The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (5 page)

Down on the ground, the panzers swelled from specks to toys to real, deadly whitewashed machines. He dove from behind. When he struck, he fired a round from each gun at the engine compartment. The steel on the decking there was thin, and pierced to let heat escape. He hauled back on the stick as hard as he could to pull the Stuka out of the dive.

“Nailed him!” Sergeant Dieselhorst yelled through the tube. “He’s on fire!”

“Good.” Hans-Ulrich climbed as steeply as he could. He picked another camouflaged panzer and dove on it. Two more rounds. Another burning machine, or so the rear gunner assured him. Some of the crewmen on the other panzers popped out of hatches to blaze away at the Ju-87 with pistols and submachine guns, but Rudel wouldn’t lose any sleep over that. Small-arms fire
could
bring down an airplane, but it didn’t happen every day, or every month, either.

He blasted three more Russian panzers. The rest started up and skedaddled for the nearest trees. Then Dieselhorst said, “I’m getting reports of planes in the neighborhood.”

“All right. We’ll go home.” Hans-Ulrich had heard the reports in his earphones, too. He hadn’t wanted to do anything about that. Sometimes discretion
was
the better part of valor, though. He could gas up again and hit the Ivans on a stretch of front where they didn’t have any air cover.

A flak shell burst under the Stuka, staggering it in the sky. No, the Russians didn’t want him around anymore. He gave the plane more throttle. If they’d got set up a little sooner, they might have knocked him down. Not now.

“Just another morning at the office,” Sergeant Dieselhorst said.

“Aber natürlich.”
Hans-Ulrich laughed. Why not? Just another day at the office, sure—and they’d lived through it.

SERGEANT HIDEKI FUJITA
had thought winter in the Siberian forests was about as bad as anything could be. It was worse than winter on the border with Mongolia, which made it pretty appalling. But winter in front of Vladivostok turned out to be worse yet. It was as cold as the rest of Siberia, with the same wet, heavy snowfall. But it was out in the open—nowhere to hide from the relentlessly probing Russian artillery.

The Red Army was always ass-deep in guns. Russian artillerymen had harried the Japanese on the frontier between Manchukuo and Mongolia. They’d fused their shells to burst as soon as they touched the treetops in the woods, showering Japanese forces astride the Trans-Siberian Railway with deadly fragments. And, here in front of their Far Eastern port, they tried to murder anything that moved.

They came much too close to succeeding. Kilometer upon kilometer of barbed wire and entrenchments ringed Vladivostok. The Soviet Union had always known it might have to fight for the place one day. If Japan was going to take it, her soldiers would have to winkle out the Red Army men one foxhole at a time.

More than a generation earlier, the fight for Port Arthur had gone the same way. Some of the men commanding at Vladivostok would have been junior officers in the earlier fight. Fujita hoped they’d learned something in the intervening years. By everything he could see, it didn’t seem likely.

He mostly huddled in a dugout scraped from the forward wall of a trench. Digging was anything but easy. The ground was frozen hard as stone. It wouldn’t collapse under shellfire, which was something. Not enough, not as far as Fujita was concerned.

Japanese and Russian cannon dueled with one another. Machine guns made sticking your head up over the parapet tantamount to committing
seppuku
. Runners who brought rice and other food up from the field kitchens risked their life with every trip. Even when they made it
through, meals were commonly cold by the time they reached the frontline soldiers.

Rumors flew thick and fast as bullets. Some people said the Russian commander was about to surrender, the way the nobleman in charge of Port Arthur had in 1905. Fujita didn’t believe that one. He’d spent too long fighting the Russians to doubt they were in earnest. They might bungle things—they weren’t always skillful soldiers. But, no matter what they’d been like in 1905, no one who fought them now could think they’d quit so easily.

Other rumors claimed the Japanese would soon charge the works in front of them again. Fujita had to hope those weren’t true. Too many frozen corpses still sprawled suspended in the wire ahead. Along with solidifying the ground, the cold meant dead bodies didn’t stink. Having said those two things, you exhausted its virtues.

Fujita wanted the generals to come up with something brilliant, or at least clever. If they tried something like that, he was less likely to get killed or maimed than if they just pounded away. They didn’t seem to worry about that. As far as generals were concerned, soldiers were only munitions of war, expendable as machine-gun bullets or 105mm shells.

