The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Read online

  Sergeant Hermann Witt, the commander of Adi and Theo’s machine, had run up and down the rutted field. He put an arm around Adi’s shoulder. “Man, I didn’t know you could play like that,” he said expansively—his other hand clutched a bottle.

  “Fat lot of good it does me.” Adi sounded surprisingly bitter.

  “You just made those ground pounders look like a bunch of jerks,” Witt said. “Nothing wrong with that. They think we’re out of shape because we don’t tramp like horses all day long. I guess you showed ’em different.”

  “I like to play. That’s all there is to it.” Adi shook himself free of the sergeant.

  Witt turned to Theo. “What’s eating him?”

  “Beats me.” Theo had an opinion, which he kept to himself. As far as he was concerned, opinions were like assholes: necessary, but not meant for display.

  The panzer commander frowned, lit a cigarette, and coughed. “I didn’t mean to piss him off—he was great. But the way he acts, I could have told him he stinks.”

  Theo only shrugged. The less he said, the less he’d have to be sorry for later. At least Witt was interested in keeping Adi happy. That was more than Heinz Naumann, the previous panzer commander, had been. There would have been trouble between the two of them if Naumann hadn’t stopped a bullet. Theo didn’t like trouble, which meant he could have picked a better time to be born.

  An infantryman came up to him. “You’re in the same crew as that maniac?” the fellow asked.

  “That’s right,” Theo said. “What about it?”

  “If he drives like he plays, you’re screwed,” the foot soldier said. He swiped his sleeve across his forehead. Despite the cold, sweat stained his tunic under the arms. “He’ll send you right into the Russian panzers, and they’ll blow you to hell and gone. He doesn’t know how to go backwards.”

  “We’re still here so far.” Theo looked to the touchline. His greatcoat lay over there. As soon as this mouthy guy—Theo saw anyone who talked to him as a mouthy guy—went away, he could find it and put it on.

  “Don’t get me wrong. He plays good,” the infantryman went on. After a moment, he added, “You weren’t bad yourself, dammit. I thought a couple of the shots you stopped’d go in for sure.”

  “Thanks,” Theo said in surprise. He didn’t think he was anything out of the ordinary. You did your best to keep the ball from getting past you. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you couldn’t. Even if you couldn’t always, you tried not to look like too much of a buffoon out there.

  “Well …” More slowly than he might have, the man in field-gray figured out Theo wasn’t the world’s hottest conversationalist. “See you. Try and stay in one piece,” he said, and walked off.

  It was good advice. Theo hoped he could follow it. He was relieved when he found his greatcoat. Nobody who’d lost his own had walked off with it. If he found himself missing his, he might have done that. You didn’t screw your buddies when you were in the field. People you didn’t know could damn well look out for themselves.

  There it was: the essence of war. You stuck with your friends and gave it to the swine on the other side as hard as you could. Theo knew who his friends were—the guys who helped him stay alive. He had nothing in particular against Russians, any more than he’d had before against Frenchmen or Englishmen or Czechs. But if they were trying to kill his pals and him, he’d do his best to do them in first.

  The greatcoat fought winter not quite to a draw. The Wehrmacht needed better cold-weather gear. Boots, for instance: the Russians’ felt ones far outclassed anything Germany made. Well, there was more a ground pounder’s worry than a panzer man’s. Theo snorted. It wasn’t as if he had no worries of his own.

  OUT IN THE North Sea again. Lieutenant Julius Lemp felt the change in the U-30’s motion right away. The Baltic was pretty calm. As soon as you passed out of the Kiel Canal, you got reminded what real seas were like. And a U-boat would roll in a bathtub.

  A rating up on the conning tower with the skipper said, “Somebody down below’s going to give it back—you wait and see.”

  “Not like it’s never happened before,” Lemp answered resignedly. Once something got into the bilge water, it was part of a U-boat’s atmosphere for good. All the cleaning in the world couldn’t get rid of a stink. Overflowing heads, spilled honey buckets, puke, stale food, the fug of men who didn’t wash often enough, diesel fumes … Going below after the freshest of fresh air was always like a slap in the face from a filthy towel.

