The Thousand Year Reich - A Germany 1936 Narrative AAR

[thenerdwriter]

Since I haven’t seen too many strictly narrative-style AARs on the HoI3 forum, I thought I’d try my hand at one. Some of you may remember a (very short-lived) Japanese Vic2 AAR from several years ago that I wrote, and, like that one, I can’t promise that I will see this thing through to the end. I would like to push an update out once a week, but considering my schedule for the next few months, that seems unlikely. Nonetheless, I would very much like to see this AAR through to the end, whenever that may be.

As for the game itself, I’ll be playing vanilla HoI3 FtM v3.05. While I did begin with the 1936 scenario, this AAR beings in 1941. However, I did follow a mostly historical path, but I will further elaborate on this over the course of the story. As far as House Rules, I really have none. I’m really not terribly good at Hearts of Iron, so I’ll probably be savescumming quite a bit, but, other than that, I doubt I’ll be messing around with the game too much.

As for the AAR, I intend to include multiple POVs within the story, so I’ll leave a cast of characters below which I’ll update as the AAR progresses. In addition, I’ve tried to intersperse some of the writing with languages other than English, such as German, and later, possibly Russian. However, I’ve only spent a few days in Germany, and have not yet had the pleasure to experience Russia, so if someone more familiar with any of the languages I’ll be using throughout the AAR would ever like to enlighten me on any mistakes, please feel free to do so.

Also, I’m a bit of a newcomer to this AAR-writing business, so general advice and criticism is always welcome! And now, without further ado, let us begin.

Cast of Characters
​

Generalfeldmarschall August Holst - Commander of Heeresgruppe E
Leutanant Werner Junge - Holst's aide
David Emerson - An American reporter

Table of Contents
​

Holst 1 - September 1, 1941
Emerson 1 - September 1, 1941

 

[thenerdwriter]

Holst - September 1, 1941​

All over the world, the mapmakers were busy redrawing their maps. Soon, these new illustrations would appear at the front of classrooms, in libraries, at embassies. They would be printed in books and atlases that would sit on shelves in homes, from France in the West, to Russia in the East. All German homes, of course, for the Reich extended in an unbroken line from the Atlantic, all the way to the Urals. For the first time in human history, one could travel from Moscow to Paris, or from Berlin to St. Petersburg without ever having to cross a border or present a passport. In fact, that was just what Generalfeldmarschall August Holst was doing, midway on his journey from Rostov na Don in the East, to Amsterdam, in the West.

The Deutsches Reich in 1941.​

It had been just three days since the USSR had finally surrendered, having lost nearly everything of value in her European territories, and 90% of her army, and already, millions were marching West. The Field Marshal reflected upon this fact as his train rumbled across the now quiet Ukrainian countryside. It was these men, these millions of fighting souls whose fates he would be responsible for in just a few short months, for he had been appointed to lead the charge into Britain, the final blow which would secure the future of the Thousand Year Reich.

The millions on the move.​

Of course it weighed heavily on him, but, for now, he tried to keep it out of his mind, at least as much as someone in his position could. He noticed as the clock struck midnight. Twelve times it chimed, sounding like a great gong in the quiet train car, silent aside from the rattling of the wheels below the carriage. It was September 1st once more. Today marked two years since the beginning of this great and terrible war. He hoped it would be over soon.

It was not that he didn’t appreciate the Fuhrer’s goals, of course he, a loyal party member and German officer, did, as did most German citizens, it was just that, after two years of the constant stress of fighting, he had begun to grow weary of it all. He wasn’t even sure he felt capable of his post. After all, why should he be the one to send these men off to certain doom? Millions had perished in the East under his command, and he shuddered to think of what had been done to the Russians. No man should have had to bear that torturous weight, but he did. After all, the Reich needed him; he had been assured of that many times, even by the Fuhrer himself.

What remained of the Red Army at the campaign's end.​

It had been a while since the Fuhrer had appeared in public, though Holst had seen him several times over the past few months. He had grown frail, a mere shadow of the man who had taken Germany by storm in 1933. He did not want people to see what he had become. Holst was not even sure if he would complete the scheduled tour of the Reich and her allies, meant to celebrate the victory over the Bolsheviks. He imagined they would concoct yet another lie for the people of Europe, as to not let the Fuhrer seem weak in the hour of his greatest triumph, and once again, they would be fooled. The Nazis were experts at that. Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, they were all weasels, thugs, liars, cheats, thieves, just like their leader. Holst despised them all.

