The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  Back when Naumann commanded the Panzer II, the carb also misbehaved. He and Adi had quarreled about it. Witt didn’t seem to want to quarrel with anybody except the Ivans. Theo approved of that.

  The next morning, the promotion fairy sprinkled magic dust on the panzer’s crew. Adi became a Gefreiter, and Theo himself an Obergefreiter. Witt slapped him on the back and said, “They’ll pull you out and turn you into a real noncom pretty soon.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” Theo answered. The Wehrmacht had one more grade below Unteroffizier or corporal. After that, you had to go to training classes to get rid of the emblem on your sleeve and acquire an Unteroffizier’s shoulder-strap pip. Theo had had enough of training classes in basic to last him the rest of his life and twenty minutes longer.

  Witt laughed. “Might do you good. It’d make you come out of your shell a little bit, maybe.”

  “Maybe.” Theo didn’t believe it for a minute. He could no more come out of his shell than a turtle could escape from its. It was part of him. If anything, he wished he came equipped with a Panzer III’s armor, not a Panzer II’s.

  Heinz Naumann would have gone on giving him grief about it. Witt didn’t. All he said was “You keep living through fights, they’ll make you an Unteroffizier whether you like it or not.”

  “Oh, boy,” Theo said. The panzer commander laughed again. Had Theo been the kind to come out with what he was thinking, he might have added that he’d never run into a better reason to get killed. He hated the idea of giving other people orders. He didn’t like getting told what to do himself, either. He was, perhaps, not ideally suited to the Wehrmacht.

  That, of course, bothered the Wehrmacht not a bit. Round peg? Square hole? Drive the damn thing in anyway. Hit it hard enough and it’ll stay in place. Then we can hang some more stuff from it and get on with the war.

  Adi Stoss was thinking of other things. “You know what?” he said. “Winter in Russia’s liable to make winter in Poland look like a Riviera holiday.”

  “Try not to sound so cheerful about it, all right?” Witt said. “Besides, we’ll have the Poles and the French and the Tommies shivering right beside us. Oh—and the Ivans, too, of course.”

  “Aber natürlich,” Adi agreed with more sardonic good cheer. “But the Ivans do this every year. They’re used to it, poor devils. The rest of us aren’t, except maybe the Poles.”

  “You’re jam-packed with happy thoughts today, aren’t you?” Witt said. “Why don’t you gather up some firewood?”

  “I thought Gefreiters didn’t have to do shit like that,” Stoss said. “Isn’t the whole point of getting promoted not needing to do shit like that any more?”

  “Like I told Theo, getting promoted means you didn’t get blown up,” the panzer commander answered. “If you figure out how to pack a servant into the panzer, he can gather firewood for us. Till then, somebody’s got to do it, and right now that’s you.”

  “Come the revolution, you won’t be able to abuse the proletariat like this.” Adi went off to collect sticks and boards.

  Witt looked after him, shaking his head. “He sails close to the wind, doesn’t he?” he murmured, perhaps more to himself than to Theo. “If somebody who takes the political lectures seriously heard him, he’d go on the rocks faster than a guy with the shits runs for the latrine.”

  Theo shrugged to show he’d heard. He did his share of fatigues, even though he was now an exalted Obergefreiter. For that matter, so did the sergeant. Adi knew as much, too; he was just making trouble for the fun of it. A panzer wasn’t like an infantry platoon, with plenty of ordinary privates to do the dirty work for everyone else.

  They rolled forward again the next morning—but not very far forward. The Russians had laid an ambush, with panzers hidden in a village and antipanzer cannon hiding among the fruit trees off to one side. The Germans pulled back after a couple of Panzer IIs brewed up and another lost a track.

  Maybe the Ivans thought they’d halted their enemies. If they did, they soon learned better. Stukas plastered the orchard with high explosive. One of them, with cannon under the wings in place of bombs, dove on the village again and again. The columns of greasy black smoke rising into the sky spoke of hits.

  Adi and Hermann Witt watched him swoop in the distance. They whooped and cheered and carried on. Theo watched the dials on the panzer’s radio set. He could see the machine pistol on its brackets near the set and, if he turned his head, the back of the chair in which the panzer commander sat. Since Witt wasn’t sitting now, Theo could also see his legs. It wasn’t an exciting view. Theo didn’t care. He wanted excitement the way he wanted a second head.

