Hitler's War Read online

  “Maybe they’ll let you repatriate,” Chaim said. Sometimes the Internationals wanted nothing but willing fighters. Sometimes they figured you had to be willing or you wouldn’t have volunteered. It all depended on the officer, on how the fighting was going—sometimes, people said, on the phases of the moon.

  “Ah, fuck it,” Mike said: the usual comment of every line soldier in every war since the beginning of time. “I’m just blowing off steam, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” Chaim said. And he did, too. It wasn’t as if he’d never pissed and moaned since he got here. “All I wish is, people would remember us. We were a big deal till the rest of Europe blew up. Who gives a shit about Spain now? Stalin’s forgotten all about it.” That was a dangerous thing to say; the International Brigades toed Moscow’s line. But a love of truth was part of what had led Chaim to Spain. He wouldn’t give it up even here.

  Mike Carroll had a tobacco pouch on his belt, too. He stuck the remains of the Gitane into it. “Well, so has Hitler,” he answered. “That’s not so bad.”

  “You know who remembers?” Chaim said. He waited till Carroll raised a questioning eyebrow. “Us and the Spaniards, that’s who. It’s not just fucking politics and games and shit for us. It really matters. Do you want that fat prick over there”—Chaim pointed toward the Fascists’ lines—“running this whole goddamn country?”

  He’d never talked that way in New York City. Back home, he’d always had the feeling his mother was listening and would wash his mouth out with soap. But everybody swore on the battlefield. By now, Chaim could cuss in English, Yiddish, Spanish, Catalan, German, French, and Russian. Talk without swear words seemed as bland as food without salt and pepper.

  “If I wanted that, I’d be over there myself,” Mike Carroll said. The Italians and Germans who fought on Sanjurjo’s side had no choice. But for them, only a handful of foreigners—mostly English and Irishmen—had joined the enemy. Men from all over the world opposed the Fascists. If that didn’t say something…

  Before Chaim could decide what would be true if that didn’t say something, a rifle bullet cracked between him and Carroll. Both of them hit the dirt. “We’ve been standing up and waving our arms too damn much,” Mike said ruefully. “They got a sniper to take a shot at us.”

  “Yeah.” Chaim hadn’t quite pissed himself, but he’d come mighty close. Well, so had the bullet. “Good thing he’s a shitty sniper.” A good marksman would have hit one of them. Maybe this guy couldn’t decide which one to aim at.

  “Spaniards.” Mike Carroll’s shrug punctuated that—but didn’t expose him to any more rifle fire. “They’re brave as all get-out—the guys on both sides. But…” His voice trailed away.

  Chaim knew what he was talking about. “Yeah. But,” he said, making the word sound like a complete sentence. It might as well have been. Spaniards didn’t keep proper lookout. They didn’t like digging trenches. They didn’t bother cleaning their weapons unless somebody screamed at them—and a lot of the time not then, either. Their logistics were a joke. Food and ammunition came to the front when they felt like it. That was how things looked, anyhow. Their hospitals were almost as bad as their jails.

  But they were brave. Point them at an objective and they’d take it or die trying. Tell them they had to hold a strongpoint and it was ¡No pasaran! You were embarrassed to falter or fall back, because you knew they wouldn’t. If only they would pull themselves together…

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Mike said when Chaim suggested that. Then the other American asked, “Do you think we can nail that sniper?”

  There was a serious suggestion. “Worth a try,” Chaim said. “He’ll make this whole stretch of trench dangerous unless we do get rid of him. How do you want to work it?”

  “We ought to call a sharpshooter of our own,” Carroll said. Chaim gave him the horse laugh. Republican snipers were few, far between, and none too good. The other American’s ears turned red. “Okay, okay. Which of us do you think is a better shot?”

  “I am,” Chaim answered without false modesty. “Let me find a position where I can look out without getting drilled. Then you hold up a cap on a stick, and I’ll see what I can see.”

  “I’ll do it. Wave when you’re ready,” Mike said.

  “Yeah.” Chaim worked his way fifty yards down the trench. Some bushes—brown and leafless in the winter cold—offered cover there. Cautiously, he peered out through them. Nobody fired at him. He brought his rifle up over the top and rested it on the dirt. Then, carefully keeping his hand below the level of the parapet, he signaled to his buddy.

  Up went the cap. A shot rang out. Mike not only jerked the cap down but also let out a scream. Chaim saw where the sniper fired from, but the Fascist ducked away before he could plug him. Now…Was the maricón dumb enough to shoot from the same position twice in a row? Everybody knew you shouldn’t, but some boys did anyhow. Only one way to find out…

  “Move a little and pop up again,” Chaim called, as softly as he could.

  Mike did. He even put the cap on the stick sideways this time, so it would look different. Chaim peered down his rifle barrel. He had the range, he had windage.…

  He had a target. Yeah, the guy on the other side was greedy and stupid, all right. He showed one shoulder and his head, and that was all Chaim needed. He pressed the trigger, not too hard. Red mist exploded from the enemy sniper as he slumped back into his trench.

