The Big Switch twtce-3
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They knew how to get what they wanted, too. A bigger explosion followed the first one. An enormous cloud of black smoke toadstooled up into the sky.
“Rifles!” yelled another Marine coming up from below. “I’ve got rifles, so we can shoot back at the lousy yellow bastards!”
Pete gratefully grabbed a Springfield. You could shoot down a plane with a rifle. (You had to be mighty goddamn lucky- mighty goddamn lucky-but you could.) And even if you didn’t shoot anything down, you were trying to. You were in the fight. No-you were in the war. It had taken almost two and a half years, but the United States was finally in the war.
War! The headline on the Philadelphia Inquirer took up most of the space above the fold. Peggy Druce had to turn the newspaper over to learn that Japan had launched attacks on the Philippines and Hawaii, and was also moving into French Indonesia and British Malaya.
It wasn’t that she didn’t already know some of that-she and Herb had been glued to the radio ever since news of what was going on halfway around the world broke here in the States. But the paper had more details than the hasty radio bulletins she’d heard before, many of them delivered by men who sounded as if they could hardly believe the copy they were reading.
She brought the Inquirer in to her husband, who was eating fried eggs and buttered toast and getting down a second cup of coffee heavy with sugar and almost white with cream. She remembered some of the rationed breakfasts she’d had in Europe, and what passed for coffee in Germany. Americans didn’t always understand how lucky they were.
She handed Herb the front page without a pang. She’d glanced at the headlines, and he’d fill her in on anything important she might have missed. He took the Inquirer with a word of thanks. As soon as he had it in front of him, he lit a cigarette. Breathing out smoke, he said, “Lord, what a mess!”
Peggy nodded but didn’t answer. She’d been in the middle of such an exploding mess. Herb, of course, had seen and done even worse things when he went Over There a generation earlier. That wasn’t quite the same, though. The mess then had already exploded by the time he got to it. He knew what he was supposed to do and how to go about it. Things now were up in the air, as they had been when Peggy found herself too close to the German border as Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. Some of those things had been machine-gun bullets and 105mm shells and 500kg bombs. They’d come down, much too close to her head.
“Looks like Manila got caught napping,” Herb remarked, exhaling more smoke. “Hawaii’s not so bad. We were ready for ’em there-but why didn’t we spot ’em while they were on the way, darn it?”
“Maybe they came from a funny direction,” Peggy said.
“Maybe they did-but we ought to be looking every which way at once when there’s liable to be a war on, don’t you think?” Herb opened the Inquirer to get a look at the inside pages. He shook his head. “We were ready in Hawaii, and we still lost a carrier and a battlewagon and some of the fuel store we’ve got there.” He held up a page with a photo for Peggy. She supposed it was smoke from burning fuel oil or whatever the hell. It looked more like a volcano going off.
“What about Manila?” she asked.
“It’s a lot closer to the Japs, and it got hit a lot harder,” Herb answered. “They’ll probably try invading the Philippines if they haven’t already.” He went to another inside page. “MacArthur says, ‘We shall prevail.’ That sounds pretty, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does,” Peggy said. “I wonder how he expects to do it, though.”
“Ha!” Her husband finished the toast and stubbed out his cigarette. “There’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right.”
“What does FDR have to say about it?” Peggy asked, adding, “There wasn’t anything on the front page.”
Herb nodded, acknowledging that she’d looked as she brought in the paper. He settled his bifocals more firmly on his nose as he looked for an answer. He grunted, not much liking what he found. “A White House aide says, ‘Obviously, we are at war. Obviously, we didn’t want to be.’ ”
“Our goldfish could tell us that much, and we haven’t got a goldfish,” Peggy said.
“Yeah, I know.” Herb nodded. Then he let out a different grunt, one that said Now we’re getting somewhere. “The President’s going to address Congress at noon. Emergency session. It’ll go by radio all over the country.”
Peggy wondered how many people would miss church to hear him. It was still Sunday morning here-still very early Sunday morning on the Pacific Coast. It had been Sunday morning for quite a while in Manila, though. Hawaii had got hit at midday Saturday, their time.
