The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Read online

  “We are going to become the arsenal of democracy, as I said in my Fireside Chat not long ago,” the President continued. “We must be strong enough to defeat the enemy in the Far East and to ensure that no enemy anywhere in the world can possibly defeat us.”

  Yet again, people clapped and cheered. How many of those people had the faintest idea what war was like? Oh, some of the men would have gone Over There a generation before. They’d seen the elephant, as their grandfathers would have said in Civil War days. Most of FDR’s audience, though, didn’t really have any idea of what he was talking about.

  Peggy did. She’d watched the Nazis storm into Czechoslovakia and promptly start tormenting Jews. She’d watched them march off freighters and into Copenhagen, ruining her chances to get back to the States for a while. She’d huddled against their bombs—and, while she was stuck in Germany, against English bombs, too, and maybe even against French and Russian bombs as well.

  So she knew as much about what war was like these days as anyone who hadn’t carried a rifle could. Some people cheering Roosevelt would find out just that way. And others would learn when young men they loved came back maimed or didn’t come back at all. Would they still be cheering then?

  The truly scary thing was, all the anguish and agony Roosevelt wouldn’t talk about in an inaugural address were going to be needed. The horror Peggy had seen and gone through in Europe made her much too sure of that.

  SARAH GOLDMAN EYED the clerk behind the barred window in the Münster Rathaus with nothing but dismay. She’d never faced this fellow before. It wasn’t that he was gray-haired and had a hook where his left hand should have been. No one young and healthy would have sat behind that window. Young, healthy German men wore Feldgrau these days, not a baggy brown suit that reeked of mothballs.

  But a button gleamed on the clerk’s left lapel. It wasn’t the ordinary swastika button that proved somebody belonged to the Nazi party. No: The gold rim on this button showed that the clerk was one of the first 100,000 Party members. He’d been a Nazi long before Hitler came to power, in other words. He’d like Jews even less than most National Socialists.

  “You wish?” he said as Sarah came to the head of the queue. He sounded polite enough for the moment. Well, why not? She was a pretty girl—not beautiful, but pretty. And, with her light brown hair, hazel eyes, and fair skin, she didn’t look especially Jewish.

  “I need …” She had to nerve herself to speak louder than a whisper. “I need to arrange the paperwork for my wedding.” There. She’d said it, and loud enough for him to hear it, too.

  “You should be happy when you do that, dear.” The clerk might be graying and mutilated, but he noticed a pretty girl, all right. Behind the reading glasses that magnified them, his own pale eyes seemed enormous as he studied her. He held out his good hand. “Let me have your identity booklet, and we’ll begin.”

  “All right,” Sarah said as she took the indispensable document out of her purse. It wasn’t all right, and it wasn’t going to be.

  He held the document down with the hook and opened it with the fingers of his meat hand. He was no slower or clumsier than someone who hadn’t got hurt. How many years of practice and repetition lay behind him?

  “Oh,” he said in a voice suddenly colder than the nasty weather outside. Of course the booklet bore the big stamp that said Jude. The Nazis had made all German Jews take the first names Moses or Sarah. Since Sarah already owned the one required for women, she’d briefly confused the bureaucracy. She didn’t confuse the clerk now. She just irritated him, or more likely disgusted him. He shook his head. “You wish to … marry?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. Staying polite wouldn’t hurt, though it might not help, either. “It’s not against the law for two Jews to marry each other, sir.”

  That was true—after a fashion. Law for Jews in Germany these days was whatever the Nazis said it was. Jews weren’t even German citizens any more. They were only residents, forced to become strangers in what most of them still thought of as their Vaterland.

  “Well …” the clerk said ominously. He pushed back his chair and stood up. He was shorter than Sarah expected; the chair let him look down on the people he was supposed to serve. Shaking his head, he went on, “I must consult with my supervisor.”

  The stout middle-aged woman behind Sarah in line groaned. “What’s eating him?” she said.

  Sarah only shrugged. She knew, all right, but she didn’t think telling would do her any good. She waited as patiently as she could for the clerk to return. The woman and the people in the queue behind her grumbled louder and louder. Anything that made him leave his post obviously sprang from a plot to throw sand in the system’s gear train.

