Chapter 91: The Leader's Fury

Lieutenant General von Ellencamp, commander of the Twenty-Fourth Armored Corps, should have died on October 3, 1942, in the fighting along the Don during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Major General Bruckmann, commander of the One Hundred Thirty-Seventh Division, should have been killed on December 14, 1941, in the Battle of Moscow.

For reasons no one could fathom, those two men were still alive on October 17, 1942.

Perhaps this was a parallel world.

At any rate, when Meimu brought the uniforms of those two ill-fated generals back to a subordinate headquarters of the Soviet Sixty-Second Army, the people there stared at him as though he were some kind of monster.

And when the Russians developed the photographs from the camera as well, the entire army headquarters erupted.

This was going to shake the heavens.

At this point in time, the Battle of Stalingrad was at its most desperate. The city was surrounded on three sides, and at the worst moment nearly eighty percent of the urban area had fallen into enemy hands. Even the Germans’ own telegraph back to Hitler said, “We have occupied Stalingrad.”

For the Soviet Union, Stalingrad was not only an economic and military stronghold; because the city bore Stalin’s name, it also carried profound symbolic significance.

To hold the city at all costs, Chuikov had no choice but to throw every available man into street fighting, and the daily casualties exceeded ten thousand.

At this moment, when the city stood on the brink and most needed a surge of morale, Meimu, this fake Russian, was practically a gift from heaven to Chuikov.

When the confirmed report reached Chuikov, he was stunned for a full three seconds before muttering, “No wonder the German attack in the north felt so strange today. So their command post was wiped out! In the name of the Great Leader... that was a corps-level command post!”

Originally, the Germans in the northern sector still had a chance to stabilize the line, for example if the subordinate divisional headquarters had clung to its position.

But Meimu had wandered out for a stroll, then fired one shot from a distance of a thousand meters and killed a staff officer right at the divisional headquarters gate, frightening the Germans so badly that they were in complete disarray. A whole row of armored vehicles rammed up to the headquarters entrance, and in frantic haste they relocated the command post.

With the command structure gone, the battalion headquarters below was no longer worth worrying about.

As one of the greatest street-fighting commanders of the Second World War, virtually unmatched by any other, Chuikov naturally seized this chance to exploit the enemy’s paralysis with ruthless force. Two feints, meant to draw attention east and west, shattered the coordination of the German northern sector, and in a single day he recaptured more than thirty blocks.

Under normal circumstances, taking those blocks back would have cost at least fifty thousand casualties. And this was the hardest moment of the battle for Stalingrad, with only twenty percent of the city still in Red Army hands. Many places that might have served as docking points had been forced inward to the city’s eastern center because the docks themselves lay within range of enemy mortar fire.

It was a vicious cycle: fewer reinforcements and fewer supplies made the counterattack even harder.

Now, however, the air was full of vindication.

Anyone could see that Commander Chuikov was almost glowing with satisfaction.

When Lieutenant General Chuikov of the Sixty-Second Army telephoned Zhukov, the overall commander in Stalingrad, Zhukov was silent for a long while. “Are you certain?”

“You can send your men to higher ground and see where our red flag has been planted,” Chuikov said, trembling with excitement.

A flag planted there could not be faked.

Zhukov knew very well the strength and equipment of this subordinate’s forces. “How did you do it?”

“You may not believe this, but I have a super-soldier here. He single-handedly wiped out the German Twenty-Fourth Armored Corps headquarters in the northern sector. We even photographed the generals’ uniforms and the bodies. Ha! The medals on those uniforms can’t lie. The ground we’ve retaken can’t lie either. Most important, we now have strategic depth. And the Huns have to change their codebooks, hahaha!”

“Yes! At the very least, this has won us a week more precious than gold itself.” Zhukov’s hands were even trembling.

The news spread with wings, flying westward and eastward alike to Berlin and Moscow.

When the Führer, Hitler, heard it, he was beside himself with fury. He froze for a full two seconds, then sprang to his feet in place.

“Incompetents! All of them incompetents! Tell me, those damned Ivan raiders crossed the front line, crossed more than ten of our barricades, slipped through to our command post under the noses of fifty thousand men, killed our generals and everyone in the command staff, stripped the generals’ uniforms, took our codebook, and even posed for photographs!?”

In his rage, Hitler hurled a stack of documents at his adjutant’s head.

The adjutant shrank back in terror, too afraid to dodge, and took the blow squarely.

The papers scattered across the floor like a burst of petals.

“How did they do it? The details! Tell me more details! Otherwise, if the Ivans can wipe out our command post today, tomorrow they can come to Berlin and point guns at our heads!” the Führer roared, his mouth spitting fury like a machine gun.

Another adjutant hurried to answer:

“At 12:05 last night, local time, the last person to see Lieutenant General Ellencamp alive was SS Lieutenant Colonel Werner von Hans. But at that same moment, the guards on the first floor of the command post witnessed Colonel Hans leaving, returning one minute later, then leaving again ten minutes after that.”

“At 12:20, when Army Staff Major Wolf Lafran entered the command post, he found the throats of the two sentries at the entrance and everyone inside slit by a sharp weapon. He immediately called for help and raised the alarm. At 12:22, all security troops had reached their assigned positions, and mobile units began searching, but by dawn they had found nothing.”

At this, Hitler could no longer restrain himself. “What? You’re telling me my generals and more than thirty men were butchered by those Ivans, who can do nothing but guzzle vodka and shout ‘hurrah,’ like savages? What kind of joke is this? Even boy scouts can fire guns these days. More than thirty men, and not one of them fired a shot? Not one person heard gunfire?”

The adjutant lowered his head even further. “The SS quickly took control of all guards on duty. After interrogation by the Gestapo, more than a hundred guards said they heard no gunfire. The Gestapo examined the bodies; some of the sentries had been killed while reaching for their weapons, but the bullets were still in the magazines, not even chambered. Clearly they were killed before they could fire.”

He handed over the emergency photographs from the scene, sent back by air.

Hitler could hardly believe his own eyes and ears. “Damn it! What the hell is this? Our intelligence—never mind, what is being broadcast from the Ivan side? Those bastards must be celebrating, yes?”

Stalin’s Great Purge was, in essence, a brutal political struggle. Though its main purpose had been to eliminate rivals, it also swept away genuine spies. In fact, throughout the entire Second World War, German intelligence concerning the Soviet Union remained effectively paralyzed.

The adjutant replied, “Their front-line commander obviously knew what had happened. They launched a major counterattack and in one stroke took back nearly all the blocks in the northern sector. But for some reason, their propaganda organs seem strangely slow to react!”