Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  Had made. That was the right phrase, unfortunately. Now the naval situation was back the way it had been when Teddy Roosevelt sat in this chair. What was in the Pacific would stay in the Pacific or take its own sweet time getting to the Atlantic, and vice versa.

  None of which was likely to make any enormous difference in how this war came out. Stalin had done it anyhow. “That miserable fucking bastard!” Truman snarled. When the Germans retreated through Russia as they began to lose the last war, they destroyed everything they could to keep the Red Army from getting any use from it. Scorched earth, they called the policy.

  Destruction for the sake of destruction, the Allies named it. War-crimes tribunals convicted several German field marshals and generals because they’d ordered such devastation. He wasn’t sure, but he thought some of them still sat behind bars.

  That was the kind of thing Stalin was doing. What else was wrecking the Panama Canal but damaging America economically in a way that didn’t have much directly to do with the war? Truman would have loved to see the mustachioed four-flusher in the dock at Nuremberg to answer for his crimes. Unlike the German generals, he couldn’t claim he was only following orders. He didn’t follow orders. He gave them.

  Truman swore under his breath. Then he came out with the question that had been in his thoughts more and more lately: “Even if we win, what the hell do we do about Russia?” Hitler had planned to occupy it on a line that stretched from Arkhangelsk down past Moscow and all the way to the Caspian Sea. Chances were he wouldn’t have had enough men to make that occupation stick even if he’d won all his battles. And, with the majority of the vast USSR still unoccupied and still in arms against him, all he would have bought himself was endless grief.

  Suppose the United States eventually made Russia say uncle. Suppose it stripped away the Soviet satellites and turned them into free countries again. Suppose it kept a close eye on the Reds for years to come. Then what?

  The unhappy example of the Treaty of Versailles leaped to mind. Only it was worse than that. Russia would still be enormous. It would still have swarms of people and tremendous industrial power. Some of those people would still know how to make atom bombs. It would still be a deadly danger to the rest of the world, in other words.

  Stalin and his henchmen had to be looking at the United States the same way. The USA and Canada put together posed the same problem for the USSR as Russia did for America. Truman only wished that were more consolation.

  Then the telephone rang once more. He picked it up. “Truman.”

  “It’s the Secretary of Defense again, sir,” Rose Conway told him.

  “Thank you.”

  “Mr. President…” George Marshall sounded even gloomier than he had before. Truman hadn’t dreamt such a thing possible. He could come up with only one reason why it might be. Before he could ask, Marshall went on, “I’m sorry, sir, but my call came too late. The British were on the point of ringing us—that’s how the First Sea Lord put it—to tell us to watch out for the Panama Canal, because they’d just lost Suez.”

  “Oh,” Truman said: a sound of pain disguised as a word. “Well, this is a hell of a morning, isn’t it?”

  —

  Rain drummed down. The ground got muddy in a hurry. So did the soldiers on both sides fighting in Germany. Isztvan Szolovits wore his shelter half as a rain cape, the way you were supposed to. He got muddy anyhow, and wet, and uncomfortable. Maybe he was a little drier than he would have been without the shelter half, but he wasn’t dry enough to be happy about it.

  He was happy that the rain had slowed down the fighting. Those dirty-gray clouds hung only a couple of hundred meters above the ground. Fighters couldn’t tear along shooting up anything they saw when a pilot was liable to fly into a tall tree or a church steeple before he had the chance to dodge. It was wet enough for wheeled vehicles to make heavy going of it when they left the road. Tanks could still manage, and so could foot soldiers, but the rain also cut down how far anybody could see to shoot.

  Pickets and snipers on both sides of the front still banged away, just to remind everybody the war hadn’t gone on holiday. But if you were back a little way and you used some care and common sense, you could almost relax.

  Isztvan sat with a smashed tree trunk between him and the fighting ahead. He leaned forward to get some extra protection from the brim of his helmet and kept his hands cupped as he lit a cigarette. Even so, he needed a couple of tries. Considering how wet it was, he didn’t think he’d done badly.

