Re: Blood and Iron

It had been three months since Bruno sent Ludwig home. During this time, the Volga region was cleansed of the Red Menace that had infected it. The result of which was tens of thousands of casualties. Primarily civilians were affected, as those remnants of the Red Army that cowardly hid in the Volga region did so while taking up residence in towns and holding the civilians inside at gunpoint.

It was a hostage situation to put it simply, but Bruno did not negotiate with terrorists. And quite frankly, he felt unusually bad about the deaths that occurred after shelling the Red Army and their positions within the innocent villages.

After all, starting in the second half of the 18th century, ethnic Germans began to move into the region and create entire towns of their own. Under the reign of Catherine the Great and her successors, German farmers were invited to the Russian Empire to farm the land, having been enticed by extensive land grants similar in a way to the American homestead act which occurred over the course of the 19th century.

These were technically Bruno's people, at least to some extension. And he felt bad having to shell them along with the despicable Marxists who held them hostage. But, using CS gas here and now in the open for all nations to observe was not a price Bruno was willing to pay to ensure the safety of civilians who were ultimately not citizens of the Reich, and thus not under his protection by any measure of his moral compass.

With this in mind, Bruno's result was to warn the civilians in advance that they would be shelling the city and give them 72 hours to flee by any means necessary. If they could not, then it was simply God's way of saying that their time had come, and thus they could enter the pearly gates sooner than they had anticipated.

After repeated losses against the Iron Division and the accompanying Russian forces. It became clear to the Red Army that defeating their enemies in a siege was an impossibility. They were simply equipped with too many machine guns, and such weapons made a significant difference on a modern battlefield.

And since they could not defeat the enemy in a siege, it meant that there were two options left. One was to fight in the field, in a decisive battle that would determine an end to the war. Or two were to engage in a protracted guerilla campaign.

Both of these had their faults. For example, in a field battle, the Russian Army could make full use of its cavalry units. But the upside was deploying machine guns in any meaningful capacity was almost an impossibility. Or so the Bolsheviks believed, as their understanding of such weapons, while expanded upon by Bruno's tactics, was not fully enlightened.

As for the Guerilla campaign, it was almost certain that the Iron Division, the Russian Army, and the supporting Black Hundreds of loyalist militias would begin dragging out anyone suspected of harboring Marxist sympathies and simply execute them in the streets. Or perhaps brutally interrogate them for information on the identities and locations of their comrades before doing so.

The brutality shown towards those who supported the Bolshevik party thus far in the war was an indicator that the enemy did not see them as human. Rather, in the eyes of the Tsar and his loyalists, Marxists were nothing more than a pest that needed to be fully exterminated. And they would use any means, no matter how wicked, to achieve this.