The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  Sergei Yaroslavsky understood his superior’s pride. He had trouble sharing it, though. Enough was enough. Enough, in fact, was too much. Against the Luftwaffe’s fighters, the SB-2 had had its day. It was as simple as that. Too many of the faces listening to Ponamarenko were fresh and new. Too many veterans who’d served as long as Sergei were dead, shot down by fighter planes they couldn’t escape.

  Yes, night bombing was second-line duty. But it was something the SB-2 could still manage. Finding enemy aircraft at night was largely a matter of luck. Bombing by night was also a matter of luck, with navigation and aim so uncertain. But what about it? The explosives were bound to come down on somebody’s head, and the somebody would more likely than not be a Nazi.

  Kerosene lanterns and men with electric torches marked the edges of the runway. “Should be fun finding this place again in the dark, shouldn’t it?” Lieutenant Federov remarked.

  Sergei had been thinking the same thing. To keep from dwelling on it, he told his bomb-aimer, “Well, if they lit it up like peacetime, the Germans would find it before we got back.”

  From Moscow all the way to Germany’s western border, no one showed a light at night. You didn’t want to give the other side a free shot at you, any more than you wanted to hand the other team a penalty kick in a football match. But the lights were on again in England and France. They didn’t worry about German bombers any more. They didn’t need to: the capitalists had made common cause with the Fascists to destroy the building workers’ and peasants’ paradise here.

  It won’t happen, Sergei told himself. We won’t let it happen. The Red Army kept yielding ground, but falling back before the enemy worried him much less than it would have worried, say, a Frenchman. In France, you could fall back only so far till you ran out of real estate.

  That wasn’t a problem in Russia. Trading space for time had been a Russian specialty ever since invaders started coming out of the west—pretty much forever, in other words. Napoleon made it to Moscow, but much joy he had from his homecoming. Sergei didn’t think the Germans would get that far, even with help from the other degenerate Western powers. And if they should, he didn’t think they wanted to fight through a Russian winter.

  Once they were airborne, an order came over the radio: “Switch off navigation lights!” Sergei flipped the switch. The command came sooner than he’d expected. He hoped the SB-2s wouldn’t collide with each other in the darkness. He saw no bursts of flame or midair explosions, so he supposed they didn’t. He would have waited longer than Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko had all the same.

  The bombers droned west. A fat gibbous moon spilled milky light over the Rodina far below. There was the front. It couldn’t be anything else. Those sullen fires down on the ground, the plumes of smoke climbing into the air … “Any target we hit from now on, it belongs to the Nazis,” Federov said.

  “Any military target,” Sergei agreed absently. He was studying the compass. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the copilot and bomb-aimer blink. If Federov was NKVD, as he’d wondered, should he have said that? Too late to worry about it now. And how many Byelorussians had the German hordes overrun? Millions, surely, and some Great Russians and Ukrainians as well.

  Russians called Germans Nemtsi—the tongue-tied ones. To ancient Russian ears, the German language was sense-free, senseless babble. In German, Slav and slave both came from the same word. Even in the days when they were forming their speech, the Germans had thought their eastern neighbors fit only for doing what they told them to do.

  All that went back more than a thousand years—how much more, Sergei didn’t know. He did know not much had changed since.

  The navigation lights were out, but he found he could still spot the flames in the exhaust from the other SB-2s’ engines. No doubt they could see his plane the same way. That was good—he supposed. If he saw other ghostly shapes, other exhaust fires, coming out of the west … He shook his head, refusing to borrow trouble.

  Compass and airspeed indicator were his only navigation tools. Calling that crude gave it too much credit. “We’re about where we ought to be,” he said at last, hoping he was right. “Let’s give them our present and head back to the airstrip.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Federov said.

  Sergei shouted into the speaking tube: “Bombs away, Ivan!”

  “Right!” the Chimp answered. The bombs fell free. The SB-2 got livelier. “Bombs fucking away!” Kuchkov reported.