The Nazi party had come to power in the early ‘30’s on a platform of blame, blame for the Great War, blame for Germany’s loss, blame for the poor economy. They blamed the Communists for sabotaging the war effort, they blamed the wealthy, those like the Krupps, for pushing Germany towards war for their own profit, even the German people weren’t spared, for they were the ones responsible for not fighting hard enough, claimed the Nazis. But most of all, they blamed the leaders, the politicians, the diplomats, men like the Kaiser, Bethmann-Hollweg, Grey. It was these men, they said, who were the ones responsible for the death and destruction wrought upon Europe, these men who forced her nations to arms.

Hitler’s solution, therefore was to remove the necessity for these men, to remove the need for diplomacy, for politicians. Remove the nations of Europe altogether, unite them all under the German banner. For, with only one nation, how could two countries quarrel? The Fuhrer, they said, would bring an end to war, once and for all. Under a Thousand Year Reich, the world would see a thousand years of peace.

Of course, he said, there would be no easy way to accomplish this; most countries would not willingly give up their sovereignty. The idea went that one last war, the true war to end all wars, would have to be fought. It would engulf the entire world, require the blood of all nations would to be shed, but at the end of it, out of the ashes, would rise a better world, cleansed of all the hatred and petty arguments which had set the world alight in 1914. This was what the German army was fighting for, and it was this idea which still gave Holst, along with most of his comrades, hope, and the will to carry on with their grim task. But for how much longer, Holst did not know. The German people were tired, war-weary, for though the war was only two years old now, the German people had begun preparing long before that.

The Fuhrer had begun his rearmament program in 1936. At the time, the Wehrmacht consisted of only a few thousand men, scattered across the countryside, but their first test came in January of that year.

Troop dispositions at the beginning of 1936.​

Since 1933, the Nazis had been yearning to test the Allies, to push the boundaries of what was allowed by Versailles. In 1935, the Saarland had been re-integrated into the Reich, finally returned by the French. The next logical step was the Rhineland, and on January 5th, it too had been brought back into the fold. Holst remembered the event well. He had been at the Reichskanzlei at the time and could still recall the enormous sense of relief that had passed over everyone present, from the clerks to the generals, when the other European powers had failed to react as two divisions marched on Pirmasens and Baden Baden violating Articles 42 and 43 of the treaty. He had never seen the Fuhrer as nervous as he had been that night.

It had also been the night that had launched Holst’s career. On the recommendation of a superior who had noted Holst’s skill as a tactician and strategist, he had been ordered to the Chancellery as an advisor in the whole affair. After the success of the Reoccupation, the Fuhrer embarked on his massive rearmament program, Aufrüstung, and appointed Holst as an assistant to Erwin Rommel, who was to be one of the program’s overseers. When the colonel was assassinated during a trip to Spain in 1937, Holst was his natural successor. For the next two years, he worked closely with men like Frick and Schact to expand the Heer from barely a hundred brigades in 1936, to nearly four hundred by September ’39, when war finally did break out.

Composition of the Wehrmacht at the outbreak of war.
​

The success of the program, and the fact that it had all but ended the Depression in the Reich, securing employment for many who had been out of work since 1929, turned Holst into a minor celebrity, a fact that he disliked, especially considering the baggage he carried. He was a dissenter at heart, and though the ideals of the Party did appeal to him, he hated the men who led the damnable monstrosity. Though he certainly wasn’t the only one in the Wehrmacht who felt that way, being in the public eye did place him under a particularly great deal of scrutiny, and that was what worried him, if only for the sake of his wife and child. He feared what might come to them should anyone discover his thoughts on the matter.

A sharp knock came at the door.

“Come in,” shouted Holst.

“Herr Generalfeldmarschall, the door is locked, I’m afraid,” came the muffled reply.

Holst turned away from the window and walked across the soft red carpeting, past the oak desk and mahogany chest against the wall of the train car, and turned the bolt on the door. The rattle of the heavy iron wheels against the tracks suddenly became louder as the door swung open. From the front of the train, the scream of the horn spilled into the room as the train sped through what had once been a tiny, quaint, village, now just a small collection of charred buildings.

