The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (4 page)

English, French, and Norwegian soldiers still hung on to Namsos, on the coast of central Norway. Sooner or later, the Fritzes were going to throw them out. That seemed obvious to Walsh. His superiors hadn’t figured it out yet. He’d been in the army since 1918. He walked with a bit of a limp from a German bullet that had got him more than half a lifetime earlier. He wasn’t surprised that he had a clearer view of things than the blokes with the shoulder straps and peaked caps.

Smoke rose from the direction of the docks. The Germans had come bombing again. They did it blindly, from above the clouds: to fly down below them was to risk flying straight into the ground. But they’d got lucky, damn them.

All the same, sailors and locals and, no doubt, some dragooned soldiers labored like draft horses to unload whatever ships hadn’t been hit.
Without the stuff the Royal Navy brought in, resistance here wouldn’t last long. Even with it …

Walsh had plenty of clips for his submachine gun. He wasn’t too hungry. The artillery, though, was severely rationed. The expeditionary force’s handful of tanks still running were low, low, low on petrol. He could hardly remember the last time a Hurricane, or even a Gladiator, had got airborne.

The Germans didn’t have those worries. They held Denmark. Their planes and U-boats and even their pissy little excuse for a surface navy dominated the Skagerrak, the strait between Denmark and Norway. And they occupied the south here. Whatever they needed, they could bring in and bring up to the front with nothing to worry about except occasional ambuscades from Norwegian ski troops.

Of course, the Germans had ski troops, too.
They would
, Walsh thought, less angrily than he might have. He’d fought Fritz in two wars now, and trained to fight him in the gap between them. He had a thorough professional respect for the sons of bitches in field-gray. That didn’t keep him from shooting them whenever he found the chance. After all, they respected his side, too, but they’d plugged him all the same.

Some French
chasseurs alpins
had been part of the expeditionary force. Damned if they didn’t ski with berets on their heads. Nervous Allied soldiers had shot a couple of them anyway. Anything unfamiliar was assumed to be dangerous. More often than not, it was. The rest of the time? Hard luck for the poor bugger who’d made somebody jumpy.

One of the men in Walsh’s company came up to him and said, “ ’Ere, Sergeant, can I talk to you for a minute, quiet-like?” His broad Yorkshire contrasted with Walsh’s buzzing Welsh accent.

“What’s up, Jock?” Walsh asked. They’d been together a long time. Catching the worried look on the big man’s face, he added, “Is something wrong with the cat?” They’d sneaked the little gray-and-white beast onto the troopship that carried them here, and somehow they’d kept it with them ever since. Plenty of hard-bitten troopers would have been heartbroken if a shell fragment found Pussy.

But Jock shook his head. “Nay, it’s not the beastie.” He looked this
way and that. As with Sergeant Walsh, his eyes and forehead were the only skin he showed. Seeing no one close enough to Walsh’s foxhole to overhear him, he dropped his voice to a near-whisper and said, “It hurts when I piss—hurts powerful bad.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Walsh exploded. “Who have you been fucking?”

Soldiers used the word all the time, in every possible form and most of the impossible ones. But hearing it used in its basic meaning made Jock blush—Walsh watched the skin above his eyes redden. Hesitantly, he answered, “There was this lady in one o’ the villages we went through a few days back. She gave my mates an’ me bread an’ boiled pork—an’ she must’ve given me summat else to remember her by, too.”

Coming down venereal was serious business. Your pay got stopped. Your family might even get a wire from the War Ministry—which was, of course, the last thing on God’s green earth you wanted. Even so, Walsh said, “You’d better take it to the medical officer.”

“Sergeant!” Jock yelped—pure anguish.

“I mean it,” Walsh said. “They’ve got new pills that can really cure you. You take ’em, you keep it in your trousers for a bit, and a few days later you’re fine. That’s better than letting the clap stew.”

“Nah. It ain’t.” The Yorkshireman shook his head again. “Ah don’t wahnt nobody t’ken of it.” His accent thickened as he got more upset.

Walsh set a hand on his shoulder. “Look, things are going to the devil around here. Nobody’s going to worry about paperwork at a time like this.”

“The sawbones will.” Jock spoke with dour certainty.

“Tell the miserable quack to fix you up, and tell him to talk to me before he goes and gets all regulation on you,” Walsh said. “I’ll take care of it—you see if I don’t.”

