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Let's Read: Watch on the Rhine by Tom Kratman

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Reveen said:
Oh.

So not only is it just "Oooh, they're bad because they want to kill everybody because you totally care about that!" but they're not even interesting about it.
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As far as I understand it (from reading the ... first and maybe second books in the series a while ago, and from looking at Wikipedia): the Posleen are basically Orks, only not as interesting or fun.
 
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Chapter 3: In Which Kratman Hates Safety
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    • Chapter 3: In Which Kratman Hates Safety​

    We start with the SS being pricks while training their recruits, something that's actually historically accurate. Despite Chancellor Palpatine's promise that nobody even suspected of war crimes would be rejuvenated, Dark Helmut Kreuger is constantly boasting about being a camp guard and raping female inmates. Luckily for him, there is zero accountability or oversight for the rejuvenated Waffen-SS. It should be noted, of course, that rape was an absolute constant by German soldiers. While the recruits are right to be nauseated by it, and though Dark Helmut is made out to be some sort of unique monster, the secretly recorded conversations of German POWs make it clear that this was actually the norm.

    At the end of this, the recruits march away singing the Banner Song of the Hitler Youth, a tune which, unsurprisingly, includes the following among its lyrics (Google Translated):
    Our flag flutters ahead.
    In the future we move man by man.
    We march for Hitler through night and through distress
    with the flag of youth for freedom and bread.
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    We move on to a scene where Rinteel the Indowy shows off a hidden base from the time of the Romans to Chancellor Palpatine and his entourage. According to him, the Indowy had tried to create an impenetrable defense for Earth in secret, only to be betrayed and slaughtered by humans led by none other than Siegfried when he tore his heart out and gave it to a homunculus desired gold and a mate more than some random alien dudes? Honestly, it's a weird tale and not one I'm sure actually matches up with any of the Siegfried stories, though I'm certainly no expert on them.

    "Well, that didn't work," sighed Mueller.

    "Back to the drawing board," agreed Prael, disgust dripping with every syllable.

    The object of that disgust, an enormous steel cylinder leaking heavy red hydraulic fluid as if from a ruptured heart, stood shattered within its testing cradle. The cylinder, intended to be one of ten that would absorb the recoil of the Tiger III's twelve-inch gun, had proven deficient . . . and that in the most catastrophic way possible. Indeed, so catastrophic had the failure been that at least one of the testing crew within Prael's vision was leaking red fluid nearly as rapidly as the cylinder. Instantaneous decapitation will do that.
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    HOW??!!!!!

    Seriously, how do you screw up that horribly badly?

    It's not like this is some sort of brand new never before tried technology, you have the bloody plans of twelve inch guns from nearly a century prior even if you need them. All of these recoil forces and absorption capacities are things that you know, catastrophic failure like this should be impossible. Plug in the numbers, add in a safety margin, and you're good to go. But, just to make sure, you test it with remote firing and all personnel in safe positions, just on the off-chance that you're an incompetent fuckwit who can't do the proper calculations to save his life. This is also a giant freaking tank, right? Should have a nice spacy interior, right? Take a look at the Abrams. Do you see how nobody is behind the gun? How even if the gun decided to go full evil on them and slam all the way back to the turret, nobody's body, much less head, would be directly behind it and thus injuries would be minimal? This is called "competent engineering."

    However, these engineers have entered The Kratman Zone, where the narrator has a disturbing fetish for killing people off in everything except combat. Thus, nameless red shirt is now nameless red smear, victim of complete and utter incompetence on every scale imaginable.

    Worried by this incompetence, yet greater incompetence rears its head as they fret about what to do. They can't lower the velocity or shell weight, but it's too big to fit in the turret. Sane solutions such as casemating the gun are not explored, when, oh so conveniently, some sort of inertial dampening harness is shown off and solves all their problems, yay!


