Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

A Russian foot soldier craned his neck up at the block of flats across the street, the one with the missing front wall. He turned to look at the building Gustav was holed up in. If he and his buddies decided to search this one, the Germans on the ground floor would open up on them. Gustav’s chance would vanish.

  If any of the men in here opened up on the Russians now…But these guys weren’t rookies. They’d all learned their business the last time around. They had fire discipline. They knew how to wait.

  Here came the Stalin, right past the block of flats at a slow walk. Gustav picked up one of his wicked bottles. He flicked the Zippo. First time, every time. He lit the wick and chucked the Molotov cocktail out through the glassless window.

  The hatch on top of the cupola wasn’t very wide. He needed to throw well enough to make a basketball player proud. The shot wasn’t easy, but, because he was so close, it was a long way from impossible. If he missed, he’d spill fire down the outside of the turret, and the Stalin would probably keep working. It would also probably hose down the second floor here with machine-gun bullets. Better not to miss, then.

  And Gustav didn’t. The tank commander must have seen the bottle in the air. He ducked. Half a second later, he would have slammed the lid shut. In that half second, the Molotov cocktail followed him down the hatch and broke.

  Smoke started pouring out of the turret. Tanks carried fire extinguishers inside, but would a startled crew have the presence of mind to grab one and use it? Even if it got used, would it kill the fire? Not just the gasoline-oil-and-soap mixture in the wine bottle would be burning in there. All kinds of things inside the fighting compartment could catch: paint, insulation, lubricating grease. Pretty soon, the ammunition in there would start cooking off.

  But the Russian tank crew didn’t wait around for that. As soon as they saw the extinguisher wouldn’t stop the blaze, they bailed out. Two of them had their coveralls on fire. Gustav squeezed off a couple of short bursts at them as they rolled in the street trying to smother the flames.

  He hit one man—he thought it was the tank commander. The other Ivan scrambled into shelter behind the Stalin. More and more smoke belched from the stricken tank. Machine-gun ammo went off with cheerful popping noises. Pretty soon, the massive shells the main armament flung would go off, too. All that steel, though, would keep the explosions on the inside from hurting the tankmen on the outside.

  Foot soldiers started shooting into the room from which Gustav had done his dirty work. The only trouble with that was, he wasn’t in there any more. He knew they’d pock the back wall with as many bullet holes as they could. In their boots, he would have done the same thing. What else would you do, with a rifle or a PPD in your hand?

  Some of the other Germans in the block of flats started shooting at the Russian infantry. The Russians gave back the fire. That didn’t worry Gustav, except in the limited sense that he always worried some about getting wounded or killed. The important thing was, the Red Army wouldn’t be bringing any more tanks up this street.

  Wham! The block of flats jerked as if some giant had kicked an upper story. Wham! It shuddered again, convulsively. Those were two HE rounds from a 122mm gun. The Stalin had had a friend trailing it, and the friend was cranky. One more might bring the place down.

  Wham! That one almost brought Gustav down. The other heavy tank had lowered its cannon. Another way to flatten a building was to knock out the props so the top fell in.

  Coughing, deafened, ghost-white with plaster dust, Gustav didn’t wait around for another love tap. He got the hell out of there. He could fight the war from the next building over. If the Russians wanted this one so much, they were welcome to it, as far as he was concerned.

  In the last war, he might have won the Knight’s Cross for killing a heavy tank with a Molotov cocktail. Here, he got to stay alive. That was a better decoration, in case anybody wanted to know what he thought.

  —

  “What’s the trouble up there, Comrade Sergeant?” Pavel Gryzlov asked. “How come we aren’t going forward any more?”

  “I’ll have a look, Pasha,” Konstantin Morozov said. He flipped the cupola hatch open and stuck his head up to see what was going on. He knew he needed to keep doing that. He also knew Dortmund was full of snipers. In the last war, Nazi snipers had loved blowing tank commanders’ heads off. So had Soviet snipers. Things wouldn’t have changed since.

  He ducked back down. “Something’s burning, dammit,” he said. “I don’t know for sure it’s a killed tank, but it’s that kind of smoke. And a killed tank in a place like this means a traffic jam.”

