Last Orders

by Harry Turtledove

  Only they weren’t Showas. Somebody’d told him once that the Japanese transport was a license-built version of the U.S. DC-3. These were the American originals, with stars on wings and fuselage in place of the Rising Sun. They’d come close enough for him to spy such details now—and to give him a good look at the men parachuting out of them one after another after another. The sky was full of silk.

  He didn’t hang around to admire the spectacle. Instead, he unslung his rifle and started to fight. He’d never dreamt Midway might be invaded from above. But even though he hadn’t, the Americans had.

  Some Japanese soldiers were already firing at the paratroopers, and at the planes that carried them. One transport blew up in midair, showering Midway with blazing wreckage. “Banzai!” Fujita whooped.

  He quickly emptied one clip, then another. He took more from a countryman’s corpse. The dead man didn’t need the rounds any more, while Fujita could still kill Americans with them.

  He fired again at the men wafting down. Then a Yankee already on the ground sent a bullet that kicked up sand by his feet. He dove for cover. Standing up to fire at the parachutists wasn’t safe any more.

  Everyone was running every which way, Americans and Japanese alike. The Yankees had mostly come down in the less garrisoned western part of the island, but not all their drops put them where they were supposed to go. The Japanese had trained against invasion from the sea till Fujita was sick of it. Anybody with eyes in his head could tell that the Americans would want Midway back if they could get to it.

  But no one—at least no one with the authority to give orders here—had dreamt the Americans would come by air. No one had planned what to do in case that happened. Without planning, the Japanese were at a disadvantage. They never had been great improvisers.

  “We will defend the barracks and the desalinization plant and the special unit!” shouted an officer—Fujita presumed the man was an officer, anyhow—with a loud, authoritative voice. “They will give us the best cover. And we’ll see how the Yankees do with only the water they brought along.”

  Whether the fellow with the loud voice was on officer or not, the command made good sense to Fujita. If the Americans had to come straight at defensible positions, they’d pay a high price for every centimeter of sandy soil they seized. Maybe other Japanese forces would be able to relieve the garrison. Or maybe it would be able to dispose of all the paratroopers and go on harassing Hawaii.

  An American machine gun spat funny-looking red-orange tracers not far enough above the ground. The Yankees fed their machine guns from belts, not aluminum strips, so they could fire longer continuous bursts. And for every tracer you saw, there were all the ordinary rounds you didn’t. You also had to hope none of those rounds saw you.

  Japanese soldiers whom some of those rounds had seen lay sprawled in the sand. A dreadfully wounded man pulled a grenade off his belt, yanked out the pin, and rolled onto the little bomb. His body took the full force of the burst. Not the perfect form of seppuku, but it would serve. He wasn’t suffering any more, and he wouldn’t need to worry about disgracing himself and his family by being captured.

  By the way the Americans kept pushing forward, they didn’t think the garrison could stop them. As the sun slid down the sky toward the western horizon, Fujita began to believe they were right. More of them had landed than he’d guessed, and transports kept flying in to drop reinforcements and supplies. They wouldn’t have to fight with just the water they’d brought.

  “Sergeant!” a captain called. “Can you take a squad and drive the Yankees off that little bit of high ground there?” He pointed to show the position he meant. “It gives them too good a firing position—they can rake these trenches if they bring up machine guns.”

  “Hai!” Fujita saluted. What was he going to do, tell the captain no? He didn’t think a whole company could drive the Americans off that swell of ground, but the garrison didn’t have a company to commit in the first place. He grabbed a squad’s worth of soldiers and sailors and told them what they had to do.

  No one told him no, either. The men just nodded. They hefted their rifles. One attached a fresh magazine. Then they were up and scuffing over the sand toward the low but dangerous hillock.

  Like autumn leaves, they began to fall. Had Fujita been a samurai, he would have used the line in his death poem. But he was only a sergeant trying to do a job. He knew he would fail, but the trying somehow mattered.

  He made it farther than he thought he would—all the way up the swell. He was wounded once before he reached the top. His leg hurt, but he kept going. And he shot an American there before he caught two more rounds in the chest. He fell as if in slow motion in a film. A Yankee with three stripes on his left sleeve brought up his rifle to finish him off. Flame from the muzzle. And then, as in that film, final fadeout.