Far off in the distance, Vladivostok itself burned. Black columns of smoke rose into the sky all day long. Japanese bombers pounded the city night and day. When, as occasionally happened, the wind blew from the south instead of the north, the half-spicy, half-choking smell of smoke filled Fujita’s nostrils.

Russian fighters rarely came up to challenge the Japanese planes. The Reds hadn’t had many fighters when Fujita got here, and they had fewer now. Fighters were short-range planes; the Soviet Union couldn’t bring in more very easily.

Russian bombers, by contrast, flew over fairly often, for the most part at night. Fujita had no idea where they came from. Some landing strip up in Siberia? The northern, Soviet half of the island Japan called Karafuto and the Russians Sakhalin? No doubt it mattered to his superiors, who had to decide what to do about the air raids. To Fujita, they were only one more annoyance. Machine-gun bullets and the deadly artillery were worse.

And worse still was knowing his regiment was only an officer’s
whim from being thrown into the fire of a frontal attack. Many went forward. Few came back—even fewer unmaimed.

Shinjiro Hayashi, a superior private in Fujita’s section, had been a student when conscription nabbed him. He still had a calculating turn of mind. “If we use up a regiment to take a stretch of ground two hundred meters wide and fifty meters deep, how many will we use to advance twenty kilometers on a front at least fifty kilometers around?” he asked.

When Fujita was in school, he’d hated problems like that. He tried to work this one, but didn’t like the answer he got. “I don’t know if there are that many regiments in Japan,” he said.

“I don’t, either, Sergeant-
san
,” Hayashi answered somberly.

And what was Fujita supposed to do with that? A sergeant punished defeatism wherever he found it. And a sergeant had the right—the duty—to beat the snot out of his underlings when they didn’t live up to his expectations, or sometimes whenever he felt like it. But the only thing the senior private had done was ask a simple question. They went back to Mongolia together, too.

Instead of belting Hayashi, then, Fujita said, “If you open your big yap any wider, you’ll fall right in.”

Hayashi got the message. “I’ll be careful, Sergeant-
san
,” he promised.

“You’d better,” Fujita growled, but he didn’t sound angry enough to frighten a nine-year-old, let alone a combat veteran.

Then they got something to be frightened about: an order to attack the Red Army positions in front of them. Fujita was a combat veteran, all right, and he was scared green. He spent half an hour sharpening his bayonet. He didn’t think that would keep him alive, but it gave him something to do so he wouldn’t have to worry—too much—about what lay ahead.

No artillery preparation. That, the officers said, would warn the Russians. And so it would, but it would also kill a lot of them, and flatten some of the wire in front of their trenches. What could you do? Live—if they’d let you.

He couldn’t even tell his men the Red Army soldiers would have loot worth taking. In Mongolia, Russian gear and rations seemed luxurious to the Japanese. Not here. The Russians around Vladivostok had been
under siege for months. Even by Japanese standards, they didn’t have much.

The only covering fire the attackers got came from machine guns. Ever since the fight at Port Arthur, the Japanese had handled those aggressively. If the gunners shot a few of their own men in the back … Well, to everyone but the luckless victims, that was only a cost of doing business.

Mouth dry, Fujita ran forward, hunched over as low as he could go. The Russian Maxim guns needed only a few seconds to snarl to life. Bullets coming toward him, bullets snapping past him from behind … He’d been places he liked more. Less? Maybe not.

He tripped over something and fell full length in the snow. Two bullets, one coming and the other going, slammed together about where he’d just been. They fell beside him, sending up a small plume of steam. He hardly noticed, and had no idea how lucky he was.

He got up again and stumbled on. Not all the Japanese soldiers who’d gone down would get up again. If you lost a regiment taking a stretch of ground not very wide and even less deep … He called down elaborate curses on Shinjiro Hayashi’s learned head.

Some soldiers had wire cutters. Some of them stayed unwounded long enough to get up to the vicious stuff and cut it. More Japanese soldiers, Fujita among them, pushed through the gaps and rushed the Russian trenches. A Red Army man popped up like a marmot. He aimed his rifle at the sergeant. Fujita fired first. He missed, but he made the Russian duck. With a cry of
“Banzai!”
Fujita leaped into the trench after him.