When Peggy remarked on that, Herb grunted one more time, now as if to convey Well, what do you expect? “Some of the guys there were still sober, I bet,” he said. “Odds are that’s why they did better.”
“Why does everybody get smashed on Saturday night?” she wondered.
His look told her she could have asked a better question. She thought he’d grunt yet again, but he fooled her: he only rolled his eyes. “You’re in the service, what else is there to do?” he said. Then, slowly and deliberately, he lit another cigarette. His cheeks hollowed as he took a deep drag. When he let it out in twin streams through his nose, he looked like a locomotive venting steam. Peering down at the paper rather than at Peggy, he went on, “If they’ll have me, hon, I’m going to put the uniform on again.”
“Oh, no!” But that was dismay, not surprise. Peggy knew him too well for such a thing to surprise her. She did take her best shot at changing his mind: “You did your bit the last time around-your bit and then some.”
Herb chuckled sourly. “If they have to stick a Springfield in my paws, the USA’s in deep water, all right,” he admitted. “But I know some stuff I didn’t back in 1918. All kinds of things’ll run smoother if somebody like me who knows the ropes is there to keep an eye on ’em.”
She imagined swarms of canny, successful middle-aged men with gimlet eyes and skeptical stares descending on war plants all over the country and telling Army regulars how to do their jobs better. “If you think the regulars will thank you for it, you’re nuts,” she predicted.
She squeezed another chuckle out of him. This one might in fact have been amused. “They may hate us, but they’ll need us.”
Maybe he was right, maybe wrong. Maybe the Army wouldn’t take him back. Peggy hoped it wouldn’t and feared it would. She said, “I don’t remember the last time I wanted a drink so bad first thing in the morning.”
To her amazement, Herb built her a strong one and himself one stronger yet. “What the dickens?” he said. “We don’t go to war every day, thank God. And if we get sleepy later on, so what? It’s Sunday.” Ice cubes clinked as he raised his glass. “Here’s to the USA!”
“To the USA!” Peggy echoed. The bourbon hit her hard in spite of her morning coffee. But Herb couldn’t have put it any better. What the dickens? So what? They both had another hefty knock after the first one. The newspaper stopped being interesting. Reading felt like too much effort. And, on the morning the United States found itself at war, the funnies weren’t very funny.
Peggy turned on the radio. She and Herb took turns spinning the dial. Music and prayers-many of them hastily and badly written to take account of suddenly changed circumstances-and confused war news came from one station after another. Peggy didn’t worry about any of it. She was paying attention to the state of the nation, which was what the times called for.
A little before noon, Herb turned the dial to 610 for WIP, the Mutual Broadcasting System’s local affiliate. No doubt most stations would carry FDR, but you could count on that one. Right on the hour, an announcer spoke in hushed tones: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States addressing a joint session of Congress… Here is the President.”
“Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, yesterday the Empire of Japan attacked American possessions without warning or provocation,” Roosevelt said,
his voice raspy with anger. “The Empire’s despicable action shows that its leaders think us weak and irresolute. Like it or not-and no sane man can relish war-we are at war with the Japanese. They have started this fight. We will finish it, and we will win it.”
A great cheer rose from the members of Congress. FDR went on to ask them to make a formal declaration of war against Japan. That cheer told Peggy he’d get exactly what he asked for. he Ivans were getting frisky. Somewhere a long way ahead lay Smolensk. The orders for Willi Dernen’s regiment said it was one part of a giant pincer that would help encircle the Russian city. But to encircle a place, you first had to nip round behind it. The orders came out of Berlin, and Berlin didn’t get what was going on all these kilometers to the east.
Willi hadn’t shaved since… he couldn’t remember quite when. His face fungus helped a little when it came to keeping his cheeks and chin warm. It would have done more if it weren’t full of rime from his breath. And he was better off than many. He had his greatcoat and the sheepskin vest underneath. And he had a pair of fine felt boots some Russian didn’t need any more. His feet wouldn’t freeze… too soon.
