Hitler's War

by Harry Turtledove

  Trees and bushes and rocks. The western part of the Ardennes was as wild and rugged as anything in Czechoslovakia. Vaclav would have bet the Germans couldn’t get any armor through here, but he would have lost if he had. He’d already escaped from tanks in these parts: Panzer Is and IIs, and also some captured Czech T-35s. Those infuriated him. Yes, everybody grabbed whatever he could get his hands on—his own antitank rifle and Dominik’s machine pistol showed as much. But seeing Czech tanks fight against Czech soldiers made him want to cry.

  Dominik waved urgently. Vaclav dove behind the closest bush. He didn’t know what was up ahead, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way. Sergeant Halévy twiddled fingers at him. Ever so cautiously, Vaclav slithered forward. He swore under his breath every time a knee or an elbow broke a twig.

  Then he froze—German voices up ahead. The breeze swung, and he got a whiff of cigarette smoke. “God in heaven, I’m tired,” one of the Fritzes said. “I could sleep for a month.”

  “Just a little going on, Klaus.” If those dry tones didn’t come from a sergeant, Vaclav would eat his boots.

  “Ja,” Klaus said, and then, “What the hell was that?”

  That was Vaclav’s antitank rifle scraping through some dry bushes. The goddamn thing was more than a meter and a half long—almost as long as he was tall. It wasn’t just heavy; it was also unwieldy as all get-out. Jezek froze.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” the noncom said.

  “I sure thought I did,” Klaus replied.

  “Want to check it out?”

  “Nah. I just want to sit here and grab a smoke.”

  “Sounds good to me. Let me bum one off you,” the sergeant said.

  Even more warily than before, Vaclav crawled forward. He spotted an armored car between a couple of chestnuts. Hoping the noise wouldn’t give him away, he chambered a round. The Germans didn’t have kittens, so he got away with it. A couple of those long, fat rounds through the engine compartment and that armored car wouldn’t go anywhere for a while.

  He waggled the fingers on his left hand to let Sergeant Halévy know he was in position. The rest of the Czechs opened up on the Germans. His noise covered by theirs, he punched one through the armored car’s thin steel side and into the engine.

  He was about to shoot at it again when a German with a submachine gun popped up out of nowhere. Vaclav shot him instead. A round designed to pierce armor did horrible things to flesh. It seemed to blow out half the German’s insides. The poor bastard fell over with a grunt and never stirred after that. It was over fast for him, anyhow.

  Shoulder aching—even with muzzle brake and padded stock, the antitank rifle kicked harder than a kangaroo—Vaclav reloaded. Here came the other armored car. He fired at where the driver would sit, once, twice. The car slid to the left and slammed into a tree.

  That seemed to take the vinegar out of these Germans. They either ran off or gave up. “Good job!” Sergeant Halévy called to Vaclav. “Don’t you wish it was this easy all the goddamn time?”

  “Jesus!” Vaclav exclaimed. “I’m just glad it was this easy once.” Halévy laughed, for all the world as if he were joking.

  LIEUTENANT JULIUS LEMP STOOD AT stiff attention. When a rear admiral reamed you out, you had to stand there and take it and pretend it didn’t hurt. The process was a lot like picking up dueling scars, except you had no sword of your own.

  “You thick-skinned idiot!” Karl Dönitz didn’t raise his voice, which only made things worse. “Did you want to drag the United States into this war?”

  “No, sir,” Lemp replied woodenly He stared straight at a spot three centimeters in front of Dönitz’s nose.

  The round-faced chief of U-boat operations was not a man who stood out in a crowd. Dönitz was supposed to be a pretty good guy, too. He had a reputation for sticking up for his captains. But nobody would stick up for you when you screwed up the way Lemp had.

  “U-boats brought the Americans in the last time,” Dönitz said. “We try not to make the same mistakes twice, you know.” He waited.

  “Yes, sir.” Again, something mechanical might have spoken through Lemp.

  “I’ve had to calm down Goebbels and von Ribbentrop and the Führer,” Dönitz said. “They all wanted your scalp.” He waited.