    We move back to our newest generation of Nazis who are, as Kratman is wont to have, engaging in a live fire training exercise, with said live fire mostly being directed at them. Calling in tank support, our main neo-Nazi, Dieter Schultz, manages to somehow get hit by a friendly flechette. Luckily for him, he's a main character, so it's only a bloody scratch that he manfully powers through, impressing his Nazi drill sergeant in the process. To be fair, the Nazis did make a real cult of masculinity and whatnot. Hans Brache has a flashback to getting blown up at Kursk and how it sucked.

    This is pretty much it for what is, quite frankly, a pretty boring chapter outside of the hilarious incompetence of Kratman's engineers. The husband of our token French viewpoint is called up to national service and she is completely unwilling to understand why a doctor might be useful for the Army. The tank is prototyped and unveiled. Posleen do meaningless Posleen things that remind the reader that they exist and lay the ground for "everything is the fault of liberals," and that's about it. There is this last bit of lunacy however:

    Yet the nights and days remained long. Soldiers were killed in training and their places taken by new faces. The old German army had thought that one percent killed in basic training was not merely an acceptable, but a desirable figure. The new-old German Army did as well, this portion of it, at least.

    That rarely happened in the regular Bundeswehr. There, the few Wehrmacht veterans scattered about were impotent to change things from the politically correct, multiculturally sensitive stew the politicians had made of the German army.

    Only in the 47th Panzer Korps, called by political friend and foe alike, "the SS Korps," were there enough men who knew the old ways—knew them, and more importantly, were willing to tell the politicians and social theorists to "go fuck yourselves" over them—to meld their new charges into what Germany, what Europe, what humanity, needed.

    And so the boys marched with pride and a spring, knowing that, perhaps alone among their people's defenders they could and would do the job at hand.
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    There is, as always, Kratman's long standing obsession with murdering his recruits. As I've never found a source for this, I can only conclude that attributing it to the Wehrmacht is simply a cover for his own rectal extraction and that such a thing never existed, though I'd love evidence to the contrary. I don't really understand why he thinks such an absurd thing anyhow. Are our pilots somehow less capable or trained because the Class A mishap rate has dropped by orders of magnitude since Vietnam and WWII?

    And on the disgusting note that "Only the SS could and would defend against a horde of man-eating locust centaurs," we end this particular chapter.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Osteoclast said:
    Are our pilots somehow less capable or trained because the Class A mishap rate has dropped by orders of magnitude since Vietnam and WWII?
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    Yes all those newfangled safety features and safety equipment and sadety procedures have made training less horrible lethal, thus our trainees are clearly limp-wristed namby pamby losers.

    Clearly.

    (Or maybe without national existential fear, people aren't willing to put up with the insane accident rates that a lot of WWII military units had because they were using new, unrefined, largely untested gear and doctrine rushed into use in no small part due to desperation.)
     
    I'm sure I'll find out, but how bad does the "YOU ARMY SHITBIRDS WHO DIDN'T PROMOTE ME, I'LL SHOW YOU" style on full force in Carrera and some of his other stories get in this book? Or is this more """social commentary"""?
     
    Coiler said:
    I'm sure I'll find out, but how bad does the "YOU ARMY SHITBIRDS WHO DIDN'T PROMOTE ME, I'LL SHOW YOU" style on full force in Carrera and some of his other stories get in this book? Or is this more """social commentary"""?
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    From what I remember of it, there's a good bit of both. Tends to lean more on historical revisionism/"""""social commentary"""" angle though.
     
    Coiler said:
    I'm sure I'll find out, but how bad does the "YOU ARMY SHITBIRDS WHO DIDN'T PROMOTE ME, I'LL SHOW YOU" style on full force in Carrera and some of his other stories get in this book? Or is this more """social commentary"""?
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    Pretty much all social commentary as far as I can tell, unless you count his penchant for murdering recruits (public advocacy of lowered safety standards goes back at least to 1985).

    Next chapter should be up tomorrow, progress is currently dependent on how much I'm raging or thanking the RNG gods in Battle Brothers.
     
