The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (52 page)

“You have to understand, sir, it doesn’t work this way all the time,” Walsh told Lieutenant
Preston when another band of Italians waved white flags after the briefest exchange of fire. “For those dagos, it’s nothing but a game. You come up against Fritz, though, and you’ll find out he means it.”

The subaltern nodded, with luck in wisdom. “Quite,” he said. “It is a bit like playing football when the other side’s down to nine men, isn’t it? Hardly seems sporting.”

“Bugger sporting …
 sir,” Walsh said earnestly. “You lose men here, they don’t get up again after the referee blows his bleeding whistle. It’ll take the Judgment Trump to set ’em on their pins again.”

Wilf Preston stared at him. The youngster’s eyes were blue as sapphires. They were also red-tracked with weariness, just like Walsh’s. Sun and wind and sand had burned and chapped Preston’s fine, fair skin. “I do grasp
the difference, Sergeant,” he said, his voice starchy with indignation.

Devil you do
. But Walsh couldn’t say that. “Yes, sir” would have to do. “Besides,” Preston went on, “wouldn’t you sooner have it easy than rough?”

Maybe he wasn’t a complete twit. Walsh sketched a salute. “Now that you mention it, sir,” he answered, “yes.”

Only later did he wonder how true that was. Had he asked Ronald
Cartland to stay in England and help turn young hooligans into proper soldiers, the MP would have arranged that as effortlessly as he’d seen to this. And Walsh would have done something useful to King and country, something where he could have lived comfortably and where he would have been most unlikely to catch a packet.

Instead, he’d requested service here, and here he was. A fat black fly
landed on the back of his hand. He squashed it before it could bite him. It had a nasty smell, like shit mixed with blood. And you couldn’t kill them all. There were just too many. Beelzebub—lord of the flies. He’d had the Bible pounded into him when he was a boy, same as most Welshmen. Till this campaign, though, he’d never realized what a dark and terrible god old Beelzebub must have been.

Lieutenant Preston wasn’t immune to the flies, either. Could you bring the bugs up on charges?
Officers, disrespect to
—something like that? Preston didn’t try to smash his flies. He just waved his hands over them so they buzzed away. That might have been a better idea. He didn’t need to fret about the mess and the stink. Of course, the bloody things would come back.…

He still had his pecker up:
“If we keep going the way we are, we’ll take Tobruk away from Musso’s lads before long. What will they do then?”

“They’ll be in even more trouble than they are already, that’s what,”
Walsh answered, liking the notion. Tobruk was the big Italian base in eastern Libya. If it fell, the enemy might have to fall back to Benghazi, or maybe all the way to Tripoli. Without it, the dagos sure as dammit
wouldn’t be able to mount another attack on Egypt.

They seemed to know that, too. Some of them even seemed to care. Their resistance stiffened as they pulled back into the works surrounding the Mediterranean port. No doubt about it, they were better at fighting a static campaign than one that called for movement.

And now they had ships bringing supplies straight in to them. That beat the stuffing
out of the English truck convoys that started way the hell back in Alexandria. Italian tanks might be laughable, but one army’s 105mm howitzer was about the same as another’s. If the other buggers could bring in more ammo than you could …

In that case, you dug trenches and laid barbed wire in a ring around his trenches and barbed wire and you settled in as best you could, because grabbing Tobruk
was liable to take a while after all. But for the weather and the scenery, it might have been 1918 over again.

In 1918, biplanes had dueled above the trenches. And so they did again here in 1941. RAF Gloster Gladiators fought Fiat CR-42s high overhead. Planes and pilots seemed evenly matched. When one side or the other won a dogfight, a cheer went up from its troops on the ground.

These days,
pilots wore parachutes. They mostly hadn’t in 1918. God, what a long, hard way down! Every time Walsh saw a silk canopy blossom in the sky, he remembered Rudolf Hess bailing out of his Bf-110 over Scotland. What a mess that had made! Not for the first time, Walsh thought,
I should have bashed his brains in with a rock
.

Both RAF flyers and their Italian foes were sporting. When a pilot hit the
silk, they didn’t machine-gun him while he floated helplessly. The same courtesy had been observed most of the time in Western Europe. From things Walsh had heard, the Russians and the Japanese didn’t play by those rules. Neither did the Fritzes in Russia. Fair play?
Verboten!