  “I don’t like standing still in the middle of a place like this,” the gunner said. “Too many bad things can happen.”

  “I know,” Konstantin said. “But unless I crawl up the back of the next tank ahead and start humping it, what am I supposed to do?”

  A bullet clanked against the tank’s side armor. The people who’d fired it could do that from now till doomsday without hurting anything. But, where there were riflemen, there were liable to be pricks with bazookas. And a bazooka wouldn’t clang off the armor. The shaped charge in the rocket’s nose would burn through.

  With a sigh, Morozov took his PPD off the brackets where it hung and opened the cupola hatch again. He glanced to the left, the direction from which the shot had come. All he saw were ruins. Like the other German cities he’d come through, Dortmund seemed far richer than a Soviet town of the same size. The shops looked fancier. They’d been looted, but even what was left was of higher quality than anything you could get back home. All the cars Morozov saw were abandoned hulks, but there were many more to see than there would have been on a Soviet street.

  Dortmund had been heavily bombed during the last war. The Red Army and the imperialists were still banging heads for it now. Not all the old damage was repaired. It had new damage to go with it. The buildings still put to shame the cheap concrete blocks of flats that sprouted like toadstools near the statue of Lenin in any Soviet town’s main square.

  A foot soldier in Red Army khaki came out of one of those battered buildings. He carried a Kalashnikov in one hand and a bottle in the other. By the way he wobbled as he walked, he’d put a serious dent in the contents of the bottle. A silly smile on his face, he nodded to Morozov. “How the fuck are you, Comrade Tank Commander?”

  “Well, I’m here,” Morozov answered. “Looks like I’m stuck here, too, till they clear away whatever’s on fire up ahead.”

  “That’s a shame!” The infantryman was drunk enough so it seemed tragic to him. He looked down at the half-empty bottle in surprise, as if just remembering he had it. He probably was. “You want what’s left of this? Can’t hurt, not as long as you’re stuck anyway.”

  “Sure. Bolshoye spasibo!” Morozov said.

  The foot soldier stood by the tank. Boris leaned toward him. The guy had to toss the bottle. Gribkov caught it. Now that the foot soldier had a free hand, he waved and staggered away. Morozov guessed he was more interested in a place to sleep it off than in meeting the enemy.

  More power to him if he is, Konstantin thought. He ducked down into the tank gain. “Look what I found,” he said. The liquid in the bottle was amber, not clear. He’d drunk schnapps before. He liked vodka better, but schnapps would cure whatever ailed you.

  “Good job, Comrade Sergeant!” Pavel Gryzlov gauged the bottle with an experienced eye. “Plenty in there for a good knock for all of us.”

  “Just what I was thinking.” Konstantin yanked the stopper, tilted his head back, and drank. The schnapps was harsh but strong. Warmth exploded out of his belly. He passed the gunner the bottle. Gryzlov also drank. He gave Mogamed Safarli the schnapps. Safarli was an Azeri, and so certainly a Muslim. He drank as eagerly as any Christian, though. Then he crawled forward to let Yevgeny Ushakov put paid to the bottle.

  Ushakov’s voice came back through the intercom as the loader returned to his place: “I killed it. Thanks!”

  “Pass the body back here,
” Morozov said. “I’m going to look around again, so I’ll chuck it out.”

  He threw the bottle onto the sidewalk. Watching it smash, he nodded to himself. No enemy would send it back full of burning gasoline. Just then, the T-54 in front of his belched more stinking black smoke from its exhaust and lumbered forward.

  “Hey, Zhenya!” Konstantin called over the intercom. “They’re moving!”

  “I see it, Comrade Sergeant.” The driver put the tank in gear. Whatever rubble lay in the streets, the tracks rolled over it with effortless ease. They ground most of it to dust.

  A recovery vehicle had pulled a burning tank off into a side street to let the rest of the Soviet armor advance up the wider way the tank had blocked. It was a Stalin: the hardest tank to kill that the USSR knew how to make. Hard didn’t mean impossible, though.

