Hitler's War (55 page)

“Yes, sir,” Fujita said resignedly. Japanese officers always figured enlisted men were hayseeds. The sergeant had figured out why his unit was
transferring from the Mongolian border to the northeast as soon as it got the order. He knew what a map looked like. And if he’d never slept in a bed with a frame and legs till he got conscripted…Lieutenant Hanafusa didn’t need to know that.

“As soon as the weather warms up and the snow melts, I think we’ll move,” Hanafusa said.

“Sounds good to me, sir,” Fujita said. You needed as many clothes here in the winter as you did in Mongolia, and that was saying something.

Something buzzed by high overhead: an airplane. “Is that one of ours or one of theirs?” Hanafusa asked.

“Let me see, sir.” Fujita raised the field glasses. The plane was too far off to let him make out whether it bore the Rising Sun or the Soviet red star. But he recognized the outline, and spoke confidently: “It’s one of ours, sir.”

“Well, good,” Hanafusa said. Both sides sent up reconnaissance planes: each wanted to see what the other was up to. Every so often, one side would send up fighters to chase off the spies or shoot them down. Sometimes the other side would send up fighters of its own. Then the men on the ground could watch dogfights and cheer on the planes they thought were theirs.

Sergeant Fujita hoped the Russians would open up with their antiaircraft guns. He didn’t want them hitting the Japanese plane—that was the last thing he had in mind. But if they started shooting at it, his side could see where they’d positioned their guns. That would be worth knowing when the big fight started.

He wasn’t much surprised when the guns stayed silent. The Russians were better at hiding their artillery till they really needed it than he’d imagined anyone could be. If you didn’t think they had any guns nearby, half a dozen batteries were zeroed in on you. If you thought you knew about those half a dozen batteries, four wouldn’t be where you expected them to be and you’d missed another half a dozen. You wouldn’t
find out about them, either, not till the Russians needed to show them to you.

He said as much to Lieutenant Hanafusa. Not all of the Kwantung Army had as much experience with the Russians as the men who’d fought them in Mongolia did. These fellows who’d been on the Ussuri or over by the Amur…well, what did they know? Not much, not so far as Fujita could see.

But Hanafusa nodded. “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. “We’ve seen that ourselves. There have been skirmishes along this frontier, too, you know. Even the Korean Army got into the act—but they had to ask us for help when the Russians turned out to have more than they expected.”

“All right, sir.” Fujita wasn’t sure it was, but what could he say?

He did share Hanafusa’s scorn for the Korean Army. The Kwantung Army was a power unto itself. It dictated policy for Japan as often as Tokyo told it what to do. The Kwantung Army had masterminded and spearheaded the Japanese thrust deep into China. Some people said there were men in the Cabinet back in Japan who didn’t like that and wanted to pull back. If there were, those people were keeping their mouths shut and walking softly. Army officers had assassinated Cabinet ministers before. They could again, and everybody knew it.

The only force that had any chance of restraining the Kwantung Army wasn’t the Cabinet. It was the Navy. Generals here saw the Russians looming over Manchukuo like the bears cartoonists drew them as. The admirals looked across the ocean and babbled about America—and, sometimes, England.

“Can the Americans give us trouble, sir?” Fujita blurted.

“What? Here on the Ussuri?” Lieutenant Hanafusa stared. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Fujita’s cheeks heated in spite of the chilly wind wailing down from Siberia. “No, sir, I didn’t mean that. I meant, well, anywhere.”

“Oh. I see.” The lieutenant relaxed. “Mm, they won’t jump in and
pull the Russians’ chestnuts out of the fire, the way they did in the Russo-Japanese War. I’m sure of that. The Communists don’t have any friends. England and France are fighting Germany, too, but the two wars might as well be one on the moon, the other on the sun. They don’t like Stalin any better than we do, and neither do the Americans.”

“Yes, sir.” That did help ease Fujita’s mind. All the same, he went on, “I’ve talked to some guys who served in Peking. They say the United States doesn’t like what we’re doing in China.”

“Who are these people?” Hanafusa asked softly.

