The War

Late April, 1943. There has been no movement since the spring mud stopped the First SS Panzerkorps back in March. Now this is where it gets interesting. Stalin has two hundred new tanks. Hitler has fourty. Like chessplayers, both dicators have moved the shiny new tanks towards the front. They have fresh, clean shaven crew men. They have officers who can read maps, and Underofficers who can show them how to stay warm and fed. But Stalin has way too many for Hitler to be thinking about attack, or so Stalin thought. 'No, the Fascist War Machine will not attack me. They are defeated. Hitler has no more soldiers.'

From the Reich came the Fourth SS Division. It was made up of disgraced and cashiered policemen from the height of the Nazi Police state. Think about it. These guys were dirty Kraut cops. They had a heightened sense of survival that was not in keeping with the expected character of a German soldier.

Stalin reacted with fear when he found out about this new, scary threat. He fled to his new fortress headquarters bunker. A parachute brigade surrounded him. The local anti-aircraft commander was ordered to shoot down all planes, which he did, and he got a medal for shooting down twelve Russian planes. Very Russian.

The Police division never left their attack trenches. Actually, then avoided the front lines and most forms of danger through sly soldiers tricks, threats, and bribery. Back in Berlin, two conspiracies formed: one to keep the bad news of the failure of the Police SS division from Hitler, and another to make sure he knew all about it, every hideous detail. When Hitler did find out, the entire SS contingent at his headquarters were sent to a secret command post in Northern Finland, where they spent the war living on canned food and never seeing sunlight. This made the German General Party happy, and the German Fascist Party sad. Very German.

The only ray of hopeful sunshine for Hitler was the success of his new railway artillery. These monsters could easily shell Hamilton if they were based at Toronto City Hall. Hitler had eight of them. Stalin's troops were terrified of them. Too bad they were not very mobile. These guns weighted as much as a parking lot, and were about as mobile as railway artillery could be.

Aside from a few towns and villages being crushed like a fly under a slipper, not really too much actually happened at the front. Stalin held his two hundred tanks back, and Hitler never got a chance to use his.

So much for April, 1943.

I, Maximinus Thrax, wrote this.