Hitler's War

by Harry Turtledove

  The Dutch did have some field guns—75s or 105s—close enough to the frontier to help their infantry resist the German onslaught. That was where the Stukas came in. The squadron leader put a wing over and dove on the gun positions. One after another, the rest of the Ju-87s followed.

  Acceleration shoved Hans-Ulrich against the back of his armored seat. He hoped Sergeant Dieselhorst was well strapped in—that same acceleration would be trying to tear him out of his rear-facing seat.

  Hans-Ulrich spotted three or four gun pits close together. He steered toward them as his altimeter unwound. You had to be careful to pull up. In Spain, a whole flight of Stukas had smashed into the ground because they didn’t start to come out of their dives till too late.

  There was an automatic gadget that was supposed to make you pull up. Hans-Ulrich had quietly disconnected it. He wanted to stay in control himself, not trust his life to a bunch of cams and cogs.

  As he dove, the wind-driven sirens on his mainwheel legs screamed. Even inside the cockpit, the noise was unearthly. During training, he’d heard it from the ground. Coupled with the engine’s roar, it sounded as if a pack of demons and the hounds of hell were stooping on the target.

  He watched the Dutch artillerymen scatter like ants from a kicked anthill. They weren’t cowards, not in any ordinary sense of the word. The poor bastards were just up against something they’d never known, never imagined, before. Rudel had wanted to run, too, that day on the training field.

  And nobody had bombed him. He yanked the switch that loosed the bombs, then pulled back on the stick for all he was worth. The Stuka’s airframe groaned as it went from dive to climb, but the plane was built to take it. His own vision went red for a few seconds. That was the danger point. The dive bomber could pull more g’s than the pilot could.

  But color came back to the world. Clarity came back to Hans-Ulrich’s thoughts. For a little while there, all he’d remembered was that he had to hang on to the stick. He gathered himself. “You good back there, Albert?”

  “Hell of a roller coaster, Herr Leutnant,” Dieselhorst answered. “You blew that battery to kingdom come, too. I saw the bombs go off. Right on target.”

  “Good. Good,” Rudel said. “I thought I aimed them right, but I’m pulling up by the time they go off.”

  “You’d better be,” Sergeant Dieselhorst said. They both laughed. Why not? Laughing came easy when the war was going well.

  And then tracers flamed past the cockpit. Dieselhorst’s machine gun chattered. A Dutch Fokker fighter—like the Ju-87, a monoplane with landing wheels that didn’t retract—zoomed past, much too close for comfort. The enemy pilot sent Rudel an obscene gesture as the Fokker flew off.

  “Gott im Himmel!” Hans-Ulrich said. “Where the devil did he come from?”

  “Beats me,” the rear gunner answered. “I thought our fighter pilots were supposed to keep that kind of Scheisse from happening.”

  “Theory is wonderful,” Rudel said. Sergeant Dieselhorst laughed again, but shakily.

  The Stuka flew back toward the Reich for more fuel and more bombs. Hans-Ulrich spotted a column of trucks and buses heading east, toward the fighting. The trucks were painted the grayish green of Dutch army uniforms. A convoy bringing troops and supplies to the front—had to be.

  Hans-Ulrich dove again, not so steeply this time. His thumb rested on the firing button atop the stick. He had two forward-firing machine guns mounted in his wings. The Ju-87 seemed to stagger in the air as his bullets stitched through the convoy.

  A bus ran into a truck. The bus caught fire. Another bus rolled off the road and into a ditch. Soldiers bailed out of their vehicles and ran like hell. It was almost like going after partridges with a shotgun.

  Almost. Some of the Dutch soldiers didn’t run very far. They un-slung their rifles and started shooting at the Stuka as it roared away. Infantrymen didn’t have much of a chance against aircraft, but no denying the balls on these guys. And damned if a bullet from somewhere didn’t clang through the Stuka’s tail assembly. A few meters farther forward…

  My armor would have stopped it, Hans-Ulrich thought. That’s what it’s there for. Reassuring to remember you had eight millimeters of steel at your back, five millimeters under you, and four millimeters to either side. It wouldn’t keep everything out, but it beat the hell out of not having any.