  “You get him?” Carroll asked.

  “Uh-huh. Don’t have to worry about that for a while, anyway.” Chaim might have been talking about delousing or killing a rat. He’d got rid of a nuisance—that was all. Well, now the nuisance wouldn’t get rid of him. Nothing else counted. He lit another Gitane.

  IT WAS A FINE, BRIGHT MORNING in western Belgium—colder than an outhouse in East Prussia in February, but sunny and clear. The sun came up a little earlier than it had a month earlier, at the end of December. Chances were spring would get here eventually: no time real soon, but eventually.

  Breath smoking in the chilly sunrise air, Hans-Ulrich Rudel walked to the squadron commander’s hut to see what was up. Something would be. He was sure of that. This time of year, days with decent flying weather were too few and far between to waste.

  Other Stuka pilots nodded to him. He nodded back. He didn’t have a lot of buddies here. Not likely a milk drinker would, not when most of the flyers preferred brandy and loose women. But he kept going out and doing his job and coming back. That won him respect, if no great liking.

  Cigarette smoke blued the air inside the hut. Hans-Ulrich didn’t like that, either, but complaining was hopeless. He tried not to breathe deeply.

  “We’re going to bomb England again,” Major Bleyle announced. That got everyone’s attention, as he must have known it would. He went on, “They’ve been hitting our cities—miserable air pirates. What can we do but pay them back? We will strike at Dover and Folkestone and Canterbury, just on the other side of the Channel. Questions?”

  Hands flew up, Rudel’s among them. The squadron commander pointed to somebody else—he didn’t much like Hans-Ulrich, either. But the other pilot said about what Rudel would have: “How are we going to come back in one piece? Stukas are sitting ducks for English fighters.”

  “We’ll have an escort,” Bleyle said.

  “We had an escort the last time, too,” the pilot pointed out. “Some of the enemy planes kept the 109s busy, and the rest came after us.”

  “We’ll have a better escort this time,” the squadron commander answered. “Not just 109s, but 110s, too.”

  The pilots all paused thoughtfully. Bf-110s were brand new. If half what people said was so, they were formidable, no doubt about it. The big, two-engined fighters mounted two 20mm cannon and four machine guns in the nose, plus another, rear-facing machine gun on a mount like the one in the Stuka. If all that firepower hit an enemy aircraft, the poor devil would go down.

  “And there’ll be Heinkels and Dorniers overhead,�
�� Major Bleyle added. “The enemy won’t be able to concentrate on us the way he did before. We’re going to knock eastern England flat. Let’s see how they like it.”

  One by one, the Stuka pilots nodded. Most of them had seen enough to know war wasn’t always as easy as they wished it would be. They’d signed up to take whatever happened, the bad along with the good. Hans-Ulrich suspected things would turn out to be harder than the squadron CO made them sound. By the thoughtful looks on the other men’s faces, so did they. But if the people set over you told you to try, what else could you do?

  He took the word to Sergeant Dieselhorst. The gunner and radioman shrugged. “Oh, well,” he said. “Maybe she’ll have engine trouble. We can hope, anyway.”

  “It won’t be that bad,” Rudel said.

  “No, I suppose not…sir.” Dieselhorst spoiled it by adding, “It’ll be worse.”

  The Stuka had no engine trouble. Some groundcrew man’s head would have rolled if it did. The mechanics and armorers gassed it up and bombed it up. It roared down the runway and lumbered into the air with the others.

  Bf-109s and 110s took station around the dive-bombers. The 110s—Zerstörers, they called them: destroyers—certainly looked formidable. With all that firepower in the nose, they packed a mean punch. Idly, Hans-Ulrich wondered how maneuverable they were. He laughed. His own Ju-87 dodged like a rock.

  There was the North Sea. There ahead lay England. The popular song dinned in his head. He was going up against England. If the enemy bombed the Reich, the Luftwaffe would repay blood with blood, murder with murder.

  He saw ships—boats—whatever they were—on the sea. Did they belong to the Kriegsmarine or the Royal Navy? Were they radioing a warning to the English mainland now? Was that how the RAF had been so quick to attack the Stukas the last time they raided southeastern England? Rudel shrugged. Not his worry, though he did think he’d mention it if he happened to remember after he got back to Belgium.

  If I get back to Belgium. He did his best to stifle that thought. You didn’t want to go into battle with your head full of doubts and worries. He was no more eager to go into this battle than any of his squadron mates. The Ju-87 was terrific when it enjoyed air superiority. When it didn’t…

  Several 109s seemed to leap out ahead of the pack. Following their path with his eyes, Hans-Ulrich spied another plane out ahead of the oncoming German air armada. Tracers from the Messerschmitts blazed toward the stranger, which dove and spun down toward the ocean. It wasn’t a fighter. They charged after it and sent it smoking into the water.

  Someone in the squadron voiced on the radio what Hans-Ulrich was thinking: “Now—did he get word out before we shot him down?”