Italian bombers sometimes came over the English lines by night. They weren’t very accurate—they cost the Tommies more
in lost sleep than in damage or casualties.

Little by little, the besiegers assembled a striking column to try to break through the Italian lines. The Italians had to defend everywhere, so they spread themselves thin. Without tanks, an attack on their position would have been suicidal (remembering 1918, Walsh knew that might not have stopped the donkeys with the red collar tabs from ordering
one anyway). With tanks, a breakthrough had a chance. That was one of the things tanks were for: punching holes in positions too tough for infantry to crack by itself.

The Italians didn’t do much to hinder the English concentration. Walsh got the idea that, like a tortoise bothered by a dog, they weren’t going to stick their heads out of their fortified shell unless and until they had to. The
English generals must have got the same idea, because they took their own sweet time readying their attack.

As things turned out, they waited too long. Walsh’s regiment wasn’t in the main striking column. It went to a smaller one that would deliver a feint to make the Italians commit their reserves to the wrong part of the semicircle around Tobruk.

Just after dawn two days before the feint was
supposed to go in, he heard unfamiliar engine noises in the air. Then, all of a sudden, they weren’t the least bit unfamiliar—only unexpected and out of place, which, unfortunately, wasn’t the same thing.

He grabbed Lieutenant Preston’s arm. “Sir—that’s the bloody
Luftwaffe
—109s and Stukas, heading this way!”

“What? You’re daft!” the subaltern exclaimed … perhaps five seconds before the Messerschmitts
started strafing the feinting column. A few seconds after
that
, Stukas dove down out of the sky like ugly falcons, their Jericho Trumpets screaming fit to jolt a man’s soul right out of his body. And in case the Jericho Trumpets fell down on the job, 500kg bombs weren’t half bad for spreading terror around, either.

Walsh dove under a lorry—the best cover he could find. He would roll out to fire
a shot or two at the planes overhead, then duck back again. Those weren’t Italian pilots flying German planes. Black crosses and swastikas declared who was at the controls. For reasons of his own, Hitler had decided to jump into the war in Africa.

With both feet, too—manmade thunder off to the east said the real
striking column was catching hell, too. Tobruk might fall, but it sure as the devil
wouldn’t fall day after tomorrow.

RAIN IN RUSSIA
meant panzers went nowhere fast. Theo Hossbach knew that as well as any German soldier in the USSR. With the wider
Ostketten
, his Panzer III was less likely to bog down, but swift thrusts and dashes were a thing of the past.

The Ivans slowed down in the mud, too. Their ponderous KV-1s had as much trouble with it as any German panzer. T-34s, though,
chugged through goop Theo wouldn’t have wanted to try even with
Ostketten
. Adi was right—the T-34 wasn’t a perfect panzer. But it was kilometers out in front of whichever machine ran second.

And so, for the time being the
Wehrmacht
would try to hang on to what it had already gained instead of pushing deeper into Russia. Maybe, once a hard freeze came, the
Panzertruppen
could have another go at
Smolensk. In the meantime, units settled down in villages and on collective farms to wait out the mud time.

A couple of platoons from Theo’s company based themselves on a
kolkhoz
southwest of Smolensk. A few of the buildings remained more or less in one piece. The Ivans who’d fled the farm had slaughtered some of their livestock and driven the rest with them when they headed east. Hitler planned
on turning European Russia into Germany’s breadbasket. No one in the
Reich
had seemed to realize Stalin would have plans of his own. The Germans might gain ground, but they’d draw as little benefit from it as the Russians could manage.

Like any sergeant worth the paper he was printed on, Hermann Witt believed idle hands were the Devil’s playground. “If our panzer isn’t going anywhere for a while,
then by God we’ll make sure it goes like anything when we do start moving again,” he declared.

Theo wasn’t the only one who had no trouble containing his enthusiasm. “What? Stand in the rain and sink into the mud while we screw around with the engine?” Adi Stoss said.

“In a word, yes,” Witt answered. “Do you think I won’t be there with you, passing you spanners and pliers and fan belts and whatever
else
you happen to need? I’ll be messing with the ironmongery, too, you know.”