  What am I supposed to say now? Lemp wondered. He tried, “I’m honored, sir.” In a way, he was. If the Propaganda Minister and the Foreign Minister and Hitler himself noticed you, you’d done something out of the ordinary, no doubt about it.

  Rear Admiral Dönitz’s pale eyes grew cold as the seas off Greenland. “I wouldn’t be, if I were you,” he said, and his voice was as icy as his face. “Dr. Goebbels had to put together a whole propaganda campaign to shift the blame away from us. Now there’s some doubt about who sank the Athenia—but not among us, eh?”

  “No, sir. I did it, all right.” Lemp still didn’t change expression. Yeah, sometimes you had to stand there and take it. This was one of those times.

  “I’d run you out of my office if you told me anything else,” Dönitz said. “If you screw up like this again, I won’t be able to help you. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, sir.” Men who served on U-boats weren’t normally long on military discipline. This was one of those occasions where formality was mandatory, though. You took your abuse by the numbers.

  “A notation about your error will go into your service jacket,” Dönitz said, which meant Lemp would be a long time seeing another promotion.

  “Yes, sir,” Lemp said one more time. He couldn’t get into more trouble as long as he kept saying that, and he was in plenty already.

  “Next time we send you out, for God’s sake try not to sink anything flying the Stars and Stripes,” Dönitz said.

  “I will, sir,” Lemp replied. But he couldn’t help adding, “You are going to send me out again?”

  “Yes, yes.” The commander of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat forces sounded impatient. “You’ve proved you can hit what you aim at. We need that in our skippers. I have to dress you down, because you aimed at the wrong ship. I have my orders, too, you understand.”

  Did that mean he’d been going through the motions before? It sure sounded that way to Lemp. If he had, he could take his act on stage. He’d make more money with it than he ever could in a naval career. “I see,” the U-boat skipper said cautiously—one more phrase that stayed pretty safe.

  Dönitz looked altogether different when he smiled. “All right, then,” he said. “Dismissed. And you can tell your crew we won’t send them to a camp.”

  Lemp saluted. “Yes, sir. I’ll do that. Some of them have been worried about it.” Some of them had been scared shitless. You didn’t want to say that to a rear admiral, though. Lemp didn’t like the idea of living in a place where making an honest mistake could land you in this much trouble. But, no matter what else the Vaterland was, it was the Vaterland.

  “Go on, go on.” Dönitz had spent all the time with him he was going to. Stacks of papers smothered the admiral’s desk. It wasn’t as if he had nothing else going on.

  After one more salute, Lemp made his escape. He was glad he’d worn his greatcoat. Germany had enough coal to keep furnaces going and heat buildings, but Wilhelmshaven was bloody cold outside. Screeching gulls wheeled overhead. The air smelled of the sea and, more faintly, of fuel oil—familiar odors to a U-boat skipper.

  Dönitz’s office wasn’t far from the harbor, and from the seaside barracks that housed U-boat crewmen when they came in to port. Lemp made for the two-story red-brick building with dormer windows where the sailors from the U-30 were staying. A sailor wearing a Stahlhelm and carrying a rifle stood guard outside. He saluted Lemp. The skipper and his crew weren’t quite under arrest—but they weren’t quite not under arrest, either.

  Returning the salute, Lemp said, “You can relax, Jochen. I think they’ll give you some other duty soon.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Jochen said.

  Lemp walked on in. The sai
lors crowded the wardroom, smoking and playing cards and reading newspapers. It wasn’t nearly so crowded as the long steel tube of the U-30 would have been, though. Everything stopped when the men saw Lemp. They searched his face as anxiously as they would have searched the horizon when Royal Navy destroyers were in the neighborhood.

  “It’s over,” Lemp said. “The admiral read me the riot act, but they’ll let us put to sea again.”

  The sailors cheered. They stamped their feet. A couple of them whistled shrilly. Only later did Lemp wonder why. As long as they stayed in harbor, they were safe. Any time they went hunting, they laid their lives on the line. And they were glad to do it. If that wasn’t madness…

  Of course it was. He had a case of the same disease. So did the British sailors who tried to bring merchantmen into their harbors, and the other sailors who set out to sink U-boats. So did the soldiers in German Feldgrau, and so did the bastards in assorted shades of khaki who tried their best to stop the Wehrmacht.

