Hitler's War Read online

  BOOKS BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE

  The Guns of the South

  THE WORLDWAR SAGA

  Worldwar: In the Balance

  Worldwar: Tilting the Balance

  Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance

  Worldwar: Striking the Balance

  Homeward Bound

  THE VIDESSOS CYCLE

  The Misplaced Legion

  An Emperor for the Legion

  The Legion of Videssos

  Swords of the Legion

  THE TALE OF KRISPOS

  Krispos Rising

  Krispos of Videssos

  Krispos the Emperor

  THE TIME OF TROUBLES SERIES

  The Stolen Throne

  Hammer and Anvil

  The Thousand Cities

  Videssos Besieged

  A World of Difference

  Departures

  How Few Remain

  THE GREAT WAR

  The Great War: American Front

  The Great War: Walk in Hell

  The Great War: Breakthroughs

  AMERICAN EMPIRE

  American Empire: Blood and Iron

  American Empire: The Center

  Cannot Hold

  American Empire: The Victorious

  Opposition

  SETTLING ACCOUNTS

  Settling Accounts: Return

  Engagement

  Settling Accounts: Drive to the East

  Settling Accounts: The Grapple

  Settling Accounts: In at the Death

  Every Inch a King

  The Man with the Iron Heart

  20 JULY 1936—OUTSIDE LISBON

  General José Sanjurjo was a short, heavyset man in his early sixties. He looked from the light plane to the pilot and back again. “Is everything in readiness?” he asked, his tone saying heads would roll if the pilot told him no.

  Major Juan Antonio Ansaldo didn’t tell him anything, not right away. Ansaldo was pacing back and forth, his agitation growing with every stride. He watched as Sanjurjo’s aides shoved two large, heavy trunks into the airplane. “Those look heavy,” Ansaldo said at last.

  “They hold the general’s uniforms!” an aide said, as if to a simpleton. “On the eve of his victorious march into Madrid, he can’t arrive in Burgos without uniforms!”

  Nervously, Ansaldo lit a cigarette. Who was he, a major, to tell Spain’s most senior—and most prestigious—general what to do? He’d placed himself at the disposal of the Spanish state…which Sanjurjo would embody, once he flew from Portugal to Burgos to take charge of the rising against the Spanish Republic.

  When he flew to Burgos? If he flew to Burgos! The city, in north-central Spain, was a long way from Lisbon. The plane, a two-seater, had only so much fuel and only so strong a motor.

  “General…” Ansaldo said.

  “What is it?” growled the man people called the Lion of the Rif because of his victories in Spanish Morocco.

  “¡Viva Sanjurjo!” the general’s men shouted. “¡Viva España!”

  Sanjurjo preened…as well as a short, heavyset man in his sixties could preen. “Now I know my flag is waving over Spain,” he boomed like a courting grouse. “When I hear the Royal March again, I will be ready to die!”

  That gave Major Ansaldo the opening he needed. “General, I don’t want you to die before you get to Spain, before you hear the Royal March again.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sanjurjo demanded.

  “Sir, those trunks your men put aboard—”

  “What about them? They’re my uniforms, as my aides told you. A man is hardly a man without his uniforms.” At the moment, Sanjurjo was wearing a light gray summer-weight civilian suit. He looked and acted quite manly enough for Ansaldo.

  “They weigh a lot.” The pilot gestured. “Look at the pine trees all around the airstrip. I need the plane’s full power to take off. I have to make sure I have enough fuel to fly you to Burgos. I don’t want anything to happen to you, Señor. Spain needs you too much to take chances.”

  General Sanjurjo frowned—not fearsomely, but thoughtfully. “I can’t fly into Burgos like this.” He brushed at the gray linen of his sleeve.

  “Why not, your Excellency? Why not?” Ansaldo asked. “Don’t you think the people of Burgos would be delighted—would be honored—to give you anything you need? Aren’t there any uniforms in Burgos? God help the rising if that’s true!”

  “God help the rising.” Sanjurjo crossed himself. Major Ansaldo followed suit. The general took a gold case from an inside jacket pocket and lit a cigarette of his own. He smoked in abrupt, savage drags. “So you think we’ll crash with my uniforms on board, do you?”

