gnovel Chapter 49 Stuka's Requiem
Chapter 49 Stuka's Requiem
Chapter 49 Stuka's Requiem (Fifth Update)
伯尔格上空2000米，德国空军第2俯冲轰炸机联队（StG2），17：05PM。
"This is Black Hawk, lead aircraft." Target confirmed: Berg City Hall.
Lieutenant Weber looked down through the cockpit glass at the small town below, which resembled a toy model yet was shrouded in wisps of black smoke.
At the edge of his vision, on the northern horizon, a bustling coastline could be faintly seen—that was Dunkirk. There, four hundred thousand British and French troops were desperately crammed onto the beaches, the "exclusive hunting ground" promised to the Führer by the Reich Air Force Commander-in-Chief Göring.
Compared to sinking destroyers full of soldiers or turning those devastated beaches into battlefields, the task in this small town was so tedious it was utterly uninspiring.
"I really don't understand what those army guys are doing."
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The wingman's voice crackled on the radio, laced with undisguised complaint: "The 10th Panzer Division? Isn't that General Guderian's trump card? They've been held up by this little town all afternoon? And we have to clean up their mess?"
Lieutenant Weber adjusted his flight goggles, looking down at the German tanks that were stuck like beetles, and scoffed, "They can only crawl in the mud, after all. I heard they lost a lot of equipment trying to attack this place. What a bunch of useless trash—"
The wingman, looking at the mission area they were about to reach, was somewhat puzzled: "I can't see any smoke from anti-aircraft guns, not even a decent machine gun position. Have the French all fled? Or are they hiding under their beds praying to God that we'll drop the bombs accurately?"
"Don't be careless."
Weber chewed on a piece of mint gum that was already losing its flavor, and though he said this, his voice carried the condescending arrogance typical of German Luftwaffe pilots: "Those army idiots are crying in the telegrams that there are tough nuts to crack here," saying that the French artillery is as accurate as if it had eyes.
He used the Revy sight to lock onto the red spire of the city hall.
"One squadron (5 aircraft) follow me. Target: City Hall—the lair of that so-called prophet. I'm going to raze that Baroque building to the ground."
Weber calmly allocated targets; in his view, attacking a building with no anti-aircraft defenses would be a huge waste of five aircraft.
"As for the rest of the people—"
His gaze swept across the edge of the city, where two extremely conspicuous landmarks stood: "Squad 2 and Squad 3, do you see that brick-red barracks to the south, and that towering clock tower to the west? According to intelligence, those are the two highest observation posts of the French, and also the anthill where their forces are concentrated."
1
"Blow them up. I'm going to turn that place into ruins and bury all the rats hiding there."
"Understood, sir."
Weber sneered, abruptly shoving open the safety cover on the control stick, his thumb hovering over the red bomb release button: "In front of the Stuka, all bones are just powder waiting to be crushed."
"Since the army can't break through, let's flip the whole table."
"Attention everyone, follow me into the attack path. Activate the Jericho Horn—let those below hear how Death screams."
Weber turned on the red switch located on the left panel.
That was the activation switch for the "Jericho Horn," a wind-powered sound generator mounted on the landing gear fairing. It was harmless, but during high-speed dives, it emitted a high-frequency whistling sound similar to a banshee's scream.
That was a sound specifically designed to destroy the sanity of humans on the ground.
"Let these Frenchmen hear the songs of hell."
Weber slammed the joystick.
The massive Stuka bomber, like a rock, suddenly flipped 180 degrees, then nose-down, entered its iconic 90-degree death dive.
Buzz—! ! !
on the ground.
The chilling sound finally came.
At first it was just like the buzzing of a mosquito in the distance, but within seconds it turned into a piercing shriek that tore at your eardrums. It was a scream as if the air was being violently torn apart, with a crazy frequency that didn't belong to this world.
The sound caused soldiers on the ground who hadn't yet taken cover to instinctively cover their heads with their hands, kneel down, and some even began to scream uncontrollably.
This is psychological warfare. Before the bombs even fall, fear has already destroyed the will.
The first group of six Stukas flipped their fuselages, like six dead metal eagles hunting their prey, and swooped down almost vertically with a piercing shriek.
"Sir!!"
Higgins screamed, his foot on the firing pedal, instinctively trying to track the plane and move the cannon towards the growing dark shape.
"Hold your ground! Don't move!"
Arthur's voice nailed him to the spot. He remained seated, toying with the exquisitely crafted pen in his hand, without even looking up: "Trust those coordinates. That's the realm of mathematics."
"Don't let fear cloud your judgment. He's diving, he's accelerating, he's stiffening."
Arthur silently counted down the countdown given by the RTS.
During the dive, the Stuka must engage its speed brakes and maintain a perfectly straight flight path to ensure aiming stability. At this point, the pilot's field of vision is limited to the center point of the sight.
In that instant, the aircraft was no longer a nimble falcon, but a bullet gliding along a fixed trajectory.