  The Soviet Union might have been able to make tanks that were tougher yet. But it couldn’t have made them in numbers worth putting in the field. In the last war, German tanks had had far more advanced engineering, most ways, than the good old T-34. But when there were five or six T-34s for every highly engineered Tiger or Panzer IV or Panther, what difference did that make? Quantity took on a quality of its own.

  To Soviet planners, tanks were as expendable as bullets or rations. That was hard on the crews, but it made sense from a military point of view. Why waste too much quality on something that was sure to get smashed up pretty soon anyway? Turning out two or three of the pretty good instead of taking the time for the best worked out just fine.

  In the same way, a swarm of half-trained soldiers spraying lots of lead in front of them would eventually wear down the smaller number of hardened professionals who faced them. The men who lived through their first few battles would learn their trade and leaven the new swarm that got seined into the Red Army after them.

  That kind of approach had worked for Stalin the last time around. It was expensive, but the USSR had more men and more machines than it knew what to do with (by the way some generals performed, that was literally true).

  A head popped up in the ruins. The helmet on the head was an American pot. Konstantin saw that just before he saw the bazooka tube on the broken masonry. He squeezed his PPD’s trigger at the same time as the tube spat fire.

  He never found out whether he got the American or German or whoever the son of a bitch was. The bazooka slammed into his T-54’s frontal armor. He thought it hit near or on the patch the repair crew had welded on. The blast that consumed his crewmates flung him out of the turret and through the air instead.

  He just had time to realize that his boots and the legs of his coveralls were on fire before he hit the sidewalk, hard. The thick leather tankman’s helmet probably kept him from fracturing his skull. He rolled and beat at himself, trying to put out the flames before they burned him too badly.

  A corporal jumped on him and rolled up and down his legs, smothering the fire. The infantryman also had the mother wit to yell for a medic. He got one faster than Konstantin had thought he would. Between them, the medic and the corporal lugged him away from the front. “Do you want morphine?” the medic asked him.

  The burns and the bruises all started to hurt at once. “Fuck your mother, yes!” Morozov exclaimed. The medic stuck him. The pain went away, or maybe Konstantin did.

  —

  Now that it was May, the snow had melted in Korea. The countryside turned muddy, then green. “Ain’t that sweet?” Sergeant Lou Klein said. “Spring is in the air. La-de-da!”

  “Nice to know you’re enthused about it,” Cade Curtis said.

  “Fuckin’-A…sir,” Klein replied. “The birdies’ll be singing their heads off. And us and the Chinks, we’ll be blowing each other’s heads off.”

  “How long do you think this war can go on?” Curtis asked.

  “I’m just a dumb sergeant. I don’t know nothin’. I don’t want to know nothin’,” Klein said.

  “You’re a sandbagging dumb sergeant, is what you are,” Cade told him. “C’mon—give.”

  “Well, I guess it kind of depends,” the veteran noncom said. “Sooner or later, they’re bound to run out of cities to plaster. When they do, I guess things’ll just peter out. Not much point to blowing up forests or prairies or anything. That’s how it looks to me, anyway. How do you see it?”

  “I don’t think we can last even that long,” Cade said. “As soon as the logistics get so bad we can’t support the armies, we’ve got to quit.”

  That applied with special force here in Korea, something he made a point of not mentioning to Lou Klein. The only functioning port on the West Coast was San Diego. All the ones north of there had taken A-bombs. With the Panama and Suez Canals gone, the harbors on the East Coast couldn’t quickly take up the slack. Everything that didn’t leave through San Diego would go around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope. It would be only two or three days less than forever on the way.

  Red China, in the meantime, sat right across the Yalu, right where it had always been. The logistics of a war in Korea had always been bad for America. With the ports and the canals destroyed, they’d gone from bad to worse.

  Sergeant Klein looked amused. “Anybody can tell you’re an officer,” he said. “Officers go on and on about logistics.”

  “You’ve got to,” Cade said. “They’re important.”

  “As long as I’ve got ammo for my M-1, as long as the guys in the battery behind us have enough shells for their 105s, I won’t worry about it.”

  Cade started to explain that that was what logistics were all about, that things would go horribly wrong if you didn’t worry about making sure dogfaces had plenty of cartridges and howitzers had plenty of shells. He started to, but a glint in Klein’s eye shut him up before the words came out. The sergeant was sandbagging again.

