Axis & Allies - damowords

Secret War
At England’s heart there stands a splendid house
Twixt Oxford & Cambridge equidistant,
Grounds hush’d more than a sleeping harvest mouse,
The fine façade stately & innocent;
But step within,
A new world is reveal’d,
The day’s work shall begin for England’s unseen shield.
Crack team of elite specialists
Work hard on the ENIGMA,
Chess masters & cryptologists,
An expert crossword puzzler,
Math’maticians & star linguists
Brought from America
To decode the unbreakable machine…
If Germany but knew she would go green!
“With but one panzer division
Reserve in Sicily,
The battleʹs won before begun!
She brew’d a pot of tea,
As Sun Tzu said, “To win a war first know the enemy.”
Bletchley Park
June
1943
Kertsch
According to the well‐tried strategum
Hitler arrays his army’s fair flower,
Attacking the pendulum’s momentum,
This salient, central peninsula;
The panzers roll,
The blitzkrieg underway,
The first defenders fall this hot & sultry day,
Where aggression was confounded
Mid the orchards & copses,
Their panzers punisht & pounded,
Fields thicken with fresh corpses,
These killing grounds, litterʹd with dead
& staggering losses
Weeping for this clash of superegos
Molten aluminium thro crackt vent flows.
Death roam’d about the battlefield
Between each pock‐mark’d ridge,
No slope or shield, nor those that yield,
Were spared his privilege,
From lifeʹs bloom bodies shrivelling, withering river‐sedge.
Prokhorovha
July 9 th
1943