A Russian family rests in what remains of their village.​

“What is it, Herr Junge,” asked Holst.

“We should be arriving in Kursk in under an hour to resupply. Is there anything you’d like me to do,” asked the leutnant.

“Yes, actually. Find me a hotel or the like. I need a real bed, not the incessant rattle of this damned train car I’ve spent the last four months in.”

“As you wish, sir,” replied Junge. “Also, I believe this package was meant for you. We picked it up at the last station.”

“Danke schön, Leutnant. Would you also send for some of those lemon cakes from the dining car?”

“Of course, Herr Generalfeldmarschall. Will there be anything more?”

“No thank you, Werner.”

“Well then, I shall be on my way,” said the adjutant as he turned back towards the door.

“Gute nacht, Herr Junge,” said Holst absently as he laid the contents of the envelope on his desk. The thick manila envelope contained a letter from the Ministry of Propaganda, explaining that they wished to attach an American reporter by the name of David Emerson to Heeresgruppe E, in Holst’s HQ. Another one of Murrow’s Boys. He pushed the letter aside and began leafing through the stack of papers beneath it. Articles, files, portfolios, family records; everything he could have ever possibly wondered about the fellow.

He was a reporter for CBS. Born in Los Angeles in 1914. Attended University of California Berkeley. Moved to New York in 1936. Married Evelyn Brown the same year. He had briefly covered Spain and China, and evidently he was now on his way to Berlin, where he would join the Army Group when it arrived.

Holst put down the papers and walked over to the sofa on the opposite side of the car. He turned to look out the window behind him. The moon hung low in the sky, its white glow distorted by a light fog creeping up from the fallow farmland, bare soil covered in blood and ash. Holst sighed and laid down his head on the dark velvet pillow. He reached up and turned the knob to shut off the lamp. He didn’t like to think about the cost of the war. Perhaps sleep would put it out of his mind; perhaps a brief nap before they stopped in Kursk would offer him respite from his thoughts. But the bright glow of the full moon would not allow it, and so, Holst’s demons did not leave him.

 

[Towll]

Yup, this looks good. Subbed.

 

[thenerdwriter]

Yup, this looks good. Subbed.

Glad to have you on board!

 

[TehDarkMiner]

Subbed

However, I’ve only spent a few days in Germany, and have not yet had the pleasure to experience Russia, so if someone more familiar with any of the languages I’ll be using throughout the AAR would ever like to enlighten me on any mistakes, please feel free to do so.

I know conversational German, so I should be able to correct you on that; though my Russian is fairly limited so I won't be too much help there

I’ll probably be savescumming quite a bit

shh, don't tell them that
Although mind you, sometimes it's nice to actually see an AAR that loses - I tend to keep playing my AARs even after massive mistakes for that exact reason. Don't feel bad if something terrible happens, it can make for some very interesting gameplay

 

[thenerdwriter]

Emerson - September 1, 1941
​

Far above the Atlantic, David Emerson himself was also awake. From one of the soft, spacious, beige seats of the Yankee Clipper, he stared through a thick pane of glass at the moonlit clouds below, and beneath those, he could occasionally catch a glimpse of frigid ocean waves, crashing one against the other in ceaseless battle, spraying their salty mist skywards. Despite the harshness of the North Atlantic, he almost wished he were down there too. He hated travelling by plane. The constant whine of the engines, the stuffy air, the occasional (though frighteningly sudden) encounters with turbulence, and the looming sense of dread that accompanied the knowledge that at any time, this glorified tin can was liable to drop from the sky into the abyss thousands of feet below.

But the 314 was luxurious, he had to give it that, and those PanAm stewardesses were lookers, that was for sure. But such opulence did come at a rather high price, he knew that much. He was sure CBS would’ve happily let him spend a few days on a ship instead, had he asked, but at least this way he wouldn’t spend the entire time bent over a railing.

A 314 at takeoff.
​

Either way, he knew the trip would grant him precious little sleep, unlike the man in the bunk across the aisle, whose snoring could be heard quite clearly above the roar of the engine outside. He had flown by plane often, globetrotting, hopping from conflict to conflict, and never once had he managed to get a single wink of sleep on one.