  He came back after three or four minutes that seemed like an hour. With him came another functionary, this one a little older, who also wore an alter Kämpfer’s gold-rimmed Party button on his lapel. The newcomer eyed Sarah as if he’d have to clean her off the bottom of his shoe.

  “You want to get married?” he said, his voice full of even more revolted disbelief than his subordinate’s had held.

  “Yes, sir,” Sarah repeated. Whatever she thought of him, she carefully didn’t show.

  “And your intended is also of Hebraic blood?”

  “That’s right.” Sarah supposed her family had some Aryans in the woodpile. Isidor Bruck looked like what everybody’s idea of looking Jewish looked like. He came by it honestly—so did his father and mother and younger brother.

  “What is his name?” the senior bureaucrat asked. She gave it. The senior man sneered. “No, that is not correct. He is Moses Isidor Bruck, and will be so listed in our records.”

  “Sorry,” said Sarah, who was anything but. She was mad at herself. She’d just been thinking about the forced name change, but she’d forgotten to use it. Nobody remembered … except people like the ones on the other side of the window.

  “I see by your documents that you are twenty years old,” the senior man said. “And what is the age of the other Hebrew?” It was as if he couldn’t even bear to say the word Jew.

  “He’s, uh, twenty-two,” Sarah answered.

  “Why is he not here to speak for himself?” the bureaucrat demanded.

  “He’s working, sir. He’s a baker, like his father.” Bakers never starved. When rations for most German Jews were so miserable, that wasn’t the smallest consideration in the world.

  “Mrmp.” The functionary was anything but impressed. He scribbled a note on a form, then glared out through the bars that made him look like a caged animal. But he and his kind were the ones who kept Jews in the enormous cage they’d made of the Third Reich. “And what is your father’s occupation?”

  “He’s a laborer,” Sarah said, as steadily as she could. “He used to be a university professor when Jews could still do that.” Both Nazi bureaucrats scowled. To wipe those nasty expressions off their faces, Sarah added, “He’s a wounded war veteran, too. Wounded and decorated.”

  Benjamin Goldman’s Iron Cross Second Class and his limp did matter. Nazi laws mandated better treatment for Jews who’d fought at the front and their families. Not good treatment—nowhere near good treatment—but better.

  Sarah almost told the clerk and his boss that her father and brother tried to volunteer for the Wehrmacht this time around. But she didn’t want to remind them she was related to Saul Goldman, who was wanted for smashing in a labor gang boss’ head after the other fellow hit him and rode him for being a Jew once too often. On the lam, Saul had stolen papers or got his hands on a forged set, so he was in the army now even though the Nazis didn’t know it. The less they thought about him these days, the better Sarah liked it.

  Both men with gold-rimmed Party badges went right on looking unhappy. No matter what Nazi laws said about Jewish frontline veterans, a Jew with a medal and a wound was plainly just another kike to them. “Laborer,” the senior fellow said, and he wrote that down, too.

  “When will Isidor—uh, Moses Isid
or—and I hear about getting official permission to marry, sir?” Sarah asked. This wasn’t her first trip to the Rathaus. Official policy made everything as difficult as possible for Jews. Marriage was definitely included. The Nazis wished there were no more Jews in Germany (or anywhere else, come to that). No wonder they weren’t enthusiastic about anything that threatened to produce more people they hated.

  “When?” the functionary echoed. “When we decide you will, that’s when.”

  “All right.” Sarah fought down a sigh. She didn’t want to give the Nazis the satisfaction of knowing they’d annoyed her. They might be pretty sure, but she didn’t aim to show them. She was her father’s daughter—no doubt about it. She even managed a smile of sorts as she said “Thank you very much” and left the window.

  “Well! About time!” said the stout gal who’d waited behind her. The woman started pouring out her tale of woe to the bureaucrats. Sarah didn’t hang around to find out how she fared. Any Jew in Germany had plenty of worries of her own.