Compared to those of his buddies still stuck with Wehrmacht -issue gear, he was well off. Compared to the French and English, whose cold-weather clothing was nowhere near so good as what the Germans made, he was incredibly lucky.
But the Poles didn’t have to scrounge to get their hands on stuff like this. They knew ahead of time what these winters were like. Seeing German troops collect pitying stares from a bunch of damn Poles was galling, to say the least.
Red Army men had clothes made for this hideous weather, too. They also had gun oil that didn’t freeze up when it got really cold, unlike the fancy shit the Germans used. Willi carried a little tube of that, taken from the dead Russian who’d supplied him with valenki. The action on his Mauser still worked just fine.
He shared the gun oil with his friends. He even shared it with Awful Arno, more from expediency than affection. Baatz might be the world’s biggest pain in the ass, but he was almost as dangerous to the bastards on the other side as he was to his own men.
Fighting went back and forth, back and forth. German panzer lubricants didn’t like the bitter weather any better than German gun oil did. Sometimes you could get panzer support, sometimes not. Russian panzers didn’t seem bothered. They had wider tracks than German machines, too. They could go through or over mud and snowdrifts that made German panzers bog down.
Squatting by a fire in a hut in a wrecked village, Willi said, “If the Ivans even halfway knew what the fuck they were doing, they could run us back into Poland in about a week and a half.”
“Nah.” Adam Pfaff shook his head. He was as grimy and shaggy as Willi. “We’d hang on for two weeks, easy.”
Arno Baatz crouched by that crackling blaze, too. He didn’t growl at Pfaff for defeatism. He just bummed a papiros off of him. There might not be much tobacco in the damn things, but what there was was a lot stronger than German-issue smokes. Willi also had some papirosi in a greatcoat pocket. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of dead Russians to frisk.
“Poor brave stupid shitheads,” he went on. “Their officers tell ’em to do something, they keep on trying to do it, no matter how dumb it is.”
“You mean, like charging off to surround Smolensk?” Adam Pfaff inquired. Awful Arno stirred at that, but for a wonder he didn’t say anything. Maybe he was taking mental notes. If he was-well, fuck him.
And Willi shook his head. “No, not like that. We’re trying all kinds of ways to do it.”
“None of ’em’s come close to working yet,” Pfaff said. Arno Baatz stirred again.
Willi ignored him. “But they’re all different,” he said. “The Russians keep doing the same goddamn thing over and over, no matter how many of ’em get killed. It’s like they don’t care, or they don’t dare get any ideas for themselves.”
“Always more Russians to throw in,” Baatz said. For once in his life, he wasn’t even close to wrong. Soviet generals spent men the way a sailor on leave spent money on girls. More where those came from seemed to be their guiding principle. The Germans always killed more enemies than they lost themselves. But the Ivans kept on coming.
The thought had hardly crossed Willi’s mind before a sentry out at the edge of the village yelled, “Halt! Who goes there?” Only a burst from a Russian submachine gun answered him. The burst must have missed, because the German fired back and an MG-34-not too frozen to operate-chattered to irate life.
“Fuck!” Awful Arno grabbed his rifle. Like Willi, he’d slapped whitewash on the stock and barrel so the piece wouldn’t stand out against the snow. Adam Pfaff’s remained gray-not perfect camouflage, but not bad, either. Since whitewashing his own Mauser, Baatz had quit riding Pfaff about it.
“Urra! Urra!” The Russian battle shout dinned through the village. The Red Army soldiers were probably liquored up-their daily ration was a hundred grams of vodka, and their officers upped it when they went into action. Booze drove fear into the background.
Willi wished for a hundred grams of potent spirits himself. He burst out of the hut, Pfaff and Baatz at his heels. Bullets cracked past them. They ran toward the heaviest fighting at the eastern edge of the village.
Most of the Ivans wore white snow smocks, on the same principle as the whitewashed Mausers. The Poles had them, too. German quartermasters kept promising to produce some, and kept breaking promises. Some Landsers improvised their own from captured bedsheets, but there weren’t nearly enough of those to go around. Willi wished he had one. His Feldgrau greatcoat turned him into a big blot against the snowy background.
