Chapter 422: The Battle for Norwich

In truth, landing in Britain was an unprecedented challenge for the German army. This challenge extended to every corner, making the vast German war machine feel a faint sense of unease.

The first to feel the pressure was the German Navy’s logistics and transport department. To accumulate the fuel and strategic materials needed for the landing operation, they had been working tirelessly since the end of January, and it was only on February 12th that they had barely met the minimum required standards.

Thousands of tons of supplies were transported to the British landing site, and then, to save time, were sometimes dumped directly into the nearby sea as the ships hastily returned, just to be able to make another supply run on the same day.

Even so, the German transport fleet felt the strain of being stretched to its limit. They finally understood how difficult and arduous it was for Britain, as a vast hegemonic empire, to maintain such a massive naval fleet. Of course, while it was difficult to build, it was simple to destroy. The German Navy had taken only a month to inflict devastating losses on the enormous British fleet.

The difficulties in logistics and supply were, in a way, intangible. Compared to the hardships faced by the front-line troops, they seemed less conspicuous.

It was in this landing operation that the German infantry truly witnessed the cruelty of war. The previous method of racing forward in a steamroller-like fashion, with panzer units and the air force leading the way, had been replaced by a repetitive, inch-by-inch struggle for every piece of land. The rapid advances of a thousand li a day had become a brutal slaughter where progress was measured in a few kilometers, or even a few hundred meters, per day.

In the battle on the landing beach, for example, the German army had lost over a thousand men in the first ten minutes. The soldiers had to endure the bone-chillingly cold seawater while charging into enemy machine-gun fire. If not for the limited number of British defenders on the coastline, the Germans might have been driven back into the sea before they could even get ashore.

The battle for Cromer, in particular, made the German soldiers understand the cruelty of urban warfare. Even the elite Akado Youth Division suffered heavy losses. The tactics the German soldiers excelled at—night combat, armored thrusts, and large-scale flanking maneuvers—seemed to be rare in the battle for Britain. Instead, they were met with one small town after another, one British defensive strongpoint after another.

The British were constantly learning and improving, learning how to fight from the German soldiers. They paid their tuition with blood and lives, trying every means possible to grow quickly and become true warriors capable of defending their homeland.

The Germans were also constantly learning and improving. They learned to fight in smarter ways, learned to face the heavy sacrifices of urban combat with composure, and learned to use the various weapons at their disposal to create a grimly satisfying rhythm of slaughter in the city streets.

Engineers devised a way to weld six Panzerfausts together with a pair of wheels, creating a new weapon that could be controlled with wires and a detonator. This weapon could fire six rockets at a single target in succession until the target was reduced to a pile of rubble.

This weapon was often used with two sections of scrapped tank tracks. They would dig a hole under one wheel and use the tank tracks to chock the other, causing the Panzerfaust launcher to wobble erratically when fired, which created a terrifying spread effect for the short-range rockets. The German soldiers used this simple weapon to easily destroy buildings occupied by the British, and the soldiers nicknamed it the “Building Terminator.”

In the street fighting in Norwich, a German soldier shook his head to dislodge the dust from his helmet and looked at a building in the distance that had been completely destroyed by a “Building Terminator.” He gave a satisfied thumbs-up to the men behind him. “Clear!”

Hearing his shout, the soldiers behind him quickly grabbed their weapons and charged, hunched over, towards the collapsed building. They had to occupy it as quickly as possible, or in half an hour, the British might reappear in the ruins to defend the territory beneath the rubble.

In a small square on the other side of the city, a German soldier with an assault rifle crept closer to the door of a building. He signaled for his comrades behind him to help. Two soldiers stood ready by the door with hand grenades. He kicked open the locked door, and the two soldiers behind him simultaneously threw their grenades inside.

Two massive explosions sent out a powerful shockwave, shattering the glass and making the door rattle on its hinges. The German soldiers then charged into the smoke-filled house with their weapons raised. This was followed by the sound of intense gunfire from within, and it was impossible to know which side had ultimately won.

In the city’s western square, three Panther tanks were parked next to a central fountain, and an 88mm anti-aircraft gun was pointed at the sky. The German armored units were forced to play the role of supporting the infantry in urban assaults. Because the British soldiers did not have many anti-tank weapons, the losses for the German panzer units had not yet reached an unbearable level.