  And, while the Stukas kept the Russians who’d set the trap hopping, more German panzers raced around their flank. The Ivans skedaddled; they were always nervous about their flanks. Theo’s panzer company, or the survivors thereof, rolled past the village where they’d been held up. They didn’t roll through it, a plan Theo liked. Nobody knew for sure whether all the Red Army men had abandoned the place. They might be waiting in there with Molotov cocktails and antipanzer rifles and whatever other unpleasantnesses they could come up with.

  German and Polish infantry tramped along behind the panzers. Before too long, the ground pounders would come through here and clear out whatever Russians remained behind. In the meantime, the panzers would motor ahead and bite out another chunk of territory for the infantry to clear.

  This was how things worked when blitzkrieg ran according to plan. When things went wrong, you outran your infantry support and the enemy concentrated against you where you couldn’t outflank him. That had happened in France. There was a lot more space to play with in the Soviet Union. Maybe it wouldn’t happen here. Theo hoped not. He wanted to win. More than anything else, though, he wanted to go home.

  ANASTAS MOURADIAN would have liked more training on the Pe-2 than he got. No matter what he would have liked, he and his classmates went into action as soon as they figured out the controls and took off and landed a few times.

  He did have a better plane than he’d flown before. The SB-2 had been a fine bomber in its day, but its day was done. In a couple of years, no doubt, something newer and snazzier would also replace the Pe-2. Till then, Mouradian was happy to fly one against the Soviet Union’s enemies.

  Was Sergei Yaroslavsky still hauling his old SB-2 around the sky? For his sake, his former bomb-aimer hoped not. The Pe-2 was close to a 150 kilometers an hour faster. It could fly higher and carry more bombs. All that meant it had a better chance of coming back from its missions.

  Three of his classmates at the airstrip outside of Moscow never got the chance to fly the new bomber against the Nazis. One of them botched a takeoff and crashed—or maybe an engine failed. Either way, he was dead. So were the two who flew their planes into the ground instead of landing them. Flying was an unforgiving business. If the Germans didn’t get you, a moment’s carelessness and you’d do yourself in.

  His bomb-aimer and copilot was a Karelian named Ivan Kulkaanen. He was as blond as Anastas was dark, and spoke Russian with an odd accent. “Don’t worry—I think you sound funny, too,” he told Mouradian.

  “When I talk Russian, I know I sound funny,” Stas answered. “But you should hear me in Armenian.”

  Whereupon Kulkaanen gabbled out a couple of sentences in what Mouradian presumed to be his native tongue. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to him. “Finnish,” the blond man explained.

  “If you say so.” Mouradian couldn’t contradict him.

  Back in the bomb bay was a Russian sergeant called Fyodor Mechnikov. Like the other bombardiers Stas had known, he was brawny and foul-mouthed. “They took me off a farm,” he said, his grin displaying several stainless-steel teeth. “I’ve got the muscle. I don’t scare easy. For the shit I do, who needs brains?”

  “Can you read? Can you write?” Stas asked.

  Mechnikov shook his bullet head. “Not a fucking word, sir,” he answered, not without pride.

 
“I’ll teach you if you want.”

  “Nah.” Mechnikov shook his head again. “I’ve gone this long without it, I wouldn’t know what to do if I could all of a sudden. And I remember real good. I start writing shit down, I bet I start forgetting like a son of a bitch.”

  He might well have been right. Stas had dealt with more than a few illiterate enlisted men in his time. Russia was full of them. In Western Europe, they said, almost everybody could read and write. It wasn’t like that here. And illiterates did tend to have better memories than people who could read and write. They needed them.

  The newsreaders on the radio tried their best to give the impression that everything at the front was fine. Their best might have convinced civilians who hadn’t seen German soldiers or had German bombs fall on them yet. But if everything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe, why was the Red Air Force rushing half-trained Pe-2 pilots to the front as fast as it could?

  Stas didn’t think anything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe. He never had. Soviet propaganda was primarily aimed at Russians, and Russians, as seen through the jaundiced eye of a man from the Caucasus, lacked a certain subtlety. So did Soviet propaganda, at least to Mouradian. Stalin was a man from the Caucasus, too. Chances were he chuckled cynically at the stuff he had his propagandists put out. Which didn’t mean the stuff didn’t work.