He enjoyed it though, looking at the little houses, the roads, the forests, the miniature villages far below, and of course there was always the excitement of visiting some new, exotic location. In his four years at CBS, he had seen more of the world than most would see in a lifetime.

His memories of Spain were still as vivid as they had been four years ago. It had been his first real assignment after Murrow had picked him up from United Press after taking a fancy to his writing. Murrow was one of, if not the, greatest figure in contemporary journalism, and Emerson had nearly fainted when he’d opened his mailbox to find a letter from the man. Murrow had heard that, growing up in LA, he had picked up a good bit of Spanish, and two weeks later, he’d found himself on a flight to Seville.

The situation in Spain in March 1937.​

When he had arrived in the city (then held by the Nationalists) in March 1937, it seemed as though he would be covering a rout, but it did not take long for the tide of war to change, and by May, all but a handful of divisions of the Republican Army had been wiped out and Franco was drinking wine in Madrid. Though it had been his first taste of war, he had rarely seen the frontlines. He had spent much of his time stuck at Emilio Mola’s headquarters, and what little he did see of the war was tightly controlled by the fascists.

Nonetheless, he had been there for the fall of Barcelona, and despite the length of time that had passed, it still seemed as though he could not flush the smell of burning hair from his nose, or the images of corpses dismembered by artillery shells from his eyes. And if war was hell, the fascists were its demons. He remembered the queer overzealousness with which they had wrought the destruction of war upon that last Republican stronghold. By the time the old Spanish government finally gave in, Barcelona was no more than a pile of rubble, wiped from the map.

His next assignment had been in Asia. Dispatched to cover the ongoing conflict between Japan and the various Chinese states, he had spent nearly ten months alongside the Imperial Japanese Army in muddy trenches, on snow-capped mountains, in dense jungles, and vast deserts making his way from Beijing in the north, to Hunan in the south by late August. Yet, once more, rarely had he seen the fighting. When he returned home to New York in early November 1938, he couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt that followed him.

A taste of the varied Asian landscape.​

How could he have covered these wars for two years without ever having seen them? He had dreamed, as a teenager, of going out into the world, having adventures, doing something good, doing something right, enlightening people as to the state of the world around them. But how could he do that just being spoon-fed lines by propagandists and dictators? Did not the publication of such material constitute complicity in their terrible deeds? He hated the fascists, and yet, here he was, flying into the heart of their evil empire. But not all was at seemed.

For five years he had watched as nation after nation had fallen. First Abyssinia, then China, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, and finally, Russia. He knew the plight of their people. Though he had spent most of his time away from the wars themselves, he had had the opportunity, many times, to speak with the recently subjugated peoples.

Often, they had spoken only of hopelessness, though he had heard whispers from some of fighting back, before they’d had that idea violently suppressed. They spoke of loss, too, of their families, their homes, their liberties. There were still those who were ignorant, in some of the more remote villages. In China, some had not even known the Japanese had been victorious in the North until the men in the strange uniforms began marching through, initially cheered on by the locals, thinking they were their own.

Dissatisfaction within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.​

Of course little of the anger and desperation the victims of the war felt ever made it past the censors. Every letter, telegram, or phone call was meticulously combed by those on whom he was reporting to ensure that nothing that would make them look the part of villains in the eyes of the world ever made it out. And so, the public rarely ever heard of the atrocities of war. It would not be long before the consequences were upon them.

The citizens of Britain would be the next to face the plight of war, of the enemy at the gates, it was a fact everyone knew. With the Soviets giving everything West of the Urals up to the Nazis, Britain now stood alone, and there was no way they would be able to fend off the Germanic hordes when they fell upon her shores.

Yet David Emerson saw it all as an opportunity for redemption. Perhaps he could, with his dispatches back home, convince America to get involved, to come to the aid of her old friend, a savior in Europe’s darkest hour. The way he saw it, American involvement was the only way of taking Europe back from the grip of the fascists, and time was running out. Most were loath to support intervention in another European war, the memory of the Great War still fresh in their minds. After all, why should they? Were they not immune to the effects of a general European war, defended by a well-armed professional army, the great expanse of the Atlantic in between? But from up there, the ocean sure did look small, and he certainly did not see any army.