  THEO HOSSBACH SUPPOSED he should have been happy that the Wehrmacht and its Polish, Slovakian, Hungarian, English, and French allies hadn’t lost more ground to the Red Army during this brutal winter. After all, a headlong retreat would have made it more likely for something bad to have happened to the Panzer II in which he served as radioman.

  But bad things could happen to the Panzer II all too easily any which way. The lightly armed, lightly armored three-man machines weren’t obsolescent any more. They were obsolete, and everybody who had anything to do with them knew as much. They soldiered on regardless. A veteran crew, which his panzer certainly had, could still get good use from one. And any panzer at all made infantry very unhappy.

  Besides, there were still nowhere near enough modern Panzer IIIs and IVs to go around. When the best weren’t available, the rest had to do what they could.

  What Theo’s company was doing now was protecting a stretch of front that ran from a village to a small town closer to Smolensk than to Minsk. Just exactly where the village and town lay, Theo wasn’t so sure. A good atlas might have shown him, but he didn’t have one. What difference did it make, anyhow?

  All he really knew was, the front had gone back and forth a good many times. Lately, it seemed to have gone back more often than it had gone forth. The Ivans were marvelous at slipping companies, sometimes even battalions or regiments, of infantry in white snowsuits behind the German lines and raising hell with them. They weren’t so good at taking advantage of the trouble they caused—which was a lucky thing for everybody who had to fight them.

  Theo still wore the black coveralls of a panzer crewman. They looked smart and didn’t show grease stains. No doubt that was why the powers that be had chosen them. But odds were a man in black coveralls running toward a hiding place through the snow wouldn’t live to get there.

  “Got a cigarette, Theo?” Adalbert Stoss asked.

  “Here.” Theo passed the driver a tobacco pouch. He doled out the fixings for a smoke more readily than he parted with words. Adi tore off a strip from a Russian newspaper none of the panzer men could read. He sprinkled tobacco from the pouch (taken off a dead Ivan) onto the cheap pulp paper, rolled the cigarette, and lit it—he did have matches.

  “Ahh,” he said after the first drag, exhaling a mixture of smoke and fog—it was well below freezing. “Much obliged.” He returned the pouch. Unlike a lot of soldiers Theo knew, Adi didn’t steal everything that wasn’t nailed down. His family must have raised him the right way … which didn’t necessarily make him the ideal man for life in the field.

  On the other hand, if anybody in a black coverall could make it to shelter running through the snow, Adi could. He was the best footballer Theo had ever seen except for a handful of professionals—and he was in their league. He was fast and strong and agile. And he was smart, which only added to his other gifts. With a sergeant’s pips, or even a corporal’s, he would have made a fine panzer commander.

  I should be jealous, Theo thought. He’d been in the war from the very beginning. Adi hadn’t. But Theo knew he would be a disaster trying to command a panzer. He was the kind of fellow other people didn’t notice, which suited him fine. Give orders? Talk all the time? No thanks!

  Sergeant Hermann Witt, who did command the panzer, had machine-made cigarettes of his own. Theo preferred the captured stuff. It might not be especially good, but by God it was strong. Everything that came out of Germany these days was adulterated—well, everything but the ammo, anyhow. The cigarettes that got issued along with rations tasted of hay and horseshit. The coffee was ersatz. People said the war bread had sawdust in it as a stretcher. Theo didn’t know if he believed that. People also said the war bread was better than it had been in the last fight. Theo didn’t know if he believed that, either. If the last generation had it worse than this, no wonder they threw the Kaiser out.

  The Nazis said Germany got stabbed in the back in 1918. Well, the Nazis said all kinds of things. Theo took them no more seriously than he had to. Since he said next to nothing himself, he wasn’t likely to get in trouble on account of that.

  He glanced over at Adi. Stoss smoked as intently as he did everything else. By all the signs, he didn’t take the Nazis very seriously, either. And chances were he had better reasons not to than even Theo’s.