But the losses were still there. In the morning, a concealed British anti-tank gun at a street corner had destroyed a Panzer III from the 5th Light Panzer Division. In the afternoon, two Panther tanks were destroyed while providing cover for an infantry attack. Three hours after the battle for Norwich had begun, the Germans had already lost nine tanks.

By 2:26 PM on February 17th, Norwich was still under the control of the British defenders, although one-third of the city had been occupied by German soldiers. The Germans knew full well that the British would counter-attack at night and make some gains. So, after a full day of fierce attacks, the Germans had, in fact, achieved very little.

“My troops are not skilled in this type of combat. Or rather, Germany’s elite forces should not be committed to this type of combat,” Rundstedt wrote in his diary. “We lose 300 men to capture a city block, the enemy loses 500 to take it back, and when we recapture it, we have to pay a price of 200, or even more, men.”

“This is a tremendous waste of resources,” he concluded. “I would rather fight a battle of 200,000 men in the open field than waste our time and energy in these cities.”

His complaints were answered. At 4 PM, the German strategic bombing of the Norwich area began, using large quantities of napalm bombs. The entire city was turned into a sea of fire. The losses the German bombers inflicted on the British tilted the subsequent battle for Norwich in the Germans’ favor, but it was still bloody and cruel, still a cause for helpless sighs.

To reduce losses, Rundstedt deployed special forces to clear out the British soldiers in the city. The effect was noticeable, but the losses were still heavy. After inflicting 1,000 casualties on the British, the special forces were also forced to withdraw from the attack due to their own devastating losses. Of the 180 special forces soldiers who participated in the operation, 97 were killed, more than half.

The silver lining was that the Germans had used their losses to open up a new front. The grenadiers of the 1st Infantry Division, after an attack that cost them 35 men, got close to the central government building, but they were unable to advance any further due to the desperate British resistance.

Both sides were at their wits’ end over the ruins of Norwich. Like the Battle of Verdun in World War I, every minute, every second of the battle for Norwich, a soldier lost his life. If it wasn’t a British soldier, it was a German one. But both sides were determined to fight to the death and were prepared to break their opponent’s confidence here.

The tragedy of the soldier is that a single word from the generals above is enough to throw you into a place more brutal than hell to taste the helplessness and bitterness of war. Two hundred German grenadiers who had just arrived at the outskirts of Norwich were given a short rest before being sent by a stroke of their commander’s pen into the still-burning and exploding city. And from the moment these 200 men entered the front line, it would take less than half an hour for only 100 of them to be left…

On the other side, the British would certainly not give up this important city easily. They moved troops and threw every unit they could find into the great pit that was Norwich. The city was now like a blood-mouthed monster, devouring the lives of soldiers from both sides. By 4:30 PM that evening, the German army had lost 3,900 soldiers in the vicinity of Norwich. The British were even worse off, with 7,400 killed and missing.

Night began to fall. The British welcomed the fourth night since the German landing. The bad weather they had been hoping for still had not arrived; God was still on the German’s side. But the British had held their positions with tenacious willpower, and the flag of the British Empire still flew over the center of Norwich. Montgomery had bought Britain another day, but no one knew what kind of turning point this one day could bring to the teetering British Empire.

That night, for the first time, British bombers visited the German positions. There were not many of them, but they caused considerable trouble for the Germans. The bombers launched a surprise attack on several small German-controlled piers, destroying some of the pontoon docks the Germans had erected. However, these planes were also met with fierce return fire from the German anti-aircraft units. About 20 British planes were shot down by the superior 88mm anti-aircraft guns.

The British launched a frenzied counter-attack within the city of Norwich, and the German infantry switched from attackers to defenders. These German grenadiers proved a point to the British: anyone facing a well-organized urban defense must pay a heavy price to attack it. After suffering 2,000 casualties, the British had not managed to retake a single city block.

That night, German bombers continued to bomb the British-held areas. The British ground troops, already accustomed to being ravaged by the German air force, did not suffer many losses. They carefully dispersed their forces, hid their tanks and cannons, and became as adept at it as the German army in Normandy in July 1944, in another timeline.

The novel has already been fully translated up to the final chapter. You can access it on my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/caleredhair