  Soldiers fired green flares. That was the German recognition signal. They didn’t want their own Stukas shooting them up. Hans-Ulrich waggled his wings to show he’d seen.

  He bounced in on a dirt strip a few kilometers inside the German border. Groundcrew men and armorers cared for the Stuka. Hans-Ulrich rolled back the canopy so he could stand up and stretch. “You’ve got a couple of bullet holes, sir,” a groundcrew man reported.

  “I know I got hit at least once,” Rudel answered. “Anything leaking? All my gauges are good, and the controls answer.”

  “No leaks,” the man assured him.

  “Well, then, I’ll worry about it later,” he said. “Mach schnell, bitte. We’ve got a war to fight, and no time to waste.”

  Five minutes later, he was airborne again.

  ONE OF THE THINGS ALISTAIR WALSH had forgotten about war was what a bloody balls-up it made of traffic. Or maybe things had been different in 1918. By the time he got to the front then, all the civilians had run off. Either that or they’d got killed. Anyhow, they weren’t around to get in the way.

  Things were different now. The Dutch and the Belgians hadn’t expected the Nazis to jump on them. Sergeant Walsh didn’t know why they hadn’t—his opinion was that they were a pack of goddamn fools—but they hadn’t. Now that the shells were bursting and the bombs came whistling down, half of the locals decided they really wanted to go to some place where things like that didn’t happen.

  And so they did. Whatever small respect Walsh had acquired for the Belgian army during the last go-round dissolved like his stomach lining in the presence of cheap whiskey. He didn’t particularly expect the Brussels Sprouts to fight. (He knew damn well the Germans would fight, and hoped the French would, too. About all other foreigners he remained deeply pessimistic.) But couldn’t they at least act like traffic police?

  On the evidence, no. Now that the balloon had gone up, the Belgians weren’t threatening to shoot at anybody who crossed their sacred border. The British Expeditionary Force, the French Seventh Army to its left, and the French First Army to its right were moving into Belgium to take up positions to throw back the Germans. They should have done that sooner, but King Leopold kept saying no. So they were doing it now.

  Or they were trying to.

  When lorries and tanks and long columns of khaki-clad men on foot headed east, and when mad swarms of autos and horsecarts and donkey carts and handcarts and terrified men, women, and children on foot headed west, and when they all ran headlong into one another…

  Nobody went anywhere. The lorries and tanks tried to push forward. Drivers screamed in English, which mostly didn’t help. Not many Englishmen knew enough French to do them any good—if French would have done them any good, which wasn’t obvious. If Belgian troops had channeled the refugees down a few roads and left the rest open for the soldiers who were trying to save their miserable country for the second time in a generation…

  Too much to hope for, plainly.

  “We’re not going to make our stage line today, are we, sir?” Walsh asked before the first day was very old.

  “Too bloody right we’re not,” his company commander agreed.

  Planes flew off toward the east. That, at least, was reassuring. Till now, the RAF had left the Germans alone. The Luftwaffe had also left the BEF alone, but Walsh didn’t think about what that meant. He got his first lesson a little past noon.

  The day was chilly, but only partly cloudy. The sun had risen late and would set early. It hung low in the sky, a bit west of south. The English soldiers were trying to fight their way through yet another clot of refugees. These people were gabblin
g in Flemish, or possibly Dutch. Whichever it was, it sounded enough like German to raise Sergeant Walsh’s hackles.

  “Don’t they know we’ve got to get up there so we can fight?” he demanded of nobody in particular, or possibly of God.

  His soldiers weren’t listening. They were too busy yelling and swearing at the frightened people in front of them. As for God…When Walsh heard the rumble in the sky, he thought at first it was more RAF planes going over. The poor damn refugees knew better. That sound scattered them faster than all the yelling and swearing the British troops had done.

  That timbre wasn’t quite the same as the one Walsh had heard before. And those shark-nosed planes with the kinked wings had never come out of British factories. They dove almost vertically, like hawks after rabbits. And as they dove, they also screamed. The sound alone was plenty to make the sergeant want to piss himself.

  “Get down!” he screamed. “Hit the dirt! Get—!” He followed his own order, just in the nick of time.