“All right.” Jock still sounded miserable, and well he might. He didn’t seem so proud now of jumping on that friendly Norwegian lady, though doubtless he had been at the time.

An artillery barrage livened things up after Jock mooched off. Sure as hell, the Germans had plenty of ammunition, even if the expeditionary force didn’t. In weather like this, shells didn’t tear up the landscape
the way they did in a more civilized climate. Snowdrifts muffled bursts. And even a 105 made a crater only a little bigger than a washtub when the ground was frozen hard.

After the barrage let up, the Fritzes came forward on foot. Machine guns and accurate rifle fire soon persuaded them that they hadn’t blasted their foes to kingdom come. They pulled back, leaving a few bloody bodies on the snow between the two sides’ lines. By the same token, wounded Tommies and
poilus
and squareheads went back toward Namsos for treatment, as Jock had before them.

Walsh hoped he could deliver on his promise to the Yorkshireman. Doctors were nominally officers. They didn’t have to listen to a career noncom, though the ones with any sense commonly did.

Captain Beverly Murdoch seemed typical of the breed. Though overworked and indifferently shaved, his accent and the way he looked at Walsh declared him a member of the upper classes.
Chaps like him, it’s no wonder a bloke like Trotsky gets a hearing
, Walsh thought irreverently.

“I am given to understand you wish this man treated for his social disease in an informal fashion.” Murdoch’s tone said that ought to be a hanging matter on the off chance it wasn’t.

“Yes, sir.” Walsh kept his response as simple as he could.

“Why?” The word sounded colder than the Norwegian winter enfolding them.

“He’s a good soldier, sir. I’ve known him a long time. He took what he could get, but plenty of others would’ve done the same. I might myself, if the lady was pretty. So might you.” Walsh hoped the quack wasn’t a fairy. That would queer his pitch. “And the way things are right now, we need all the men we can find, and we need them with the best morale they can get. Since you have your pills—”

“I’d do better using them on wounded men than on those who diseased themselves,” Murdoch broke in.

“Sir, he’s wounded in war, too, in a manner of speaking. He never would have met that woman if we hadn’t been posted to Norway,” Walsh said.

“No, he would have got his dose from some French twist instead.” Murdoch sent him an unfriendly look. “And I suppose you’ll find ways to make my life miserable if I don’t play along.”

“How can I do that, sir? I’m only a staff sergeant.” Walsh might have been innocence personified.

He might have been, but the doctor knew he wasn’t. “People like you have their ways,” he said sourly. “Half the time, I think officers run the army on the sufferance of sergeants.”

Walsh thought the same thing, but more often than half the time. All the same, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Yes, likely tell.” Murdoch made a disgusted gesture. “All right. Have your way, dammit. He’ll get the bloody sulfanilamide, and I’ll write it up as a skin infection.”

“Much obliged to you, sir.” Walsh knew he might have to pay the sawbones back one day, but he’d worry about that when the time came. He
had
got his way, and Jock wasn’t in a jam on account of it. Except for the Norwegian winter and the advancing Nazis, everything was fine.

HANS-ULRICH RUDEL
had thought he’d flown his Ju-87 under primitive conditions in France. And so he had: with its heavy, fixed undercarriage, the Stuka was made for taking off and landing on dirt airstrips. All the same, he’d been flying in France, and France was a civilized country. Poland, now …

The pilot came from Silesia. He knew about Poles: knew what Germans in that part of the
Reich
knew about them, anyhow. They were lazy, shiftless, drunken, sneaky, not to be trusted behind your back. Nothing he saw in this village east of Warsaw made him want to change his mind. If anything, the Poles here were even worse because they hadn’t been leavened by Germans the way they had in Silesia. They were well on their way to being Russians, and how could you say anything worse about a folk?

With no Germans in these parts till the
Wehrmacht
came to pull the Poles’ chestnuts out of the fire, the only leavening they got was from Jews. A Jew named Fink ran the local pharmacy. Another one named Grinszpan was the village bookkeeper. Yet another named Cohen pulled teeth. A Pole owned the newspaper in Bialystok, the nearest real city, but his editor was a Jew named Blum. And on and on.