  Other Magyars sprawled here and there amidst the wreckage of war. Some also smoked. Some ate. Some slept. Szolovits thought he might try that after the cigarette. He’d quickly learned you were more likely to be sleepy—tired to death, not to put too fine a point on it—at war than you were to be hungry.

  More men with shelter halves worn as ponchos moved up to the Hungarians’ left. Isztvan saw they weren’t countrymen of his. Their uniforms were of deeper khaki, and their helmets had a slightly different shape. He guessed they were Russians and forgot about them.

  He forgot about them, that is, till Sergeant Gergely burst out laughing. Half the Magyars in earshot sat up straight when that happened. A bear playing the piano might have been more astonishing. On the other hand, it might not.

  “What’s up, Sergeant?” Somebody had to grab the bear by the ears. Szolovits took care of it for his comrades. Some of them would step up for him one day.

  Gergely was laughing so hard, he needed a few seconds to check himself so he could talk instead. “Oh, the company we keep!” he said once words worked. “This stretch of Germany is turning into the slum of the war.” Then he started laughing again.

  “What do you mean, Sergeant?” another Magyar asked, military respect and annoyance warring in his voice.

  “I mean you’re a fucking idiot, Lengyel,” the noncom answered. “Can’t you see? No, I guess you can’t—no eyeballs. They’re pushing up a bunch of Poles alongside us.”

  Urk, Isztvan thought. That could prove nasty all kinds of ways. The Hungarian and Polish People’s Republics were fraternal socialist allies against the capitals and imperialist forces opposing them. The governments of both countries would jail or kill anyone mad enough to have any different opinion. But…

  Poland was the first country Hitler overran in 1939. Hungary fought on Hitler’s side during the war, though Magyar troops hadn’t invaded Poland. To say things might be touchy summed them up pretty well.

  Isztvan could see other complications, too. Compared to Red Army soldiers, the Poles were as likely to be as underequipped as his own countrymen. That wouldn’t be so good when the fighting heated up again. And…“How the devil will we talk with them?” Magyar and Polish had nothing in common.

  Well, neither did Magyar and Russian. Gergely found the same solution he would have used when he didn’t feel like ignoring Red Army officers. In his fluent German, he yelled, “Hey, you fucking Polack Arschlochen! C’mon over here and swap sausages with us!”

  “Who’re you calling assholes, you stupid, stinking piece of shit?” The Pole who answered didn’t sound angry. He just sounded as if that was how he spoke German. Szolovits could understand him, but it wasn’t easy. And every word with more than one syllable, he stressed on the next to last.

  Some of the Poles did come over to swap food and smokes and booze. Neither they nor the Magyars got the Soviet hundred-gram firewater ration, but neither nation’s soldiers had to do without. One of the Poles said, “Kind of fun to pay the Fritzes back for all the shit they dumped on our heads.”

  Most of the Magyars looked at one another when they heard that. They didn’t have anything in particular against Germans or Germany. Isztvan thought he understood how the Pole felt better than his countrymen did. He was a Hungarian, yes. But he was also, forever and inescapably, a Jew. Even if there were times when he might want to forget that, the Magyars wouldn’t let him.

  “So does it make you happy to screw the Germans for Stalin’s sa
ke?” one of the Hungarians asked, perhaps incautiously.

  Their new friends—well, comrades—muttered to themselves in their own language. Not surprisingly, the accent went on the next to last syllable of every word in Polish, too. After a moment, the fellow who’d spoken before said, “Screwing the Germans makes me happy any which way.” His buddies nodded. He went on, “Did you guys enjoy screwing the Russians for Hitler’s sake?”

  Not even the incautious Magyar felt like answering that. Admitting you enjoyed screwing the Russians could only land you in deep shit, no matter how true it was. Poles didn’t love Russians, either; Isztvan knew that. Down through the centuries, the Russians had screwed them as hard as the Germans had. The Germans had done it most recently, though, and this latest screwing was a rough one. That was what the Poles got for living between nations bigger and stronger than they were.

  “I still think it’s a kick in the head German’s the only language we can use to talk to each other,” Sergeant Gergely said.