  “When you’re flying, you never know,” the pilot answered. “That’s why you don’t want to take any chances you don’t have to.”

  Sanjurjo grunted. He took a couple of more puffs on the aromatic Turkish cigarette, then ground it out under his heel. “Luis! Orlando!” he called. “Get the trunks off the plane!”

  His aides stared as if they couldn’t believe their ears. “Are you sure, your Excellency?” one of them asked.

  “Of course I’m sure, dammit.” By the way José Sanjurjo spoke, he was always sure. And so he probably was. “Spain comes first, and Spain needs me more than I need my uniforms. As the pilot here says, there are many uniforms. Por Dios, amigos, there is only one Sanjurjo!” The general struck a pose.

  The aides didn’t argue any more. They did what Sanjurjo told them to do. Wrestling the trunks out of the plane’s narrow fuselage proved harder than stuffing them in had been. It took a lot of bad language and help from three other men before they managed it.

  Major Ansaldo wondered how many kilos he’d saved. Fifty? A hundred? He didn’t know, and he never would—no scale was close by. But now he would fly with the kind of load the light plane was made to carry. He liked that.

  “If your Excellency will take the right-hand seat…” he said.

  “Certainly.” Sanjurjo was as spry as a man of half his age and half his bulk.

  After Ansaldo started the motor, he ran through the usual flight checks. Everything looked good. He gave the plane all the throttle he could. He needed to get up quickly, to clear the trees beyond the far edge of the bumpy field.

  When he pulled back on the stick, the nose lifted. The fixed undercarriage left the ground. The bumping stopped. The air, for the moment, was smooth as fine brandy. A slow smile spread across General Sanjurjo’s face. “Do you know what this is, Major?” he said. “A miracle, that’s what! To fly like a bird, like an angel…”

  “It’s only an airplane, sir,” said Ansaldo, as matter-of-fact as any pilot worth his pay.

  “Only an airplane!” Sanjurjo’s eyebrows leaped. “And a woman is only a woman! It is an airplane that takes me out of exile, an airplane that takes me out of Portugal, an airplane that takes me away from the hisses and sneezes and coughs of Portuguese.…”

  “Sí, Señor.” Major Ansaldo knew how the general felt there. If a Spaniard and a Portuguese spoke slowly and clearly, or if they wrote things out, they could generally manage to understand each other. But Portuguese always sounded funny—sounded wrong—in a Spaniard’s ears. The reverse was also bound to be true, but the pilot never once thought of that.

  And his important passenger hadn’t finished: “It is an airplane that takes me back to Spain, back to my country—and Spain will be my country once we settle with the Republican rabble. It is—what does Matthew say?—a pearl of great price.” He crossed himself again.

  So did Juan Antonio Ansaldo. “You have the soul of a poet, your Excellency,” he said. General Sanjurjo smiled like a cat in front of a pitcher of cream. Ansaldo did, too, but only to himself; a little judicious flattery, especially flattery fr
om an unexpected direction, never hurt. But he also had a serious point to make: “I’m glad you chose not to endanger the plane—and yourself, a more valuable pearl—with those trunks. Spain needs you.”

  “Well, yes,” Sanjurjo agreed complacently. “Who would command the forces of the right, the forces of truth, against the atheists and Communists and liberals in the Republic if anything happened to me? Millán Astray?”

  “I don’t think so, sir!” Ansaldo exclaimed, and that wasn’t flattery. Astray, the founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, was a very brave man. Colonial fighting had cost him an arm and an eye. He still led the Legion, whose war cry was “¡Viva la muerte!”—Long live death! Men like that were valuable in the officer corps, but who would want such a skeletal fanatic leading a country?

  “Bueno. I don’t think so, either.” Yes, Sanjurjo sounded complacent, all right. And why not, when he held the rising in the palm of his hand? He couldn’t resist throwing out the name of another possible replacement: “Or what about General Franco?”