    Chapter 4: The Hippies Are Coming, The Hippies Are Coming!
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    • Chapter 4: The Hippies Are Coming, The Hippies Are Coming!​

    Sennelager, Germany, 14 July 2005

    The base had been chosen for the assembly of the 47th Panzer Korps because of its central location. From all over Germany's hundreds of small Kasernen, new, old and refurbished, poured in the thousands of newly trained troops and their veteran cadres.

    Convenient for assembly of a large Korps as it might have been, the base was also too close to Hamburg, too close to Berlin, too close to Essen and Frankfurt for comfort. Another way of saying this was that it was altogether too comfortable and easy for the left of center of German politics, at least of that part which answered to those leaders of the left who had secretly sold out to the Elves, to find their way to the place.
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    Evidently anywhere in Germany is too close for comfort for the SS. Which, to be fair, is exactly what anyone with any reason would be saying about the SS.

    "Must be fifty thousand of the bastards," muttered Mühlenkampf, standing at his office window overlooking the main gate to the Kaserne. "Where the hell did they all come from? And why aren't the boys out there in the army instead? Why aren't the damned girls in the army, for that matter?"

    He knew the answer, of course. Despite the threat of the Posleen, the idea of alternative service was too deeply ingrained in German political and social culture even for the threat of annihilation to overcome fully. Curiously, Great Britain and the United States, without a long or stable tradition of peacetime conscription or "compulsory social service," had done better by far in dragging in their young people. There, the old age homes and the like had never become dependent on low-paid slave labor. Private always—or at least not fully governmental, they could remain so. In Germany? No such luck.
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    A great unwashed (literally as Kratman later describes them) horde of draft dodging hippies descends upon the poor SS, apparently intent on either killing the Nazi bastards or converting them to peace and free love. The signs say dirty Tau lovers, the physical actions say that they're about as good in melee as the Tau.

    Kratman does have a valid point about conscription here. You see, unlike the United States and Britain, which have always allowed those with a sincere objection to violence to perform some sort of alternative service such as conservation, caring for the very young or old, or healthcare; Germany actually allows those with a sincere objection to violence to work in healthcare or caring for the elderly as an alternative to uniformed military service. Absolutely disgusting. Of course, this is always open to abuse, and so while America requires that those claiming conscientious objector status have their claims scrutinized by the local draft board to ensure that it is meritorious, Germany merely required that the applicant hoodwink a panel at the military replacement office.

    Incidentally, while Mühlenkampf utters a profoundly un-Nazi disdain for the fact that the women aren't in the army (female Red Army soldiers did not receive terribly pleasant treatment from the Nazis, to put it mildly), I don't recall a single woman ever showing up in arms in this book. Funny that.

    Mühlenkampf apparently doesn't have any direct superiors, because he's soon on a direct line to Chancellor Palpatine about the situation. When riot police turn out to be too little and far too late for his tastes, he threatens to use the resident SS Panzer corps to deal with the problem. Palpatine makes no reply, but his aide, Designated Traitor Günter tries to order him not to, at which point the phones miraculously stop working.

    The Tir's group of human underlings sat again in a semicircle before the desk. The Tir's eyes were closed, though his ears were open. His breathing was shallow but steady. His lips moved in a mantra in his own tongue.

    "All is in readiness," said Dunkel, the Red. "Not less than fifty thousand protesters are converging on the base at Sennelager to combat the Fascists."

    "The army has no objections to this," announced the one gray-uniformed human present, a representative of certain elements in the General Staff. "Even if some portions objected to the trashing of our own bases, virtually no one wants these hideous SS men to remain in uniform."

    Günter, the Green, sat silently for a while. "We have our people there as well, at least sixty percent of the protesters are Green."

    The Tir, eyes still closed and breathing still shallow, said in a strained voice, "You have all done well. There will be rewards for good performance. . . ."
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    You'd think that the Bundeswehr representative would've noted that a mob of untrained and relatively unarmed civilians is going to do pretty much bupkis to any sort of military formation, much less one led by folks who thought that war crimes went great with an ice cream sundae. I mean, really, all they have to do is fix bayonets and use the natural human fear of being stabbed to help keep the protestors back, blockade the entrances, and….

