Chapter 5
Chapter 5
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 5
Chapter Title: Spanish Civil War - Battle of Guadalajara (2)
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The battle was a complete mess, plain and simple.
The Condor Legion's heavy equipment and elite training were enough to crush the enemy's surprise attack, which had been concealed by the fog, but we were far too short on men to repel the relentless waves of oncoming foes.
“Relay the message! Hold this position for thirty minutes!”
“R-Relay! Hold this position for thirty minutes!”
I had the platoon members, who were fighting from behind a half-shattered wall, relay the order first. Then I pressed myself against the wall and fired at an enemy soldier charging toward me.
As the enemy fell, the metallic *click* of the bolt-action rifle being worked pulled every nerve in my body taut.
The enemy was swarming across the riverbank, openly setting up multiple pontoon bridges as if to cover the entire shore. What the hell were those Italian bastards doing!
This wasn't some small-scale raid. It was clear the enemy's main force was directed right at us! We only had three battalions here!
Amidst the chaos, I heard the *thump, thump* of bullets hitting the wall and the whistle of wind grazing past my ear.
“Gah!”
It stung like hell and my hand came away bloody, but thankfully, it was just a graze. My ear wasn't shot off, but I knew for sure that sticking my head out in this situation would get me killed ten times over.
I pressed myself flat against the wall, clutching my ringing ear, when Clemens came up beside me.
“Six men are down already! Dietrich! Where's the captain?”
“Make that seven! Clemens! Pick three of our fastest men—no, just two—and send them as messengers to battalion HQ! Tell them we can't hold the line! We'll fight a delaying action, but we need permission to retreat!”
The ringing in my ears was still so loud that I had to scream, even though he was right next to me. Instead of asking more about the captain, Clemens acknowledged the order, immediately yelled for Sergeant Kocher, and gave him swift instructions.
As he picked two men from the squad who were frantically returning fire and sent them off, a private from the 3rd Platoon came running up, out of breath.
“Heil—”
The idiotic private tried to stand up straight and raise his arm in the middle of all this. I was so dumbfounded that I grabbed him and yanked him down.
Sending a private as a messenger? Depression or not, that Habenstein fellow must be out of his mind!
“Shut up and report! What is it!”
“Seven casualties in the 3rd Platoon! We're being pushed back from the defensive line! The, the platoon second-in-command was also shot!”
“Shit, what happened to get you into that state already!”
By the time this clumsy bastard made it here, the body count was no doubt rising by the second!
“W-Well…”
“Can't you see everyone's fighting for their lives! Spit it out!”
I was so furious I slapped the private across the face and yelled at him. On the verge of tears, he answered.
“The, the Italian bastards abandoned their positions and ran, so from the side…”
Those goddamn pizza-eating bastards…
“G-Grenade!”
“Get down!”
At the shout from somewhere, I slammed the private's head to the ground and dropped down with him. An instant later, the ground shook and an explosion roared.
Thankfully, the grenade hadn't landed near us. Instead, the MG34 machine gun team firing from behind the tattered wall was blown to bits.
The Republican battle cries, like ‘Death to the fascists!’ and ‘You shall not pass (No Pasaran)!’, were now dangerously close.
This is insane. If we hold this position, half the company will be dead in fifteen minutes, not thirty!
“Dietrich! We're all going to die at this rate!”
I could see Clemens was clearly shaken. If only the captain were here…!
If those damn Italians had just held the line, this wouldn't have happened! With our flank exposed, fighting behind this wall would get us surrounded in no time.
I quickly recalled the city map from the strategy meeting, thinking of a larger building located further inside the city.
“Messenger! Go tell the 3rd Platoon to pull back! They'll conduct a delaying action as they retreat to the post office! 1st Platoon, cover the 3rd for five minutes while they abandon the wall! I'll bring the 2nd Platoon to cover your six, then you pull back! We're falling back inward, narrowing the defensive line using the buildings!”
The private nodded vigorously and took off running. I grabbed Clemens as he was about to return to his position and quickly added.
“I don't trust that bastard, send another messenger!”