  Blast picked him up and flung him around. He did piss himself then, but realized it only later. A lorry caught by a bomb turned into a fireball. Men and pieces of men flew through the air. A marching boot thudded down six inches in front of Walsh’s nose. It still had a foot in it. He stared, then retched. He’d seen such things twenty years earlier, but he’d done his damnedest to block them out of his mind ever since.

  More bombs went off among the refugees and the marching troops. Shrieks rang out through and even over the stunning crump!s of explosives. Wounded soldiers screamed for medics and stretcher-bearers. Wounded civilians simply screamed.

  The nasty dive-bombers roared away toward the east, the direction from which they’d come. Alistair Walsh was just getting to his feet when more planes flew in from that direction. At first, he thought they were RAF fighters returning from strikes against the Nazis—their lines weren’t so aggressively unfamiliar as those of the previous attackers. But then fire spurted from their wings and from their propeller hubs. They were shooting at—shooting up—the British column and the poor damned hapless refugees.

  “Down!” Walsh yelled again, and fit action to word.

  When a bullet struck flesh, it made a wet, slapping noise. He remembered that from the last time around, however much he wished he didn’t. German airplanes had strafed trenches in 1918. It hadn’t seemed nearly so horrid or dangerous then. For one thing, he’d been a fool of a kid twenty years earlier. For another, the German air force, like the Kaiser’s army, had been on the ropes. And, for one more, he wasn’t in a trench now.

  More screaming engines made him grab his entrenching tool to see what he could do about digging in. Then a few people started cheering as if they’d lost their minds. Suspecting they had, he warily looked up. British Hurricane fighters were mixing it up with the bastards with the hooked crosses on their tails. Walsh started cheering, too.

  A Hurricane went into a flat spin and slammed into the ground, maybe half a mile away. A black, greasy column of smoke marked the pilot’s pyre. Then, trailing smoke and flames, one of the German fighters crashed into a stand of trees even closer to where Walsh lay.

  He yelled like a man possessed. So the Germans could die. That cloud of smoke, broader and lower than the one rising from the Hurricane, was the first proof of it he’d seen in this war.

  Another Hurricane, also smoking but not so badly, limped off to the west, out of the fight. Sergeant Walsh hoped the pilot managed to put it down safely, or at least to bail out if he couldn’t land it. To his vast relief, the German fighters seemed to have had enough. Like the dive-bombers before them, they flew back toward the Vaterland.

  He tried standing up again. As he did, he noticed he wasn’t the only bloke emerging from a half-dug scrape. The other chaps in khaki weren’t so bloody stupid. If the buggers on the other side started banging away at you, of course you’d do what you could to keep from getting ventilated.

  But the advancing column had stuck its dick in the meat grinder. One tank lay on its side, blown off its tracks by a bomb that burst right next to it. Several trucks burned. Others weren’t going anywhere soon, not with from one to four flat tires or with bullets through the engine block…or with dead or wounded drivers. What bombs and machine-gun bullets had done to the foot soldiers was even worse. And as for that mob of refugees…

  A woman who might have been pretty if she weren’t dirty and exhausted and terrified screamed in Dutch or Flemish. She wasn’t wounded—not as far as Walsh could see, anyhow. She was just half crazy, maybe more than half, because of everything that had happened to her.

  Walsh had a devil of a time blaming her. A few days ago, she’d been a shopkeeper’s wife or a secretary or something else safe and comfortable. Then the roof fell in on her life—literally, odds were. Now she had nothing but the clothes on her back and whatever was in the cute little handbag she carried. How long before she’d start selling herself for a chunk of black bread or a mess of fried potatoes?

  How many more just like her were there? Thousands, tens of thousands, all over Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg and eastern France. And their husbands, and their brats, and…“Oh, bloody hell. Bloody hell,” Walsh muttered under his breath.

  Still, civilians weren’t his worry, except when they got in the way and kept him from getting to where he needed to be to do his job. Sorting out his soldiers and keeping them moving damn well was.

  Captain Ted Peters came over to him. The young officer looked as if he’d just walked into a haymaker. This was his introduction to combat, after all. Combat, meet Captain Peters. Peters, this is combat. Walsh shook his head. He had to be punchy himself, or his brain wouldn’t be whirling like that.

