NOVGO.NET Chapter 689: Ghosts of Dunkirk
Chapter 689: Ghosts of Dunkirk
The rails trembled beneath the weight of 100,000 men and their machines.
Soldiers, munitions, tanks, artillery… every armored shape required to field a modern army, rushed across the reinforced tracks.
Russia had entered the war almost the moment it began, and in under five days, the last of its first hundred thousand arrived at France’s doorstep.
These were not the Russian soldiers of old, drunk, corrupt, and catastrophically incompetent.
No… these men marched with twenty years of refinement behind them.
Their professionalism appeared to be rivaled only by those within the Armed Forces of the German Reich.
When they unloaded the armor, they did so with precision.
Machines were refueled, supplies stacked into convoys, and units moved out. Disciplined, efficient, professional.
And still… by the time they arrived, Paris was already within reach.
Everywhere they looked, war had passed.
The vineyards of Champagne, once sprawling, viridescent veins across the hills; lay charred, torched by artillery, rockets, and fire from the skies.
French dead rotted in the fields, some scorched to bone, others picked clean by wolves and flies.
Rain fell steadily, hissing on the wreckage, washing blood into the earth, feeding whatever would grow next.
It was not what they had expected.
Many were green, recruits fresh from training.
Others hadn’t seen combat since Spain… or Korea.
And yet nothing in their past had prepared them for the scale of devastation before them.
It was sobering. Harrowing.
One young lieutenant removed his helmet and knelt beside a corpse half-consumed by flame, its features unrecognizable.
He didn’t speak, but the way his fingers hovered above the scorched dog tags told the story, he was seeing not just an enemy, but a man, a mirror.
Another soldier whispered a prayer in Old Church Slavonic, while the unit chaplain simply crossed himself and muttered,
“We came too late to save them, but not too late to finish what they started.”
The company commander gave no speech. He merely gestured forward. And like ghosts, the Russian vanguard moved on.
This was not a war like the last one.
North of the Russian advance, still racing to catch up with the German Third and Eighth Armies, Erich’s battalion spearheaded the Airborne forces entering Belgium.
Their objective wasn’t Paris.
It was the coast.
The high command had ordered them to seize the port cities in France’s northern provinces.
Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne, no supply line could be allowed to reopen, no evacuation corridor permitted.
They passed through Nord with barely a fight.
Many believed the French had fallen back to establish a final defense around Paris.
But as the column approached Dunkirk, Erich heard the clipped voice of Central Command in his headset:
“Our satellites confirm OPFOR concentrations inside Dunkirk. The enemy has entrenched and prepared for ambush. You are not to advance. Await aerospace support.”
He relayed the order without hesitation.
The column halted.
Artillery units and MLRs wheeled into position on the surrounding ridges, guided by satellite telemetry.
Fire solutions were calculated.
Target coordinates were uploaded.
Erich climbed from the hatch of his command vehicle.
He lit a cigarette with one hand and removed his helmet with the other, glancing at his watch as the rain began to fall.
He counted the seconds.
Then came the thunder.
The men around him spoke in hushed tones, voices dampened by the drizzle and the knowledge of what was coming.
Some tightened their helmet straps.
Others muttered about their families or offered nervous jokes.
Erich said nothing.
He had fought long enough to know what firestorms looked like, and what they left behind.
How could he ever forget the craters left behind from a similar series of strikes in Spain less than a decade prior?
“They won’t know what hit them,” his radio officer muttered.
“They’ll know,” Erich said grimly. “For a second.”
First, a distant roar, then a dozen streaks across the sky, shrieking east to west.
Short-Range Ballistic Missiles, fired from mobile platforms near Bremen, screamed into Dunkirk.
Each carried a massive thermobaric payload, non-nuclear, but close enough in effect when synchronized.
Their impacts birthed fireballs and shockwaves that shattered concrete, glass, and bone alike.
Mushroom clouds rose in columns above the shattered skyline.
Erich exhaled smoke into the rain.
As soon as the pressure wave receded and the wailing of the wounded rose behind the fire and dust, he gave a single nod to his radio operator.
The order went out.
Engines roared.
Treads churned mud.
The German Airborne surged forward, hundreds of soldiers, backed by armor, artillery, and raw momentum, poured into the smoking ruins.
Dunkirk was not besieged.
It was gutted.
The defenders, stunned and scorched, barely had time to scream before the second wave hit them.
Bullets, mortars, flamethrowers.
Entire bunkers vanished beneath the assault.
Erich watched it unfold through his binoculars, the cigarette still burning in the corner of his mouth.
He said nothing. He just shook his head.
Then he stamped the cigarette into the mud, slid back into the command vehicle, and sealed the hatch behind him.
The battle raged on.
In Dunkirk, French defenders emerged from collapsed bunkers and ruined buildings, dazed and staggering like sleepwalkers.
Some fired blindly, others dropped their weapons and fled into the alleys.
German assault teams cleared buildings room by room, often meeting no resistance, only the silence of the dead or the weeping of the wounded.
Erich’s voice echoed over the command net. “Sweep. Secure. Interrogate anyone still breathing. We move again at first light.”
Above them, turboprop fighters buzzed like flies, scanning for stragglers.
Dunkirk was broken, and yet the war was still waging.
In Champagne.
In the Alps and beyond the Pyrenees.
France would not last much longer.
Of that, Erich was certain.
And as he sat there listening to the radio chatter, one thought echoed in his mind:
His grandfather was either the greatest strategist the world had ever known…
…or the devil come to damn humanity more than it had already done to itself.
Either way, he had orders to follow, and a duty yet unfulfilled.