Operation Rosenblau

The belly of the Junkers Ju 52 was freezing at 2,000 meters, not to mention deafeningly loud. The men were all doubled over, paying as little mind as they could to the roaring engines as they all sat in a row waiting for the inevitable.

Feldwebel Rolf Steiger checked his rifle for the third time; not because he thought there was any reason it may have jammed, but because doing something kept his mind off the fact that they were about to be dropped into a frozen Russian hell with flimsy last minute orders that barely made any tactical sense.

“Five minutes,” the Fallschirmjäger dispatcher shouted over the all-encompassing engine roar.

Steiger nodded to his men hunched along the fuselage. Gefreiter Metz; the thin, gaunt career soldier with the scars on his face looked back at him with his cold, dead eyes. It was a silent acknowledgment of what was about to happen.

Young Soldat Hoffmann; the perfect physical model of Aryan youth at barely twenty, with bright blue eyes and straw-blond hair, sat next to Metz. Hoffman was still green enough to believe they might actually survive this war, and he was looking at the floor of the plane, no doubt thinking that he would rather be anywhere else in the world than here.

Further down, sandwiched among other infantrymen was Oberfunker Klaus, the radio operator, chain-smoking even in the belly of the plane despite the strict regulations; not to mention constant threats from the Fallschirmjäger officers.

Sanitätssoldat Moeller lay slumped against Klaus. The unit’s medic was only in his mid-twenties, but he had the Weltschmerz of a man thrice his age. He was cuddled against Klaus with his eyes closed, like a child against a parent on a long train journey.

At the end of the line of sorry soldiers was Hauptmann Renner, the captain in charge, who’d been handed these terrible orders directly from Oberst Heitz, an of officer of the Wehrmacht High Command. He hadn’t questioned the orders once, at least not out loud, which told Steiger everything he needed to know about how desperate things had become. Dropping regular-Joe infantry behind enemy lines like this was basically suicide, not that the top brass ever had any qualms about sending men to their deaths; such was the usual business of war. No doubt Steiger’s small unit would soon become yet another set of brave heroes who sacrificed everything for the Fatherland.

“Fuck the Führer, and fuck the Fatherland,” Steiger remembered Metz as saying when they received their latest set of suicidal orders.

The mission was unorthodox but quite simple, Hauptmann Renner had told them over a pot of stale coffee in a frozen, mouldy tent behind the Estonian front line. A Field Marshal’s daughter, the young and apparently rather beautiful Greta von Reichardt, was being held in a farmhouse ten kilometers behind Soviet lines. Intelligence suggested that a “light guard” of rogue, desperate Russian infantry had seized the girl on the orders of an unknown Russian intelligence source. Steiger and his men had been ordered to secure her, get to the extraction point, and return to German lines.

“We have forty-eight hours, maximum! Anything after that and the girl will probably be dead, or worse,” Renner had said.

Now, some in the small group - Metz among them, of course - had the tenacity to pitch the very question of how it was even possible that a jewel as important as Generalfeldmarschall von Reichardt‘s only daughter ended up snatched from her bed by the Reds in the first place. They had not expected answers to that question, and had been rewarded in line with their expectations. It seemed fantastical a proposition; impossible even, that such an asset could be snatched from within Axis territory. Whatever had happened, the order had come down from Wehrmacht High Command, and off they had marched - with papers - to the closest Fallschirmjäger unit chief to request the air drop.

It was debatable whether or not the new detail beat freezing to death in a foxhole in the trenches, waiting for a Russian shell to land on their heads.

Feldwebel Steiger had been fighting since France. He’d seen many men, good and bad, fall to the Reds or to the Allies or to the elements or even to old fashioned Wehrmacht incompetence. He’d learned that “simple” operations were often the ones that got men killed. In fact, most operations were, on paper, “simple”. It was the reality that often reflected far more unseen terrors, complications and nasty surprises.

“Two minutes!” the Fallschirmjäger dispatcher screeched. He seemed almost glad to be rid of them; to send them over the side of the plane with a smile. “Try smoking out there, will you!”

The men of the unit rose reluctantly from the bench, and Steiger dared a peek out of the hatch. Below, the harsh Russian landscape stretched endlessly, white and mostly featureless, broken only by dark smears of forest. Somewhere down there, the Soviets were waiting, as they always were; an endless tide of death. Ivan didn’t know about this drop - not yet, at least - intelligence was confident about that much. But confidence was a luxury Steiger couldn’t afford; any confidence from the fat cats and top brass - the ones with the hot poker prodding the lower men of Germany into the line of bullets - meant squat to Steiger.

“Go, go, GO!”

It should have been Hauptmann Renner over the edge first, in truth. The captain should have led by example. But, more often than not as the war ground on, the Hauptmann joined them in the field on less and less occasion, and the men looked to Steiger as their leader, or at least some sort of surrogate father figure.

And so he jumped first, the wind snatching his breath as he fell from the sanctuary of the Junkers and then it was torn from his chest completely as the parachute deployed, brutally slowing his fall. For a moment there was nothing but white sky and the whistle of cold air. Then the cold earth rushed up and he hit it hard, rolling to bury his chute in the snow. He was alive, and in one piece, and in no hurry to do that again.

The others came down in sequence, like ghosts or nephilim from the heavens back down to the frozen landscape. Hoffmann landed badly, gasping, tangling in his parachute as it came down over him. He lay in the snow like a trapped animal under the cover of the chute, but he was moving. The boy had never jumped from a plane before, in all fairness. He got to his feet with a limp, his rifle hanging awkwardly about his middle. It could have been worse, a broken leg wouldn’t mean leaving him behind.

Steiger waved frantically at the men who were pulling themselves from their straps. They had maybe ten minutes before someone spotted the chutes in the open field, if they hadn’t already heard the planes.

Renner materialized through the swirling snow, rifle ready. “Form up. Two kilometers to the tree line, then we move east toward the farmhouse.”

Steiger waved again to indicate movement, just in case those furthest away hadn’t heard the order.

They moved fast, boots crunching on the crust of ice which blanketed the short grass. The cold was beyond anything Steiger had experienced, as if Russia reserved the iciest temperature for its own lands. It didn’t just bite; it infiltrated, turning blood sluggish and thoughts crystalline and strange. Hoffmann was already beginning to shake as he tried to keep pace with his unit, his face turning the color of bleached bone.

“Keep moving,” Steiger muttered, gripping the boy’s arm, “for if you stop, you die. We don’t have time to carry you.”