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When I opened my eyes, I saw a gray ceiling. Even after a slow blink, it was still a gray ceiling, not the inside of a field tent.
“I-I'm ba—Guaaaaaah…!”
My whole body screamed in protest as I tried to sit up.
Damn it! What the hell is this feeling, like a red-hot poker is stuck in my shoulder and scraping around!
“Hnngh, ugh, heok, huuh…”
The excruciating pain made my vision swim, and I trembled on the cot for a long time. As the agony subsided, a wretched sense of reality began to set in.
“Damn it, this can't be…”
This isn't my room in Korea. What color was my ceiling? I can't even remember.
I even missed that shitty barracks back in Korea. But I can't even recall the color of its ceiling.
Only then did I realize that the words I'd blurted out had been in natural-sounding German.
“Ha, fuck. This is shit…”
I deliberately tried speaking in Korean. My pronunciation wasn't as clumsy as a foreigner just starting to learn, but it didn't sound like a native Korean's at all.
Then again, my throat was so hoarse it sounded like scraping metal anyway.
“Heh, hehehehe…”
“Ahem, ahem. It seems you're awake?”
As I let out a hollow laugh, a man's voice suddenly came from my side. I whipped my body around, only to writhe in pain again.
“Oh, dear. Ahem. Here, have some water.”
The man sitting on the opposite cot poured a glass of water from the bedside and brought it to me. Only after gulping it down could I get a proper look at him.
“Th-Thank you.”
To be honest, with his receding hairline and Hitler-like mustache, he looked rather unpleasant, but he seemed much older than me and offered a good-natured smile.
“Don't mention it. Hehe, I've heard a lot about the brave first lieutenant.”
Brave first lieutenant? What's this stranger talking about? Wait, what happened? I was definitely in Brihuega because of those damn pizza-eaters…
*‘We're all going to die! We have to retreat!’*
A sharp headache hit me, along with Clemens's desperate voice. The roar of explosions and the rattle of machine guns flashed through my mind.
Seeing my expression, the man gave another good-natured smile. He looked a bit odd, but he seemed like a kind person.
“Oh, my apologies. You must be disoriented. Hehe, you've been promoted for your service at Guadalajara, Lieutenant. They say you'll be receiving a Wound Badge, too.”
The Wound Badge, an award given to soldiers wounded for fighting bravely in battle. Dammit, who would want something like that?
“I also hear you're being reviewed for an Iron Cross. Hehe, I'm quite envious. Oh, where are my manners. I am Paul Oskar Dirlewanger, a Second Lieutenant in the Schutzstaffel (SS). Hehe. You're Minister Schacht's son, aren't you? A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
In an instant, my assessment of the man turned ice-cold. Dirlewanger? As in, the commander of the SS 'Dirlewanger' division?
Seeing my face harden, Dirlewanger immediately cleared his throat and began explaining, making his own assumptions.
“W-Well, ahem, you may not be pleased to share a room with a member of the SS, but this hospital isn't just for us, you see. Hehe, and just between us, isn't it only people with connections like us who get to enjoy the luxury of a two-person room at our rank? Ha, ha, ha…”
I had no desire to correct whatever delusion this madman was under, and if I could, I would've stormed out of a room I was sharing with a man like him.
“A-Ahem. H-Have you perhaps heard some unsavory rumors about me? Th-that little brat of a girl wasn't so innocent herself, I tell you! It was all cleared up in court…”
No, this bastard was infamous for committing so much slaughter and rape that his own division couldn't even advance.
“The attempted rape charge was a complete frame-up! N-No, it was a mistake. I've completely turned over a new leaf and become a new man! Hehe! Thanks to Berger, I even got the honor of being wounded here in Spain in place of my comrades.”
I didn't know about that. I never needed or wanted to know what this guy was up to before World War II. Sure, he seems to be acting somewhat normal right now.
But once World War II breaks out, he's the madman who will not only commit war crimes but also create human shields by tying women and children to tanks—a lunatic despised even within the Waffen-SS!
Since I kept a sour expression on my face, Dirlewanger gave up on his excuses, went back to his cot, turned over, and started muttering something.
