They thought that everything would be over once they occupied Leningrad.
The city was in flames, and they had already marched and sent photos for the homeland... But Leningrad was not Germany’s.
The Soviets waited for them with their bloody mouths wide open, and the city named after the monster of the Jews-Bolsheviks, Lenin, gladly drank the blood of the Germans.
This place must be hell.
A soldier muttered.
He recalled a phrase from a literary work he had read once.
‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’