    Article:
    Muscle and bone augmented by the same process that had returned the octogenarian Brasche to full youth, Hans' fists leapt and flew like twin lightning bolts. Wading into the crowd, he strode over a medley of bleeding, tooth-spitting, choking, bruised and gagging leftists. Behind him, the singing grew louder and closer.

    He hoped it would grow very loud, very close . . . and very soon.

    A woman, tall even by German standards, stood before him, defiantly. Defiantly, too, the woman lifted her chin and tore open her shirt, baring her breasts and daring the colonel to shame himself by striking a woman. Brasche drew back a fist to strike . . . and stopped. He couldn't do it.

    Sadly for him, neither that woman, nor the shorter one who threw her arms about his legs, felt the same sort of restraint. Legs fouled, Brasche lost his balance and fell. He neither saw nor felt the booted foot that connected with his skull, sending him, briefly, out of this vale of tears and into another.

    …
    Dieter Schultz was no fanatic. No more so was his friend Harz. But when they saw their commander fall to a treacherous, underhanded attack, even the hated and despised Krueger became not too vile a man to follow into the fray.

    The boys waded in, an unstoppable mass of swinging clubs, smashing fists, and stomping boots. Those who fell before them were given no quarter, but kicked senseless, in some cases to death. Singing among the first groups stopped to be replaced quickly by sobbing, shrieking and begging Reds and Greens.


    Or you could do that I suppose.


    Visual Representation​


    While this is going on, we're also getting a view from the other side, from one Andreas Schüler. He's stoned and, of course, a literally unwashed dirty hippie, who doesn't care about the movement; he's even a former skinhead. Like "hundreds of others," he's just in it for the women, the dope, and the spectacle. So disenchanted with the actual protest is he that the songs of the protestors, barely audible over the violence anyhow, just completely fail to move him.

    We're told that the protestors refuse to acknowledge the Posleen as a threat, many of them not even believing that the Posleen are real. One wonders what sort of Truther memes exist in this alternate timeline with regards to Fredericksburg and the space battles whose explosions likely would've been visible with the naked eye in Germany. Swamp gas can't melt steel beams?

    Andreas has a conversation with a woman, trampled by the fleeing crowd, whom he is helping to get to aid:
    At length, when he had forced her back to movement to escape the rampaging soldiers, she continued. "It is impossible for people to act like those men did. They just can't have. It is impossible that our good intentions did not prevail here today. It is impossible that we are about to be invaded. What intelligent species could possibly act the way they say these 'Posleen' do? The universe simply cannot be set up that way. It is impossible."

    Schüler said nothing. Yet he thought, "Impossible," you say . . . and still the soldiers acted as they did. Impossible for good intentions to be for naught. And yet they were. Why then is it impossible for these aliens to act as we are told they will? Because you insist on denying it? Is it that you cannot see the world or the universe as it is? How much else are you wrong about, Liesel, you and all your sort?
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    This is the sort of masterful philosophy and detailed attention to strongmanning his ideological opponent's arguments that we have come to expect from Kratman. Andreas, at least, finds it convincing. So convincing, in fact, that he immediately goes to sign up, not for the Bundeswehr, but for the very SS unit which just ran roughshod over all the protestors in front of him. One wonders, of course, how it is that there are recruiting stations still operating in a time of universal conscription, or the fact that he is able to request enlistment with a particular unit rather than simply into the Bundeswehr, but these are merely categorical failure of world building.

    Let's go back a moment take a shot for Kratman portraying SS officer Hans Brache as some sort of noble hero, too pure to raise his fist against a bare chested woman. The actual behavior of the SS was rape followed by murder so that they could not be charged with "racial crimes." Rape was simply a pervasive fact of life amongst the German military.