  He went back to scanning horizon and sky with his Zeiss binoculars. Looking overhead was purely force of habit. Clouds scudded by not far above the gray-green sea. The RAF wasn’t likely to put in an appearance. But nobody who wanted to live through the war believed in taking dumb chances.

  “Skipper …?” The rating let it hang there.

  Lemp’s antennae that warned of danger were at least as sensitive as the metal ones on the boat that caught radio waves. Something was on the sailor’s mind, something he wasn’t easy talking about. The way things were these days, Lemp could make a good guess about what it was, too. All the same, the only thing he could do was ask, “What’s eating you, Ignaz?”

  “Well …” Ignaz paused again. Then he seemed to find a way to say what he wanted: “It’s mighty good to be at sea again, isn’t it?”

  “Now that you mention it,” Lemp answered dryly, “yes.”

  Thus encouraged, Ignaz went on, “The only thing we’ve got to worry about out here is the goddamn enemy. That’s a good thing, nicht wahr?”

  “Oh, you’d best believe it is,” Lemp said, and nothing more. Somebody on the U-boat was probably reporting every word even vaguely political from him to the Sicherheitsdienst. Probably every even vaguely political word from the whole crew. That was how things worked right now.

  The U-30 had been in port when some of the generals and admirals tried to overthrow the Führer. There’d been gunfire at the naval base. Who was shooting at whom was something about which it was better not to enquire too closely. The Führer remained atop the Reich. Two or three dozen high-ranking officers no longer remained among the living. The show trials were right out of the Soviet Union. Many more lower-ranking men had been cashiered.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that everybody in the military had to watch what he said and to whom he said it. If you couldn’t trust the comrades alongside whom you risked your life …

  Then you couldn’t, that was all, and you took the precautions you needed to take. Out here, as Ignaz had said, it was only the enemy who was dangerous. Back in port, you had to worry about your friends. And how were you supposed to fight a war like that?

  Carefully, Lemp thought. He had to fight carefully any which way. He’d had the misfortune to sink an American liner. History would not have been kind to the U-boat skipper who dragged the USA into its second war against Germany. Neither would that man’s superiors. Fortunately, it hadn’t happened. The Reich denied everything at the top of its lungs. The Americans couldn’t prove what they suspected. Lemp’s superiors still didn’t love him, but they hadn’t beached him, which was the only thing that counted.

  He wasn’t likely to find an American liner in the North Sea. This was a war zone by anybody’s standards. British and French troops still hung on against the Germans in northern Norway. The only thing that could supply them or get them out of there was the Royal Navy. U-boats and Luftwaffe aircraft were making the Tommies pay. That didn’t mean they’d given up, though. They were both brave and professional, as Lemp had reason to know.

  In weather like this, the Luftwaffe was no more likely to get planes off the ground than the RAF was. If anybody was going to keep enemy ships from slipping through, it was the U-boat force.

  Down this far south, Lemp didn’t really expect to spy the foe. But he and the ratings on the conning tower braved awful weather and spray that froze in midair and stung cheeks like birdshot to keep binoculars moving up and down and from side to side. For one t
hing, the crew needed the routine. For another, as Lemp had thought not long before, you never could tell.

  No planes in the sky now, though: neither English nor German. No smoke smudges darkening the horizon, not even when waves lifted the U-30 to their crests and let the lookouts see farther than they could otherwise. After a two-hour stint, Lemp and the crew went below, to be replaced by fresh watchers. You didn’t dare let concentration flag; the moment you weren’t paying close attention was bound to be the one when you most needed it.

  This early in the patrol, the boat’s stench wasn’t so bad as it would get later on. Lemp wrinkled his nose all the same. But the reek inside the iron tube was familiar and comforting, no matter how nasty. And the dim orange light in there also made him feel at home, even if his eyes needed a few seconds to adjust to the gloom.

  “Alles gut, Peter?” he asked the helmsman.

  “Alles gut, skipper,” Peter answered. “Course 315, as you ordered. And the diesels are performing well—but you can hear that for yourself.”

