Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 816: Surrender Without a Shot

As the command staff at Guantánamo Bay debated how to proceed. Cut off from high command and clinging to rumors older than their orders, a voice cut through their increasingly heated deliberation.

It was a familiar voice to anyone who had paid even passing attention to global politics over the last thirty years.

It was not the voice of a bureaucrat, nor a diplomat, nor any man whose legacy would be penned by committee.

It was the voice of a man who had shaped the world through steel, diesel, and uncompromising will.

Seldom had he appeared on broadcast or television.

But when he did, the world changed in his wake.

“To the brave American soldiers still guarding Guantanamo Bay while your homeland fractures behind you… I, Reichsmarschall Bruno von Zehntner, hereby issue a decree of benevolence. Strike your banners. Lay down your arms. Surrender yourselves to the German Reich and its allies… or be consumed by a torrential hellfire the likes this world has never witnessed.”

“You have thirty minutes to respond appropriately… after which, missiles fly.”

The message repeated across all broadcast channels every thirty seconds, static filling every moment in between.

Instantly, the naval intelligence attaché understood the grim arithmetic of their predicament.

He stamped out his last cigarette and reached for another, only to find the ash tray overflowing, the packs empty, and his hands shaking just a little too much.

“Shit… those bastards already have the tower. They’ve hijacked the radio mast. There’s no denying it now. The enlisted ranks will riot if we don’t take control of this moment.”

He was right.

Across the base, radios crackled, relays screamed, and panic spread like spilled fuel.

Men threw aside duty and discipline alike, scrambling for defensive posts, airfields, and munitions depots. Not to coordinate, but to scavenge and ask themselves which of their tools might survive the next hour, let alone the next war.

It was not looting, not quite.

It was fear-born opportunism, momentary military brigandry, a moral unraveling of discipline as ranks and roles dissolved into something primal and frantic.

Upon witnessing the collective madness unfold the base commander seized the megaphone, drowning the broadcast with the force of his own lungs and legacy.

“Enough! All of you! You are soldiers of the United States Armed Forces, have you forgotten yourselves so completely?”

Silence struck harder than the artillery ever had.

Men froze, staring at the commander, his jaw tense, eyes steady, boots planted, but his voice betrayed a faint crack of fatigue, a man who had run out of authority to invoke except his own.

“I won’t lie to you,” he said. “The situation is bleak. Our last confirmed orders are three months old. We haven’t heard a damn thing since. And they are to hold this ground until our very last breaths… But these are not orders I can ethically enforce… Not given the dire circumstances we now find ourselves in. So I will be surrendering to the Germans forthwith. And I suggest you all do the same….”

A junior officer stepped forward, uniform dusty, hands steady, voice dangerous with consequence.

“Sir! If we surrender without firing a shot, we’ll be branded traitors by whoever seizes Washington and restores the Union!”

Before the Commanding Officer could speak in his defense, the sky screamed first.

Jet engines, afterburners, and a sonic that nobody outside the German Fatherland had ever heard… until now.

No siren reacted quickly enough. No radar detected silhouettes hidden in storm clouds.

Only vapor trails and engine shrieks marked the passage of the newest German interceptors.

Men ducked for cover, expecting bombardment, only to find silence waiting on the other side of the thunder.

The commander simply looked at the sky, then at the young officer who had protested him, and pointed upward.

“Does that look like a battle we can win, Lieutenant? That wasn’t a missile. Which means they’ve hidden their best weapons until now.”

The realization settled heavier than surrender itself.

The silence after the interceptors passed was the worst part. It was the absence of noise that killed morale, not the threat itself.

A bomb you can quantify, an army you could shoot. But silence left men alone with imagination, and imagination is where discipline died.

For the first time since contact was lost, every man on the base understood that the Reich had given them a gift most tyrants never offered their enemies: time to think before dying.

It was not mercy born of softness, but mercy born of dominance, confidence that the outcome was already mathematically complete.

The junior officer swallowed, throat tight, eyes flicking to the horizon where German ships waited like patient predators, gray steel silhouettes floating in Atlantic haze.

The base commander exhaled through his nose, a man too tired for bravado, too responsible for theatrics, and too honest for illusions.

“Men,” he said quietly, “you think Washington will judge you for surrender? Washington has already judged itself by failing to exist at all.”

Nobody argued after that.

Not because they agreed, but because arguments required belief, belief required authority, and authority had abandoned the base long before the Reich’s fleet ever arrived.

Now, only inevitability remained.

The Germans had crushed allied armies across Spain, Sicily, France, Britain, and the Philippines. And yet no one knew their full arsenal until the war was already decided.

The psychological calculus completed itself in the minds of every man present:

If the Reich wanted them dead, they already would be.

Within fifteen minutes, flags were struck, arms were laid down, and every ship in harbor raised white cloth above its mast.

Not as a symbol of cowardice, but as an act of inevitability acknowledged.

The base commander transmitted surrender through what remained of official channels, no pomp, no embellishment, no elevation into myth.

Simply:

“We yield. We surrender. We stand down.”

Within an hour after the official order of surrender was given, the marine detachments of the Central Powers entered the base, restored order, and raised the banners of the German Reich above the bay.