  And the new bombers worked, too—at least if you didn’t crash them trying to get them to work. The pilots flew their planes and aircrews west toward the border between Russian and Byelorussia. That they landed at airstrips still inside the Russia Federation gave the lie to the swill that poured out of radio speakers. No, things weren’t going nearly so well as the Soviet government wanted people to think.

  English and French reinforcements for the Nazis hadn’t got here yet, either. What would happen when they joined the Germans and Poles? Nothing good, not if you were a Soviet citizen.

  Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky seemed to know his business. He wasn’t a drunken blowhard like Colonel Borisov or a hopeless loser like the fellow who’d briefly given Mouradian orders in the Far East.

  “The Nazis are still coming forward,” he told the newly assembled men of his newly assembled squadron. He didn’t bother mentioning the Poles. In his place, Stas wouldn’t have, either. Tomashevsky went on, “We can’t stop them all by ourselves, but we can hurt them. That will give the Red Army a better chance to do its job.”

  Was he saying the Red Army wasn’t doing its job? Would some political officer rake him over the coals for telling the truth? Such things happened all the time. That was a shame, but they did.

  “One more thing,” he added. “The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union isn’t to try and dogfight the 109s. The Pe-2 may have started out as a heavy fighter, but it’s a bomber now. It’s a good bomber, but it’s still a bomber, dammit. The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union is to finish your mission, come back, and fly your next one and the one after that. That’s what heroes do: what needs doing. Go take care of it.”

  Thus encouraged, they hurried to their planes. Antiaircraft guns’ snouts stuck up around the airstrip. Stas hadn’t seen any bomb craters, though. The Germans hadn’t found this place, then. Not yet.

  Groundcrew men bombed up the squadron’s Pe-2s. Fyodor Mechnikov was ready. “Let’s blow the living shit out of these Nazi cunts,” he said.

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Stas replied.

  Up they went. After the more sedate SB-2, takeoff in the new machine was like a kick in the pants. “I could get used to this,” Ivan Kulkaanen remarked.

  “Let’s hope so,” Stas answered. Kulkaanen gave him a sidelong look. Stas didn’t know about Karelians in general—he hadn’t met many—but his bomb-aimer had an ear for the little things … if they were little. If the aircrew didn’t get used to these takeoffs, they’d probably be too dead to care.

  They droned west. Orders were to hit the Germans outside of Mogilev, on the Dnieper. When they got there, they discovered the enemy was already ten or fifteen kilometers over the river. They bombed the biggest concentration of Germans they could find. Antiaircraft fire came up at them from the ground, but it wasn’t too bad. Mouradian had flown through plenty worse. No Messerschmitts seemed to be in the neighborhood. Nobody could anger Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky by pretending the Pe-2 still was the fighter it had originally been intended to be.

  Once the bomb bay was empty, they sped back to Russia—Mother Russia to Mechnikov, if not to Mouradian or Kulkaanen (although it was to Tomashevsky: by his name, he was a Russian). Stas taxied into a revetment and killed the engines. As soon as the props stopped spinning, groundcrew men spread camouflage netting over the plane. The Germans wouldn’t have an easy time finding this airstrip.

  Unless, of course, they followed the Red Air Force planes and watched where they landed. Maybe that was what happened. Any which way, the antiaircraft guns around the airstrip suddenly all seemed to go off at once. Mouradian, Kulkaanen, and Mechnikov scrambled out of the Pe-2 and sprinted for the nearest slit trench.

  One after another, Stukas dove on the field. The first one flattened what had been a kolkhoz supervisor’s office and was now Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky’s headquarters. Stas hoped Tomashevsky hadn’t got back in it yet. Two other dive-bombers planted 500-kilo bombs right in the middle of the runway. Nobody would fly in or out till those holes got filled. And a fourth German bomber blew up a Pe-2 in spite of the netting that covered it. The flak didn’t get any Stukas. As they roared off to the west, Mouradian only wished he were more surprised.

  laustrophobia was foolish. Julius Lemp kept telling himself so. It helped … some. The Baltic was a couple of hundred kilometers across. But he was used to the greater elbow room of the North Sea and the vast freedom of the North Atlantic. Here in these enclosed waters, he felt as if he had land at his elbow every way he looked.