"three----
Just as the lead Stuka was about to pass through the 1200-meter altitude layer, at its most stable and fastest speed, and at the moment when Lieutenant Webber was fully focused on pressing the bomb release button.
Arthur tapped his fingers lightly on the armrest of the chair: "Play the piano, Higgins."
boom!boom!boom!boom!
The four Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft guns fired almost simultaneously.
This wasn't some aimless barrage of bullets that relied on luck to crash into things; instead, it consisted of four straight, laser-like lines of lightning converging on a seemingly empty coordinate point.
That's the prediction point.
The next second, a miracle, or rather a disaster, occurred in physics.
Lieutenant Weber, who was diving at breakneck speed, didn't even see the fire. He just felt a sudden blur before his eyes, as if he had deliberately slammed his head into an invisible wall.
boom!
There is no suspense.
Two 40mm high-explosive tracer rounds hit his nose engine and the root of his right wing directly.
A huge, orange-red fireball suddenly exploded in the sky above Berg.
The lead aircraft, named "Black Hawk," didn't even have its disintegration process omitted. With a muffled explosion, it turned into a rain of burning aluminum sheets in mid-air, along with Lieutenant Webber's arrogance, all reduced to ashes.
Then came the second one.
Although it wasn't directly destroyed, a shell sliced off half of its vertical tail like a scalpel. The unbalanced plane instantly went out of control, spinning wildly in the air like a kite with a broken string, trailing plumes of black smoke and bombs that hadn't yet been dropped, before crashing headlong into the distant German positions.
"What?!"
The German pilots following closely behind were stunned by this sudden and precise interception.
The radio crackled with chaos: "Lead plane shot down! Lead plane shot down! An ambush! Damn it, the anti-aircraft fire is too accurate!"
They were used to the French army's sparse and inaccurate anti-aircraft fire, and had never seen such precise "targeted elimination" as if it were a pre-set trap.
Fear instantly spread through the aircraft.
"Now! Open fire!"
With Arthur's roar, the French machine gunners who were already waiting on the edge of the roof all pulled their triggers.
Da da da da da—!
At that moment, more than a dozen Hotchkiss M1914 heavy machine guns simultaneously spewed angry tongues of fire into the sky.
Although these small-caliber bullets were like tickles to the heavily armored Stuka, and they could not possibly penetrate the aircraft's skin at an altitude of thousands of meters, the psychological impact of this scene in such a tense, life-or-death dive was devastating.
From the perspective of the German pilots, countless golden trailing fire chains suddenly rose from the ground, like an impenetrable net of death, heading straight for them.
The sheer density of the visual barrage far exceeded their expectations.
With the lead plane shot down, the wingman pilots were completely terrified.
They were used to the French army's sparse, inaccurate anti-aircraft fire, which was even afraid to fire due to the screech of the Stuka. They had never seen such a precise and dense "ground-to-air strangulation" as if it were a pre-set trap.
Fear spread through the aircraft.
Without the leader's guidance, the once perfectly aligned death dive formation fell into chaos.
"Pull up! Pull up now! Drop the bombs! Throw all the damn bombs!"
To avoid the "false air defense net" that they imagined to be incredibly deadly but was actually mostly filled with machine gun bullets, the Stuka pilots behind instinctively made the worst possible choice.
They no longer cared whether the target in the sights overlapped, nor whether they had reached the optimal bombing altitude. They just wanted to get rid of the heavy burden under their fuselage as quickly as possible, then pull up and retreat.
Click! Click! Click!
The remaining three SC250 aerial bombs were dropped haphazardly at an altitude far above their intended target. They detached from their racks and, with an ominous whistling sound, scattered across the vast city of Berg with the chaos of a hailstorm.
Whoosh whoosh—
Just as Arthur had predicted, the bombs did not hit the city hall because they were dropped too high and the formation was too scattered.
They all veered off course and landed on empty streets, squares, and long-empty houses.
Rumble—!
The earth was trembling violently.
The most recent SC250 aerial bomb landed on the edge of the City Hall Square, and the violent shockwave slammed into the ancient Baroque building like an invisible giant hand.
The glass in the second-floor operations room shattered instantly, turning into countless sharp crystal knives that pierced the opposite wall and chair backs.
But there was no blood, and no screams.
Because the room was already empty.
The massive oak map table was overturned by the blast wave, and the battle map, marked with red arrows, was instantly buried by a waterfall of dust falling from the ceiling. The cup of coffee that Major General Mori hadn't finished drinking, along with the scattered documents and pencils, instantly turned into a gray still life.
Death missed its target.
If Sen and his staff had evacuated even two minutes later, this room would now be their morgue.
The situation was far worse on the rooftop air-raid shelters overhead.
Although the main building was not directly hit, the huge blast wave still tore the air defense positions to the side. The sandbag wall collapsed, and a loader responsible for loading magazines for the Bofors was blasted so hard that his nose bled. He staggered and fell to his knees on the scorching asphalt roof, but he still held the magazine tightly to his chest, not letting go even a little.
But Arthur remained seated in the velvet chair on the roof.
