Southern Ukraine, January 2, 1944
The train slowly left the station. Several thousand tons of high quality iron ore would be dragged to the Ruhr with half a dozen switches and too many maintenance stops to count. The miners were local civilians who knew they needed to meet their quota to feed their families. Resistance and sabotage was common enough to be irritating but harsh measures against the guilty or the incompetents' families had kept most of the machinery working.
An hour later, the ore train slowed down and then stopped along a siding as another supply train headed to the front. A dozen new factory fresh tanks, several car loads of petrol, and enough shells to keep a division worth of gunners busy for a heavy week of fighting would arrive at the forward depots of the 6th Army that was holding this part of the front. The 6th Army had a fairly light summer and fall as it had needed to reconstitute itself as it barely avoided being destroyed in last winter's great offensive. Now they were covering the front where the Italians had once been responsible. The two attached Panzer divisions were almost back to full strength and for once, they were almost fully trained again. They had been sent up and down the front for four months until the mud and the snow stopped the Soviet offensives to anything more than local probes. Now the panzertruppen were in warm huts with plenty of food and enough spare parts to keep their complex machines running well enough. If they had a day to mount up and move, they would be able to attack into the flanks of any Red Army offensive.