To be sure, Americans were much more willing to lend their support than they had been in 1939, just two short years ago. Reports of the ruination visited upon the resplendent cities of the Old World had slowly been trickling out, and many did still have family in Britain and France. It would only take a few shocking reports snuck back to New York to light a spark, and a spark was all he needed. After all, if it had worked for Pulitzer and Hearst forty years ago, it could work for him too.

Pulitzer's famous treatment of the explosion of the Maine.​

His gaze wandered to the attaché case leaning against his bunk across the aisle. He supposed he had better read the brief from CBS before he arrived in Berlin if he was to write a proper dispatch. He knew that he would be assigned to the headquarters of a Field Marshall August Holst, a household name in Germany, but, beyond that, little else. As quietly as he could, so as not to disturb the snoring man, now sounding something like a tea kettle, in the bunk above his, he grabbed the briefcase and flicked it open. Reaching into one of the little pocket on the side, he pulled out a surprisingly heavy stack of letterhead, prominently featuring the “Reichs Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” and a great eagle at the top of each sheet with Murrow’s notes scribbled between the lines. He realized he would not need something to make the whole thing a bit more…digestible, something to make the medicine go down as it were.

He gathered up the papers and case and took them down the step from the berths into the dining lounge. In the next room, a stewardess stood chatting with one of the galley cooks. Noticing him as he sunk into one the baby blue upholstered chairs in front of a table, she hurried over.

“Can I get you anything tonight sir,” she almost crooned, leaning over the table, her short brown bob brushing gently against her rosy cheeks.

“Just a gin and tonic, thank you,” replied Emerson as he spread the stack of papers out on the table in front of him.

“Yes sir, I’ll be right back with that,” replied the stewardess before strutting back towards the galley in her blue dress.

So just who was August Holst, wondered Emerson, looking back towards the table. He had certainly heard the name before, and the unsavory rumors that followed the name, but, for the past few years his adventures had taken him elsewhere, and thus, he was at a loss.

According to the papers before him, the Field Marshall, or the “Lion” of the Reich, as they preferred to call him, had been born in a small Bavarian village, just south of Munich in 1892, the son of a farmer. He had enlisted as an officer in 1910, and commanded an artillery regiment on the Western Front during the Great War. Afterwards, he had been assigned a post in Berlin, working at the Military Academy. It wasn’t until 1936, however, that he’d joined the upper echelons of the Heer, becoming a member of the General Staff, working on Germany’s less than secret rearmament. While he had certainly played an important role in the years leading up to the war, it wasn’t until he’d joined the frontlines that he’d truly earned his fame.

A colorized photo of a German artillery regiment, similar to that which August Holst commanded during the First World War.​

In 1939, he’d been assigned command of the 3rd Panzer Division, on the Polish border, and in September, of course (exactly two years ago today, in fact, noted Emerson), the Nazi war machine had begun rolling across Europe, starting with Poland. The 3rd Panzer Division, led by Holst, had been responsible for cutting across the Polish countryside, trapping over 40,000 men in Krakow before sweeping north to cut off Warsaw from the east. While the brave Polish soldiers had fought hard against the invaders, their fate was already sealed with most of their army trapped in four huge pockets west of Warsaw, a tactic that would become a hallmark of the new Germany Army. In less than three weeks they’d surrendered, their country once again divided between the German and the Russian regimes, a people made to suffer once more at the hands of imperialists.

The encirclement of Krakow.​

Everyone had hoped that that would be the end of it. Germany had East Prussia and Danzig once more, perhaps Britain, not wanting to repeat the hardships visited upon the people of Europe by the Great War, would agree to peace. After all, they had not come to Poland’s aid despite their declaration of war. And, in fact, it looked as if that might be the case. For almost seven months, neither side moved. The French and Germany armies sat staring at one another along the Maginot Line for the duration of the winter of 1940, in what would come to be dubbed the “Sitzkrieg”. In April, Denmark had fallen, though it was if they had merely given themselves up to the Germans, and had been incorporated into the Reich in a matter of days.

But in the first week of May, sixty German divisions had appeared on the Belgian border, and on the 10th, war had been declared on France and the Low Countries. One after another, the continent’s last democracies fell, retreating to their isolated African colonies.