Regardless, I had no intention of getting friendly with that scum of the earth. The problem wasn't a bastard like him; it was my company.
Still, as my head cleared, memories started to return one by one.
Captain Kaufmann… he's dead.
The superior officer who had called me in from the shivering sleet, poured me a warm cup of coffee, and lamented that he couldn't do the same for all his men, had died not for his fatherland, but in another country's civil war.
After the captain died and those damn pizza-eaters fled, we fought a delaying action, falling back to the post office. We held out, using the building for cover, and barely managed to survive until battalion HQ gave the order to retreat.
The problem was that after getting permission to retreat, I was running without looking back when I was hit by an enemy air raid and collapsed. The fact that I was evacuated to the rear alive, and from what that scum said, it seems the retreat itself was a success.
My body still hurts, but at least I haven't lost any limbs. I can only hope that Clemens and the other company members are okay.
But that aside, the more I thought about it, the more I realized staying here was insane.
Vaguely imagining the horrors of the German-Soviet war and planning to surrender to the Allies if I was deployed to the West or Africa was one thing. But seeing a respectable superior die right before my eyes and nearly dying myself was on a completely different level.
On top of that, I'd gotten a firsthand taste of the incompetence of our so-called Axis allies. Why the hell do those Italian idiots run away without even trying to fight?
Our other ally is the ever-glorious Empire of Japan. Are they even an ally? Setting aside my hatred for Imperial Japan as a Korean, did they do anything for the Axis besides the unprecedented idiocy of getting the United States to join the Allies?
And more than anything else, I didn't want to shed blood for this goddamn Nazi Germany and the Axis powers.
I wasn't crazy enough to like lunatics like the Nazis, and I had no desire to walk into the fires of hell with them.
Especially not alongside psychotic, scumbag trash like the man lying in the next cot!
Of course, it's not like I believe in the myth of the clean Wehrmacht—the unprecedented bullshit that the Waffen-SS did all the bad things while the Wehrmacht just served honorably!—or think that everyone in the SS is scum. There are scumbags in the Wehrmacht and decent people in the SS.
But that's what made it feel all the more tragic. Captain Kaufmann was a genuinely good man. What on earth did he die for?
As the company's second-in-command, I couldn't get too close to the men, but I'd still lost too many subordinates with whom I'd shared the hardships of the battlefield and grown attached to.
They say that after World War II, the surviving German soldiers cried out, asking what they had shed their blood and fought for.
For those who had risked their lives fighting for their fatherland, all that remained was the accusation of having fought for a criminal regime, and a Germany left in ruins.
Being in the German army led by Hitler, that crazy son of a bitch, could only lead to such an end.
As soon as I'm discharged, or if a superior officer comes to see me, I'll find out the company's status and then immediately apply for a discharge.
If it's not accepted, I was more than willing to play the part of a weak officer whose spirit was broken by a single injury.
I had to get discharged first, no matter what, and then leave Germany. I considered trying to persuade my family, but frankly, while I might try with Clemens, it was hard to feel any affection for a family I'd never met, based only on Dietrich's memories.
My father, Hjalmar Schacht, was still the Minister of Economics for the Nazi regime, so it wasn't a realistic idea anyway. Besides, this Dietrich fellow was quite the reckless womanizer and didn't have many fond memories with his family.
Fortunately, both Yun Seong-il back in Korea and Dietrich were good at English, so I'd try to go to America.
That's what I decided.
…But there was no way the god who dropped me in this shitty place would let things go so smoothly.
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I was already irritable from a poor night's sleep thanks to that damn Dirlewanger's snoring, when my battalion commander, Major Edmund Beckers, came to visit the very next day.
It always annoyed me, but now the thought of giving the Nazi salute really pissed me off. Fortunately, I couldn't salute because of my injured right arm, and the major understood.
“I'm glad to see you've woken up safely, First Lieutenant Schacht. Ah, I don't know if you've heard, but you've been promoted for your distinguished service in the Battle of Guadalajara.”
“Thank you, Major! If I may, could I ask a question?”
“Hmm, of course.”
