The War That Came Early: West and East (42 page)

“Jawohl, Herr Oberleutnant,”
Heinz answered. “Carb is working the way it’s supposed to again.” He said nothing about whether the crew was working the way it was supposed to. Maybe he didn’t even worry about it. From his perspective, from a commander’s perspective, Adi might have been no more than a bit of grit in the works. He might have been, but Theo didn’t believe it for a minute.

“Well, all right,” Schmidt said. “The push southwest goes on tomorrow. If everything works the way it’s supposed to, we’ll link up with more
Wehrmacht
units in the afternoon. They aren’t far away.”

“That’s good, sir,” Heinz said. Theo found himself nodding. He saw Adalbert Stoss doing the same thing. They’d wedged their way through the swarming Russians this long. Maybe they wouldn’t have to do it any more. Maybe there’d be a real front again soon. The Red Army wasn’t as good at blitzkrieg as the
Wehrmacht
. All the same, being on the wrong end of it wasn’t much fun.

“All right,” Lieutenant Schmidt repeated. “We move at dawn—the
sooner we give the Reds one in the teeth, the better for us.” He ambled off to talk to the next panzer’s crew.

Dawn came later than it would have a month before. Summer was going, autumn on the way. What would winter be like around here? Worse than the last one in the Low Countries and France—Theo was sure of that.

He ducked down into the back of the panzer with relief. On the move, the crew would talk about business, and that would be that. The radio net was full of traffic. Some of it was in unintelligible Polish and Russian, but most came from the Germans moving south to cut off the Russians who’d moved west to cut off the Germans moving north to cut off the earlier wave of Russians moving west. War could get complicated.

Down in what was now “independent” Slovakia, more German divisions were on the move, these heading north into Poland. Had they been attacking the Poles, the country would have fallen in a couple of weeks. But the Poles were Germany’s friends … for the moment.

The first hint Theo had that things weren’t going perfectly was the machine-gun bullets slamming into the Panzer II’s armored side. “Panzer halt!” Heinz shouted. Adi hit the brakes. Heinz traversed the turret and fired a long burst from the machine gun and several rounds from the 20mm cannon. “That’ll shift the Red arselicks,” he said. “Go on now.” The panzer clanked forward again.

Despite the earphones, Theo heard more gunfire outside. A rifle round smacked the panzer. Theo tensed. Anything bigger than a rifle round would punch right through. He’d bailed out of one burning machine. That was why he had nine and a half fingers now. He didn’t want to find out what he’d be missing if he had to do it again.

Naumann stuck his head and shoulders out of the turret. Without a decent cupola, you needed to do that every so often if you wanted to know what was going on. French turrets had proper cupolas. So did Panzer IIIs. For that matter, so did the very latest Panzer IIs. But not this one …

Naumann let out a sound halfway between grunt and groan. He slumped back into the turret. Theo needed no more than a heartbeat to realize he was dead. The twin stinks of blood and shit told the story even
before the radioman saw the red-gray ruin that had been the side of the panzer commander’s head.

He ripped off the earphones and tried to get Naumann’s corpse out of the way so he could serve the cannon and machine gun himself. Like it or not, he had to command the panzer now. “Heinz caught one,” he shouted into the speaking tube up to the driver’s compartment.

“Scheisse,”
Adalbert Stoss said. “Bad?”

“Dead,” Theo answered succinctly.

“Well, you’re it, then,” Adi said. “Tell me what to do.”

“Just keep going for now,” Theo said. Before long, he’d have to stick
his
head out of the blood-dripping hatch. That was part of what a panzer commander did. Heinz was still bleeding onto the floor of the fighting compartment. That had nothing to do with anything, either.

Absently, he wondered what the new commander would be like. He also wondered whether they’d ever be able to wash out the inside of the Panzer II. Then he wondered if he’d live long enough to find out about either of the other two. Doing his job was the best way to make the answer to that yes. The best way, sure—but no guarantee.