  One of the Poles pointed up toward the clouds, or toward the heavens beyond them. “Somewhere up there, old Franz Joseph is smiling in his muttonchops,” he said.

  Until the end of World War I, southern Poland had belonged to Austria-Hungary. Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria, had also been King of Hungary. After the war, the victorious Entente stripped Hungary of all the lands it had ruled that didn’t actually have Magyars living on them, plus some that did. Wanting to regain that lost territory had helped push Admiral Horthy into Hitler’s arms.

  “We may have one more language in common,” a Pole said in German. Then he switched to his other choice: “Do any of you know English?”

  A couple of Magyars nodded, but only a couple. Szolovits didn’t speak the language. He would have liked to; his ignorance felt like a lack. But he’d never had the chance to learn.

  Gergely recognized what tongue it was, even if he didn’t know it, either. He jerked a thumb toward the west. “You can take it up with the Yanks and the Tommies, if you want.”

  “I have cousins in America. They mine coal there,” the Pole said. “We haven’t heard from them since the war, but they’re still around.” He scowled. “Not like their country got invaded.”

  Sweden. Switzerland. Portugal. Spain. Those were the countries on the European mainland that hadn’t been invaded during the last war…and Spain had just finished its own civil war when the bigger fight exploded. Even so, Isztvan trotted out his own indifferent German to say, “Now they have A-bombs falling on them instead.”

  “So do the Russians. So do we. So do you,” the Pole said. “It’s a fucked-up world, is what it is.”

  If it weren’t a fucked-up world, Magyars and Poles wouldn’t have squatted in the German rain, filling space the Red Army couldn’t in its fight against the Americans, English, and French. Isztvan got another cigarette going, but the rain put it out in short order. That was fucked up, too.

  GUSTAV HOZZEL USED a hand-held mirror to peer through a broken window in a house on the outskirts of Schwerte. Schwerte itself lay on the eastern outskirts of Dortmund, while Dortmund was at the eastern edge of the Ruhr. The Russians were getting too damn close to the Rhine, in other words.

  This bottom floor of the house was fortified, with bricks and rubbish piled up to waist height by the east-facing wall to hold off incoming bullets. Emergency militiamen had knocked out the wall between this house and the next one farther west. They could retreat to that one when they had to.

  More emergency militiamen had dug a corridor from the cellar under this house to the one next door. Gustav had been one of them. His back still grumbled. He wasn’t so young as he had been the last time he played these house-to-house games. He grimaced. The fee hadn’t changed, though.

  The Russians, as a matter of fact, were masters at this kind of combat and field fortification. The Wehrmacht had learned a lot from them, and paid a monstrous price in blood for the instruction.

  That mirror didn’t show him any Russians or other pests. Some of the Soviet satellites’ forces were in action on this stretch of the front along with their Red Army big brothers. Hitler had used allies like that, too: Hungarians and Romanians and Slovaks. From what Gustav had seen, they were like bread crumbs in a sausage mix. You used them to stretch out the real meat.

  They’d fought bravely—sometimes. But bravery wasn’t always enough. No matter how brave you were, if you had only rifles and machine guns and the enemy came at you with tanks and truck-mounted rocket launchers and heavy artillery, you might slow him down a little but you wouldn’t stop him. And sometimes the puppet troops wanted nothing more than to bail out of the fight without getting killed.

  Max Bachman chuckled when he said that out loud. “I don’t much want to get killed myself,” the printer replied.

  “Well, neither do I,” Gustav said. “But I’m still here, same as you are. We haven’t bugged out.”

  “And does that make us heroes or jerks?” Max asked. Gustav only shrugged; he had no answer. His boss went on, “I was looking at things from a different angle.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Gustav said. Max made a face at him. Hozzel added, “Tell me what your angle is, then. You know how much you want to.”

  “Ah, kiss my ass,” Bachman said without heat. “I was just wondering whether we’d run into any Hungarians we knew.”

  “Ha! That’s funny! It could happen, couldn’t it? They hung in there longer than almost anybody else.” Gustav didn’t bother mentioning that the Hungarians had hung in for so long because Hitler occupied their country and installed his own pet Magyar Fascists to run things there for him.