I swallowed dryly and asked my question.
“What are the casualties for our company…?”
I was planning to get discharged immediately, but I couldn't help but worry about the men I had shared hardships with on the front lines, however brief it was.
Honestly, I was prepared for the worst. If nothing else, I just hoped Clemens was safe.
“Seventeen killed, fourteen wounded, nine missing. Captain Kaufmann is…”
“…Killed in action, sir.”
“Eighteen killed, eight missing, then.”
Major Beckers corrected me in a calm tone. I had been prepared, but this was pretty bad…
In modern warfare, a 20% loss of combat strength is considered wiped out. Of course, that applies to modern armies with large numbers of support and supply personnel attached to combat units; a World War II infantry company is a different matter.
But with a total of 101 men, the company commander dead, and the second-in-command in this state, those casualty numbers meant our company was effectively combat-ineffective until we received replacements.
We weren't even a vanguard unit. We were supposed to be assigned to a relatively quiet sector.
And yet, of the 101 men we had when I first woke up as Dietrich, well over 20 were dead. It sent a chill down my spine.
Seeing me speechless with shock, the major continued.
“We suffered a major setback due to Italy's poor performance. Thanks to your excellent judgment, First Lieutenant Schacht, we were able to retreat safely with minimal losses. The entire battalion is in your debt.”
What? To be honest, I had no idea what he was talking about. All I did was hold out until the retreat order came?
“I received a report from Second Lieutenant Fleck. Despite the company suffering heavy losses and facing encirclement after the Italians fled, you organized a delaying action by platoon, using buildings to buy time for the battalion to withdraw. Thanks to you, the Condor Legion's valuable artillery and equipment were saved from capture, and we were able to retreat successfully.”
“Ah…”
Second Lieutenant Fleck would be Clemens. So he made it out okay.
But what the major said was, technically, what I did. It was, but…
To be honest, I ordered the delaying action partly because I was furious about Captain Kaufmann's death and seeing my men fall, but mostly out of a sense of crisis that if we just ran, we'd be court-martialed.
The men looked like they were ready to frag me just to survive if I didn't let them flee immediately, so I tried to appeal to their emotions. I told them our battalion had a lot of artillery and heavy equipment that needed time to withdraw, and if we didn't hold on for just a little while, the entire battalion would be sacrificed.
People tend to rebel if you just scream at them to die holding a position, but if you frame it as a noble act, they're a little more receptive to the same order…
But it seems battalion HQ interpreted that as ‘a heroic officer who rallied his chaotic company after losing their commander and was wounded while making a noble stand for the sake of the battalion.’ Oh, for God's sake.
No way! I'm not going to become some model fascist hero the Nazis love to use for propaganda!
“I-It was the captain's order, sir. I was merely carrying out his instructions.”
“Hmm, you have an excellent attitude as well. First, as your battalion commander, I express my gratitude. You will be awarded the Wound Badge in Black once it's officially established. And know that you will be awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class in advance once your wounds have healed.”
The Wound Badge is one thing, but the Iron Cross 1st Class… that's grea—no, wait, I appreciate the high praise, but I'm getting discharged, mister!
“And First Lieutenant Schacht, upon your return, you will be the commander of the 2nd Company. It's a bit early, but based on your actions in the last battle, high command has judged that you are a fitting successor to Captain Kaufmann.”
“S-Sir?!”
N-No..! This can't be happening! But my horrified reaction must have looked like pleasant surprise to the major, because he added with a slight smile on his grim face.
“You must be curious about the outcome of the Battle of Guadalajara, yes? I'll leave the after-action report for you to read. The staff officers were praising your command, calling it a textbook delaying action. They're showing interest in you back in the homeland, so I expect you to continue fighting bravely. Now, get some rest.”
With those words, Major Beckers left. Hey, how can a superior officer just say what he wants and leave like that?
As I stood there, dumbfounded, my eyes met Dirlewanger's, who now wore an expression that seemed to be contemplating whether he should try to get friendly with me again.
Fight against the Allies and the Soviets under that madman Hitler, alongside scum like him?
…I'm screwed.