Chapter Eighty-two
After the Battle of Prokhorovka, Favre left the Eastern Front and was reassigned to the Western Front to join a temporary instructional unit stationed in France. Favre handed over Tiger No. 223 to the regimental headquarters and traveled with his crew by train, arriving at their base in France on June 20.
As soon as he arrived at the garrison, he immediately tried to ask for leave from his superiors. "I need to relax and take a break!" He shamelessly made the request. Given his reputation as the Empire's number one tank killer, he was granted leave. Favniel dove headfirst into the local bars and dance halls, getting drunk and having a wild time every night. Within just three days, he had blown through all of his allowance. At a bar near the garrison, he ran into an old friend, Donbergel - now a gunner on a Jagdtiger that had been pulled back from the front lines. The two of them drank together and were lucky enough to run into another friend, Aubrey, who had switched careers and was now driving a Jagdpanther as a tank commander. Favniel and Donbergel teased Aubrey about his "short and small cannon" while showing off their own tanks' large caliber guns. Aubrey shot back, mocking Favniel for having no tank to drive and being a eunuch in the Byzantine Empire. The group of friends roughhoused for a bit, temporarily putting aside their troubles and memories of fallen comrades...
Here is the translation:
Back from leave, Fawfnir had just returned to the military camp when he learned that their tanks would arrive tonight. Everyone was curious about what kind of tank they would be assigned, and many people bet on whether it would be a Tiger or a King Tiger, with over a thousand marks already wagered. At night, the train stopped at a small station outside the camp, and the unfamiliar tanks on the cars attracted everyone's attention. Many people sighed and lost their bets. Fawfnir looked at the new tanks and saw that they resembled the Russian Stalin 2 tank, without the interleaved road wheels commonly used by German tanks, with a lower profile, and a turret similar to a plate rather than the half-egg shape of the Russian turret. The gun was still the familiar King Tiger's gun. The whole vehicle looked smaller than the King Tiger. Sure enough, when the tanks were distributed, the officer in charge introduced them: "This is the new E-series tank, with the designation E50 'Wildcat', weighing 46 tons, with a 900 horsepower engine, and a top speed of 50 kilometers per hour. The gun used is still the KWK43L71, with better defensive capabilities than your previous King Tiger." Then each crew took possession of their own E50, Fawfnir again painted a tiger skull on his tank, which was still numbered 233, as his unit had not changed and he remained a member of the 503rd Independent Heavy Tank Battalion's Second Company.
It wasn't long after receiving the new tank that he became familiar with its operation, and to his surprise, this tank had a new device - a gun stabilizer, which greatly improved the hit rate. Fafnir also experienced what it meant to be strategically bombed for the first time! When he arrived, the bombing was just ending, but now during training, the bombing started again. Fafnir watched from afar as the train station, transportation hub, highway, factory, and even possible German military bases were bombed day and night, especially at night, when it was a sea of flames. In the sky, German fighter planes tangled with British and American fighter planes and bombers, with the latter two countries having an obvious advantage in numbers. The bombers and fighters formed a three-dimensional defensive formation, using their strong self-defense firepower to drive away the German fighter planes. Meanwhile, the German fighter planes used their speed advantage to repeatedly break into the "box" formed by the bombers and fighters, launching attacks under the intense firepower of the bombers, with planes occasionally falling from the sky in flames.
By June 28, the bombing reached a climax. The camp of Fawzi al-Qawuqji was subjected to extremely intense bombardment. British bombers dropped what they called "grand slam" five-ton bombs, completely turning the area into dust - fortunately, the tanks had left the camp in advance and covered themselves with camouflage, so there were no losses, but the soldiers suffered heavy casualties, many people were shaken to death.
By the morning of June 29, countless ships were scattered across the English Channel, and the sky was almost completely covered by British and American planes - Operation Overlord in Normandy had begun! Later that day, Favigny and his men received orders to immediately complete vehicle maintenance work, board their vehicles and prepare to reinforce the Normandy area. Some infantry units had already arrived in Normandy the night before - it was a stroke of luck for the Germans, as some troops were going up to relieve them.
Fafnir had met one of the reinforcements a few days ago, and this person's spiritual fluctuations were clearly different from those of other soldiers in this new unit - it turned out to be an old soldier from the Eastern Front, named Martin, but Fafnir didn't hear his surname.
Martin was a machine gunner, and at the start of this landing battle, he hid in an air raid shelter with other soldiers, enduring the bombing of bombers in the sky and the naval gunfire from British and American warships on the sea surface. They didn't come out to fight until the frontline observer saw countless landing craft rushing towards the shore. The Germans used their remaining artillery to fire at the landing craft on the sea surface, almost every gun only managed to fire a few rounds before being destroyed by British or American planes or naval gunfire, but they still achieved results. Several landing craft were hit by shells, some sank directly, and soldiers on board jumped out desperately, but many people sank to the bottom of the sea due to their heavy loads. A few landing craft may have been blown up with ammunition or fuel, exploding into a huge fireball, with bodies and weapons flying everywhere like flowers scattered by fairies, but more landing craft landed safely on the beach.
Martin and the other German soldiers opened fire immediately, Martin's MG gun under his precise control, the landing point directly covered a landing craft that had dropped its ramp - 1200 rounds per minute of bullets instantly "swept" the boat, the bullet points were accurate, almost none hit the hull, all swept into the group of American soldiers on the boat, a terrible massacre!
The massacre did not end there, before the machine gun nest was noticed by attacking aircraft, Martin mowed down three landing craft with his machine gun, almost a hundred American soldiers died under his guns in 2 minutes. After shooting up the Americans on the boats, Martin and his assistant gunner immediately withdrew from this position. Then they saw that many American soldiers had gathered under the seawall and cliffs on the shore, so they struggled to crawl over two hundred meters of beach from the other side, while avoiding fire from both sides, after half an hour of effort, they finally climbed up a rocky outcropping at right angles to the seawall and cliffs. Martin and his assistant gunner hid under the rocks, took aim at a group of American soldiers in front of them and started firing. The whip of flames swept back and forth through the crowd, before being sent down to hell by an A1 Skyraider attack aircraft, Martin turned this seawall and cliff into a human hell - all this only took 5 minutes. Possibly as many as 300-350 American soldiers died under Martin's machine gun...
Martein's desperate defense did not hold off the American landing for much time, and later that day, the British and American allied forces broke through all the landing sites, consolidating their beachheads. The German defenses in Normandy were already gone - although they had inflicted huge casualties on the Allies, with at least 25,000 killed or about to die on the first day, more than 150 tanks sank directly into the water, and more than 50 tanks were destroyed on the beachhead, over a hundred landing craft were damaged, and more than 70 aircraft were shot down while supporting the beachhead. However, there are no longer any organized German troops in front of the Allies, and the nearest troops are also outside a day's journey. This is thanks to the thorough destruction of thousands of bombers in the Normandy area. It seems that the end of the German fascists is approaching - what a surprise!