  No sooner there than gone. Theo didn’t want to think about Stoss’ reasons. He didn’t want to, and so he didn’t. No matter how little use he had for the Nazis, he’d learned a thing or three since the Führer came to power. He wasn’t even consciously aware that he had, which meant nothing at all. Ideas, thoughts, went into little armored compartments. When he wasn’t actively dealing with them, they might as well not have been there. No one else would ever notice them. More often than not, he didn’t notice them himself.

  Somebody who lived in a free country wouldn’t have to think that way. Theo understood as much. But, since he couldn’t do anything about it, he kept his mouth shut. Come to that, he kept it shut as much as he could.

  Even though he didn’t love the Nazis, he did love the Vaterland. And, regardless of what he thought of the current German regime, it had placed him—along with millions of other young German men—in a position where his country’s enemies would kill him if he didn’t fight hard.

  That was underscored when mortar bombs started dropping near the panzer crewmen. Russian rifles barked. “Urra!” the Ivans roared. “Urra! Urra!” They sounded like fierce wild animals. Their officers fed them vodka before sending them into action. It dulled their fear—and their common sense.

  Theo’s first instinct when the mortar rounds came in was to hit the dirt. His next instinct was to get inside the panzer. That was the better notion. He’d be at a little more risk while he was upright and running, but the machine’s armored sides would protect him against fragments and small-arms fire.

  Sergeant Witt and Adi Stoss also sprinted for the Panzer II. Other men in black coveralls dashed toward their machines, too. A couple of them didn’t make it. Those coveralls and their blood bright against the snow reproduced the German national colors. A bullet sparked off Theo’s panzer just a few centimeters from his head. He dove through the hatch behind the turret and slammed it shut. A Schmeisser hung on two brackets above his radio set. If somebody started climbing up onto the panzer, he’d open a hatch and start shooting. Otherwise, the submachine gun was there more to ease his mind than for any other reason.

  “Start it up!” Witt screamed at Adi. The order made sense—a panzer that was just sitting there was a panzer waiting for a Molotov cocktail. Theo didn’t want to think about burning gasoline dripping into the fighting compartment and setting things ablaze in here.

  But would the beast start? In a Russian winter, that was always an interesting question and often a terrifying one. The self-starter ground. Maybe Adi would have to get out and crank the engine to life—assuming he didn’t get shot to death before he could. Maybe even cranking wouldn’t get it going. German lubricant
s weren’t made for this hideous weather. Sometimes crews kept a fire burning through the night under the engine compartment to keep the engine warm enough to turn over in the morning.

  Adi tried it again. This time, to Theo’s amazed delight, the grinding noise turned into a full-throated roar as the engine fired up after all. “Forward!” Witt said, and the driver put the Panzer II into gear. Forward it went. Back against the fireproof—he hoped—bulkhead that separated the fighting compartment from the engine, Theo started to warm up. Heat came through slowly, but it came.

  Witt could traverse the turret by muscle power even if the gearing froze up. He could, and he did, spraying machine-gun fire and occasional rounds from the 20mm cannon at the oncoming Ivans. A few more bullets spanged off the panzer’s steel hide, but bullets didn’t bother it. Anything worse than a bullet would, but …

  “They’re running!” the panzer commander exclaimed. In the Russians’ fine felt boots, Theo would have run, too. If they had no armor of their own in the neighborhood, they were helpless against panzers. A little German victory. This time. For the moment. How to turn that into something more lasting, Theo had no idea. Did anyone else, from Hitler on down?

  Chapter 2

  Alistair Walsh had spent his whole adult life in the British Army—which, unlike the Navy and the Air Force, wasn’t Royal. The former sergeant sometimes wondered why not. His best guess, based on long experience, was that no King of England in his right mind wanted to lend his regal title to such a buggered-up outfit.

  Almost as soon as Walsh got to France the first time, in the summer of 1918, he stopped a German bullet. The Kaiser’s men had pushed as far as they could then, and soon started getting pushed instead. Walsh was back at the front before the Armistice. He saw enough action to decide he liked soldiering. He certainly liked it better than going back to Wales and grubbing out coal for the rest of his life, which was his other choice when the war ended. He managed to stay in the Army while it hemorrhaged men after peace came.