Dogs of War
7 primary works • 8 total works
Book 1
Book 2
Book 4
VOL. 5
Book 6
VOL. 7
Volume 8
v. 3
In 1942, SS Assault Regiment Wotan was training and recuperating after its gruelling struggle in Russia and they were glad to be out of the fray for a bit. But it would not be for long, for what none of those men knew was that already they had been singled out for a new mission.
In the grey September of 1944, Colonel von Dodenburg's SS battle group Wotan became the Fuhrer's Fire Brigade, the crack unit of the German Wehrmacht, to be thrown into any battle as a last desperate measure to redress the balance. As the Allied armies closed in on Aachen, even the most optimistic said that Hitler's war was lost.
They had taken the most impregnable fortress in Europe, faced Stalin's cadets on the Russian front and returned with only a handful of survivors. They were Hitler's elite, dedicated, relentless - men for whom death held no fear. Their next mission was a lightning blow at Kursk in the very heart of Soviet Russia.
The Fuhrer's orders were clear - conquer Mount Elbrus, highest peak in the Caucasus mountains. But there were problems: Elbrus was behind the Russian lines; the route to the mountain was blocked by hostile Cossack tribesmen; and the fanatical Red Ravens, Stalin's elite corps of women commandos, were dedicated to protect the mountain's secrets. Above all, the mountain itself, aloof and undefiled, was protected by bitter cold, savage winds, thin air, treacherous traverses - it was a killer. Only one unit in the German Army could hope to fulfil the Fuhrer's demand - one unit with the necessary combination of bawdy, reckless courage and elan, of superb leadership and matchless skills: Stormtroop Edelweiss...
In this gripping adventure SS Assault Battalion Wotan, the toughest troops in Europe, are sent on an apparently impossible mission against the elite of the Soviet Army in a vital bid to prepare the way for Operation Barbarossa. Once again we meet the ruthless Major Geier, known as the 'Vulture', whose sexual practices are a constant threat to his consuming ambition; here too is Captain von Dodenburg, the elegant aristocrat; and Sergeant Schulze, the wisecracking Hamburger who has smelt out the rottenness of National Socialism and views the war with unconcealed cynicism. Under the author's skilful pen their world comes vividly to life and the reader can feel the horror, and indeed the excitement, which was the lot of Assault Battalion Wotan on the road to Rostov.
Assault Regiment Wotan, the elite band of men whom Kuno von Dodenburg had led so often to victory, had been mercilessly cut down in the forests of the Ardennes. Only Sergeant-Major Schulze remained to lead the battered, war weary survivors of Hitler's famed SS through the secret pass over the snow-locked Vertes Mountains, in the Fuhrer's desperate plan to save Budapest from the Soviet armies. Every single one of them knew that it was the plan of a madman, and every man knew that whatever the cost it had to succeed.
SS Assault Regiment Wotan had been sent to join the Desert Rats, their objective to liberate the Egyptian army and to wrest the control of Alexandria from the British forces. But the men of Wotan found that Rommel didn't want them, and as they set off into the unmapped waste of the desert, they realised that something about this mission was wrong - very wrong indeed. One thousand kilometres of uncharted desert lay before them: a blazing, barren, limitless hell, just sand and sun and sky - the only living creatures an enemy lying in wait for them, silent and unseen...
It was January 1940. The Western Front was still paralysed, but, at the Adolf Hitler Kaserne, a new battalion of SS troops were being put through the most gruelling training programme in the history of the German army. SS Assault Regiment Wotan were preparing for a mission so secret that it was known only by its codename, Zero.