German troops massed on the Belgian border.​

The invasion had started with a quick sweep towards the sea, and by the end of the month, the Dutch and Belgian armies were already in full retreat towards Dunkirk and Calais, hoping the Brits would come to their aid and evacuate them across the channel. In the north, the jackbooted Nazis were marching over the canals of Amsterdam and through the streets of Brussels. Meanwhile, the Blitzkrieg was first being unveiled as the Panzers, screened by the infantry, were finally allowed to begin their push into northern France. Rushing through the Ardennes, they had reached the Channel in matter of days, unhindered by the French Army embattled in Lorraine, trapping thousands of Belgian and Dutch troops in Flanders.

It was here that, once again, the so-called “Lion” had proved himself worthy of his nickname, advancing deep into French territory, far beyond the front lines, leading the 3rd Panzer Division to be one of the first German divisions to reach the Channel. Following the success of the drive to the sea and the ensuing mass surrender, the Wehrmacht began its march south towards Paris, led by the Panzers, Holst among them, charging into the breach.

The armies of the Low Countries are trapped.​

The French began abandoning their forts along the border, rushing west to try and defend Paris, but, like the Poles before them, it was too late. The city had already effectively been cut off by the Fifth Army pushing south from Reims. Paris, nearly encircled, fell on July 6th and with it the will of the French to fight. The next day the Vichy government was established, and the northern half of the country occupied.

The Maginot Line is abandoned.​

Once again, Britain had failed to come to the aid of her allies, aside from a brief showing by the RAF, and it was generally assumed that now, with the loss of her largest foothold on the continent, she would finally seek peace. And indeed, for nearly a year, there was peace, aside from the Italian invasion of Greece. Yet still there remained a state of war between Germany and the Commonwealth. And even if either side had sought peace, there was still the imminent showdown in the East.

The resumption of the war began in March 1941, with the German invasion of Yugoslavia, a nation which had only existed some twenty years. It was a rather brief, bloodless campaign, one in which Holst had not served. The Yugoslav Army could barely be called that, and was almost left behind by the German Army who bypassed the armed Serbs and Croats in the rush to reach the cities.

The Heer had been rather careless about the whole campaign though. The Panzers rolling towards Skopje and Belgrade had nearly been cut off. Observers abroad wondered about the seemingly rushed nature of the operation, guessing as to the reason for the blunders. It would not take long for answers to such questions to materialize.

The Panzers far ahead of the main army in the Balkans.​

On May 10, Germany declared war on the Soviet Union. The largest invasion in human history involved over five million men on both sides, and thousands of tanks, planes, and artillery pieces. At its height, it stretched across a front 2,900 kilometers in length. It cost the lives of millions of men. And the whole thing was over in just four months.

Initially, it looked as the though the whole ordeal might turn into yet another static trench war, with the Germans mired on the border. The Soviets, knowing an invasion would come soon, had massed nearly the entire Red Army on the border with the Reich, some two to three million men in eighty-eight divisions. While a great deal of progress had been made in the north towards Kaunas and Riga, in the center of the front, the fortress city of Brzesc Litewski refused to capitulate, holding back the panzers in Biala Podlaska. In the south, divisions of the Fifth Army faced defeat in the thick forests along the Hungarian border.

The fighting in Brzesc Litweski has taken a toll on the troops there.​

It was in the first few weeks, as the German Army faced what looked as if it could be the beginning of the end of the Reich’s string of victories that Holst, now promoted to commander of the First Panzer Army, saw an opportunity. Just behind the frontlines lay the hellish mess of stinking mud known as the Pripyat Marshes. In a rushed presentation to Field Marshall Guderian, Holst hastily proposed his plan. If they could get the Russians to begin retreating, their center would be forced into the marshes, where they would be slowed, allowing the panzers to encircle them, and the infantry to mop up. It was a plan that the German army was familiar with, having made use of these elaborate encirclements in Poland and France. Now these tactics would be brought to bear against the Russians.

The bombing campaign at the beginning of the operation.​

In the final days of May, the Luftwaffe opened a massive bombing campaign along the center of the front, putting the seemingly endless hordes of the Red Army on the defensive. Close behind them, came the panzers, moving to envelope the entirety of the marshes, leapfrogging in order to ensure that the leading division was always fresh, in order to hasten the encirclement. Behind them, came the infantry, filling the gaps, cautiously marching into the marshes, making battle against the retreating Soviets in order to stall them. On June 8th, the pincers closed in Kiev.