  “Ja,” Lemp agreed. It wasn’t just hearing, either; he could feel the engines’ throb through the soles of his feet. As Peter said, everything sounded and felt the way it should have. When it didn’t, you knew, even if you couldn’t always tell how you knew.

  “You want the conn, sir?” Peter made as if to step away from the wheel. Discipline on U-boats was of a different and looser kind from what it was in the Kriegsmarine’s surface ships. Most of the spit and polish went into the scuppers. No officer who was happy pulling the stiffening wire out of his cap missed it. Lemp sure didn’t. The men could fight the boat. As long as they could do that, who gave a rat’s ass if they clicked their heels and saluted all the time?

  He shook his head. “No, you can keep it. I’m going to my cubbyhole and log the last two hours of—well, nothing.” Some of the rituals did have to be fulfilled.

  Peter chuckled. “All right. Sometimes nothing is the best you can hope for, isn’t it? Damn sight better than a destroyer dropping ash cans on our head.”

  “Amen!” Lemp said fervently. If a depth charge went off too close, the sea would crumple a U-boat like a trash bin under a panzer’s tracks. It would be over in a hurry if that ever happened—but probably not soon enough.

  Only a curtain separated his bunk and desk and safe from the rest of the boat. Still, that gave him more room and more privacy than anyone else enjoyed. He spun the combination lock on the safe. When the door swung open, he took out the log book. A fountain pen sat in the desk drawer. Long habit meant he never left anything on a flat surface where it could—and would—roll away and get lost. He opened the log and began to write.

  WALKING IN A winter wonderland. That was how Peggy Druce thought of Stockholm. It wasn’t that she didn’t know about winter. She’d grown up in a Philadelphia Main Line family, and married into another. She’d skied in Colorado, in Switzerland, and in Austria back in the days when there was an Austria. So it wasn’t that she didn’t understand what winter was all about.

  But Philadelphia put up with winter. Ski resorts seemed intent on making money off it—which, when you looked at things from their point of view, was reasonable enough. Stockholm enjoyed winter.

  Part of that, no doubt, was enjoying what you couldn’t escape. Scandinavia lay a long way north. If not for the Gulf Stream, it would have been as uninhabitable as Labrador. (She remembered a pulp story about what might happen if the Gulf Stream went away. She couldn’t recall who’d written it: only that he was a Jew. Now that she’d seen Hitler’s Berlin, that took on new weight in her mind.) But the Swedes did it with style. And the way they kept houses comfortable and streets clear of snow put Philadelphia—and every other place she’d visited in winter—to shame.

  Not only that, all the lights stayed on through the long, cold nights. After her time inside the Third Reich, that seemed something close to a miracle. It had in Copenhagen, too … till the Germans marched in. Now the Nazis’ twilight swallowed up Denmark, too.

  Yes, Stockholm was a wonderful, bright, civilized place. The only problem was, she didn’t want to be here. She had plenty of money. She wouldn’t have been able to come to Marianske Lazne in Czechoslovakia without it, or to maintain herself when the war stranded her on the wrong side of the Atlantic. But, just as all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again, all her jack couldn’t get her back to the good old US of A, or to the husband she hadn’t seen for well over a year.

  Norway remained a war zone. Because it did, there was no air traffic between Sweden and England—no sea traffic, either. She wished she could go to Moscow and head for Vladivostok by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Though it was the long way back to the States, it would have done the job. But, with the railroad cut and Vladivostok under Japanese siege, that didn’t work, either.

  And so she stayed where she was. Stockholm made a far more likable prison than Berlin had. The food was better, and she didn’t wonder whether everyone she spoke to would report her to the Gestapo. All the same, she wasn’t where she wanted to be.

  She’d never been one to suffer in silence. If she was unhappy, she let people hear about it. The American embassy in Berlin had got to know her much better than the clerks and secretaries and diplomats ever wanted to. (And, one drunken night, she’d got to know one of the diplomats much better than she ever expected to. She did her damnedest not to remember that.)

  Now she bent the personnel of the embassy in Stockholm to her will—or did her best. Again, the trouble was that, even when they wanted to do what she wanted (and they did, if for no more noble reason than to get her out of their hair), they couldn’t.

