Chapter 306: Blood-Stained Flag
"Didn't I make it perfectly clear that our winter uniforms were supposed to sustain combat operations even in the depths of a Soviet winter? Then why did they begin failing the moment our men reached the Arctic Circle?"
Jörg's voice was not particularly loud.
That only made it worse.
The two owners of the clothing companies standing before his desk visibly trembled. One man's knees gave way almost immediately, and he dropped onto the carpet.
"Mr. President, please allow me to explain. Several months ago, our material reserves were severely strained, especially wool and other textiles. Because of that, we temporarily substituted some of the winter equipment originally prepared for the Polish region..."
"I don't care about your excuses."
Jörg cut him off without raising his voice.
His expression remained cold.
"I gave you a requirement. The government issued you contracts. Cardolan extended you credit and financing. You were given money, authority, manpower, and time."
His fingers tapped once against the report lying on the desk.
"In return, you were expected to deliver equipment capable of meeting military standards."
He looked at the two men.
"You failed."
Neither dared breathe too loudly.
"I asked for a satisfactory answer. What you gave me was this."
Jörg leaned back in his chair.
"I am not satisfied."
His gaze shifted toward the man standing near the wall.
"Heydrich. Handle it."
One of the businessmen instantly went pale.
The moment he saw Heydrich step forward, whatever composure remained in him shattered.
"Mr. President! Herr President, please! Give me another chance! Just one more chance, I beg you!"
Jörg said nothing.
The guards dragged both men from the office while their pleas echoed down the corridor.
Only after the door closed did Jörg pick up the sealed intelligence file Heydrich had brought earlier.
He opened it and skimmed several pages.
"There are military supplies being resold through the logistics departments?"
Heydrich nodded.
"How widespread?"
"Small-scale cases existed before," Heydrich replied. "Most were suppressed internally by officers connected to the old aristocratic establishment. Only a limited number of people were involved. A few were dismissed, a few were shot, and the matter ended there."
His tone remained completely flat.
"If it had remained on that scale, Mr. President, I might have preferred to ignore it as well."
Heydrich placed several photographs on the desk.
"But some people have become ambitious."
Jörg glanced down.
Aircraft.
Documents.
Officers photographed meeting intermediaries.
"They were preparing to resell fighter aircraft," Heydrich continued. "They even contacted what they believed were French military buyers."
A faint smile appeared on his lips.
"The buyers were our agents."
Jörg studied the photographs without visible surprise.
Success always created its own parasites.
Years of victory had expanded the Wehrmacht, enlarged military procurement, multiplied logistics channels, and placed unimaginable quantities of state property into the hands of thousands of officers, quartermasters, contractors, and administrators.
It was inevitable that some would begin mistaking national property for private opportunity.
"I understand."
Jörg closed the folder.
"Compile the evidence and hand the matter over to the military courts. Let the Wehrmacht clean its own house."
Heydrich looked at him briefly before nodding.
"Yes, Mr. President."
There was a reason Jörg chose that arrangement.
Germany might increasingly revolve around one man's authority, but the state itself remained an enormous machine composed of competing institutions, traditions, bureaucracies, and interests.
A machine of that size could not be run merely by issuing orders and shooting everyone who objected.
Every cog had to remain properly aligned.
If Heydrich's intelligence apparatus were allowed to openly purge Wehrmacht officers, the issue would cease to be corruption. It would become a confrontation between the intelligence services and the military establishment.
Then ambitious men would begin whispering.
Generals would become suspicious.
Old noble families would speak of humiliation.
The security services would answer with arrests.
And an internal struggle would begin consuming energy Germany needed elsewhere.
There was no reason to create such damage merely for the satisfaction of personally crushing a handful of thieves.
Military crimes would be judged by military courts.
The lesson would remain just as bloody.
But the institution itself would deliver it.
Sometimes statecraft meant knowing when not to use the sharpest knife available.
"One more matter," Heydrich said before leaving. "The audits will continue."
"They should."
Jörg's gaze hardened again.
"If anyone believes victory has given them permission to steal from Germany, correct that misunderstanding."
"Understood."
Heydrich turned and departed.
Only moments later, another knock came.
A Wehrmacht staff officer entered, came to attention, and saluted.
"Commander-in-Chief, the latest report from North Africa."
Jörg gestured for him to continue.
"Rommel's North Africa Army Group has captured Algiers. The French forces are withdrawing eastward toward Libya."
The officer unfolded a situation map across the desk.
"The General Staff recommends consolidating Tunisia first and securing the western theater completely before beginning the main offensive toward Egypt."
He moved his finger toward the Mediterranean.
"The Navy has also defeated the British Mediterranean Fleet and is continuing operations to compress the remaining enemy-controlled maritime space."
For the first time that morning, some of the chill disappeared from Jörg's expression.
"Good."
His eyes moved across Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and finally Egypt.
"Tell Rommel not to overextend. Pause the main advance where necessary, consolidate what we've taken, and keep watching Soviet movements."
The staff officer immediately straightened.
"Yes, Commander-in-Chief!"
He saluted and withdrew.
Only then did Jörg finally receive something resembling a lunch break.
He had spent the entire morning moving from military reports to procurement failures, from corruption investigations to operational planning.
The door opened again.
Ethan entered carrying a plate and placed a freshly cooked steak in front of him.
"Mr. President."
Jörg picked up his knife and fork.
"What does the afternoon look like?"
"Heisenberg's nuclear physics laboratory."
