The Allied Rocket team held their launchers at the ready, hearing but not yet seeing the advancing Soviet armour. If the Soviets could cross this bridge, they'd be unstoppable: Athens would be theirs well before the Italian and British Navies could deliver the promised reinforcements. All the allied troops needed to do here was hold the Soviets long enough for the defences in the city to be ready. None of the defenders were under any illusions. They were a speed bump, nothing more. Their lives were currency to try and buy time.

The Soviets did not plan to give it to them. Yak attack planes entered the fray, the buzzing drone of their engines starting to become audible over the rumble of distant tanks. From the skies they descended, unleashing their barrages of automatic fire at the Greek defences. Some were dummy pillboxes and nests. Others were real.

Rockets and anti-air fire went back up, the Yaks not having it all their own way. One disintegrated in mid-air under the hail of fire. Yet more cartwheeled in flames to earth. As the Yaks withdrew, more time passed. The tanks neared. 

Allied artillery burst into life, unleashing a hail of shells at the advancing Soviets, but they could not operate for long. Soviet Spy Planes were circling high above, exploiting their air supremacy. Even as the first shells were leaving the tubes, Soviet Katyusha rockets and V-2 missiles were lining up. Some of the Allied guns moved after their first shot, others risked a second, but the Soviet artillery hit back all the same. The Allied artillery was effectively silenced: it would take the surviving guns time to regroup and re-target.

Their shots had done little to dent the Soviet advance. Emerging from the woods on the other side of the river, a wave of conscripts rushed the bridge. As the Allied defenders on the opposite shore fired, the Soviets both surged down the bridge, and rushed dinghies into the water. This took the defenders by surprise. Intelligence had anticipated an armoured advance first, the Soviets had not brought large numbers of infantry to bear until now.

Stalin had apparently kept them in reserve, seeking to use a massive human wave to open the road to Athens without risking his valuable tanks. Landmines and rockets had reaped a heavy toll in Soviet armour, not enough to halt the advance, but it had been enough to give hope when the British and Italians arrived. They'd hoped they could hold Athens and push back, liberating the rest of Greece.

Now all they could do was delay the inevitable.

More Soviet rockets began to rain on the defenders, reducing the hails of fire crossing the river even more. The first tanks entered the fray, behind the screen of conscripts charging across the bridge. The mass of troopers, wildly firing from well beyond any effective range, were being hit by rockets, machine-guns, and similarly long-ranged fire from defenders that braved the wild rains of rockets and bullets. They set off the anti-tank mines that had been laced across the bridge, the mass of men barely halting as they cleared the way.

The tanks began firing across the river too, aiming at any rocket smoke trails or any muzzle flashes they saw. They were hardly accurate, firing as they moved, but they did enough to help the conscripts keep going. The Political Officers leaning out of hatches, hands resting on their machine guns, also 'helped' to some degree. One way or another the Conscripts faced machine guns - just the ones behind them would probably also make any family they had back home suffer as well.

Outnumbered, the defenders held for a mere twenty-five minutes from the Yak attacks, to the conscripts swarming from the riverbank and bridge to overrun the Allied defences. Even though many of the conscripts that had made it had also managed to waste the ammunition they had been given, the sheer horde of Soviets with fixed bayonets was enough. The Allies would have had to kill twenty men for every one of their own that fell. They did not manage anywhere near that figure.

The Soviets kept their advance moving, clambering over and riding by. The advance would not stop for the dead. Only when Athens was in Soviet hands would it end.

It would end very soon.