Rudel thought the Jews in the
Reich
had got what was coming to
them after the
Führer
took over. He knew for a fact that Poles liked Jews even less than Germans did. But he and his comrades were forbidden from giving Jews what-for here. The Poles hadn’t cleared them out of their own armed forces, even if they didn’t like them. And, no matter how the Poles felt, Jews still had legal equality in Poland.

“Orders are orders,” said Colonel Steinbrenner, the wing commander. “All we have to do is follow them.”

“They’re crazy orders,” Hans-Ulrich complained. “The Poles are on our side, but the way they act, they might as well be Bolsheviks. Plenty of Jew officers in the Red Army.”

Steinbrenner shook his head. He preferred a German-issue tent to a house in the village, which would probably be full of vermin. Hans-Ulrich felt the same way. The colonel said, “No, Lieutenant, the Poles are not on our side.”

“Sir?” Hans-Ulrich repeated in surprise.

“The Poles are not on our side,” Steinbrenner repeated. “If they sent troops to France to fight alongside our men there, those troops would be on our side. In Poland, we’re on their side. They asked us in to help against the Russians. We have to play by their rules here, not by ours.”

“No matter how stupid those rules are,” Rudel said.

“No matter,” the wing commander agreed. “The only reason the Poles don’t hate us worse than the Ivans is, the Ivans hit them first. We can’t afford to give them an excuse to turn on us.”

That did make military sense. Even so, Hans-Ulrich said, “They ought to be grateful we’re giving them a hand. Without us, the Russians would be in Warsaw by now, and how would the Poles like that?”

“Not much. They’d probably fall to pieces—and then we’d have the Red Army on our border,” Steinbrenner said. “That would be just what we need, wouldn’t it? With us up to our eyebrows in the west, they could give us one straight up the ass. They’d do it, too. In a heartbeat, they would.”

Rudel didn’t argue with him. When you were a first lieutenant, arguing with a colonel was a losing proposition. Besides, here Steinbrenner was pretty plainly right. “I guess so, sir,” Hans-Ulrich said. “And everybody could see we were going to take a whack at the Bolsheviks sooner or later.”

“That’s what the
Führer
’s always wanted to do, all right,” Steinbrenner said.

“But he’s always wanted to pay the Jews back for betraying the
Vaterland
at the end of the last war, too.”

“One thing at a time—when you can, anyhow,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. “That’s only good strategy. First we win the war. Then we take care of anything else that needs doing. You can count on the General Staff to have the sense to see as much.”

Most of the high-ranking officers who’d tried to overthrow Hitler at Christmastime the year before served on the General Staff. Hans-Ulrich Rudel was not the most politic of men, but even he could see that pointing out as much to his superior would win him no points. Besides, he knew Steinbrenner was loyal. The wing commander had replaced another officer in France: one suspected of insufficient enthusiasm for the National Socialist cause. Where was the other fellow now? Dachau? Belsen? A hole in the ground? Better not to wonder about such things.

When the weather cleared enough to let him fly, Rudel felt nothing but relief. In the air, he didn’t have to think about Jews or politics or the price of being mistrusted by the government. He had to look for Red Army panzers. That was it. When he found them, he had to dive on them and shoot them up. His Ju-87 carried a 37mm cannon under each wing. The extra weight and drag made the Stuka even more of a lumbering pig in the air than it would have been otherwise. If Red Air Force fighters jumped him, he’d go into some Russian pilot’s trophy case. Till that evil day came, if it ever did, he was very bad news.

“Everything clear behind us, Albert?” he asked through the brass speaking tube.

“If it weren’t, I’d be screaming my head off.” Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst was rear gunner and radioman. He and Rudel sat back-to-back, separated by an armored bulkhead. If anyone had a better understanding than Hans-Ulrich of how limited the Stuka was in the air, Dieselhorst was the man.

The Ivans were masters of camouflage. Whitewash and concealment under trees or white cloth could make it hard to spot a panzer on the ground at a hundred meters, let alone from several thousand up in the
air. But not even the Russians could hide the long shadows panzers cast on the snow. “There they are!” Hans-Ulrich yipped excitedly.

“Go get ’em, Lieutenant,” Dieselhorst said. It was all news to him. Like Epimetheus in the Greek myth, he could see only where he’d already been.

Hans-Ulrich heeled the Ju-87 into a dive. He hung suspended against his harness for a moment. Then building acceleration shoved him back into his seat. It would be trying to tear the rear gunner from his and throw him out of the plane over his machine gun.