“Ready, Comrade Bomb-Aimer! Let’s fuck ’em!” Suslov answered.
“Now!” Chernenko shouted.
As soon as the bombs fell free, Mouradian pulled back sharply on the stick, climbing away from the antiaircraft fire. He heard soggy thumps when the bombs went off. When he could see the ship again, smoke rose from the stern. “We did something to it, anyhow,” he said, although it was still steaming.
“We should have done more.” Chernenko sounded absurdly disappointed. “I wanted to sink the son of a bitch.”
“We’ll have more chances.” Mouradian was just glad they’d got away in once piece. He’d never dreamt a ship could throw that many shells. It almost tempted him to go after the next one from several thousand meters up. Almost.
COLONEL OTTO GRIEHL looked out at the men of his black-clad regiment. The black-clad panzer crewmen stood waiting. Theo Hossbach absentmindedly scratched an itch. Next to him, Adi Stoss puffed on a cigarette. Nobody seemed very excited. They all—even Theo—had a good idea of what was coming next.
Griehl scratched, too, at a scar on his chin. He was lean, almost hawk-faced, with hollow cheeks and close-cropped gray hair. Like his men, he wore pink-piped black collar patches with a silver Totentkopf in each one. The skull and crossbones had been the panzer emblem for as long as Germany’d had armored fighting vehicles.
“Well, boys, it’s time,” Griehl said. “We came into this fight by dribs and drabs, and then we had to put up with the worst winter even an old man like me can remember.” Theo wasn’t sure the colonel’s face had room for a grin, but it did. It made him look years younger—though still old, of course. It didn’t last long. He sobered as he went on, “But now we’re here in the East in proper force, and now the ground and the weather … aren’t too bad.” That was as much praise as he would dole out to Polish conditions. “And so—it’s time to show the Ivans what we can do.”
A low hum ran through the Panzertruppen. Here and there, men nodded: Adi did, and so did Sergeant Witt. Theo just stood, listening. He was ready, but he wasn’t eager. He knew what could happen when things went wrong. If he was ever tempted to forget, the missing joints on his ring finger reminded him.
“We’re going to drive them out of Poland,” Griehl said matter-of-factly. “Once we take care of that—well, we’ll see. I don’t know what the Führer and the High Command will want us to do then. One thing at a time, though. Let’s talk about our immediate objectives.”
And he did, detailing the routes the regiment would take as it pushed east and north from the vicinity of Bialystok. He talked about artillery and air support, and about the infantry who would move forward with the panzers.
“Most of them are Polish units,” he said. “Remember that, for God’s sake, and don’t shoot them by mistake. They wear a darker, greener khaki than the Russians, and their helmet is almost like the Czech pot—it doesn’t have a brim like the Russian model.”
“Tell us something we didn’t know,” Adi muttered. Theo heard him, and maybe Witt did, too, but nobody else. Theo was patient with these lectures. One reason you walked barefoot through the obvious was that people did forget, especially when other people were trying to kill them.
“Give the Poles a hand where you can,” Griehl said. “They’re good troops. They’re brave troops. The only thing that’s really wrong with them is, they don’t have as many toys as we do. Infantry, machine guns—they’ve got those. But they’re light on artillery and panzers and planes. That’s why they called us in to help against the Reds. So we’ll do it.” He grinned again. “It’s not like the Führer hasn’t got his own reasons for going after Russia. If you’ve read Mein Kampf, you’ll know that.”
He got more nods. Hitler’s book was Holy Writ to the Party. Theo had looked at it, found it bombastic and badly written, and put it aside. But you didn’t have to have gone through page by page to know he talked about Russia as Germany’s Lebensraum. Stalin doubtless had a different view of that, which didn’t bother the Führer.
“We go at 0430 tomorrow,” the colonel finished. “Good luck to every one of you. Believe you me, Ivan will never know what hit him.”
When the big push in the West started a little before Christmas 1938, officers promised men the showgirls and bars of Paris. They didn’t quite deliver; Theo lost the end of that finger in the last failed effort at a breakthrough. Maybe this time everything would work out the way Colonel Griehl said. Theo had his doubts. He didn’t voice them. For one thing, what was the point? For another, he hardly ever voiced anything.