HANS-ULRICH RUDEL SOON DISCOVERED
wearing the
Ritterkreuz
at his throat changed his life very little. Oh, some jackass reporters from the Propaganda Ministry talked with him about panzer-busting with a Stuka. A photographer snapped his picture with the Knight’s Cross. But that was about it. The reporters and photographer couldn’t very well fly with him. And when he was airborne he had only two concerns: finishing the mission and getting home in one piece.

“We could take ’em along under the wings,” Sergeant Dieselhorst suggested. “We drop ’em on the frogs or the Tommies, they’ll make bigger booms than a thousand-kilo bomb.”

In spite of himself, Rudel laughed. “They would, wouldn’t they? They’re nothing but a bunch of blowhards, so of course they’ll be blowup-hards.”

“Damn straight,” Dieselhorst said. “What I wonder is, how come they aren’t in real uniforms instead of their fancy ones? They’ve got to have
connections. Otherwise, they’d need to work for a living like honest people. They’ll go back to Berlin and drink like fish and screw like there’s no tomorrow—you wait.”

“And you’ll stay here and drink like a fish and screw like there’s no tomorrow,” Hans-Ulrich said—with, he hoped, not too much reproof in his voice. He didn’t take his fun that way, but he didn’t want to come down on his rear gunner. Dieselhorst was much more inclined to worry about this world than his hope of the next one.

The sergeant grinned. “More fun than anything else I can think of. You ought to try it yourself once, so you know what you’re missing the rest of the time.”

“No, thanks,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I’ll leave you alone if you do the same for me.”

“Yes, sir,” Dieselhorst said, but then he clucked in mock reproof. “If countries behaved like that, we wouldn’t have any wars any more, and then where would the likes of us wind up?”

“Flying for a carnival, I suppose, or else Lufthansa,” Rudel answered. “Once I got up into the air, I knew nobody’d be able to keep me on the ground any more. How about you?”

“I worked in a radio studio. That’s what I told them when I joined up, which is why I look backwards all the time now.” Dieselhorst chuckled as he lit a cigarette. “I didn’t tell ’em I just swept up. They probably would have dropped
me
on the Frenchies if I had.”

“I won’t squeal,” Hans-Ulrich promised solemnly.

The sergeant blew out a cloud of smoke. “Doesn’t matter any more. I actually know what I’m doing by this time.”

They went up again the next morning. Hans-Ulrich wrenched back hard on the stick to yank the Stuka into the air. Lugging those twin 37mm guns under the wings, it really was a lumbering beast. Well, it wasn’t supposed to dogfight Spitfires (and a good thing, too!). It was supposed to smash up enemy panzers. It could do that … if nobody shot it down on the way.

Rudel peered from the cockpit, looking for concentrations of French or British armor. When he was diving, he had a fine view. In level flight,
trying to peer around the long Junkers Jumo engine was a pain in the posterior. Sergeant Dieselhorst could see a lot more than he could.

But Dieselhorst had other things besides enemy panzers to worry about. A yell of alarm came out of the speaking tube: “Fucking fighter on our tail!” The rear-facing machine gun chattered.

Fiery tracers spat past the Stuka. Hans-Ulrich mashed the throttle. He might be flying a spavined old cart horse, but he’d give it all he had anyway. The fighter zoomed past him all the same, and pulled up for another run. It wasn’t a particularly modern plane: a French D-500. It was a monoplane, yes, but it had fixed landing gear (like the Stuka) and an open cockpit (which the Stuka didn’t). It carried two machine guns and a 20mm cannon firing through the hollow propeller hub.

Without his own heavy armament slowing him down, he could have outrun the Dewoitine. Had he had a choice, he would have. With the panzer-busting guns, he not only didn’t have a choice, he didn’t have a prayer. He’d have to fight it out up here unless he could scare that Frenchman off. And the fellow wouldn’t have become a fighter pilot if he scared easily.

Sure as the devil, here he came, straight down the Stuka’s throat. His machine guns winked. A couple of bullets clanged into the Ju-87. The beast could take a beating. It kept flying … as well as ever, anyhow. The cannon fired. Its big round missed. Hans-Ulrich thanked heaven—nobody could take many hits from anything heavier than a rifle-caliber gun.

