Chapter 204: The Hare Flees Eastward
In the last breath of twilight, two He 111 medium bombers cut through the burning clouds like blue steel birds.
Their engines rolled across the sky in a low, exhausted growl.
"Pilot Pym, this is Kla Dahl, pilot of Bomber Group 92."
"Pilot Dale Harker, Bomber Group 94."
The two aircraft banked slightly in the air. Their wingtip lights flickered red, vanishing and reappearing in Pym's vision like embers in the dusk.
The distance between them was considerable, and static nearly swallowed the voices coming through the headset, but Pym could still hear the fatigue behind those words.
Clearly, both crews had only just completed one bombing mission before being reassigned to another slaughter.
"Received," Pym replied. "Target is crossing the river at seven o'clock."
He lowered his altitude.
Below, along the makeshift pontoon bridge, Polish units were wading through the water in disorderly clumps. The two main bridges were already choked with cars, motorcycles, wagons, artillery limbers, and dense crowds of retreating soldiers.
The Stuka began its dive.
Its shriek tore through the dusk, sharp and mournful, like the wail of a dying banshee.
"Run!"
The Polish soldiers scattered like startled hares, throwing themselves into the river's dark grass in the desperate hope of surviving.
The next moment, the bomb fell.
Bang!
A red lotus blossomed violently upon the rippling river.
Some escaped the worst of the blast by diving into the water, but winter was approaching, and the river was already bitterly cold. Many Polish soldiers were not torn apart by the explosion, but the shockwave stunned them in the water.
For them, drowning was almost merciful.
Others were not so fortunate.
Men with broken legs and shrapnel wounds were dragged along by the current. The rushing water washed their injuries pale. Their body temperature fell with terrifying speed, and their eyelids grew heavier with every breath.
But this was not the end.
It was only the beginning.
The two He 111s followed in, releasing the last of their remaining ordnance.
The bombers banked left and right.
The two bridges were blown apart. Overturned trucks toppled into the riverbed. Horses screamed. Men shouted. Vehicles burned in tangled wreckage.
Congestion. Flight. Men trampling men.
Survival had become a prize that only the fastest, strongest, and luckiest could seize.
Yet Pym soon realized that the two He 111s had exhausted their bombs.
More strangely, they showed no intention of returning to base.
After a brief pause in the clouds, the two bombers turned back and flew along the chaotic riverbank.
"92? 94?" Pym asked through the headset. "Aren't you returning to base?"
"Why return?" came the reply. "If we leave now, a large number of them will escape."
"Returning to the airfield only earns us commendations for an ordinary night mission. But if our three aircraft capture a large number of Polish soldiers, that is a different matter."
"They do not know whether we still have bombs."
Then came the question.
"Pym, do you still have bombs?"
After confirming with his rear gunner, Pym answered, "None left."
"That's fine, Pym. Keep diving and strafe with your machine gun. Fire at will. You don't need precision. It's too dark for them to know whether you hit anything."
Pym obeyed.
He pushed the nose down, dived again, and pulled the trigger.
The machine gun rattled wildly.
Several Polish soldiers who had crawled ashore, half frozen from the river water, were startled into falling flat against the mud. They clutched the ground and prayed to God to let them live.
The next moment, as if their prayers had been answered, no bombs landed on their heads.
Instead, countless white sheets scattered from the sky.
The papers fluttered down like pale snow.
Printed on them was Polish text.
[Write down your name and home address, soldier. We will guarantee your safety and deliver this letter to your family, so that a wife may know her husband still lives, and a mother may know her son still breathes.
The crimes of the government should not be paid for with your life.
Stop.
Is writing a letter home not worth more than continuing to flee into death?]
A small pencil was tied beneath each sheet.
When animals panic, they desperately search for a hole in which to hide from danger.
Humans were not so different.
They too would seize any chance at survival with trembling hands.
Under the enormous pressure of having just brushed past death, no one ran anymore. Most of the Polish soldiers squatted along the riverbank, clutching those letters as though they had caught hold of the last branch above a flood.
In less than half an hour, German tanks that had broken through in advance surrounded them.
From that moment onward, the Polish Western Front officially ceased to exist.
The effect of those letters was far greater than expected.
The retreating Polish Army had originally intended to use the villages between Poznań and Łódź to mobilize militias, lay mines, and conduct harassment operations.
But after one round of leaflet drops by the Air Force, most villages put down the rifles issued by the army and allowed themselves to be taken over by the German Army without resistance.
For villages reported by the army to be resisting, the Air Force brought no letters.
Only bombs.
Within two days, Łódź, Warsaw's outer moat, was already under siege.
In the east, however, progress from the Danzig direction was not as smooth.
The forces deployed there were fewer, and the air support available was far less substantial. They also faced obstruction from more than two hundred thousand Polish border troops, along with sporadic harassment from remaining Polish fighters.
Most importantly, because Poland had long been wary of Soviet Russia, nearly all of its anti-aircraft weapons had been deployed in the east.
Facing these threats, Rundstedt could not afford to be careless.
Fortunately, this old veteran of the military establishment was exceptionally skilled at finding the enemy's weakness.
The next day, from the enemy's increasingly sparse shelling, he realized that the Polish Army's supply of materials depended heavily on the railway line connected to Warsaw.
The bomber groups that had been used by the Western Theater like a carving knife were turned into a sharp blade in Rundstedt's hands.
When tank clusters briefly tore open gaps at two supply transfer towns, rendering local anti-aircraft defenses ineffective, Rundstedt immediately diverted two bomber groups to strike.
"Our targets this time are the train station and selected sections of railway track," the lead aircraft transmitted. "Execute according to plan. Maximize destruction of the railway transport lines. Quick, quick, quick."
"Received, lead plane."
The two bomber groups scattered in disciplined formation.
One section after another of railway was blasted apart, not randomly, but systematically, ensuring the Poles could not repair them quickly.
The station itself was reduced to ruins.
It could no longer handle cargo transport.
By the time the Poles realized Rundstedt's objective and tried to redeploy troops to strengthen their defenses and retake the supply transfer towns, the two armored divisions responsible for the attack had already withdrawn with practiced precision.
All they left behind was wreckage.
Without supplies, Rundstedt launched a series of attacks designed not merely to advance, but to drain the Polish Army's already dwindling reserves to the greatest possible extent.
The front line began to collapse rapidly.
Polish ammunition supplies soon became critically insufficient. Anti-aircraft weapons without ammunition were nothing but empty shells, and the Air Force took command of the battlefield.
Rundstedt maintained his style.
He repeatedly bombed Polish supply points, never allowing the enemy to breathe.
Zambrów, the largest rail and road hub of the Polish Army, suffered eighteen hours of air raids over two days.
By the end, there was no longer even a safe place in the city to store artillery shells.
As for the civilians, their minds had already been shaken by the leaflets.
The Polish Army could only commit expensive trained soldiers to repair work. With both front line combat personnel and supplies dwindling, the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Armored Divisions, acting as spearheads, easily broke through the flank defenses.
Zambrów fell on the night after the bombing ended.
That meant the remaining force of more than one hundred thousand Polish troops in eastern Poland had been completely encircled.
On the third night, Rundstedt received surrender telegrams from seven Polish divisions.
Fewer than thirty thousand men continued scattered resistance.
Only thirteen days had passed since the start of the war.
And Warsaw was already within sight.
.....
[If you don't want to wait for the next update, read 50 chapters ahead on P@treon.]
[[email protected]/FanficLord03]