In the end, Holst had trapped some fifty divisions in the pocket, a quarter of the Red Army, and almost their entire center. Five hundred thousand men surrendered, and August Holst became a national hero, the likes of which the Germans hadn’t seen since Frederick the Great, or even Barbarossa himself. He was almost single-handedly responsible for the German triumph, declared the Reichs Ministry of Propaganda, a hero to be celebrated by every citizen of the new German Empire.

The pocket in the Pripyat Marshes.​

Similar situations repeated themselves across the front. In the north, the panzers had swung up from East Prussia to Riga, trapping an entire Soviet Army, and in the south, many had been trapped in Ukraine, caught between a line of Germans from Kiev to Crimea and the advancing Hungarians and Romanians.

By the end of June, the Red Army had ceased to exist, at least in any substantial or effective form. Leningrad, or St. Petersburg as it was now called, fell on July 6th, followed by Moscow on the 23rd. The war had dragged on for another month after that as the panzers in the South raced to make it to Stalingrad before the divisions the Soviets were pulling off the Turkish border could make it up through the Caucuses, although the struggle with the lack of fuel and other supplies was something left out in the official document, noted only by Murrow’s scribbles in the margins.

Supplies stretched dangerously thin in the final days of the campaign.​

Finally, though, Stalingrad too had fallen to the might of the German Army, and later that night, Murmansk, the last major Soviet city west of the Urals, had been taken unopposed by a division of paratroopers, then untested by battle. After Murmansk had been lost, the Soviets had simply thrown in the towel, giving up all land of value to the Nazis.

And that brought them to today, with Emerson hurtling through the skies over the Atlantic Ocean at two hundred miles per hour, twenty thousand feet up. Outside the window, a purple tinge was just beginning to wash over the clouds around the plane. Soon, the sun would be up. He hoped he could find a good hotel in Lisbon before he boarded his train to Berlin. He noticed that his gin and tonic had arrived, apparently long ago, since condensation was now dripping down the side of the once cool glass and onto the table.

He looked up as a man strode into the room from the berths, dressed just the same as he was, herringbone tweed over a striped tie, though the man did look a tad frowzy. At least it seemed he had slept. He quickly dragged his fingers through his hair in lieu of a comb as he sat at a table across the cabin from Emerson.

“Up early for breakfast too,” the man asked. Portuguese or Spanish, he would’ve guessed based on the way he rolled his r’s, maybe South American.

“Oh, I certainly wish,” responded the exhausted journalist. “No, I’ve just been up all night reading.”

“Ah, and what book?”

“Not a book, a report the Reichs Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,” he replied, a mocking tone in his voice. “All about Generalfeldmarschall August Holst, the ‘Lion of the Reich.’”

The man gave him a curious look from across the aisle. “I’m a war correspondent, and this General Holst is the man I’ve the pleasure of covering for the foreseeable future,” explained Emerson with more than a hint of sarcasm.

“So you’re heading to Berlin then,” asked the stranger, receiving a nod in response. “Well, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, despite the…complications. I was there in 1936 for the Olympics. There’s no arguing the city’s beauty. Just remember the Germans are people too, same as you and I. You’ll be fine.” The man smiled.

He certainly hoped that would be true. Soon, Lisbon would appear on the horizon, and, after that, Berlin.

 

[thenerdwriter]

shh, don't tell them that
Although mind you, sometimes it's nice to actually see an AAR that loses - I tend to keep playing my AARs even after massive mistakes for that exact reason. Don't feel bad if something terrible happens, it can make for some very interesting gameplay

Haha thanks for the advice. For the most part, I'm usually just guilty of it in trying to keep my U-boats alive. I do have a rough idea in mind of where I'd eventually like the story to go, but if something interesting and unexpected occurs, I certainly wouldn't mind going in a new direction.

And as with Towll, I'm glad to have you aboard as well! I've been lurking in The Four Faction War for many moons now.

 

[SigmarUnberogen]

Subbed

 

[Icykurt]

Subbed.

 

[TehDarkMiner]

I've been lurking in The Four Faction War for many moons now.

Thank you sir

Ah, U-boats, I can hardly fault you there. Even though they're so cheap I find myself getting annoyed when I lose them myself, to the point where I micro them more than I micro my divisions fighting in Russia half the time