  “Well, Sergeant, I’m afraid you’re the new platoon commander,” Peters said. “Lieutenant Gunston stopped a large fragment of bomb casing with his belly. Gutted him like a sucking pig.”

  “Christ!” Walsh said.

  “A bit of a rum go, I’m afraid,” Peters said, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came down the pike. He did his best to ignore the ammunition cooking off in burning vehicles, the cries of wounded men and women and kids and animals, and the stenches of burning paint and burning rubber and burning flesh and fear and shit.

  When the company commander didn’t say anything more, Walsh did: “I should say so! We’ve got ourselves all smashed up, and we haven’t even set eyes on a goddamn German.”

  “I did,” Captain Peters answered, not without pride. “One of those dive-bombers was so low when he pulled up that I could see him through the glass of his cockpit. And I got a good look at his rear gunner. The bastard almost punctured me after the plane pulled out of its dive.”

  “What are we going to do when we have to fight them face to face, sir?” Walsh asked. “How the devil can we, when it looks like they’ve got more airplanes than we do?”

  “We shot down one of their fighters, after all,” the officer said. “I’m sure we’ll do better with practice, too.”

  “Right…sir,” Sergeant Walsh said tightly. He wasn’t sure of any such thing. England’s chosen method of fighting seemed to be stumbling from one disaster to the next till she figured out how to beat the set of foes who had been beating her. It worked the last time around only because the USA stuck its oar in the water. Things were moving faster now, much faster. Would—could—muddling through work at all?

  Captain Peters had no doubts. Or, if he did, he didn’t let them show, which was the mark of a good officer. Walsh didn’t let the privates and corporals he led see his doubts, either—or he hoped like hell he didn’t, anyhow. “All we can do is go on,” Peters said. “We have to clear these civilians out of the way and take up our assigned positions. We’ll have the French and the Belgians fighting along with us. The Boches will end up sorry they ever started this war—you mark my words.”

  “Right…sir,” Alistair Walsh said again. No, he didn’t believe a word of it. But you also couldn’t let your superiors see your doubts
. You couldn’t even—or maybe you especially couldn’t—let yourself see them.

  SERGEANT LUDWIG ROTHE SPOTTED A TRUCK out somewhere close to a kilometer away. He raised his field glasses to his eyes. The last thing he wanted to do was shoot up his own side by mistake. But the magnified image showed it was a French model, and bound to be full of Dutchmen.

  “Panzer halt!” he yelled into the speaking tube.

  “Jawohl! Halting,” Fritz Bittenfeld answered. The Panzer II jerked to a stop.

  Rothe peered through the TZF4 sighting telescope. It was only two and a half power—downright anemic after the binoculars. But it let him draw a bead with the 20mm cannon. He wouldn’t have opened up on enemy armor from farther out than 600 meters. The panzer’s main armament wouldn’t penetrate serious protection from farther out than that. It would chew up soft-skinned vehicles as far as it could reach, though.

  The trigger was on the elevating handwheel, to the left of the gun. Ludwig fired a three-round burst. The Dutch truck stopped as if it had run into a stone wall. Smoke poured out from under the hood. Rothe fired another burst, which emptied the magazine. He slapped in another ten-round clip. The other guys might—hell, they did—use bigger rounds in their main armament, but he could shoot a lot quicker than they could. Sometimes that made all the difference in the world.

  Sometimes it didn’t matter a pfennig’s worth. Not far away, another Panzer II burned like billy-be-damned. It had stopped a 105mm shell fired over open sights at point-blank range. None of the crew had got out. That was no surprise—hitting a Panzer II with a 105 was like swatting a mosquito with a table. The Dutch artillerymen who’d fought the gun were dead now, which didn’t do that panzer crew one goddamn bit of good.

  “Can we get going again, Sergeant?” Fritz asked pointedly. A halted panzer was a panzer waiting to stop something.

  “Wait a second.” Ludwig looked through the TZF4 again. Yes, the Dutch truck was definitely laid up. “Go ahead,” he said.

  As soon as he gave permission, the panzer seemed to bound forward. The flat Dutch plains made ideal panzer country. But the buildings and trees up ahead made equally ideal places to hide antitank guns. Even if the Dutch had taken a big punch at the start of the fight, they were still in there swinging.