Sergeant Fujita beat a hasty retreat: “I don’t know their names, sir. Just some guys I was talking with waiting in line for comfort women.” That wasn’t exactly true, but Lieutenant Hanafusa would never prove it. You didn’t rat on your friends.

“I see.” The lieutenant had to know it was a lie, but he also had to know he wouldn’t get anything more. His snort sent steam jetting from his nostrils. “Your brothel buddies aren’t too smart—that’s all I’ve got to say. The Americans go right on selling us fuel oil and scrap metal, no matter what’s happening in China. As long as they keep doing that, they don’t much care—right?”

“Oh, yes, sir.” Fujita knew he wasn’t the smartest guy ever born. But he wasn’t dumb enough to get into an argument with an officer. If you were that dumb…He shook his head. He couldn’t imagine anybody that dumb, not in the Japanese Army.

J
ulius Lemp scowled at U-30. “What the hell have you done to my boat?” he demanded of the engineering officer standing with him on the quay at Kiel.

“It’s a Dutch invention,” that worthy answered. “We captured several of their subs that use it. We’re calling it a snorkel—well, some of the guys who install it call it a snort, but you know how mechanics are.”

“Ugliest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen,” Lemp said. “It looks like the boat’s got a hard-on.”

The engineering officer chuckled. “Well, I’ve never heard that one before.”

He couldn’t appease Lemp so easily. “All you have to do is put it on. I’m the poor son of a bitch who has to take it to sea. Why the hell did you pick on me?”

“I couldn’t say anything about that. I got my orders and I carried them out,” the engineering officer replied. He wasn’t chuckling any more. “If you’ve really got your tits in a wringer about it, go talk to Admiral Dönitz.”

That shut Lemp up with a snap. He’d done more talking with the head of the U-boat force than he ever wanted to, and about less pleasant subjects. Sinking an American liner when the
Reich
wasn’t at war with the USA would do that to you. German propaganda loudly insisted England had lowered the boom on the
Athenia
. Lemp and Dönitz both knew better.

And despite all that, it could have been worse. Lemp hadn’t got demoted. He did have that reprimand sitting in his promotion jacket like a big, stinking turd, but nobody’d said a word about putting him on the beach and letting him fill out forms for the rest of the war. A good thing, too, because he wanted nothing more than to go to sea.

But…The
Kriegsmarine
had its ways of showing it was unhappy with an officer, all right. Loading down his boat with experimental equipment was one of them. You didn’t want a skipper you really cared about to play the guinea pig. Oh, no. In that case, you’d lose somebody you wanted to keep if the—the goddamn snort, that’s what it was—didn’t work as advertised. But if that happened in U-30…

Poor old Lemp
, people in the know would say.
First the liner and now this. He wasn’t lucky, was he?

Poor old Lemp
, poor old Lemp thought. He was stuck with it, all right. “I don’t need to talk to the admiral,” he mumbled after a long silence.

“No? Good.” The engineering officer paused in the middle of lighting a cigarette. A chilly breeze blew off the Baltic, but it didn’t faze him. He was one of those people who could keep a match alive in any weather with no more than his cupped hands. It was a useful knack for submariners, who had to come up onto the conning tower to smoke. Some guys had it and some didn’t; that was all there was to it. Happily puffing away, the engineering officer went on, “You’ll take two engineers to sea with you this cruise.”

“Wunderbar,”
Lemp said. A U-boat needed a second engineer the way a fighter plane needed an extra prop in its tail. The only reason you
took one was to train him so he could become the engineer on a new boat his next time out.

Or so Lemp thought, till the engineering officer told him,
“Leutnant
Beilharz is an expert on using the snorkel.” Lemp would have liked that better if he hadn’t tempered it with, “If anybody is, of course.” Still, maybe it meant the powers that be didn’t actively hope he’d sink. Maybe.

Gerhart Beilharz proved improbably young and improbably enthusiastic. He also proved improbably tall: within a centimeter either way of two meters. Type VII boats—hell, all submarines—were cramped enough if you were short. With all the pipes and conduits running along just above the level of most people’s heads…“You’re asking to get your skull split,” Lemp said.