  “I can’t call an airplane out of nowhere, Mrs. Druce,” said the undersecretary in charge of dealing with distressed travelers. “I haven’t got a liner, or even a freighter, up my sleeve, either.”

  “Yes, I understand that, Mr. Beard,” Peggy answered. To her secret amusement, Jerome Beard sported a hairline mustache. “But if you could arrange something with the German and British authorities …”

  He ran a hand over the top of his head, from front to back. Once upon a time, he might have used the gesture to smooth his hair. But where were the snows of yesteryear? He was on the far side of fifty—a few years older than Peggy. He had one of the baldest domes she’d ever seen, though, and it made him look older.

  “Why don’t you ask me something easy?” he said testily. “Walking across the Baltic, for instance?”

  “It’s frozen over for miles out to sea.” Peggy, by contrast, sounded as bright and helpful as she could.

  Beard’s harried expression said he understood she was being difficult but sugarcoating it. “Pardon my French, Mrs. Druce, but hell will freeze over before they cooperate. Last time around, both sides were perfectly correct. They did everything they could to help displaced persons like you. Now?” He shook his head. His bare scalp gleamed under the overhead lamp. “No. I’m very sorry, but it’s not just a war.”

  “You said that before,” Peggy pointed out. She was bound and determined to be difficult, regardless of whether she sugarcoated it.

  “Well, what if I did?” Beard ran his hand over his crown again. “It’s true. You have no idea how much those two regimes despise each other.”

  “Oh, yes, I do. I was in Berlin, remember,” Peggy said.

  “All right, then.” The undersecretary yielded the small point. He wasn’t about to yield on the larger one. In fact, he poured more cold water over it: “And the same holds true for France and Germany. The French don’t merely hate the Germans, either—they’re scared to death of them. That makes joint efforts even more unlikely.”

  “What am I supposed to do, then?” Peggy demanded.

  “How about thanking God you’re in one of the few countries on this poor, sorry continent where there’s plenty of food and no one is trying to kill anyone else?” Beard said. “You couldn’t pick a better spot to wait out the war.”

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bsp; “I thought the same thing about Copenhagen. Then I watched German soldiers get out of their freighters and march on the palace,” Peggy said bitterly. “No guarantee the same thing won’t happen here.”

  “No guarantee, no.” Beard paused to fill a pipe and light it. The mixture smelled like burning dirty socks. “Swedish blend,” he explained, a note of apology in his voice. “All I can get these days. But to come back to your point … The Swedes will fight. They’ve made that very plain to Germany. Since the Germans have plenty of other pots on the fire, Sweden’s safe enough for now. That’s the ambassador’s judgment, and the military attaché’s, too.”

  “And maybe they’re right, and maybe they’re wrong,” Peggy said. “All I want to do is go home. It’s 1940, for crying out loud. I was going to be in Europe for a month in fall 1938.”

  “You picked the wrong month, and the wrong part of Europe,” Beard said.

  “Boy, did I ever!”

  “There may still be a way,” he said. “You would have to take some chances.” He shook his head. “No—you would have to take a lot of chances.”

  “Tell me,” Peggy answered. “If I don’t have to put on a uniform and carry a gun, I’ll do it. And I’d think about putting on a uniform, as long as it isn’t a Nazi one.”

  “You can still travel to Poland. From Poland, you can get to Romania. From Romania, you can probably find a ship that will take you to Egypt. Once you get through the Suez Canal, you’ve left most of the war behind you,” Beard said.

  Italy and England were fighting a desultory war over Somaliland and Abyssinia, a campaign neither one of them could get very excited about. But that was the least of Peggy’s worries. “Like the kids’ magazines say, what’s wrong with this picture?” she replied. “If I fly in to Warsaw, say, the Red Army’s liable to be running the airport. And if it isn’t, the Luftwaffe will be. Besides, isn’t there fighting in the stretch of Poland that borders Romania?”

  “There is,” Beard acknowledged. “But you could skirt it by going from Poland to Slovakia and to Romania from there.”