  When Cade didn’t walk barefoot through the obvious, Klein looked disappointed for a moment. Then he grinned a grin that showed off his nicotine-stained choppers. “You’re learning, sir, damned if you ain’t.”

  “Baby steps,” Cade said. “Baby steps.”

  A moment later, they both dove for the dugout. Those screams in the air were incoming Red Chinese 105s. Klein dove no sooner than Cade—the young lieutenant really was learning. The dugout was cramped for two; it might have been cramped for one. As they huddled together, Klein said, “You come any closer, Lieutenant, you’re gonna kiss me.”

  “No, thanks,” Cade said. “I’ve been overseas a while, but not that long.” The way they were twisted up with each other, he could just about whisper in Lou Klein’s ear. They both laughed. It wasn’t that funny, but Cade was glad for anything to take his mind off the artillery fire.

  U.S. guns opened up, too, but they didn’t shoot back as hard as he would have liked. Save ammo was the new watchword. With the troubles back home, it had to be. Stalin might give the Chinks only what he didn’t feel like using himself, but he had plenty of old howitzers and rounds to shoot out of them. Artillery had always been an American advantage. It had been, but the balance was tilting.

  When the shelling let up, Cade and Sergeant Klein untangled from each other and jumped up onto the firing step to see if the Red Chinese would follow it up with a ground attack. Not this time: no dun-colored wave of men slogging forward to get cut down. They’d shelled for the sake of shelling, because they had the tubes and ammunition. They’d made the Americans keep their heads down, and hurt or killed a few at no great cost to themselves.

  By baby steps, they were learning, too.

  A hundred yards down the trench, some unlucky GI was wailing for his mother. Curtis and Klein looked at each other. Their faces both wore the same expression. “Christ, but I hate that,” Klein said. “Just dumb luck I ain’t the one making those noises.”

  “Uh-huh,” Cade said. “I’ve come too close to that too many times.”

  “Ain’t we all?” Klein said. Cade remembered he had been wounded, and more than once. What kind of noises had he made when he got hit? Nothing so ho
rrible as the ones rising now, or Cade hoped not. Those were the cries you let out when you were in agony, and death or lots of morphine were all you had to look forward to.

  After what seemed like forever but was actually five or ten minutes, the wounded man fell silent. Either he was dead or they’d doped him not just to but past the eyebrows. Whichever, he wasn’t making that horrible racket any more. Cade didn’t care about anything else.

  Klein lit a cigarette. He held the pack out to Curtis. “Want one, sir?”

  Cade hadn’t smoked at all till he put on the uniform, or, in fact, till he came under fire. He hadn’t smoked much then; he hadn’t really got the habit before he was cut off from the Army’s logistical horn of plenty. So it wasn’t as if he needed a butt. He took one anyway, saying, “Thanks. Now watch me cough my head off.”

  “I sure as hell did when I started smoking.” Klein pulled a Ronson that had seen plenty of hard use out of his pocket. Cade leaned over to get a light. “There you go,” the sergeant said when he took his first inexpert drag.

  He did cough. It tasted terrible, as if he’d inhaled the smoke from burning leaves—which was just what he had done. He got dizzy and light-headed—no, he hadn’t tried this for quite a while. He gulped as his stomach did an Immelmann.

  “You okay, sir?” Klein asked with what sounded like genuine concern. “You look kinda green.”

  “I believe it.” Spit flooded into Cade’s mouth. His body was convinced he’d just gone and poisoned himself. Gulping again, he wasn’t so sure it was wrong. “Hope I don’t lose my lunch. Been too long since I did any of this.”

  “Yeah, you gotta stay used to it,” Lou Klein agreed. “Even when you are, it ain’t like you get drunk or nothin’. Just kinda, I dunno, takes some of the edge offa things. Gives you somethin’ to do when you got five minutes with nothin’ goin’ on, too.”

  “I guess so.” Cade nodded and cautiously inhaled again. It was almost as rugged as his first try. He turned his head and got rid of some of that outpouring of spit. Klein chuckled, but softly. Cade said, “The Indians must have been crazy when they started doing this.”