  “Not likely, your Excellency!” Again, Major Ansaldo meant what he said. No one had ever questioned Francisco Franco’s courage, either, even if he wasn’t so showy about displaying it as Millán Astray was. But the plump little general was no great leader of men. With Sanjurjo’s personality, he could stand beside—could, at need, stand up to—Mussolini and Hitler. Franco? Franco had all the warmth, all the excitement, of a canceled postage stamp.

  “No, not likely at all,” General Sanjurjo said. “Once I get to Burgos, the true business of setting Spain to rights can begin.”

  “Sí, Señor,” Ansaldo said once more. The light plane droned on: toward Spain, toward Burgos, toward victory, toward the birth of a whole new world.

  29 SEPTEMBER 1938—MUNICH

  Adolf Hitler was not a happy man. Oh, yes, he was going to get Czechoslovakia. The British and French had come here to hand him his hateful neighbor—what an abortion of a country! one more crime of Versailles!—all trussed up on a silver platter, ready for the slaughter.

  But, for all the fuss the Sudeten Germans had kicked up inside Czechoslovakia (fuss orchestrated from the Reich), to Hitler the Slavic state wasn’t an end in itself, only a means to an end. The end was dominating Europe. Had that required dropping the Sudeten German Party he’d fed and watered for so long, he would have dropped it like a live grenade.

  Getting his hands on Czechoslovakia would be nice, yes. What he really wanted, though, was war.

  He was ready. He was convinced the enemy wasn’t. Chamberlain and Daladier wouldn’t have been so pathetically eager to sell their ally down the river if they were.

  The trouble was, they were too damned eager. They kept falling all over themselves to make whatever concessions he demanded. The more they yielded, the less excuse he had to send in the Wehrmacht.

  His generals would be relieved if he got what he wanted without fighting. He wasn’t happy with the halfhearted way so many of them were readying themselves and their units. And Mussolini, while a good fellow, had more chin than balls. The Duce kept insisting Italy wasn’t ready to take on England and France, and wouldn’t be for another two or three years.

  “Dummkopf,” Hitler muttered under his breath. The real point, the point Mussolini didn’t get, was that England and France weren’t ready. Not only did they not want war, their factories weren’t geared up for it. And the Russians were in even worse shape. Every day, it seemed, Stalin knocked off a new general, or a handful of them. When the Reds laid on a purge, they didn’t fool around.

  General Sanjurjo got it. Spain stood foursquare behind Germany. Well, actually, Spain stood about two-and-a-half-square behind Germany; the Communists and anarchists of the Republic still hung on to the rest of the battered country. But Sanjurjo had a proper Spanish sense of honor and obligation. He would do what he could against his benefactor’s enemies.

  The time was now. The Führer could feel it in his bones. Of all the gifts a great ruler had, knowing when to strike was one of the most vital. He’d shown he had it when he got rid of Ernst Röhm in the Night of Long Knives, and again when he swallowed Austria in the Anschluss. (Oh, all right—the Beer-Hall Putsch hadn’t quite worked out. But that was fifteen years ago now. Back in those days, he was still learning which end was up.)

  He was ready to fight. The Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe were ready, even if some generals tried dragging their feet. Even if the French and English did declare war when he hit Czechoslovakia, he was sure they wouldn’t do anything much in the West. They’d wait, they’d dither…and then, as soon as he’d stomped the Czechs into the mud, he’d turn around and smash them, too.

  Yes, he was ready. But tall, stork-necked Chamberlain—with Daladier scuttling along in his wake like a squat, swarthy little half-trained puppy—was also ready: ready to hand him Czechoslovakia without any fighting at all. The British Prime Minister was so abject about the whole business, even the hard-bitten Führer would have been embarrassed to order the panzers to roll forward and the bombers to take off. Chamberlain, damn his gawky soul, gave away so much, Hitler couldn’t very well demand more. There was no more to give.

  And so they played out the charade here in Munich. Hitler and Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier sat down together and calmly arranged for the transfer of the Sudetenland—and its mountain barriers and its fortifications, second only to those of the Maginot Line—from Czechoslovakia to Germany. Without those works, the Czechs hadn’t a prayer of being able to fight.

  They knew it, too. They’d sent a couple of nervous observers to Munich to learn their fate. The Czechs cooled their heels at a distant hotel; the Führer wouldn’t let them attend the conference. The Soviet Union was similarly excluded.