He was in the panzer before the appointed hour. He squeezed meat paste from a tinfoil tube onto a chunk of black bread. Not the kind of breakfast he’d eaten before conscription called, but he didn’t raise his voice to complain, either. And that meat paste was one of the best rations the Germans had. Tommies on patrol stole tubes of it from dead Landsers.
Where he sat, he couldn’t see what was going on. All he could see were his radio set, the machine pistol next to it, and the panzer commander’s behind and legs. He didn’t care. He had his own little world. He heard the order to go forward, and relayed it to Hermann Witt. And, through the Panzer II’s armor and through his earphones, he heard the thunder of the German artillery as it pounded Soviet positions to the east. Stukas would be screaming out of the sky to take out strongpoints too tough for artillery. Theo couldn’t hear them, but he knew how an attack worked.
No. He knew how an attack should work. Things always went wrong. Neither side had really known what it was doing when the Wehrmacht drove into Czechoslovakia. A good thing the Czechs were as thumb-fingered as the Germans, or that one might have failed. On the Western front, they’d tried to go too far too fast. Looking back, he could see that. At the time, it seemed easy—until, all of a sudden, it didn’t any more.
Now … The Panzer II squashed barbed wire under its tracks. Foot soldiers, whether in Feldgrau or dark Polish khaki, would be able to follow. Sergeant Witt sprayed short bursts of machine-gun fire ahead of the panzer. If the Russians had to keep their heads down, the infantrymen with the German armor would have an easier time disposing of them.
Rat-a-tat-tat! Except is wasn’t rat-a-tat-tat!, or not exactly. It was clangety-clangety-clang!, as if somebody were attacking the panzer with a rivet gun. Machine gunners couldn’t resist panzers. They also couldn’t hurt them, if you didn’t count scaring the crew half to death.
“Panzer halt!” Witt shouted. Adalbert Stoss obediently hit the brakes. The panzer commander fired a three-round burst from the 20mm main armament. “All right,” he said. “Drive on!”
Forward they went, with a whine of protest from the overstrained engine. A moving target was harder to hit, and the Panzer II’s armor, especially on the sides, wouldn’t keep out anything more than small-arms fire. Theo knew from experience what happened when something got through. His crewmates didn’t, and he hoped like hell they didn’t find out. He’d got away from his murdered first panzer in one piece. Too many guys weren’t so lucky. If he never smelled that thick reek of burnt pork …
“Enemy panzers ahead—two o’clock!” Witt shouted. Theo’s balls crawled up into his belly, not that that would save them. From what he’d seen, Russian panzer gunners weren’t very good, but they only had to be competent, or even lucky, once to slaughter a crew. But then Witt shouted again, in glad surprise: “Cancel that! They’re ours—Czech machines!”
No one but Theo heard his own sigh of relief. Of course the Wehrmacht had commandeered all the surviving Czech panzers it could. They were better than German Panzer Is and IIs, if not up to the standards of the new IIIs and IVs. But the new German panzers were still in short supply. Military administrators had got the Skoda works up and running again, turning out more of the Czech models for the Reich.
And if you were looking for the enemy, you’d see him whether he was there or not. Theo was happy Witt hadn’t opened up. One of war’s dirty little secrets that nobody liked to talk about was that you could
kill friends as easily as foes. Friends could kill you, too. They’d be sorry afterwards, not that that did you a hell of a lot of good.
There were Russian panzers up ahead. Theo got the word on the radio, and relayed it to Witt. Then he heard the fearsome clang! of a round from a cannon smashing through hardened steel. It wasn’t his panzer, which was the only good thing he could say about it. That crew would never be the same.
“Panzer halt!” the commander ordered. Halt it did. He fired another three-round burst from the 20mm gun. “Got the fucker!” he yelled. “Drive on!”
On they went. Theo tried to figure out what was happening from the endless stream of radio reports he heard. They made up for not being able to see out. Everything seemed to be moving according to plan. Germans and Poles stormed forward. Russians fell back or died. Germans and Poles were dying, too. Theo knew that, but the radio didn’t talk about it.
olonel Borisov eyed the flyers in his squadron. He coughed a couple of times, like a man who’d smoked too many cigarettes. He probably had, but that wasn’t tobacco roughening his throat. Sergei Yaroslavsky would have bet gold against pig turds it was embarrassment.