  Theo Hossbach missed the radioman’s position in the old Panzer II for one very good reason. The wireless set in the obsolete little machine sat back by the fireproof—everyone hoped!—bulkhead separating the fighting compartment from the one that held the engine. It was the warmest place in the panzer to sit. Even on the worst Russian winter days, it wasn’t too bad … once you persuaded the engine to start, anyhow.

  He had a much better chance of staying alive in this Panzer IV. He also felt he had a much better chance of freezing to death. Up here at the front of the chassis, he was as far from the nice, warm engine compartment as he could get. His breath smoked. His teeth chattered. The Panzer IV had a heater, but it didn’t do much.

  Adi Stoss’ breath smoked, too. The driver didn’t seem to care. “How’d you like to play football in weather like this?” he said. “The pitch’d be frozen hard, and the ball would bounce like it was out of its mind.”

  “No thanks!” Theo might have put more expression into his answer than he’d intended.

  Adi laughed. “Yeah, it’d be even worse for a ’keeper, wouldn’t it? Us outfield players, we’re running around and banging into each other. We stay warm that way. ’Keepers, you’ve got to stand in front of your nets and turn into ice cubes. Well, everybody knows you guys are nuts.”

  “Your mother,” Theo said, which made Adi laugh some more. As far as Theo was concerned—as far as any goalkeeper was concerned—the notion that their position attracted eccentrics was a slander perpetrated by ten-elevenths of the footballing world. That in itself went a long way toward proving the outfield players’ point.

  Then a sharp order blared in Theo’s earphones: “The regiment is to assemble at once in the birch forest in the northwest corner of map square Green-17. All units acknowledge immediately.”

  “Acknowledging,” Theo said, and gave the panzer’s number. As soon as he’d done that, he gave the news to Adi and to Hermann Witt.

  “That’s not where we were going,” the panzer commander said with commendable calm. “Who’ll plug the hole we’re leaving in the line?”

  “Don’t know,” Theo said: the truth, but not a helpful truth.

  “Something’s fucked up somewhere,” Witt said. Theo thought that was very likely, as it was on every other day since the creation of the world. The sergeant went on, “Well, if we lose the war because the Ivans pour through the hole, nobody can blame us for obeying orders.”

  “Who says?” Adi put in, and he too had a point. Nevertheless, he swung the panzer to the southwest and chugged toward the rendezvous.

  They got there a couple of hours later. By then, Adi was muttering darkly about how close to dry the fuel tank had got. Theo had yet to meet a panzer crewman who didn’t mutter about fuel every once in a while … or more often than that. Panzers didn’t sip gas. They gulped it. They all but inhaled it. And getting more was never as automatic as it should have been.

  Other worries first, Theo thought as he climbed out of his steel shell. It was even colder in the open air. He had on a wool sweater and long johns under his black coveralls. He was cold anyway. He lit a cigarette. It didn’t warm him up, but he enjoyed
it anyhow.

  More Panzer IVs, and a handful of beat-up IIIs, clattered into the woods. More crewmen in panzer black got out and started loudly and profanely wondering what they devil they were doing there. Theo thought it was too cold and too Russian out for such important philosophical questions, but what did he know? He knew he didn’t have the answer, which put him one up on most of his comrades.

  “Achtung! Achtung! Gather around me, dedicated soldiers of the Grossdeutsches Reich!” That loud voice belonged to Major Stähler, the National Socialist Loyalty Officer. Theo and the whole crew had as little to do with him as they possibly could. With Adi driving their panzer, even that little seemed like too much.

  “Maybe he knows something,” Witt said.

  “That’d be a first,” Adi remarked. Theo heard him, but he didn’t think the sergeant did.

  “Our regiment—our brave and reliable regiment—has been chosen for an important military honor,” Stähler went on as the crewmen gathered around him. “You will have heard certain lying rumors about disaffection, even rebellion, within the boundaries of the Grossdeutsches Reich.”