“I know,” Beilharz said. He pulled an infantryman’s
Stahlhelm
out of his duffel bag. “I got this from my cousin. He’s somewhere in France right now. I’m pretty good at remembering to duck, but maybe the helmet’ll keep me from knocking my brains out when I forget.”

“That’d be nice,” Lemp agreed dryly. “Try not to smash up the valves and such when you go blundering through the boat, if you don’t mind.”

“Jawohl!”
Gerhart Beilharz said—he really was an eager puppy.

And he knew things worth knowing. Or he was supposed to, anyhow. “Tell me about the snort,” Lemp urged.

“You’ve heard that, sir, have you? Good,” the young engineer said. “It’s a wonderful gizmo, honest to God it is. You can charge your batteries without surfacing. That’s what the Dutch were mostly using it for. But you can cruise along submerged, too, and you’re much harder to spot than you would be on the surface.”

“But how am I supposed to spot targets if I do that?” Lemp asked. “If I’m puttering along at three or four knots—”

“You can do eight easily, sir,” Beilharz broke in. “You can get up to thirteen, but that sets up vibrations you’d rather not have.”

“Can I get the periscope up high enough to look out with it while I’m running with the snorkel on?” Lemp asked.

“Aber natürlich!”
Beilharz sounded offended that he could doubt.

True believers always sounded offended when you doubted. They sounded that way because they were. That was what made them true believers. Lemp was also a true believer, in his way. He believed in going out and sinking as many ships bound for England as he could. Anything that could help him sink those ships, he approved of. Anything that didn’t…He eyed the ungainly snorkel one more time.

“Well, we’ll give it a try,” he said. “The North Sea is rough. Will the snort suck all the air out of the boat if the nozzle goes under water?”

“That’s not supposed to happen,”
Leutnant
Beilharz said stiffly.

Lemp concluded that it could, whether it was supposed to or not. What happened then? Did it vent exhaust back
into
the boat? That might not be much fun. He wished he’d never set eyes on the miserable
Athenia
. Then they’d have fitted the goddamn experimental whatsit onto somebody else’s U-boat.

Well, he was stuck with it. He tried it out before the U-30 left the calm waters of Kiel Bay. It worked as advertised. The diesels chugged along with the whole boat—but for the tip of the snorkel tube—submerged. Gerhart Beilharz seemed as proud as a new papa showing off his firstborn son.

What happens when the little bugger pisses in your eye after you take his diaper off to change him?
Lemp wondered sourly. He stayed surfaced through the Kiel Canal and out into the North Sea. Away from the sheltered bay, the ocean showed some of what it could do. Several sailors went a delicate green. Puke in the bilges would remind the crew it was there all through the cruise.

“Ride’s smoother down below,” Beilharz suggested.

“Nein.”
Lemp shook his head. “I’ll use the snort when I have to, but not for this. I want to get out there and go hunting, dammit. Even eight knots is only half what I can make on the surface, so we’ll stay up here.” The second engineer looked aggrieved, but that was all he could do. Lemp had the power to bind and to loose, to rise and to sink.

He cruised along at fifteen knots, heading up toward the gap between Scotland and Norway. The Royal Navy patrolled the gap, of course—they didn’t want subs getting loose in the Atlantic. They laid minefields in the North Sea, too. A lot of U-boat skippers stuck close to the Norwegian coast. Some even—most unofficially—ducked into Norwegian territorial waters to stay away from the Royal Navy. Sometimes—also most unofficially—the limeys steamed into Norwegian waters after them.

Lemp steered straight for the narrower gap between the Orkneys and the Shetlands. As far as he was concerned, the Norwegian dogleg only wasted fuel. He prided himself on being a hard-charging skipper. (Sometimes, these days, he wondered how proud he should be. Would he have torpedoed the
Athenia
if he’d waited longer to make sure of what she was? But he couldn’t dwell on that, not if he wanted to do his job.) And the North Sea was plenty wide. Chances were he wouldn’t hit a mine or get spotted by a destroyer. And if he did get spotted, he told himself, it was at least as much the destroyer’s worry as his.