He didn't lie down, and he didn't even change his posture.
This was certainly not because he wanted to commit suicide, nor was it simply to perform some kind of "British bravery" in front of his subordinates.
As an RTS player with a god-like perspective, he knows better than anyone else:
According to the Circle of Probability (CEP) calculated by RTS, after the Stuka's formation was disrupted by interference, the red high-risk circle representing the bomb's impact point just missed the main building of the City Hall. Even the nearest bomb would have landed more than 100 meters away.
Secondly, this is a choice made in physics.
In the face of the overpressure shockwave generated by a near miss, a confined room is actually a more dangerous death trap. The shockwave will repeatedly refract and amplify between the walls, shattering internal organs. On the open rooftop, however, the airflow can dissipate quickly, and as long as one is not directly hit by shrapnel, the damage from the shockwave will be minimized.
As for the flying rubble and glass? They don't reach the center of the roof, which is located at the geometric center of the building.
The so-called "most dangerous place" turned out to be the only "safe spot" in the entire chaotic battlefield after precise calculations.
A gust of wind, carrying dust, swept past. Arthur merely turned his head slightly, took out a clean white handkerchief from his coat pocket, and elegantly covered his mouth and nose, blocking the choking smoke and dust.
He squinted, peering through his fingers at the houses that had collapsed in the explosion.
"That's why I'm not going down there, Pierre. I'd rather breathe fresh air than be crushed to death by the ceiling."
Through the broken window, he looked at the wreckage of the two downed Stukas, and the bomb craters that, while devastating the city, had not destroyed the core combat capabilities of the 12th Division.
"Two aircraft have been confirmed shot down, and three others are damaged and smoking."
Captain Higgins poked his head out from his gun emplacement, his face covered in soot, but he shouted excitedly like a child, "Sir! We did it! They're in chaos! They're completely in chaos!"
Rumble—
As the last aerial bomb, missing its target, exploded on the street a few hundred meters away, the earth-shaking air raid finally came to an end.
The iconic shrieking of the Stuka aircraft gradually faded into the distance, leaving only Berger shrouded in smoke and fire.
After a few seconds of deathly silence, the heavy oak door to the city hall's underground wine cellar was suddenly pushed open.
Major General Sen emerged, covered in dust and coughing violently. He brushed the dust off his uniform and immediately looked up at the roof—the one he had assumed would be reduced to ruins just two minutes earlier.
Then, he froze.
Amidst the billowing smoke and dust, on the open, unobstructed rooftop of the city hall, a figure slowly rose to his feet.
The setting sun shone through the gaps in the smoke, gilding the figure with a golden edge.
Arthur Sterling.
He's still there.
He was even leisurely wiping the ash from his cuffs with a handkerchief, as if he had just gotten a little mud on his face while taking a walk in the garden, rather than having just been bombarded by two dozen Stukas.
Sen's lips trembled, his eyes filled with disbelief; it was simply a miracle. He knew very well how violent the explosion had been; the shockwave was powerful enough to shatter a person, yet he—he was completely unharmed?
"Everyone, get back to your posts! Don't act like a flock of frightened quails!"
Arthur's voice pierced through the lingering smoke and dust, echoing over the chaotic courtyard from above. There was no relief of surviving, only a reassuring, absolute coldness in his voice: "The German aerial acrobatics are over. This was just dessert before the main course."
Hearing this sound, Sen suddenly came to his senses.
Looking at the trembling, terrified soldiers still cowering at the bunker entrance, a surge of inexplicable anger and courage welled up within the French general. If that Englishman could survive in hell, what reason did they have to lie on the ground?
"Did you all hear that?!"
Rang Sen drew his pistol from his waist, brandished it wildly at the sky, and roared hoarsely, "Get moving! Back to your positions! Now! Now! Now!"
"Set up the machine guns! Bring out the ammunition boxes! Don't let that Englishman look down on us! For France!"
Inspired by the general's roar and Arthur's godlike figure, countless French soldiers awoke as if from a nightmare. They swarmed out of the wine cellars, sewers, and air-raid shelters, carrying rifles and machine guns, trudging through shards of glass and bricks, and frantically rushed back to the defensive positions they had just evacuated two minutes earlier.
Looking at the defense system beneath his feet that had resumed operation, Arthur expressionlessly stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket.
He turned away, no longer looking at the busy French soldiers.
His gaze fell on the cemetery on the edge of the city, where the smoke of battle was gradually dissipating.
Deep within that gray mist, an extremely unsettling shadow was slowly approaching.
The alarm from the RTS system reached its highest decibel level at that moment, and the red warning box flashed wildly on his retina, as if screaming the same name.
[WARNING: Extremely high-risk units detected on the battlefield]
At the very edge of that shadow, a black flag fluttered in the wind.
On the flag, the white shield with a key stood out starkly in the setting sun, like a token that opens the gates of hell.
Arthur's pupils contracted slightly, and he muttered to himself, "The real monster—has arrived."
The rest will be posted at dawn.