  As a matter of fact, Theo had heard those rumors. He didn’t suppose anyone in the regiment hadn’t. Adi seemed to know an awful lot about what was going on in and around Münster. He never got mail from home, but he damn well did keep his ear to the ground. And, from what he said in a low voice when no one untrustworthy could overhear, a hell of a lot was going on around there.

  “We must ruthlessly stamp out treason without mercy so the war effort can proceed to our certain final triumph,” Major Stähler said. “Rebels against the state, the Party, and the Führer must be suppressed. They must be, and they shall be. And our regiment has been chosen as one of the instruments of suppression.”

  He sounded proud to announce that. The panzer crewmen’s hum of low talk suddenly rose. Some of them were bound to be proud, too—like any German outfit, the regiment had its share of enthusiastic Nazis. Some, yes, but far from all.

  Stähler went on, “Since the police and the security services have not been able to bring order to certain regions in the western areas of the Reich, the Wehrmacht will insure that obedience to our beloved Führer is restored. As I said, we are part of that effort.”

  If the Führer was so beloved, why did he need a regiment of panzers to restore obedience? Theo wondered about things like that. He also wondered how many other soldiers wondered likewise. But then something else the National Socialist Loyalty Officer said lit up inside his mind like a searchlight. So they were bound for the western part of Germany, were they? Surely it was no accident that most of this regiment came from Breslau, not far from the Polish border. The Nazis might be bastards, but they were sly bastards. They knew better than to send a unit where the men might have to open fire on their cousins and sisters and mothers and granddads and kid brothers.

  “And so,” Major Stähler finished up, “tomorrow we shall proceed to the nearest railhead. From there we shall return to our dear Grossdeutsches Reich and cleanse it once and for all of the filth of treason and betrayal.” He looked out at the assembled panzer crewmen. “Any questions?”

  No one said a word. You had to be the world’s biggest Dummkopf to ask questions of someone like Major Stähler. You wouldn’t find out anything worth knowing, and whatever you said would land you in trouble. The major was just trolling for suckers. He didn’t catch anybody this time. Theo wondered why he bothered trying.

  But Theo didn’t wonder for long. Stähler bothered because some people were at the same time rebels and natural-born damn fools. If you offered them half a chance, they would give themselves away. The loyalty officer was just doing his job.

  “Germany,” Hermann Witt said in wondering tones. “Been a devil of a long time since I last saw Germany.”

  “Me, too,” Lothar Eckhardt agreed. The gunner went on, “Not my part of Germany, exactly, but a lot closer to what I’m used to than this Russian garbage is.” He nodded at Adi. “We are heading back to your part of Germany, aren’t we?”

  “Sounds like it,” Adi answered. “I’m the same as you are, only more so. I haven’t seen the old stomping grounds in a hell of a long time. I wonder if I remember what things look like.” He shrugged broad shoulders. “Doesn’t matter, I guess. We’ll figure out what to shoot at.”

  He didn’t say whether that should be rebels or people like Major Stähler. Theo had opinions on that score. No doubt Adi did, too. No doubt everybody in the crew did. Whether all those opinions matched … Well, that was an interesting question, wasn’t it?

  “This is Douglas Edwards with the news.” Even coming out of a radio speaker, the newsman’s voice sounded as if he belonged on the stage. Peggy Druce had always thought so. Edwards went on, “President Roosevelt has announced that the Stars and Stripes fly once more over Midway Island.”

  Peggy nodded as she spread butter and jam on her toast. The Inquirer’s edition yesterday had had a great photo by some wire-service cameraman of a group of Marines stabbing a flagpole with Old Glory flying from it into the sandy soil of what passed for high ground on Midway.

  “A few stubborn Jap holdouts still skulk on the little island like sand crabs,” Edwards said solemnly. “They cause casualties every now and then, but cannot hope to change the result of the battle. The Marines hunt them down one by one. Soon no more will be left to hunt. And what comes next for Uncle Sam in the Pacific? I’ll be back with a look at that right after the following important messages.”