    Soldaten, page 5

    With that understanding, and knowing what was done to female Soviet soldiers, are we honestly supposed to believe that he cannot bring himself to raise a fist to a woman who just exposed her breasts to him? This is nothing more than trying to white wash him as an SS officer and make him out to be a noble paragon, just as his convalescence in Birkenau is framed. Four years after the start of the war, and a year and a half after the announcement of the Final Solution, Brache is horrified, horrified, to find that gambling mass extermination is going on in this establishment. It's amazing, really, that despite being at the forefront of the mass murder, Brache had no actual knowledge of it when even civilians in Germany knew of it. Horrified by the exact same thing he's been responsible for for years, Brache makes his excuses and gets himself transferred back to the front, where there most certainly aren't any war crimes at all, nope.

    Following the protest, the SS holds a meeting of the Legion of Evil, complete with double lightning flashed banners for each of the SS Legions.

    "Frundsberg?" began Mühlenkampf, conversationally, naming the division rather than its commander, Generalmajor von Ribbentrop. Mühlenkampf considered Ribbontrop an absolute weenie, a posturer, a knave and a fool.28 Only the man's seniority as an SS officer, and his modern political connections, had seen him in command of a division.
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    So this von Ribbentrop is an actual person, Rudolf von Ribbentrop, son of the Nazi Foreign Minister. He served as an enlisted man first in the SS, later becoming an officer, was both an infantry and tank commander (including the Tiger tank), received the Knight's Cross amongst other awards, and was a bullet magnet who was injured no fewer than five times. He is still alive to this day and is, quite frankly, probably one of the better people to build a character around if you were to do this resurrected SS thing.

    Kratman calls him a weenie.

    Helpfully, he provides a footnote so that he can explain his reasoning:
    The wife of a German Army friend of one of the authors, who was once Ribbentrop's secretary, describes him as a "weenie."
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    That's right folks, idle gossip is a completely valid reason to libel someone. One really does have to wonder how Kratman passed the bar exam or was allowed to remain in uniform for so long with judgment like this.

    The questions were rhetorical. Mühlenkampf didn't wait for an answer. "Hohenstauffen, what is wrong with our country? Jugend, why has every Korps in the armed forces except for ours been sabotaged? G von B, why are so many young men exempted from the call to duty? Wiking, why have some elements of the government attempted to sabotage both us and the Kriegseconomie?"29

    Finally resting his eyes on the only battalion commander present, Mühlenkampf asked, "What is the problem here, Hansi?"

    "I do not know, Herr Generalleutnant," admitted Brasche.

    "I know," said Ribbentrop, confidently. "It is the Jews."

    Mühlenkampf snorted his derision. "Nonsense, Ribbentrop, you pansy. There aren't enough Jews in Germany anymore to make a corporal's guard. They are the least influential group we have. I wish we had some more. The Israelis at least can fight."
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    Right, this is just plain ridiculous by Ribbentrop. Of course it's not the Jews, it's the cowardly hook-nosed goblin capitalists who control all wealth and powerful institutions from behind the scenes from space, not the Jews. Goodness, such an obvious mistake, mistaking Space Jews for human Jews.

    Following this, Mühlenkampf proclaims that the problem is that, though Chancellor Palpatine seems to be ok, they are being stabbed in the back by the Greens and Reds, and hands out a list of names as well as encouraging men to be let out on "leave."

    Not even six weeks later, Günter is reporting to the Darhel that no less than 11 members of the Bundestag have been disappeared, coincidentally after they do things to try and get the SS in line. What should spark a massive police investigation has apparently no actual effect except to make the cowardly enemies of the Reich stop acting out against Their Real True Protectors, Honest™.

    We'll end this with this line from the Posleen, which, given Kratman's attempts to rehabilitate the Posleen, is rather horrifying:
    "The Knowers observed, 'All of life is a struggle. And yet you have forbidden us to join in that struggle. Are we then, even alive?' The Aldenat' answered, 'We know, and you know not.'"
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    Yeah, no tinges of fascism there, no sirreebob.

    Cumulative drink count: 8 shots and a bottle
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Chloe Sullivan said:
    The bar is a test of your ability to remeber legal stuff and apply legal reasoning.

    Kratman is pretty rational, really. It's his premises that are fucked, not his logic.

