I have long wanted to write about anti-tankers, I even started in Rotten Tree, but there the plot went the other way, as a result, a novel about corps commanders turned out when it turned out that only German infantry divisions operated in the Osovets area. The hero of this book: a person is completely "reckless." It is written about how the war could have gone if the wrong ideas about how anti-tank artillery should operate had not triumphed in the pre-war period and in the initial period of the war. Alas, the Red Army for several years of the war ceded the initiative to the German motorized units, which greatly affected the results of the first two years of the war. Anti-tank defense on the battlefield, capable of resisting the German offensive, was created only two years after its start, and even then, until the very end of the war, it was very, very difficult to stop the German breakthroughs. It is impossible for a modern reader to imagine: how much patience, effort and time is required for anti-tankers, on whom there are "tigers" and "panthers," whose crews are protected by 100 mm Krupp armor, and you are protected from them only by a 6 mm gun shield, and sketched branches of disguise or a grid with them. Alas, the hasty removal from service and production of ZiS-2 guns, removal from service and shortening of the 76 mm divisional gun barrel put the anti-tankers in very difficult conditions. But they persevered, though they joked darkly about the length of their trunks and the lifespan of their calculations.