The Russian shot at him from almost point-blank range. He missed anyhow. Fujita lunged with the bayonet while the Russian was working the bolt. The point went home. The white man screamed and dropped the rifle. Fujita stuck him again and again, till he finally fell over. Even then, he kept thrashing on the cold hard ground until the sergeant shot him in the head. People could be awfully hard to kill.

Little by little, paying a price, the Japanese cleared the Russians from three or four rows of trenches. No, not much left in the dead men’s pockets, though Fujita did get some Russian cigarettes—a little tobacco
at the end of a long paper holder. He lit one. The smoke was harsh as sandpaper, but he didn’t care.

Senior Private Hayashi sidled up to him and spoke in a low voice: “If clearing a space two hundred meters by fifty meters costs most of a regiment …”

“Oh, shut up,” Fujita exclaimed. He tried to blow a smoke ring.

SPAIN WAS MISERABLY
hot in summer and miserably cold in winter. Coming as he did from New York City, Chaim Weinberg had reckoned himself a connoisseur of both extremes. He had to admit, though, that Spain went further in both directions than his home town.

Spain seemed to go all-out in everything. American politics matched one side of the center against the other, and endlessly played the game of compromise solution. Communists like Chaim couldn’t get a serious hearing there. And so he’d come to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to do what he could for the left-wing Republic against Marshal Sanjurjo’s Fascists, who held more than half of it.

He’d sweltered. He’d frozen, the way he was freezing now. He’d argued in English, in Yiddish that often did duty for German, and in bad Spanish. The Republic ran on argument no less than on gasoline and high explosives. He’d learned to drink wine from a leather sack and to roll his own smokes. He’d killed. He’d been wounded. He’d got laid. If you were an excitable young man who hadn’t done most of those things before (sweltering, freezing, and arguing came naturally), Spain could look a lot like paradise.

But if this was paradise, it needed rebuilding. Sanjurjo’s men, and the Italian and German mercenaries who fought on their side, had done their best to knock Madrid flat. Their best was good, but not good enough. Buildings had chunks bitten out of them. Hardly any windows were glazed. Craters in streets and sidewalks made getting anywhere in town an adventure.

Chaim didn’t care. The Madrileños carried on as if the war were a million miles away: as well as they could when going hungry or huddling in a cellar while bombs rained down didn’t distract them. If the
wine reminded him of vinegar or piss, if the cigarettes tasted of hay or horseshit or other street scrapings, well, so what? You could still get drunk. Whatever else went into the cigarettes, they had enough tobacco so you didn’t think you’d quit.

And the people … Everybody called everyone else
tu
. The formal
Usted
hadn’t been banned in the Republic, but anyone who used it might get sent off for reeducation. Women acted like men, in the shops, in the streets, and in bed. Yes, Chaim had got laid. If you couldn’t get laid in the Spanish Republic, you weren’t half trying.

Prisoners from the other side who were brought into Madrid had to think they’d landed on Mars. Where the Republic jumped on class and sex distinctions with both feet, under the Fascist regime they got enforced more strongly than ever. Enforcing the ruling class’s dominance was what Fascism was all about.

Almost by accident, Chaim had got the job of reindoctrinating those prisoners. His Spanish still wasn’t the best, but it did the job—and if he was fluent in any part of the language, it was Marxist-Leninist jargon. Besides, Spaniards were absurdly respectful of foreigners. The Fascists even respected Italians, for crying out loud! Prisoners assumed an American had to be a political sophisticate. Chaim knew better, but didn’t let on that he did.

The POW camp was in a park near the center of Madrid. When enemy planes came over at night, they dropped their bombs more or less at random. They bombed their own people, too. Sometimes they blasted the camp’s barbed-wire perimeter. That led to escapes: POWs on the loose in Madrid weren’t much shabbier than anybody else, and looked, acted, and sounded like any other Spaniards. It also led to casualties.

Chaim still wasn’t sure whether Joaquin Delgadillo, a man he’d captured himself, was the one or the other. Delgadillo wasn’t in the camp any more. Chaim knew that. But whether the Spaniard had got away after a bombing run or been blasted into unrecognizable scraps of meat, the guards had no idea. They only shrugged. “One or the other,” they chorused.