    Which is, as GK Chesterton notes, pretty common among madmen.
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    I mean, Sovereign Citizen types have passed the bar.

    And then used their licenses to engage in petty nuisance lawsuits that eventually got them disbarred, but the point is they passed it in the first place.
     
    ​

    Sorry for the delay, but should have something up in next couple days. Been a fun kerfluffle with my alma mater of late which has been sucking up time lately (the Catholic trad right doing its thing again). That and I'd rather read Spinning Silver, which took a three month hold from library, than this.[/CENTER]
     
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    Chapters 5 & 6: A Journey Through Time and Space
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    • Now that what has turned into a literal witch hunt is dying down, we return once more to Kratman's terrible tale…

    Chapters 5 & 6: A Journey Through Time and Space​

    When last we left our tale of Nazis, it was mid-2005, Earth was still at relative peace, and we'd just finished beating up a bunch of hapless hippies. We return now in early 2007 and no, it is not an uneventful time hop.

    We begin with a handful of sentences describing what would ordinarily be considered an epic multiday battle, a last stand by the Supermonitor Lexington and Titan base trying desperately to at least delay a horde of Posleen. It is dispensed with in only 9 sentences of terrible prose.

    Dieter, along with most of his fellow tank crew, is off in town, enjoying leave at the "soldiers recreation center", which he's been frequenting because he's got the hots for one of the girls who comes there.

    Her name meant "battler" or "battle maiden." Yet if ever a girl was misnamed, thought Dieter, that girl was Gudrun. Tall and slender, from golden hair to ivory skin to long and shapely legs, Gudrun evoked no image of battle. Gracefully she walked, as a woman, though Dieter suspected she was rather young, sixteen at most.
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    Sixteen at most when Dieter is 20 or 21?



    And now—had God above smiled upon him?—the girl actually sat at the table nearest to his. Close up Dieter found her even lovelier than he had at a distance; this despite a fairly obvious attempt at portraying a sophistication the girl probably lacked. She pulled a cigarette out, and held it, nonchalantly, awaiting someone to light it.
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    Legit the first thing that popped into my head:


    Thank you for years of anti-smoking ads and being used as a focus group in elementary school California.

    On principle, I'd like to take a shot for this scene, but it's actually somewhat realistic in the sense of Germany having a major smoking problem, especially amongst teens and young adults, about three times the rate of California.

    After her cigarette is lit, she asks Dieter about his unit:
    "I am the gunner for a Tiger III in the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion, 47th Panzer Korps," he answered.

    Gudrun recoiled momentarily. "The SS Korps? The Nazis?"

    Laughing, Dieter answered, "We're not an SS Korps, Gudrun. Why, according to my chief, Sergeant Major Krueger, we are not fit to wipe the boots of real SS men. They did train us," he admitted.

    "Then you are not a Nazi?"

    "Me?" Dieter laughed again, louder. "No, Liebchen. I was a student when they drafted me and gave me a choice. Sort of a choice. Not much of one, as a matter of fact." He shrugged. "And my grandfather told me I would be better off training under the old SS than under the new Bundeswehr. So there I went.
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    Objection: It is explicitly an SS Panzer Corps, despite some trash talk by their driver (who is now their chief), and I'm calling bullshit on them not being Nazis after two years of solid indoctrination by the armed wing of the Nazi Party.

    Gudrun was light and graceful in Dieter's arms as they danced. The boy himself was no dancer. And yet, at its best, dance, like the act of love, brings souls together in union and harmony. So it was with this couple, bodily movements meshing into unity of bodies. By the time the dance ended, Dieter knew he had found the one right girl for him. They simply fit. Perfectly.
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    Aww, how nice. On the very eve of the apocalypse, Dieter finds true love. Truly what magical…

    At the table they talked. And both knew that the talk was serious. There was little time for the boy-girl games so beloved of the romances.

    "I want you, Gudrun," Dieter announced simply. "Now. Here or nearby. Anywhere, really. But now."
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    Take a shot for this Romeo rhetoric.