That thought was part of what made him fire both 37mm cannon at the D-500. Scaring the enemy off was the other part. If you saw those big blasts of fire from the underwing guns when you weren’t expecting them, if a couple of great honking shells roared past you, you wouldn’t need to be
very
cowardly to have sudden second thoughts.

And if one of those great honking shells tore off half your right wing, you’d go into a flat spin and spiral down toward the ground without a prayer of getting out of your plane even if you didn’t have to wrestle with a cockpit canopy. Hans-Ulrich didn’t see a parachute canopy open. He did see a column of black smoke jet up from where the D-500 went in.

He yelled so loud, Sergeant Dieselhorst asked, “You all right?” If a certain anxiety rode his voice, who could blame him? He had no controls back there, and he couldn’t have seen where he was going even if he did. If one of those French bullets had nailed his pilot, his only hope was to hit the silk right now.

“I’m fine,” Rudel answered. “Do you know what I just did?”

Dieselhorst was quick on the uptake, but still sounded disbelieving as he said, “Don’t tell me you shot that motherfucker down?”

“I did!” Hans-Ulrich sounded surprised, even to himself. Well, why not? He
was
surprised. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was astonished. “Now, where are those panzers?”

“What’ll you do if we run into more fighters?” Dieselhorst asked.

“Get away if I can,” Hans-Ulrich said, which seemed to satisfy the sergeant, for he asked no more questions.

A column of French machines crawling up the road toward the front sent him stooping on them like a hawk on a column of mice. He blasted the lead panzer first, then climbed again to dive on the others. They went off the road to try to get away, but he still killed two more before the rest got under some trees.

“Now we go back,” he told Dieselhorst.

“Sounds good to me, sir,” the rear gunner said. “I radioed what you did to the French fighter. By the way the clowns carried on, you might’ve got yourself a Knight’s Cross for that if you didn’t already have one.”

“Shooting down a fighter’s not worth a
Ritterkreuz
!” Hans-Ulrich exclaimed.

“It is if you do it in a Stuka,” Dieselhorst replied. “These things are made to get shot down, not to do the shooting.”

“They’re made to hit things on the ground. They’re made to get hit and keep flying.” Hans-Ulrich knocked the side of his head in lieu of wood. The engine sounded fine. None of the dials showed him losing fuel or oil or water. The ugly bird could take it, all right. He flew back toward the airstrip.

Chapter 18

A
newsboy hawked papers on a corner. Sarah Goldman got a look at the big headline as he waved a copy:
GERMANY RESCUES POLAND FROM RUSSIAN HORDES!
“Paper! Get your paper!” the kid shrilled. Then he saw the yellow star on her blouse. His lip curled. “Oh. Like
you’d
care.”

She wanted to kick the little monster. Only the certainty that it wouldn’t do any good and would get her into more trouble than she was likely to be able to get out of made her walk on. And what really infuriated her was that the little prick was wrong, wrong, wrong. For all she knew, her brother was in the middle of the fighting there. If Saul wasn’t, he was in France, or maybe Scandinavia.

Wherever he was, Sarah hoped he was all right. The Goldmans had got that one letter from him—actually, the neighbors across the street had got it, and had the sense and kindness to know for whom it was really intended. Then not another word. Saul wasn’t a thinker like their father, but he had the sense to realize anything connecting him to his family was dangerous to him and to them.

She wondered how the Poles felt about being “rescued” by Germany.
Better than they would have if the Russians had overrun them, she supposed. Otherwise, Marshal Smigly-Ridz never would have asked the
Führer
to pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him.

And just because troops marched in as rescuers, that didn’t necessarily mean they’d march out again so readily. Poland was almost as offensive to the German sense of how the map of Europe ought to look as Czechoslovakia was: or rather, had been. Hitler was doing everything he could to get the map to look the way he wanted it to.

Her mouth twisted. Hitler was doing everything he could to get everything to look the way he wanted it to. Why else would she be wearing the star that said
JEW
in big, Hebraic-looking letters? Because she wanted to? Not likely! No more than she wanted to go out shopping just before the stores closed, when most of them were sold out—if they’d had anything to begin with.