The War

Early March 1943. It sure looked bad for Adolph Hitler and everything he stood for. But he had an Ace up his sleeve: The First SS Panzer Korps...

Doctor Paul Hausser was a mathematics genius who excelled at chess and crossword puzzles. It was his tactical plan that made the wheels roll and the jackboots click in the Nazi War Machines latest frontal offensive. Like all classic German frontal offensives, it was a susprise. It came at the Russians out of the snow. Stalin was drunk with victory, fresh from the smoking battlefield of Stalingrad. To Stalin and the Party boys, well, things looked good. They just did not look deep enough into the storm sweeping from the Polish Plains. A fresh fifty thousand men, all told. Fresh and well fed. With a new generation of German secret weapons, plenty of ammunition, and an unbreakable radio code for communications.

Hausser's plan of attack was based on the 1915 autumn counter-offensive at Verdun. The overconfident Russians would be lured into a prepared zone of death. Stalin, like most everybody, thought that his T-34 tanks were invincible. They had been for the last six months, anyway; since Stalingrad. Two hundred tanks, the victors of Stalingrad, were assembling at Kharkov. They would attack soon, in March. Hausser was waiting for them in the snowy hills and creek beds of the Central Ukraine.

Pakfront was the name of the new tactic. All of the artillery on a section of front were controlled by one officer: an artillery officer. In three days, the SS divisions Liebstandarte and Das Reich littered the suburbs of Kharkov with five hundred burning wrecks. They were ghastly to behold, and stank. Charred corpses (usually five, the size of the crew) made stains around the sooty wreckage. Once the Russian tanks were gone, the hiding infantry was easy meat for the Stormtroopers with their heavy, automatic weapons.

A week into the battle, Hausser got reinforcements: another SS division. This one was worse than the first two. The Germans themselves called it the Division of Death. Accompanying Death were five battalions of this new fangled rocket artillery. Concentrated along a ten kilometer front one winters day, every Russian position to a depth of seven kilometers was annihiliated. Only one Russian in ten survived the attack. They were usually burned and raving. Into the bar-b-que of Russian positions roared the Kamphgruppen of three SS divisions. There were no Russians left to retreat. The next city was two hundred miles away. Hausser returned to put the city of Kharkov to the sack. Stalin had sixty-three staff officers shot at breakfast.

In Kharkov, the truimphant Fascists found huge supply dumps of fuel, ammunition, and food. There were two hundred thousand captured slaves, freed from slavery to Communism, and now slaves of the Fuhrer's military lusts. They prepared fresh fortifications to protect another fresh wave of weapons and warriors that Hitler had forged in his underground factories. The city was a center of heavy industry, and Hausser and his SS could re-work his arsenal into more fearsome weapons. Armor slab was handed out like candy. Captured tanks were made into ammunition carriers. Evil machines that threw grenades were forged and attached to tanks by cunning veterans. Deserters rallied around Nazi banners, and shouted Sieg Heil with drunken voices. Twenty thousand German prisoners of war regained their freedom. They were vengeful. Moscow was three hundred miles of mud away.

So much for March, 1943.

I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this.