    He gets shot down, not for being incredibly unromantic and unsubtle, but because she already has a boyfriend in another unit, something that didn't stop her coming to a soldiers rec area, trying her best to get picked up, and flirting with a Nazi. She and Jody Dietrich exchange promises to write and to screw after she's dumped her boyfriend. How noble.

    Meanwhile, as they're exchanging promises to write each other, Krueger is entertaining the troops with tales of raping women in the concentration camps and Brasche is reminiscing over his late lost love. Gosh, it's all so romantic.

    With a brief tale, but still longer than the last stand of Lexington and Titan base, of the attempt by Planetary Defense Bases (shore to ship railguns in mountain bases) to stop the Posleen landings, we end the chapter and move to the next.

    They descended in waves of waves, tens of thousands of Posleen landing craft. Far out in space they split into three large task forces, one large group for Europe and North Africa, and one smaller one each for India and South America—those places already being largely taken over by the Posleen who had come before. The Latins and Hindus had really never been in any position to defend themselves.
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    If you're highly confused by this and wondering when India and South America were taken over, you're not alone. It's never mentioned in this book. I did find a timeline which places it a year prior, in 2006, during the period glossed over by our time skip. In fact, it looks like timeline mention is all it ever is. Personally, I'm mildly curious as to how they just managed to steamroller two billion heavily armed people in locations with rather more in the way of defensible terrain than Europe's natural battleground, Germany.

    Oh who am I kidding, it's totally racism.

    Note that the loss of said two billion people plays absolutely no part in the novel's worldbuilding or how characters act or anything.

    A litany of who gets whacked by what follows:
    North Africa, including Egypt, described as "the seats of one of Earth's most ancient civilizations, that and the broad sweep of one of its most ancient areas of barbarism," is wiped out by three Posleen globes.
    Three again suffices for Italy.
    One lands in Switzerland and is promptly wiped out by hidden guns and super infantry hordes. Belgium and Holland get eaten by one each however.
    Four wipe out Spain and Portugal. Four more are held off by the Brits however, who establish a defensive line south of Hadrian's Wall. Those of you who are at least somewhat familiar with the topography of Great Britain and wondering how this makes any sense whatsoever are in good company.
    Seven globes land on Germany, leaving 34 for France and Poland.

    France and Poland, bearing the brunt of the Posleen effort, found themselves drawn and quartered. Paris held out for the nonce, as did Warsaw. A few other cities, prepared for defense in advance, did as well. Neither French nor Poles could be said to have been quite prepared for the magnitude and ferocity of the attack. Wishful thinking had beguiled the French while the Poles, never so numerous, still struggled under the legacy of forty-five years of Communist misrule and its resulting inefficiency and corruption.
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    Just so we're clear: France and Poland are being hit with approximately 2.5 times each the size of the assault of Germany; about 100 million Posleen are landing in each country and all the really dumb ones are being sent to Germany. Yet the French and Poles are smeared for their efforts in holding out. Go figure.

    The odds in Germany were worse for the Posleen than they had ever faced in their history. Five of those heavy divisions awaiting them were called "Wiking, Hohenstauffen, Frundsberg, Jugend and Götz von Berlichingen." One battalion was called the "501st Schwere Panzer (Michael Wittmann)."
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    Take a shot for stroking Nazi dick.

    Her husband had had time to make one call, and that very brief. "I love you, Isabelle. Always remember that. But it turns out that this threat you denied is real, after all. And it looks like it is concentrating on us and the Poles. My unit will be in action soon. You, however, must get yourself and the boys ready to flee. I cannot tell you where to go to or how to get there. But watch the news carefully. Do not trust everything the government says. And when it is time to move, move you must . . . and quickly."
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    Isabelle, our random French POV, prepares to evac, still apparently disbelieving the Posleen threat despite annual invasions, and not having made any prior evacuation preparation or plans.