  If you found yourself in desperate need of cigars or laundry soap and had no idea where to turn, the messages might have seemed important. Otherwise, they just helped the network pay its bills. Douglas Edwards was bound—was more than bound: was paid—to think that important. It didn’t matter a hill of beans, or even a single bean, to Peggy.

  When Edwards came back, he delicately suggested that the United States might look to Wake Island next. “Thank you, Field Marshal Model!” Peggy exclaimed. You didn’t need to belong to the German General Staff to figure that one out. Peggy’d done it for herself while the sultry chanteuse sang the praises of White Owls. Wake was now the closest Japanese-held dot on the map to the main Hawaiian islands. It legally belonged to the USA. Once it fell into American hands again, nobody could even dream about dropping any more germ bombs on Honolulu.

  In the Atlantic, a German U-boat had fired two torpedoes at a U.S. destroyer. Both missed. The destroyer depth-charged the U-boat, but didn’t sink it. FDR had sent Hitler a stiff protest note. Hitler’d told Roosevelt where he could stick that note. All of which was done diplomatically, of course, but that was what it boiled down to.

  On the Eastern Front, the Russians kept moving up and the Germans kept falling back. Marshal Antonescu loudly denied that Romania was thinking about bailing out of the war. Of course, the louder a dictator and his henchmen denied something like that, the truer it was liable to be.

  Take Dr. Goebbels, for instance. He was now loudly denying there was any such thing as unrest inside the Reich. Douglas Edwards played a recording of Lord Haw-Haw—otherwise an Irishman named William Joyce who’d lived in the States for a while and who could put on a plummy, aristocratic British accent—saying, “The German people stand united behind Adolf Hitler!” Goebbels had also announced that anyone who didn’t stand united behind the Führer would stand alone in front of a firing squad.

  In Spain, the Nationalists really did seem to be falling to pieces now that Marshal Sanjurjo had bitten the dust. The Republic had regained more ground the past few weeks than in several previous years. Peggy had read For Whom the Bell Tolls. It made her admire the Spaniards. It also made her think that the parts of Spain the Republic took from the Nationalists wouldn’t be much happier now than Nationalist-conquered chunks of the Republic had been before. A civil war was a filthy business no matter who wound up on top.

  When Edwards started talking about tornadoes in Oklahoma and Arkansas, Peggy stopped listening. She thought of places
like that the way a smart, well-connected Englishwoman would have thought of Scunthorpe, a Frenchwoman would have thought of Périgueux, or a Russian woman would have thought of Irkutsk. She supposed people had to live in such places, but she was mighty glad not to be one of them.

  A train wreck in Wisconsin and a strike at an aluminum plant outside of Los Angeles didn’t much interest her, either. She got up and turned the radio to a station that was playing music. She kept it on while she did the breakfast dishes. The jazz was hotter than she usually enjoyed, but she found herself washing the frying pan in time to the sax’s propulsive rhythm.

  After the dishes were done, she changed the station again. She didn’t want to be jitterbugging while she swept the floors. Music that made you get up and dance was all very well in its place, but she didn’t think cleaning the house was that place.

  Once she got things clean enough to suit her, she paused to smoke a cigarette. American tobacco tasted so much better than the hay and horseshit they had in Europe, it wasn’t even funny. She sometimes wondered why she hadn’t quit while she was stuck over there. Hanging on to the habit with the crap they were stuck with hardly seemed worth it.

  But she had, and she was glad of it. For one thing, the Nazis disapproved of women who smoked. They claimed it was unhealthy. The prejudice seemed as irrational to her as their hatred of Jews. Anything they disapproved of, she was all for.

  And, for another, what else besides a cigarette gave you the perfect excuse to do nothing for a few minutes? Oh, there were coffee breaks, too, but those weren’t the same. They were bigger. You couldn’t take coffee any old place, the way you could with a cigarette. A lot of the time, you had to go to the trouble of making coffee if you wanted some. A Chesterfield or an Old Gold was always there.

  “Unhealthy, my ass,” Peggy muttered as she stubbed out the butt. Now that Herb wasn’t here, she could talk to herself as much as she pleased. No one would think she was crazy. Well, not on account of that, anyhow.