  “Then I’m getting out of here.” Sergei hadn’t seen any German night fighters, and he didn’t want to, either. He hauled the bomber around in the sky and headed back toward the airstrip. Even more than he had on taking off, he hoped he’d be able to find it.

  A moment later, he started hoping he’d get back to Russia to find it. German flak woke up all at once. The Nazis had no searchlights, the way they would while defending their own cities. They were firing by ear and by guess, gauging height and position from the sound of the bombers’ engines.

  Fire flashed on the ground as the antiaircraft guns went off. Red and yellow streaks were tracer rounds rising through the air. And the bursts reminded Sergei of the booms when skyrockets turned nights into magic. Here he was, in the middle of one of the fanciest fireworks shows he’d ever imagined.

  A fragment clanged into the fuselage. The Germans might be guessing where his plane was, but they made goddamn good guessers. The longer the flak went on, the scarier it got. “You all right back there?” Sergei called to Sergeant Kuchkov.

  “Bet your cock I am. Pussy missed me by twenty motherfucking centimeters, easy. Those bitches can’t shoot any better than they can fart.” Kuchkov swore as naturally as he breathed, and a lot more artistically.

  “Well, good,” Sergei said, making the bomber jink to help confuse—he hoped—the gunners’ aim. “Any damage to the plane?”

  “Nothing the groundcrew assholes can’t fix pretty easy,” the Chimp replied, and Sergei had to be content with that.

  After crossing the front, Sergei picked up a little antiaircraft fire from his own side, but only a little. He’d been thinking about football before. Now he did again. Come on, fellows. You don’t want an own goal here. What Ivan Kuchkov called the Russians manning those guns should have unmanned them from several thousand meters.

  Sergei peered down toward the ground, looking for the rectangle of lights he’d left—or for any other rectangle of lights he happened to see. They wouldn’t mark a football pitch, but an airstrip.

  He almost yipped in surprise when he saw one. Was he that good a navigator, or just that lucky tonight? As he descended, he grew more and more convinced this really was the runway from which he’d set out. The lights were arranged the same way, anyhow, and he didn’t think the authorities would have standardized that.

  He lowered the landing gear and put down as gently as if the dirt strip were paved with eggs. Night landings were not for the faint of heart. He was proud of this one, and prouder when Federov said, “We’ve come in rougher than that plenty of times in broad daylight.”

  “We have,” Sergei agreed. He tried to sound as if that were routine, but couldn’t even convince himself that he managed it. If those bombs had actually hurt the Nazis, this would be a perfect run.

  HANS-ULRICH RUDEL was happy in the way only a man who’s wanted a woman for a long time and finally got her into bed can be happy. He was pretty much an idiot, in other words, but a sated and smiling idiot. This was the best furlough of his life. He was sure it was the best furlough of anybody’s life. Yes, he was pretty much an idiot for the time being.

  Sofia, he discovered after asking eight or ten times (definitely an idiot), was half-Jewish: a Mischling First Class, as the Reich classified racial categories. She thought of herself as a Jew, though. “My father’s a miserable drunk,” she said. “Why should I want to be like him?”

  Sounds like a Pole, Hans-Ulrich thought, as if there’d never been a German drunk in the history of the world. Although an idiot,
he wasn’t quite an imbecile: he didn’t say what he was thinking out loud. He did ask, “What does your mother do?”

  “She went to Palestine,” Sofia answered. “With the war, I haven’t heard much from her the past year or so. After she broke up with my father, she got the Zionist itch. I think she was making up for marrying a goy, but try and tell her that.” She rolled her eyes. “Try and tell my mother anything. Good luck!”

  “And here you are with me,” Hans-Ulrich said, running a hand along the smooth, warm length of her. She had a tiny flat a couple of blocks from the tavern where she worked. “Maybe you’re not so different from her after all. Should I watch it if I try to tell you something?”

  Not quite an imbecile, but absolutely an idiot. What woman wants to hear she’s like her mother? “You’d better not start,” Sofia replied with a bayonet-sharp edge to her voice. “And I haven’t talked about marrying you, have I? Gevalt!”

