The German mountain troops were dug into their shallow, frozen foxholes waiting for the enemy ski troops to appear across the horizon. Armed with a bewildering array of equipment salvaged from enemy depots and sunken ships, the Germans prepared to hold off yet another assault across the frozen landscape.
In an eerie foreshadowing of the upcoming campaign on the Eastern Front, the outnumbered and under-supplied German force was defending a shrinking perimeter as their only lifeline, the Luftwaffe, desperately attempted to keep the forces supplied. This landscape, however, was not in Russia, and the attacking ski troops were not Siberians but rather Norwegians and Frenchmen trying to drive German forces from their tenuous foothold in northern Norway.
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