    German infantry formations are getting crushed and thousands of soldiers are simply breaking and running along with the refugees, who have filled the roads. The 47th Panzer Corps, which is all of our friendly Nazis, is sent to deal with landings in Würzburg and Schweinfurt, without any infantry support or flanking units as they've all been chewed up already. Normally this would be mildly suicidal but we've got plenty of chapters to go. Incidentally, this also means a 200km road march to contact that goes through an area, Aschaffenburg, already fallen to the Posleen invaders. Clearly we have a military genius writing this.

    Watching the refugees brings back memories for Hans Brache of running away from Soviet troops who, for some odd reason, weren't overly fond of taking prisoners from the SS Wiking Division. He escapes west through the mountains of Austria until he's able to join up with the French Foreign Legion.

    We return back to the present day, having arrived in Hammelburg (why here, I'm not entirely certain: It's certainly not on any direct routes) in what must be the fastest corps movement ever, having come in contact finally with the Posleen.

    From somewhere behind his Tiger came the sound of artillery, lots of it, firing. The shells' passage rattled the air with the racket of one hundred freight trains. In Brasche's ears, the radio crackled with reports from the Korps' forward reconnaissance unit, the Panzeraufklärungsbrigade, Florian Geyer. The enemy was near at hand.
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    Huh, who's Florian Geyer?

    Article:
    The 8th SS Cavalry Division "Florian Geyer" was a German Waffen-SS cavalry division during World War II. It was formed in 1942 from a cadre of the SS Cavalry Brigade which was involved in the Bandenbekämpfung ("bandit-fighting") operations behind the front line and was responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of the civilian population. It continued "pacification" operations in the occupied Soviet Union, leading to further atrocities.


    OH COME THE FUCK ON! Could this be any more blatant?

    Also, what moron names a recon brigade after a unit that specialized in rear action "security"?

    Having made contact, the 47th Panzer Corps, spreads out, crunching civilians who don't get out of the way quick enough. The heavy Tiger III tanks wait in ambush with two kilometers between them, ensuring that they can't provide mutual support, concentrate fire, or most likely even see each other given typical German terrain.

    Despite the haste with which they deployed, it's not until the next day that the Posleen actually run into the Nazis, Sadly, we must wait for the next chapter for that conflict.

    We end with a scene of Günter and his Darhel superior happily stabbing the brave German populace in the back but being miserable over the fact that the SS have not been infiltrated and aren't playing ball with them. They're not discussing anything except with Chancellor Palpatine, who isn't talking to the Darhel (why this should be a problem when his aide is right there to pass everything on is a mystery), and the Darhel aren't able to make them use their AI smartphones so that they can be eavesdropped on. Why one wasn't integrated into their tanks and command vehicles, especially with the advanced AI systems that they later display, is a wonder never explained.

    I'd like to digress slightly at the end of this by pointing out how absolutely disturbing Kratman's views are as an Army officer, as expressed through this and other texts. There is not just distrust, but an active hostility towards civilian control of the military, but also towards senior officers. The SS are effective, not simply because they're "hard men doing hard things while hard," but because they flip off both the civilian and military leadership, ignoring all sorts of lawful orders in the process. He has a decades long belief in the efficacy of removing safety from training and acceptable casualty rates in training literally orders of magnitude higher than anyone else accepts; on his forum he has bragged about setting up training that was "technically illegal" back when he was still in uniform. I know it sounds terrible, but the Army must have rejoiced when Kratman had his heart attack. "What an absolute shame it is that we have to medically invalidate you."
     
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    • Hey, its been forever since I read this book... I wonder how much of it I actually remember. I do recall one scene that I got a kick out of towards the end. But that would be spoilers.

    That said, I will always approve of tanks that can shoot targets in orbit, regardless of the quality of the rest of the work.
     
    Crazael said:
    Hey, its been forever since I read this book... I wonder how much of it I actually remember. I do recall one scene that I got a kick out of towards the end. But that would be spoilers.

    That said, I will always approve of tanks that can shoot targets in orbit, regardless of the quality of the rest of the work.
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    That was literally the only thing I liked about this book- the super-tanks. I love that kind of absurd scale. Shame literally everything else in the book was trash.
     
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