  “Well … no,” Rudel admitted. He hadn’t talked about marrying her, either. You could screw just about anybody, and your superiors wouldn’t care as long as you didn’t come down venereal. He tried to imagine a Luftwaffe officer marrying a Mischling First Class in wartime. His superiors would care about that. Oh, yes, just a little! What better way to shoot your military career right between the eyes? You’d never see another promotion again. They’d probably take the Ritterkreuz away, too.

  “All right, then. Don’t be dumber than you can help,” Sofia said, which, at that moment, might have been asking for more than Hans-Ulrich could give.

  “How about this, then?” he said, and rolled on top of her. She squeaked with surprise, but not with dismay. He was amazed he could go this often. He was a young, healthy animal in fine physical condition. He had very few limits when it came to horizontal athletics.

  Some little while later, after both their hearts stopped thudding so hard, Sofia asked him, “And what do you do when you’re standing up?”

  “It’s been too long. I don’t remember,” he answered, deadpan.

  “Braggart!” She poked him in the ribs. “You—man, you.” An exquisitely timed pause. “But I repeat myself.”

  He did have the mother wit to realize he ought to ask her something personal (and he wasn’t ready for another round [he didn’t think he was, anyhow]). “What do you want to do with yourself?” he said.

  “Live through the war,” she said at once. “If I can’t do that, nothing else matters, does it?”

  “No,” he said, wishing he’d come out with the question in a different way. His odds of living through the war were … well, not good. Stuka pilots went where things were already hot and made them hotter. That was a good way to win yourself a Knight’s Cross. It wasn’t such a good way to persuade your insurance man to write a fat policy on you.

  Most of the time, Hans-Ulrich avoided thinking about that. What combat soldier didn’t? If you started feeling the goose’s footfalls every time it walked over your grave, how were you supposed to do your duty? You couldn’t—it was as simple as that. And so you figured that everything had gone all right the last time, and that meant it would this time, too.

  “You’re going to forget me,” Sofia said. “When you remember me, you’re going to be embarrassed you had anything to do with me.” Most women would have started weeping and wailing after they came out with a line like that. Sofia sounded no more excited than she would have if she asked him whether he wanted more coffee.

  All the same, Rudel tried to deny everything. “I’ll remember you forever.”

  “Oh, cut the crap,” Sofia said. “You’re going to remember me after you’ve got four kids and a blond Aryan wife? Don’t make me laugh. You’ll do your best to pretend nothing in Bialystok ever happened.”

  “How do you know I’m not married now?” he asked.

  “You’re the kind who’d wear a ring. And even if you didn’t, you’re the kind who’d get upset about cheating on his sweetie back home,” Sofia answered. “It wouldn’t stop you—does it ever stop anybody?—but you’d get upset about it anyway.”

  He twisted in the narrow bed so he could face her. The mattress creaked under him. It had been doing a lot more creaking than that lately. The sun was going down; shadows shrouded Sofia’s features. “You don’t much like people, do you?” he said.

  She shrugged. The same excellent firm that did her ankles had also sculpted her collarbones. “I am one. What else have I got to like? I’m not one of those jerks who get a dog or a cat and pretend it’s their baby.”

  “All right,” he said. He tended to get sloppy over dogs, but not the way she meant. If Sofia were to get a pet, he had the feeling she’d choose a cat instead. Or maybe a viper.

  She leaned up on one elbow. Her breasts were small, with broad, dark nipples, almost as if she’d already had a child. Maybe she had; there was a lot he didn’t know about her. When he reached out to touch one, she knocked his hand away. “So,” she said, “what’s it like for a Nazi to fuck a Jew?”

  He had no idea how to answer that, so he tried a counterquestion: “What’s it like for a Jew to lay a Nazi?”

  “My people already don’t like me because of who my father is,” Sofia replied. “You, though, you’re different. What would your mother say if she found out who I was?”