  On with the farce, then. The Führerbau was the National Socialists’ chief office building in Munich. Hitler had taken a major role in its design, but it wasn’t a full success. A hundred yards long and fifty deep, it was only three stories high. To an uncharitable observer, it looked like nothing so much as an overgrown barracks hall.

  Nevertheless, Hitler thought the big bronze eagle over the entryway particularly fine. Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Daladier were already there by the time the Führer and the interpreter, Paul Otto Schmidt, came in. So was Göring, in a fancy white uniform—he’d motored in with Daladier.

  The Duce spoke with Chamberlain in English and Daladier in French. He spoke German, too, after a fashion. Hitler, who knew only his own language, envied his fellow dictator’s linguistic skills. He consoled himself by noting how plain the handful of British and French aides in civilian clothes appeared in contrast to his uniformed henchmen, and Mussolini’s.

  Hitler led the heads of government into his office. The big oblong room had a fireplace at one end, with a portrait of Bismarck above it. Light-colored chairs and a matching sofa faced the fireplace. There were no name tags—not even any pads and pencils for taking notes. There was no agenda. Discussion darted where it would. Everyone already had a good notion of how things would end up.

  “Now that we are all here, we must decide soon,” Hitler said, and smacked one fist into the palm of the other hand.

  But things moved more slowly than he wanted them to. The heads of the two leading democracies had to get their views on record. The Führer supposed that was for domestic consumption. It wouldn’t change anything here.

  His temper began to fray. “You know nothing of the dreadful tyranny the Czechs exert over the Sudeten Germans,” he said loudly. “Nothing, I tell you! They torture them, showing no mercy. They expel them by the thousands, in panic-stricken herds. They have even forced the Sudeten Germans’ leader, Konrad Henlein, to flee from his native land.”

  “One jump ahead of the gendarmes, I shouldn’t wonder,” Daladier said dryly.

  “Joke if you care to, but I—” Hitler stopped in surprise at a loud knock on the door.

  “What’s going on?” Neville Chamberlain asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hitler answered a
fter Dr. Schmidt translated the question. “I left clear orders that we were not to be disturbed.” When he gave orders like that, he expected them to be obeyed, too.

  But, even for the Führer, expectations didn’t always match reality. The knock came again, louder and more insistent than before. Hitler sprang to his feet and hurried toward the door. Somebody out there in the hallway was going to regret being born.

  “Whatever he’s selling, tell him we don’t want any,” Mussolini said in his inimitable German. Daladier and Chamberlain both smiled once the interpreters made them understand the crack. Hitler didn’t. He’d never had much of a sense of humor, and the interruption pushed him towards one of his volcanic eruptions of fury.

  He flung the door open. There stood Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, his adjutant. “Well?” Hitler growled ominously. “What is the meaning of this—this interruption?”

  Hossbach was a stoic man on the far end of middle age. “I’m sorry to bother you, mein Führer, but—”

  “But what?” Hitler demanded. “Whatever the devil it is, it had better be important.”

  “Yes, sir. I believe it is.” Hossbach took a sheet of flimsy yellow paper from his left breast pocket. “Here is a telegram we have just received. You will know Herr Henlein has had to take refuge in the Reich because of Czech outrages.…”

  “Of course, of course,” the Führer said impatiently. “I was just now talking about his plight, as a matter of fact. What’s going on with him?”

  Colonel Hossbach licked his lips. “Sir, he has been shot. Shot dead, I should say. The murderer is in custody. He is a certain Jaroslav Stribny: a Czech, sir. His passport shows a Prague address.”

  Hitler stared at him in astonishment, disbelief, and then sudden crazy joy. “Ich bin vom Himmel gefallen!” he blurted. I’ve fallen from heaven! was what the words meant literally, but what they really conveyed was his utter amazement.

  “What shall we do, mein Führer?” Hossbach asked nervously.

  A moment later, it was his turn to be amazed, because Hitler bussed him on both cheeks like a Frenchman. “Leave that to me, my dear Hossbach,” he answered. “Oh, yes. Leave that to me!”