  Without that kind of madness, you couldn’t have a war. Julius Lemp took it for granted. So did men far more important than he.

  “What did Dönitz say?” asked a machinist’s mate.

  “That we were bad boys for sinking an American liner. That we could have got the Reich into all kinds of trouble. But we didn’t,” Lemp answered. “He also said he needed people who could shoot straight.”

  More cheers rose. These were so loud and raucous, Jochen stuck his nose into the wardroom to see what was going on. Nobody told him. Miffed, he slouched back outside. The soldiers started clapping and stomping again.

  “We’ll go out there and do some more straight shooting,” Lemp said. The men shouted agreement. They were good fellows, all right—and crazy the same way he was.

  For more than two years, the war in Spain had electrified the world. Everybody could see it foretold what would happen when Fascism squared off against Marxism. Both sides threw what they could into the struggle. Italian troops, German planes, Russian tanks…Most of the bodies, on both sides, stayed Spanish.

  Not all. Chaim Weinberg wouldn’t have left New York City without a strong feeling that something had to be done to stop Fascism before it exploded all over Europe. He wasn’t the only one: the International Brigades were proof of that. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Republic remained a going concern despite everything Marshal Sanjurjo could do to crush it.

  And then, when the Internationals were about to get pulled from the line, the big war did break out in Europe. Spain’s fight was suddenly Britain and France’s fight, too. Matériel flooded south across the Pyrenees as the French border opened up. It seemed too good to be true.

  It was. As soon as Hitler turned his troops on the Low Countries and France rather than Czechoslovakia, the flood didn’t go back to being a trickle. It dried up altogether. Everything the French could make, they shipped northeast to shoot at the Boches.

  Germany and Italy had already pretty much forgotten about Spain. With the French and English navies in the war, the Fascists had a much harder time getting through than they’d had before. And they needed their toys to use against the Western democracies.

  So Spain went from being the cockpit of world attention to the war that everybody forgot. Everybody, that is, except the poor, sorry bastards still stuck fighting it.

  Lately, Sanjurjo’s men on an outpost a few hundred meters away had found themselves a new weapon: a loudspeaker system. It crackled to life now: “Come over to the winning side!” a Spaniard shouted, and the loudspeaker gave him something close to the voice of God. “Come over to us, and we’ll feed you what we eat ourselves. It’s lovely chicken stew tonight! Don’t miss it!”

  “Ha!” Chaim said, and turned to Mike Carroll. “You know how to make Sanjurjo’s chicken stew?”

  “First, you steal a chicken,” Carroll answered wearily. “That’s an old one. Got a smoke?”

  “Yeah.” Chaim gave him a Gauloise.

  “Lovely chicken stew!” the Nationalist boomed again.

  “Thanks. Tastes like shit, but thanks.” Carroll puffed happily. Chaim agreed with him—the French tobacco did taste like shit. But Gauloises and Gitanes were better than no cigarettes at all—and better than roll-your-owns made from other people’s (and your own) butts.

  “Chicken stew—with dumplings!”

  “Lying cocksucker,” Chaim said without much rancor. Every so often, guys from the other side deserted. From what they said, the Nationalists were just as hungry, just as miserable, as the Republicans.

  “Maybe their officers have chicken stew,” Carroll said.

  “Now you’re talking,” Chaim said. Republican officers ate and lived no better than the men they led. It was an article of faith on this side that the enemy’s officers exploited their soldiers—they were fighting for class distinctions, after all. Some of what the deserters said supported that: some, but not all. The Republicans mostly discounted anything that disagreed with what they’d thought before.

  “Wonderful chicken stew! All you can eat!”

  Somebody in the Republican lines fired at the loudspeaker. If you were hungry and cold and miserable, talk of food could drive you nuts. And you had to be nuts to shoot like that. At long range, with the crappy rifles and cheap ammo most Republicans carried, how likely were you to hit what you aimed at? Even if you did, what kind of damage could you do? And besides…

  Chaim pulled his entrenching tool off his belt. It was very well made; he’d taken it off a dead Italian. He started digging. “That stupid asshole’s gonna bring some hate down on our heads.”