  His mother disapproved of everything that had anything to do with sex. She’d warned him about women before he had any idea what she was talking about. He was sometimes amazed he’d ever been born. His father must have been very persuasive one night—or just too horny to take no for an answer.

  “I’m a big boy now,” he said. “I don’t have to worry about that any more.”

  “Fine.” Sofia found a new place to stick in the needle: “What would your commanding officer say, then?”

  “He teased me about having a girlfriend before I set out for Bialystok,” Rudel answered. “I just hoped he was right.”

  She gave him a crooked smile. “What? You weren’t sure you could sweep me off my feet?”

  “I don’t think anybody’s ever sure of anything with you,” he answered truthfully.

  “I hope not.” Sofia took that as a matter of course—and as a matter of pride. “When people are sure about you, things get boring.”

  Hans-Ulrich could imagine the two of them parting a lot of different ways. Heading the list was one—which hardly mattered—clanging the other in the ear with a frying pan. Other filmworthy melodramas also stood high up there. Getting bored with each other lay way down below something like being separated in an attack by flying orangutans.

  He could imagine her finding a German protector useful. Poles didn’t love the Jews who made up a tenth of their country’s population. Perhaps because they had so many Jews, no laws restricting them were on the books here. The Reich had such laws, of course. Maybe Sofia feared they would come to Poland, too, and hoped a German could help her escape their bite. And maybe she was right in both fear and hope.

  That might account for her taking a German into her bed. But what accounted for her taking a particular German, one Hans-Ulrich Rudel? He didn’t ask her. He had a fear of his own: that she might tell him the exact and literal truth. Whatever her reasons were, he was glad she had them. Glad and more than glad …

  “Again?” she said as he began to rise to the occasion. “I’m going to have to put some new minerals in your mineral water, I swear I am.” But she didn’t push him away or tell him no. Her arms closed around him, her lips met his, and he wished his furlough could last forever.

  LIKE MOST OF the men in his division, Willi Dernen came from the Breslau Wehrkreis—near the Polish border. He knew a handful of Polish words, most of them foul. Till this campaign, though, he’d never crossed the frontier. He hadn’t even fought in Czechoslovakia; his outfit had guarded the Reich’s western border against a French attack that never really materialized. A good thing, too. If the froggies had hit hard, they would have cracked the undermanned German defenses like a man breaking the shell on his break
fast soft-boiled egg.

  And now Frenchmen and Tommies would help the Wehrmacht smash Stalin’s so-called workers’ paradise. Life—and who was diddling whom at any given moment—could get very strange sometimes.

  Minsk, now, wasn’t in Poland. Up until recently, it had been the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Now it was where the Germans reorganized before sending units new to the east up to the fighting front. A lot of Jews and Red officials had fled the place before the Germans and Poles broke in. The Russians and White Russians who remained seemed resigned to the town’s sudden change of overlords. The Poles in the population seemed delighted. They flew Polish flags, white over red, at any excuse or none.

  Willi watched German engineers cart away larger than life-sized bronze statues of Lenin and Stalin. That wasn’t just to show the locals that Minsk was under new management. There had to be at least a tonne of bronze in each statue. Germany was chronically short of raw materials. Pretty soon Vladimir and Josef would get shot back at the Ivans.

  Even Corporal Baatz laughed when Willi remarked on that. Awful Arno hadn’t been as awful as usual, at least not to Willi. He had to inflict his Schrechlichkeit on the replacements who filled out the company, and that took up most of his time and bad temper.

  The bulk of the replacements also came from Wehrkreis VIII. The Wehrmacht tried to keep men from the same part of the country in the same outfit. It helped units hold together, and anything that did that looked good to the men who gave orders. If you’d gone to school with one of the new guys, or maybe with a cousin of his, you’d try harder to keep him in one piece, and he’d do the same for you. That was the idea, anyway.

  Unfortunately, the high foreheads who’d come up with the idea had never heard of Arno Baatz. He was doing his best to make sure that all the replacements, regardless of which Wehrkreis they came from, hated his guts. And his best, as Willi had too much reason to know, was pretty goddamn good.