Ethan placed a folder beside the plate.
"He reported a significant breakthrough two days ago and personally requested that you inspect the results."
Jörg paused briefly.
Then he nodded.
"Very well."
While Berlin turned its attention toward science, procurement, and the expanding machinery of war, another capital was drowning in reports of victory.
Moscow.
With Yenov increasingly inserting himself into military affairs, the situation on paper seemed to improve almost overnight.
Good news arrived one report after another.
Villages had supposedly fallen.
Enemy formations had supposedly collapsed.
Breakthroughs were allegedly imminent.
Stalin's mood improved considerably.
Unfortunately, a large portion of those victories existed mainly in ink.
Some had indeed been purchased with staggering numbers of Soviet lives.
Others had simply been invented.
Among the most shameless offenders was the 6th Infantry Division of the Kyiv Military District.
Because of the way headquarters distributed supplies between formations, the division's food allocation had become completely inadequate for sustained high-intensity operations.
Men were exhausted.
Rations were insufficient.
Morale deteriorated rapidly.
The national resentment that had been suppressed beneath years of purges, political surveillance, and executions began surfacing again.
Several company commanders were shot for failing to maintain discipline.
It changed nothing.
Hungry soldiers did not become stronger because another officer had been executed.
Faced with battlefield failure on one side and political execution on the other, the commander of the 6th Infantry Division made the choice many Soviet officers were beginning to make.
He lied.
His report claimed that the division had achieved significant progress around Lavlar Village and was preparing to organize the main assault against the next section of the Mannerheim Line.
It was fiction.
Headquarters, desperate for results, accepted it as fact.
Worse, they acted on it.
Two additional infantry divisions were ordered forward.
No sufficient reinforcement was provided on either flank.
No reliable reconnaissance confirmed the situation ahead.
The two divisions simply advanced into the position described in the report.
And marched directly into a Finnish encirclement.
The result was catastrophic.
Of approximately twenty-five thousand men committed to the operation, a large number were captured.
Fewer than ten thousand ultimately escaped.
The Soviet forces on the Karelian Isthmus had entered the campaign with overwhelming numerical superiority and a clear offensive posture.
Yet repeated command failures, falsified reports, political interference, and logistical collapse transformed that offensive into confusion.
The entire front gradually sank into stalemate.
Even Mannerheim found himself struggling to understand the enemy.
The Soviets possessed more men.
More tanks.
More artillery.
More aircraft.
More industrial capacity.
Yet somehow, their command repeatedly ordered tens of thousands of soldiers to move in ways so self-destructive that some decisions appeared almost suicidal.
Units advanced without support.
Divisions attacked without adequate ammunition.
Commanders concealed setbacks.
Political officers demanded progress regardless of terrain or circumstance.
The enormous Soviet military machine was not being stopped purely by Finnish firepower.
It was tripping over its own limbs.
And matters in the north were even worse.
By mid-April, after two weeks of continuous fighting, many Soviet formations still lacked reliable supply lines.
The Finnish cities in those regions were defended by only two regular divisions.
Yet the Soviet Army had not even reached their outskirts.
In many areas, the forces actually holding up the Soviet advance were not regular army formations at all.
They were civilians.
Hunters.
Local militias.
Volunteer guerrillas.
And small elite detachments dispatched by the Finnish Army.
That was enough.
The northern forests had become a nightmare.
At night, Soviet camps often remained completely dark.
Men refused to light lamps.
They hesitated even to build fires despite the cold, because everyone understood what a flame meant.
A target.
Somewhere beyond the camp perimeter, hidden among white trees and black branches, a Finnish rifleman might already be watching.
The fear of snipers grew into something close to collective paranoia.
At the slightest suspicion of movement, Soviet units opened fire.
Machine guns swept forests.
Mortars pounded hillsides.
Artillery batteries fired blindly into snowy woodland merely because someone claimed to have seen a silhouette.
Much of the ammunition struck nothing.
The shells were already scarce.
The fear only made them disappear faster.
Yet the official reports remained triumphant.
Every day, lines supposedly advanced.
Every day, enemy resistance supposedly weakened.
Every day, victory supposedly came closer.
And with every report, Yenov's influence grew.
He became increasingly indispensable in Stalin's eyes, appearing to be the hard man capable of forcing the army forward when professional soldiers hesitated.
But lies had limits.
Sooner or later, battlefield reality would reach Moscow.
Stalin was not ignorant of this.
In fact, he had already noticed enough inconsistencies to understand that Yenov was manipulating reports.
He simply allowed it.
For now.
Because Stalin had reached an uncomfortable conclusion.
The Finnish campaign had stalled.
But the leader of the Soviet Union could not publicly admit that the Finnish campaign had stalled.
Not after promising rapid victory.
Not after dismissing warnings.
Not after ordering hundreds of thousands of men forward.
To acknowledge a strategic failure would mean acknowledging his own error.
And Stalin had no intention of doing that.
Yenov, however, offered another possibility.
If the campaign failed because Yenov had interfered with military command...
If casualties had risen because Yenov had falsified reports...
If logistics collapsed because Yenov's purges had frightened officers into silence...
Then the explanation became much simpler.
The state had not failed.
Stalin had not misjudged the war.
One subordinate had betrayed the trust placed in him.
And once that story became necessary, Stalin already knew what to do.
He would break the blade he had used.
Yenov could absorb the blame.
The dead could remain buried.
And Stalin could walk away from the blood-stained flag without allowing a single drop to touch his own hands.
....
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