World War II: From Stragglers to Rebuilding Faith on the Eastern Front

Strategic battles + comeback + decisive ruthlessness + fiery passion + no System

On the Eastern Front in 1941, there were only two kinds of people: those already retreating in disarray, and those about to. When Zhou Yan, C Country’s top special forces commander, transmigrated there, his company had just been scattered and the political commissar had led the flight. He picked up the flag the commissar had abandoned and said to the survivors, “I won’t lie and tell you that you’ll live. I’ll only promise to tell you which way to run before I do.”

No one believed him. But three days later, thirty-seven men followed him through a gap in the German encirclement. A month later, three hundred men under his command had learned how to take out tanks with rifles. A year later, three thousand men in the ruins of Stalingrad were shouting the same thing: “Wherever Zhou Yan points, that’s where we fight.”

The year the war ended, someone asked him how he had done it. He said, “I didn’t do anything. I just ran five minutes later than they did.”