  “Tell me about it.” Carroll’s entrenching tool consisted of some scrap iron a smith had beaten flat and then bolted to a stick. But it moved dirt, too. He deepened his foxhole and added dirt to the parapet in front of it and the parados behind.

  Sure as hell, the shot woke up the Nationalist artillery. Sanjurjo’s men had more guns and better guns than the Republicans. Hitler and Mussolini had been lavish in supplying their Spanish friends till they got distracted. Nobody on the Republican side had ever been lavish with anything, not till the Czech fight started and not for long enough then.

  Fragments wined and snarled overhead. Chaim dug like a mole, trying to make what vets of the last war called a bombproof. He should have done that a long time ago. He knew as much, but nobody liked to dig without need. Now the need was here.

  Mike Carroll made dirt fly, too. They both stopped about the same time. Somebody not far away had been wounded, and was making a godawful racket. “I’d better go get him,” Chaim said, though he could think of few things he wanted to do less. As if to convince himself, he added, “God knows I’d want somebody to pick me up if I got hit.”

  “Yeah.” Carroll also scrambled out of his hole, even if he’d just improved it. Not being by himself above ground made Chaim a little less lonely. It also made him wonder if he’d have to try to make pickup for two. Well, if he stopped something himself, somebody was out there to make pickup on him.

  He scuttled along like a pair of ragged claws—some damn poem picking the exact wrong moment to bounce around in his head. Like a snake would have been closer, because his belly hugged the ground every second. Off to his left, Mike also looked flattened by a steamroller.

  To add to the joy, a couple of Nationalists started shooting at them with rifles. Luckily, none of the rounds came close. Spaniards, whether Nationalists or Republicans, made piss-poor riflemen. Chaim didn’t know why that was true, but it sure seemed to be. The bullets got close enough to scare him cracking past, but no closer than that.

  He crawled past some trench a shell hit had caved in and flopped down into the earthwork beyond with a sigh of relief. Mike Carroll made it, too. There lay the wounded guy, trying to clutch his chest and his leg at the same time and howling like a banshee. Two other men from the International Brigades were nothing but raw meat and blood—no blaming them for not helping their buddy, because nobody could ever help them again.

  �
�Fuck,” Carroll said hoarsely. “See who it is?”

  Chaim hadn’t noticed—one injured fighter sounded much like another, no matter which language he’d grown up speaking. Now he took a look. “Fuck,” he echoed. “It’s Milt.”

  Milton Wolff—El Lobo to the Spaniards on both sides—had led the Abraham Lincoln Battalion since Robert Merriman was lost the spring before. He’d kept them in the line no matter what Sanjurjo’s goons threw at them. He wasn’t just their heart; he was also a big part of their backbone.

  And he was badly hurt. Fragments had shredded his left calf and thigh and laid open the left side of his chest. “Jesus,” Chaim muttered. His stomach tried to turn over. He wouldn’t let it.

  “What do we do?” Carroll sounded as lost and horrified as Chaim felt. If you saw your father like that…“What can we do?”

  “Try and patch him up. Try and get him back to the docs. Maybe they can pour some blood into him,” Chaim answered. Republican doctors could do more with transfusions than just about anybody. That was one of the few places where the Republic worked well—if the crack mobile unit was anywhere within a few kilometers, anyhow.

  They used their wound dressings. They used strips of cloth from their uniforms and from those of the dead men, who didn’t care any more. One of the corpses had a miraculously unbroken syringe in a belt pouch. Chaim jabbed Wolff with it—it was the only painkiller he was likely to get.

  Wolff was a big man—six-two, easy—which only made things worse. Manhandling him over to a communications trench that went back was no fun for Chaim or Mike Carroll or the wounded Abe Lincoln officer. Hauling him across bare, broken ground and praying the snipers didn’t get lucky would have been even worse…Chaim supposed.

  They were heading back instead of sideways when Wolff stopped screaming and asked, “Will I die?” He sounded amazingly calm. The morphine must have hit him all at once.

  “I don’t think so, Milt,” Chaim answered, and hoped he wasn’t lying. “We’ll get you patched up.”