“Thank you commissar.” Yeorgi said but he was thinking… I’ll be seeing that in my nightmares tonight and for many nights to come. What was that idiot thinking? I was his fault and I had no choice, no choice. I had to take the shot it was so blatant an infraction of any kind of military discipline or even common sense even for a new person. What was that Amerikosi thinking? Now I will be thinking about him for the rest of my life, thinking of how his head just exploded from the eyes downward. How the jaw just hung open and even twitched and how his body did not comprehend what had just happened to it. How it sat there for a few seconds before it toppled over. Yes he would be seeing this one forever, possibly every night over and over again. It would be mixed up with the many others but it would always be there, night after night in his nightmares.
Bill had just got a “Dear John” letter from his high school sweetheart, his one and only. On top of that he had just lost his best friend Miller to a napalm attack. He couldn’t sleep and had been up for three days straight thinking about the hell he was living and how he just wanted it to stop. He wanted the pain and suffering he saw around him every day to just stop but he could do nothing about it.
He had fought starting on D-Day up until the end of the war and had seen horrible things but the new weapons that each side in this fight where using on each other was inhumane by any standard, especially napalm. He had a lifelong fear of fire anyway and to see your best friend consumed by fire in front of your eyes screaming for you to shoot him and stop the pain had just been too much. Combined with losing his girl… “his girl”, Jenny, it was just too much for him to take.
By letting the sniper take his life he would be able to give his mother some money from his life insurance policy. If he had just put gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger she would get nothing but if he just leaned a little bit further forward from his post on the wall he would be an easy target and knowing the skill of that commie sniper they had over there, he would be dead quite quickly and painlessly before his brain had time to register what happened.
All in all a good solution for his physical and mental pain that had become unbearable. First his father had been killed when his tractor rolled over him, leaving his ma to try and run the placeby herself. Jenny had come over to help and they had hired some drifter as a hired hand. Then Miller had been burned alive before his very eyes and the next day the letter from Jenny arrived telling him she was running away with the hired hand… it was all just too much for his 20 year old brain to handle and he had just leaned over a little bit too far knowing what would happen, and it did.
Whoever had killed, Jones and Edwards had just killed him. The last thing that went through his mind was the phrase “suicide by sniper” and that was it.
Rene had never seen so many trucks. Trucks carrying both men and tanks and all headed East. He had concerns that the bridge would hold after such a pounding. The tanks had come by the dozens and under their own power fighting their way at times. Now they were just passengers on trains and large trucks going back the direction they had come from. I guess tanks are meant to fight and not to travel long distances, Rene thought. He really didn’t care why. I’m sure the commander will be glad to hear it one way or the other. They are leaving Southern France and that is all that matters for now. Why in the world would they be headed east? Could the Americans be attacking somewhere else?
He had heard about the atomic bombs, so maybe they were going to that area. Once again it did not matter too much to him just as long as they were gone. Rene was not a very curious man for being a sometimes spy for NATO. He spied whenever he found or observed something worth passing on. He did not go looking for trouble but if it was going past his car at 50 kilometers per hour he would take notice and pass that information on.
He was going to be here all day from the looks of the dust clouds coming from the mountains. He personally hated the mountains. Too many things that could kill you. He understood the sea but being high up made him breathe hard and who needed that to be added to their woes. Too many other things that can go wrong besides not being able to breath.
He noticed a strange looking engine on the train he was watching at a distance from his vantage point where he was stuck anyway by the military traffic of the Red Army. It looked more like a rolling fortress than an engine. It had multiple what looked like tank turrets mounted on top. Rene shrugged. I suppose you can do anything if you have the will, he thought. It certainly looked intimidating and that is what the Ruskies loved big things that looked intimidating similar to the Germans in a way.
Merde! They were really on the move in enormous numbers and all heading east. Borscht sucking scum… he would miss their vodka however. He had acquired a taste for it along the way as it was the only thing available in some towns. He was not tight with the Ruskie like the mayor and the council members. He doubted that the mayor and the council would be run out of town like the Vichy when the Red finally left and the town thought it could retaliate without being burned down like so many during the time of the hated Boche.
Besides many of the city leaders were former resistance fighters and most were communist for many, many years. Who could blame them for putting in place a government that they thought would save the world. It was much better than the time of terror or even the Vichy. It was amazing to him that his own people could be so cruel to their neighbors.
Let’s see that makes roughly 6 battalions by his count with over 200 tanks. They were those big ones that had the turret with no neck kind of like a short helmet and that massive gun that they had mounted on those beasts. The whole effect was horrifying. Must be hard to knock that pot off the body he mused. Well that was up whoever faced those steel monsters and not him. He was part of the earth here. One way or the other he would never leave. One day his body would nourish the ground he was now squatting on and perhaps the small tree he was using for cover would grow big and tall on the chemicals and nutrients his body put back into the soil. No, he would never leave here and that was just fine with him.
Zhukov was intrigued with the idea of invading the Turk, the Ottoman Empire, the former scourge of the south and the peoples who had terrified many generations of Russian children. He was going to avenge the Byzantine empire and once again bring Constantinople into the sphere of civilization once again.
Individually the Turk was a formidable fighter but collectively he was a disaster. He expected to eliminate the Amerikosi airfields that were being used in Turkey to be over-run in as little as 45 days once the assault started. Constantinople’s walls would be no impediment to a modern army as they had been for thousands of years first to keep out the Mongol, then the Turk and finally the west.
The art of war had progressed too far for the old walls to withstand a 122mm shell or a 46 ton tank. The Soviet soldier was the undisputed master of city warfare so he expected little trouble in first by-passing and then eliminating any resistance there. With the Turk no longer in control of the Bosphorus or collectively the Turkish straits and the Black Sea fleet could start to harass the British and Yankee boats that have so far plagued his plans. That Sergo character had promised to unleash his missiles if a worthy target presented itself and he had more conventional weapons ready to fight the B-29, Shooting Star and RAF Meteor. It was some kind of new jet that would bring superiority to the VVS over the skies of the battlefield.