Adi nodded—reluctantly, but he did. So did Theo. Sergeant Witt was not a man to stay dry where his crew got wet, nor a man to stay clean where they got dirty. He made a good panzer commander, in other words. That didn’t mean he couldn’t be a pain in the fundament.

The new guys were no more enamored of busting their
humps in the rain and the ooze than the crew’s old-timers. “If I had a pretty girl there with me, now, not some hairy, smelly old sergeant—” Kurt Poske said.

“You’d come down venereal in about a minute flat,” Witt broke in.

Affronted, Poske shook his head. “I can last a lot longer than that.”

Once they got the bitching out of their systems, they fell to work. They tore down the engine, rain
or no rain, mud or no mud. They bore-sighted both machine guns. Lothar Eckhardt calibrated and adjusted the sights for the main armament. They checked every link of their tracks, and got the track tension left and right to just where Sergeant Witt and Adi wanted it.

And Theo serviced his radio set. It still worked all right, but a couple of the tubes plainly wouldn’t last much longer. He swapped
in a spare for one, but couldn’t match the second. To his annoyance, none of the other half-dozen radiomen at the
kolkhoz
had—or would admit to having—that tube, either. He’d gone and talked to all those relative strangers, and they hadn’t been able to help him? It hardly seemed fair.

Unhappily, he reported his difficulty to Sergeant Witt. Witt rubbed his chin, considering. “How long will the
old one last?” he asked.

Theo shrugged. “A day? Six months?” He shrugged again. As usual, he talked as if he had to pay for each word expended.

“All right. Next time a
Kettenrad
comes along, hop a ride back to regimental HQ and snag a new one,” Witt said. “Snag more than one, if you can. Maybe we can swap some of the spares for other stuff we need.”

Muttering didn’t count as words. Neither
did Theo’s resigned sigh. Most of the men at regimental headquarters were real strangers, not the relative kind. He would rather have tackled a T-34 with a Panzer II than have anything to do with them, no matter how much sense Witt’s order made.

Two days later, a
Kettenrad
—a motorcycle with a track instead of a rear wheel—brought mail up to the
kolkhoz
. When it started back, Theo sat in the sidecar.
He carried his Schmeisser. You never could be sure the
Wehrmacht
had cleared out all the Indians (the common German name for enemy soldiers).

He didn’t have to use the machine pistol on the way to the village the regimental bigwigs had taken as their own.
Babushkas
cooked for the headquarters staff. Old men with Tolstoyan beards cut their firewood. Younger women probably served them other ways.

Theo didn’t have to ask questions to find the machine shop. Following his ears toward a smithy’s clangor got him there. He stood and waited to be noticed. Eventually, one of the mechanics asked, “Well, what do you need?” He held out the failing tube. The mechanic turned and yelled, “Hey, Helmut! Here’s a guy for you!”

The bespectacled Helmut plainly cared more about radio sets and their parts
than about his fellow human beings. Theo got on fine with him, in other words. And he had and could spare four tubes of the model Theo needed. Theo stowed them in his greatcoat pockets.

He wondered how he’d get back to the
kolkhoz
. Witt hadn’t said anything about that. He was walking up the village’s muddy main street (all the other streets were muddy, too) when someone called, “Hey! Yeah, you—the
goalkeeper!”

That made Theo stop. He turned. At first, he didn’t recognize the
Landser
coming toward him. Then, to his dismay, he did. It was the fellow who claimed he’d seen Adi play football before the war. Theo would rather have met up with a Russian ambush.

“How are you doing?” the guy asked, as if they were old friends. Theo doled out a shrug. He didn’t want to talk to this fellow, who
was nothing but trouble—and worse trouble because he had no idea how much trouble he was. Sure as hell, he went on, “And how’s your buddy, the footballer?”

Several possibilities ran through Theo’s mind. The truth was among them, but he didn’t let it bother him for long. Saying Adi’d been killed seemed better, but Mr. Snoopy here might suspect that and try to check it out. How about some play-acting
instead?

With a guttural growl, Theo raised the Schmeisser and pointed it at
the
Landser
’s belly button. The safety was still on, but he didn’t figure the other guy would notice fine details. “You fucking son of a bitch!” he ground out. “So you’re the asshole who tipped him to the blackshirts, and now you’re here to gloat? I ought to blow your balls off—if you’ve got any.”