He flopped down behind the burnt and mashed wreckage of another hut and snapped off a shot at the oncoming Russians. One of the snowsuited figures went down. Was he hit or just taking cover himself? No way to tell, not from where Willi sprawled.
Adam Pfaff lay on his belly ten or fifteen meters away, also firing at the Ivans. “After we capture Smolensk…” he said, slapping a fresh five-round magazine onto his rifle.
“Fuck that shit,” Willi answered. “All I want to do is get out of this lousy place in one piece.”
“That’s on account of you’ve got your head on straight,” Pfaff said. “Now if the clowns in Berlin did, too…”
“Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” Willi fired at another Russian.
Enemy fire eased off. None of the Germans in the little village relaxed. The Russians loved to play games like this, to lull their foes into a false sense of security and then jump on them again from a new direction.
Sure as hell, the next attack came in from the south. Mortar bombs burst here and there. Then it was another wave of drunken Ivans bawling “Urra!” at the top of their lungs.
This time, the Russians broke into the village. No matter how frigid the weather was, the work got very warm for a while. The MG-34 worked fearful execution among the Ivans. They couldn’t bring their heavier, clumsier machine guns up for close combat, but raked the village with them at long range.
Willi’s head might have been on a swivel. He tried to look every which way at once. “Adam!” he screamed. “Behind you!”
Pfaff heard. And the gray Mauser knocked over a Russian who would have rammed a bayonet through his kidney in another few seconds. Pfaff shot the Russian again, deliberately this time, to make sure he wasn’t shamming. He wouldn’t pull a Lazarus now, not with the top of his head blown off. His blood steamed in the snow.
“Obliged,” Pfaff said. “This is a whole bunch of fun, isn’t it?”
“If you say so,” Willi answered. The other Gefreiter chuckled.
Sullenly, the Russians pulled back. Bodies littered the ground, some in snow smocks over khaki, others wearing Feldgrau. Wounded men wailed. Injured Russians and Germans sounded pretty much alike. The Landsers kept a few wounded Ivans for questioning and disposed of the rest. It wasn’t as if the Red Army men wouldn’t have done the same to them.
Adam Pfaff came up beside him, also soaking in heat like a lizard in the sun. “Smolensk… Moscow… All easy, right?” Pfaff said.
“Well, sure,” Willi drawled in a way that left no doubt about what he really thought. They both grinned. It wasn’t as if they could do anything about where fate-and the Wehrmacht -had stuck them. A Russian machine gun fired a burst from the woods beyond the fields that surrounded the village. Willi flopped down in the snow again, but no quicker than his friend.
“Reds bomb Scapa Flow! Read all about it!” a newsboy shouted, waving a paper on a London street corner. Alistair Walsh handed him a broad copper penny and got a Times in exchange.
Sure as the devil, the Russians had hit the great British naval base in the Orkneys. Walsh couldn’t imagine how they’d done it. The story told him. They evidently had some huge, lumbering four-engined bombers to which no one in the Royal Navy had given a second thought… till they lumbered southwest from Murmansk, struck the great anchorage, and droned away homeward before the RAF could give chase.
Radio Moscow’s claims as to the damage inflicted on our ships are grossly exaggerated, a Royal Navy spokesman has stated, the Times story said primly. Once upon a time not so long ago-before he resigned from the Army-Walsh would have been sure that was true. Trust the Russians ahead of his own government? Not a chance!
But there was a chance, and maybe a good chance. If a Bentley could run down a prominent critic of the government’s policy, what was safe after that? Not a thing, not so far as Walsh could see.
Not for the first time, he wondered if he was safe himself. He supposed so-he was too small a fish to worry the likes of Sir Horace Wilson. The same didn’t hold, though, for his newfound friends. That he should be friends with MPs still amazed him. If the wind had blown Rudolf Hess’ parachute a few fields over, odds were he’d still be a senior noncom today.