  “Oh, good, skipper. I’m not the only one, then,” Gerhart Beilharz said when Lemp complained out loud.

  “You’d best believe you’re not,” Lemp agreed. If anyone on the U-30 was entitled to feel cooped up all the time, it was Beilharz. With his size, it wasn’t as if he were wrong.

  “Not a whole lot of traffic out there, either,” the engineering officer said. “I hope we’re not just wasting our time.”

  “Me, too,” Lemp said. “Well, at least it’s a war.”

  His voice sounded hollow. If he could hear it, no doubt Beilharz could, too. And he had his reasons for keeping enthusiasm on a tight lead. You could foul up all too easily in the Baltic, and foul up your career, such as it was, while you were at it. In the North Atlantic or the North Sea, he could assume any surface ship he saw was bound for England or France.

  Here … Suppose he sank a Swedish freighter bound for the Reich with a load of iron ore. That would torpedo any hopes he might still have for moving up the chain of command. Would it ever! He’d survived sending one ship to the bottom by mistake. Nobody could get away with being wrong like that twice.

  Even if he spotted a gunboat, it might not belong to the Ivans. It might be Swedish or Finnish or Polish or Latvian or Lithuanian or Estonian. He’d wondered if Stalin would gobble up the Baltic republics the way Hitler had seized the Low Countries. No sign of it yet. Like drowning men with life preservers, the little nations in these parts clung to neutrality for dear life. As soon as one side invaded them, the other would, too. Whichever big power won the war, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia would lose.

  So he had to be careful. Airplanes might belong to one of the neutrals, too. He couldn’t shoot it out on the surface with one unless it fired at him first. Since that would be just exactly too late, he dove as soon as anybody spotted anything flying. Once, what turned out to be a Russian flying boat dropped depth charges on him—fortunately, with bad aim. They rattled his teeth and made the sailors use some amazing profanity, but did no damage.

  “Are we going into the Gulf of F
inland?” Beilharz asked one afternoon on the conning tower, in much the same tones a patient might use when asking his doctor if a biopsy had come back malignant.

  “That’s where Leningrad is. That’s where the Russians go in and out,” Lemp answered. Beilharz only sighed. Well, Lemp felt like sighing himself. The Baltic was narrow. The Gulf of Finland wasn’t more than a good piss wide. If something went wrong while the U-boat was there … The technical term for that was screwed. But Lemp went on, “When somebody asked that American gangster why he robbed banks, he said, ‘Because that’s where the money is.’ ”

  “Hey, even if we got a boatload of rubles, we couldn’t spend ’em in Germany anyhow,” Beilharz said.

  Lemp was a pretty fair submarine driver. He hadn’t been blessed with the sharpest or quickest sense of humor, though. He was about to snap at Beilharz for missing his point when he realized, in the nick of time, that the Schnorkelmeister was joking. “Heh,” he managed—not the merriest or most sincere laugh that ever rang out on the U-30, but a laugh all the same.

  Estonia owned the lower jaw to the Gulf of Finland, its namesake country the upper. Soviet territory lurked back deep in the throat. Minefields shielded that territory from visitors like Lemp’s U-boat.

  He respected those minefields without fearing them. He had good charts of where they lay. He didn’t know for sure, but he would have bet the Finns had contributed a lot to those charts. They didn’t love the enormous neighbor who’d ruled them till the Russian Revolution, and they needed to worry about the minefields, too, if their fishing boats and freighters were to stay safe.

  But the Russians also sowed mines through the gulf at random. They’d sneak out under cover of darkness in fast attack craft, dump a few in the water, and run away again. They denied everything, of course. When one of those floaters blew a Finnish steamship sky-high, the Russians insisted the Germans must have placed it.

  There were German mines in the Gulf of Finland, to make things difficult for the Soviet Union’s Baltic Fleet. Lemp also had charts showing their positions. Sometimes, of course, a mine would slip its mooring cable and go drifting with wind and wave. You might not think any bobbed close by, but you had to keep your eyes open.