MG42 (6)

The fourth visit came a month later.

In the meantime, Hardenberg stayed at the training ground with the company taking part in the trials, refining the concepts I had developed. For the first ten days, they repeated squad-level firing and movement drills; after that, they gradually added platoon coordination, company command, signaling, and ammunition transport, one by one.

And today, at last, was the day we would connect everything we had practiced separately, from beginning to end, all at once.

Of course, we weren’t changing the actual unit structure. The soldiers taking part weren’t learning an official manual, either; they were simply going to spend one day operating according to the method we’d drawn up on paper.

Before we began, Hardenberg gathered the officers and NCOs and said,

“Today’s purpose isn’t to prove that this method is right. It’s to find out where it falls apart.”

I quietly added from beside him,

“Though I’d prefer it if it didn’t fall apart.”

A few of the officers laughed when I said this bluntly.

The training unit was built around a single infantry company. The platoons still had squads as usual, but each squad used one machine gun and was divided into a firing group and a maneuver group. There weren’t enough MG01s, and they were too heavy to carry around, so we used mock machine guns instead. We attached a machine-gun section, an engineer detachment, and signalmen to the company. The headquarters playing the role of battalion command could request artillery fire...