Just a couple of weeks before, Borisov had been loudly certain this year’s fight against the Nazis in Poland would look the same as last year’s. Well, not even a colonel was right all the time. Coughing once more, Borisov said, “The situation at the front has developed not necessarily to our advantage.”
He sounded like Radio Moscow. As it had when Vladivostok fell, the radio was doing its damnedest to make things sound better than they really were. Like the other SB-2 pilots, Sergei had flown over the front. He’d done everything he could to slow down the Germans. The radio would have faced a bigger challenge had it tried to make things out to be worse than they were.
“In certain places, the Nazis and their Polish running dogs have penetrated our lines to some degree,” Borisov went on. “Our assignment is to help whip them back to their kennels so the Red Army can resume—excuse me, can continue—its victorious offensive.”
No one laughed in his face, which proved discipline—or fear of the NKVD, assuming the two weren’t one and the same—ran deep. From the sky, you could see that the dark gray German tanks hadn’t just “penetrated” the Soviet line. They’d torn through, and were rampaging loose in the Russians’ rear. Enemy infantry moved up with them and behind them to finish off the pockets they carved out.
“Groundcrew men are fueling and bombing up our planes,” Borisov said. “We shall strike hard for the Rodina! We serve the Soviet Union!”
“We serve the Soviet Union!” the flyers echoed. They left the big tent in which he’d harangued them and hurried to their SB-2s. Sergei wondered whether he’d be able to land at this airstrip when he came back from the bombing run. The way the Germans were moving, it was almost in range of their guns. One more thing to worry about.
“Does he truly believe what he says?” Vladimir Federov asked in a troubled whisper.
Sergei would have whispered a question like that, too. “He does while he’s saying it, anyhow,” he answered, also quietly. “You can’t contradict the Party line.”
Off in the distance—not far enough in the distance—German artillery rumbled. It might have been distant thunder. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, not on this bright, sunny day. No thunderheads in the sky: only a few little white puffs. Federov jerked his head in the direction of the sound. “That contradicts the Party line.”
Sergei didn’t feel like arguing with him. “Well, we’ll dispose of the contradictions, then, won’t we?”
He climbed into the cockpit. Sergeant Kuchkov was already at his station in the bomb bay. The Chimp didn’t worry about contradictions in the Party line. He’d drop the bombs. He’d shoot at whatever tried to attack the SB-2. He’d get back to the airstrip and he’d drink and swear and try to get laid. He hadn’t come down venereal yet, but not from lack of effort.
Nothing looked bad on the preflight checks. The engines started up right away. The familiar roar and vibration filled Sergei. Groundcrew men pulled out the chocks in front of his wheels. He taxied down the dirt runway and took off. The heavily laden SB-2 wasn’t a hot performer, but it flew, it flew.
It hadn’t flown far when antiaircraft guns opened up on it. “Are the Nazis this far east already?” Federov shouted through the din.
“No—these are our guns, dammit,” Sergei shouted back. “The stupid muzhiks down below see anything in the air, they think it has to belong to the Germans.”
The Germans had come farther east than they had on the last mission the SB-2 had flown, the day before. Fire and smoke did a good job of announcing where their panzers were—where Soviet forces were in trouble, in other words. And so did antiaircraft fire of a sort entirely different from what the Red Air Force bombers had got a few minutes before. When the Nazis started shooting, the shells burst all around the SB-2s. Every one of them seemed much too close.
One scored a direct hit on a bomber in front of Sergei. The last third of a wing parted company with the rest of the plane. Fire raced up the wing root toward the fuselage. The SB-2 lurched out of formation and tumbled downward. Sergei looked for parachutes, but didn’t see any.
“Bozhemoi!” Behind the oxygen mask, Vladimir Federov’s face was white as milk. “They’re murdering us!”
“Well, we need to pay them back, then.” Sergei found what he was looking for: Nazi flags spread out on the ground. Both sides used their national emblems to keep from getting hit by their own aircraft. But the recognition signals could also turn into targets. Sergei pointed through the cockpit glass. “There. That’s what we want.”
