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When the Polish campaign came to its end, I was already a man marked out for an outstanding military career. With Von Back as my patron, I was smoothly promoted to Major and the hyperbolic headlines about the Great Train Ambush trumpeting my name and full-dress portrait to the public at large, I became something of a celebrity; children sought my autograph; lonely wives my nocturnal companionship. Life was as good to me then as we can reasonably hope for on this side of Heaven!
Which brings us to a new chapter in this clandestine memoir, one which I have chosen to entitle:
After the French surrendered, we of the Panzer force began to feel like the supermen Hitler was trying to portray us to be. Not long after the Frogs capitulated, I was given a chance to examine one of their latest and best tanks: the ‘CHAR B’ classified officially as a “Heavy Assault Tank”. The experience of viewing one up close was an eye-opener. Low-slung from top to bottom, it would have been difficult to spot except at close range. Its 66 mm, frontal and side armor was protection against everything we test-fired at it less than a 105 mm howitzer at point blank range! The Char B’s main armament was an extremely robust and accurate 47-mm, gun and the very size and weight of the tank itself made it a very stable gun platform. The French only had a few hundred of these monsters in service when we declared war on them, but fortunately for us, they wasted the tanks’ potential by doling them out in small batches to protect infantry positions. Had a French commander with the tactical sharps Guderian, or the brass-balls recklessness of Irwin Rommel been given control of just a 100 Char B’s, our Blitzkrieg might have been stopped cold, or at least been rendered far more costly. The French may be irritating, but thank God they are also arrogant!
I wondered, during the next few weeks, if the Russians had any vehicles comparable in their power to the Char B. Despite Stalin’s peasant-ignorance and brutality, he had always welcomed promising technical innovations into the Red Army (even if he later had their inventors shot on bogus charges of “spying for Finland” or something equally grotesque!). Yes, both my brain and my gut-instinct assure me that if we do go to war with the USSR, there will be numerous unpleasant surprises sprung by both sides.
LATER, SAME DAY:
I confess that I feel a bit of a hypocrite because if I caught one of my own men writing a journal filled with militarily sensitive speculations, I would have no choice but to confiscate the diary and bring the author up on charges of “violating national security” or some such bureaucratic rot. So when I see one of my soldiers scribbling earnestly on bound paper that looks too heavy for air mail, I make it my business to walk past him with my eyes firmly fixed on some distant object.
For once, the rumors are congruent with common sense: no one will say it openly, but the amphibious assault on England is a dead issue, and it cost us one-third of the Luftwaffe to figure out that there’s more to invading that “Sceptred Isle” than merely cramming ordinary infantry into ferry boats and garbage scows and dropping them off on the nearest stretch of English beach!
Our main enemy now is Russia, the only remaining European power capable of matching our strength, the only one ruled by a single authority figure as unchallenged in his power as the Fuhrer. Ideologically, of course, the two leaders detest each other and behind the façade of the recent “Treaties of Friendship” any fool can see that each country is looting from the other the strategic goods it would need to wage war against its “partner”. We will gladly trade you three excellent locomotives for ten tons of prime-grade bauxite – that sort of tit for tat horse trading. And it fools no one; the most cretinous private in my force is now discussing these issues with keen perceptions never demonstrated before from this dullard. Our minds as well as our senses have come fully alive!
Does a war HAVE to be inevitable just because both sides tend to think a show-down is necessary for their very survival? The notion both exhilarates and frightens me! At least, if war DOES come, I will be commanding a superb, experienced instrument for waging it: MY ELITE SEMI-AUTONOMOUS LITTLE ARMY -- KAMPFFGRUPPE MENGELBERG!
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