  That Stalin was their other choice had no doubt kept them compliant, too. They’d had time to see how he treated other countries that yielded to him. Seeing it kept them in the Führer’s camp. So, instead of surrendering to Stalin, they’d got overrun by him. And now they were Russian cannon fodder, not the German kind.

  “The guy who’ll probably know some of the Hungarians is Rolf,” Gustav said after a little thought. “He fought there till the end—till the Ivans drove us back toward Vienna.”

  Max made a production of opening a ration can. “I still think chow ought to come in tinfoil tubes, not these stupid things,” he muttered. After a couple of bites, he continued, “Rolf’s a pretty good soldier—for a Waffen-SS puke.”

  “There is that,” Gustav said. Rolf lived up to, or down to, the Wehrmacht’s stereotypes about Himmler’s rival service. He was recklessly brave. But he was also inclined to kill anybody on the other side who got in his way. For him, the laws of war were something out of a fag beautician’s imagination. The Wehrmacht hadn’t kept its hands clean on the Eastern Front. Nobody had, on either side. But the Waffen-SS hadn’t just fought dirty. It had reveled in fighting dirty. That made a difference.

  Not quite out of the blue, Max said, “I wonder what Rolf thinks of Israel.”

  “Matter of fact, I can answer that one,” Gustav said. “He told me the bomb that blew up the Suez Canal should have gone off a little farther northeast.”

  “Ach!” Max pulled a face. “I never jumped up and down over Jews, but only an idiot would take the Nazi Quatsch about them seriously. An idiot or an SS man, I mean, if you can tell the one from the other.”

  “Sure.” Gustav nodded. “You couldn’t tell those people they were full of crap, not unless you wanted them to bust your balls. But I didn’t go out of my way to give Jews grief.”

  “Me, neither.” Max’s head bobbed up and down, too.

  As long as things outside seemed quiet, Gustav also opened a ration can. He shoveled pork and beans into his chowlock. It was nothing he would have eaten had he had a choice; as far as he was concerned, the Americans kept their taste buds in a concentration camp. Even a lousy ration, though, beat the hell out of going hungry.

  As he ate, he remembered SS Einsatzkommandos leading scared-looking Jews out of a Russian village back in the early days, the days when victory looked su
re and soldiering still seemed as if it could be a lark. He didn’t know what happened to those Jews, or to others later on. He didn’t want to know. It was none of his business.

  Had Max seen things like that? He probably had. If he hadn’t, he would have been looking away as hard as he could. Not impossible, but it didn’t seem to be his style.

  They’d hardly got done talking about Rolf before he poked his head up out of the cellar. “Anything going on?” he asked.

  Gustav had found falling back into the military life easier than he’d expected. Rolf might never have left it. Gustav had heard that some old sweats went straight from the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS into the French Foreign Legion: one of the few outfits that didn’t worry about where its soldiers came from. They really hadn’t quit soldiering. Now they fought in meaningless little wars in places like Senegal and Indochina, places that could never matter to anybody in a million years.

  “Not much,” Gustav said. Afterwards, he had a hard time making himself believe he hadn’t jinxed things. It was quiet. Then, without warning, it wasn’t any more. A series of descending shrieks in the air made him yell “Down!” even as he threw himself flat.

  The heavy shells slammed into the houses in Schwerte. Pieces of the houses started falling down. Gustav scuttled like a crab—arms and legs every which way, belly on the ground—toward a heavy table. He huddled under it. So did Max. They hugged each other, as much to keep from being knocked out of that problematic safety as for friendship and reassurance.

  Something slammed into the top floor like a giant’s kick. Big chunks of roof crashed down onto the table. Gustav sniffed anxiously for smoke. If the place started burning, he’d have to leave in spite of the barrage. He hoped he didn’t shit himself before then. Lying under artillery fire was the worst thing in the world, as far as he was concerned.

  After fifteen minutes that seemed like fifteen years, the shelling stopped as suddenly as it had started. He and Max both knew what that meant. “Come on!” they yelled in each other’s stunned ears. Untangling themselves, they hurried to the window.