“All right.” No matter how shaken Federov was, he had a job to do. And the sooner he does it, the sooner we drop our bombs, the sooner we can get the devil out of here, Sergei thought.
But before the bomb-aimer could line up the SB-2 on the swastika flags far below, a frantic shout dinned in Sergei’s earphones: “Messerschmitts!”
“Drop the bombs, Kuchkov!” Sergei ordered at once. “Right now!” They’d come down on somebody’s head: with luck, on some German’s. He wanted the plane as light as he could make it. He also didn’t want machine-gun bullets tearing into all those explosives. That was asking to turn into a fireball in the sky.
“Bombs away!” the Chimp yelled, sending them earthward with some choice obscenities. Then he asked, “Nazi cocksuckers jumping us?”
“Da,” Sergei said. He still hadn’t seen any 109s. But, one after another, three SB-2s spun toward the ground, two burning, the other out of control—maybe the pilot was already dead. With the bombs gone, he had no reason to stick around any more. He had no desire to, either. He swung the bomber into as tight a turn as he could manage and gave it full throttle back toward the east.
A 109 shot across his path. He had two forward-facing machine guns in the cockpit. He squeezed off a long burst at the German plane. He didn’t hit it. He hadn’t really expected to. He did want to warn it he was alert and ready to fight. Let it go after some sleepier pilot.
It must have worked. Kuchkov, in the dorsal turret now, didn’t start shooting at anything. And no bullets came ripping up through the bomber’s now empty belly. Sergei looked wildly around the sky. Some of the other SB-2s had also escaped. One of them had a starboard engine that trailed smoke. He hoped it would keep flying till it found the airstrip.
“That was … very bad.” Federov seemed to be trying his best to stay calm, or at least to seem calm.
Sergei respected him for that. You had to do it in combat. Showing how scared you were didn’t do any good. Everybody was scared. You had to keep going anyway. If you didn’t, you only made getting yourself killed more likely.
Sergei wondered whether Stukas would have cratered the airstrip. He didn’t want to try to land on a highway or in the middle of a field of new-planted barley.
He didn’t have to, to his vast relief. He taxied into a revetment. Groundcrew men covered the SB-2
with camouflage netting. In the gloom, he reached out and set a hand on Federov’s shoulder. “We made it. One more time, we made it.”
“But how often can we keep getting away with it?” the copilot asked. “I know the plane used to be able to run away from fighters, but not any more. The idea is for us to hurt the enemy, right? Not for him to shoot us down? How many of our guys didn’t come back today?”
“Too many. Maybe some landed at other strips, but too many any way you look at it,” Sergei answered.
“One of the planes that went down was Colonel Borisov’s,” Federov said.
“The squadron commander’s? Are you sure? I didn’t see that.” Sergei wasn’t sure what to think about it, either. Borisov had too much apparatchik in him to get close to the men he led, but he was a good administrator and a brave enough pilot. He had been, anyhow.
“I’m positive,” Federov said.
“One more thing, then,” Sergei said wearily. He unhooked his flying harness. “Well, let’s go report to … whoever we report to.”
“BROAD STREET STATION!” the conductor bawled as the train down from New York City slowed to a stop. “All out for Broad Street station! Philadelphia!”
“Oh, my God!” Peggy Druce dabbed at her eyes with a tissue she pulled from a purse. She didn’t need the fellow in the kepi yelling at her. That Gothic pile of brick, granite, and terra cotta couldn’t be anything else. It meant she was home. She wouldn’t have believed it, but it was true. More than a year and a half after she set out on what was going to be a month in Europe, here she was.
If I ever, ever set one toe outside the borders of the US of A again, somebody ought to whack me in the head with a two-by-four, she thought. She’d almost been whacked with plenty of worse things in too many different places in Europe.
People were getting up and heading for the door. Lucky for them, too, because she would have stepped on them if they weren’t moving the way she wanted to go. A liner back to New York from London. No sign of U-boats, for which she thanked God. Not the smoothest passage, but not the choppiest, either. She was a good sailor. She didn’t lose any victuals.
The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Page 15