  “We’ll find out,” somebody else said in sepulchral tones.

  And they did. English fighter planes rose to meet them: biplane Gladiators, monoplane Hurricanes, and a handful of new, sleek Spitfires. The RAF fighters bored in on the Luftwaffe bombers. They wanted no more to do with the escorts than they had to. The 109s and 110s couldn’t hurt their country. Bombers could.

  What was going on higher in the sky, where the Heinkels and Dorniers had escorts of their own? Rudel couldn’t check. He was too busy trying to stay alive. Even a Gladiator could be dangerous.

  Sergeant Dieselhorst fired a burst. “Get anything?” Hans-Ulrich asked.

  “Nah,” the rear gunner answered. “He’ll bother somebody else, though.” That suited the pilot fine.

  Cannon fire from a nearby Me-110 knocked down a Hurricane. A moment later, another Hurricane bored in on the two-engined German fighter. That combat didn’t last long. The Hurricane easily outturned the 110, got on its tail, shot it up, and shot it down.

  Hans-Ulrich saw he was over some kind of city. He thought it was Dover, but it might have been Folkestone or any other English port. It lay by the sea—he could tell that much. And he could tell it was time to unload the frightfulness he’d brought across the ocean. He yanked the bomb-release lever. The Stuka suddenly felt lighter and nimbler.

  “Now we get the devil out of here?” Dieselhorst’s voice came brassy through the speaking tube.

  “Now we get out of here,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. No point in lingering. The Stuka sure wasn’t agile enough to dogfight against a British fighter.

  A broad-winged He-111, afire from the nose back, plunged into the North Sea just off the coast from the town that was probably Dover. An enormous cloud of steam and smoke rose: a couple of thousand kilos’ worth of bombs going off when the Spade hit. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t seen any parachutes. Four men dead, then.

  “You know what happens next, don’t you?” Dieselhorst said.

  “What’s that?” Rudel asked. He looked every which way. He didn’t see any Indians, which was what Luftwaffe pilots called enemy planes. That let him ease back on the throttle a little. The Continent loomed ahead. He’d probably make it to the airstrip.

  “They come over tonight or tomorrow night and bomb the crap out of some of our towns,” Dieselhorst said. “Where does it end? With our last two guys coming out of the ruins and going after their last guy with a club?”

  “That’s not for us to worry about. That’s for the Führer.” But Hans-Ulrich couldn’t leave it there. “As long as we’ve got two guys and they’ve got one, as long as our two get their one, we win. And we’re going to. Right?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” the gunner answered. Nobody could or wanted to imagine Germany losing two wars in a row. Losing one had been bad enough.

  But when Hans-Ulrich put down at the Belgian airstrip, he waited and waited, hoping against hope that more Stukas would come home safe. A few had returned before him. A few more straggled in afterwards. But so many were lost over England or the North Sea.…The squadron would need a new CO, among other reinforcements. Hans-Ulrich hoped the Reich would have two men with clubs coming out of the ruins, not just one.

  EVERY NIGHT, THE PANZERS IN Sergeant Ludwig Rothe’s platoon reassembled—or they tried to, anyhow. By now, Rothe’s crew was the most experienced one left in the platoon. Neither he nor his driver nor his radioman had got badly hurt. Given how thin-skinned Panzer IIs were, that was something close to miraculous.

  Rothe had commanded the platoon on and off on the drive across the Low Countries and into France. Lieutenants and their panzers were no more invulnerable to flying shells than anybody else. But the platoon had an officer in charge of it again: a second lieutenant named Maximilian Priller.

  He was dark and curly-haired. He had a whipped-cream-in-your-coffee, strudel-on-the-side Viennese accent. Before the Anschluss, he’d served in the Austrian Army. Like a lot of German soldiers, Rothe looked down his nose at Austrians as fighting men. He had nothing bad to say about Lieutenant Priller, though. No matter how Priller talked, he knew what to do with panzers.

  “Our next stop is Coucy-le-Château.” Priller pointed the place out on a map he unfolded on his knees. His German sounded funny in Ludwig’s ears, but he spoke fluent French. “Well, not our next stop—where we go through next. It’s only about five kilometers ahead. We ought to drive the enemy out by the middle of the morning. Questions, anybody?”

  “Do we soften them up with artillery first, or do we break through with the panzers?” another sergeant asked.

  “With the panzers. That way, we’ve got surprise working for us.” Priller cocked an eyebrow. “We see who gets the surprise—us or them.”

  The four sergeants who commanded the other panzers in the platoon all chuckled, Ludwig among them. It was laugh or scream, one. Maybe the French troops in front of the Germans would panic and flee. On the other hand, maybe they’d be waiting with panzers of their own, minefields, antitank guns: all the things that made life in the panzer force so…interesting.

  “We’ve bent them back a long way,” Max Priller said. “If we break through here, we drive the sword into their heart. We want them all disordered. Then we can race them to Paris. Better than even money we win.”

  “Paris…” Ludwig and a
couple of the other sergeants said together. Back in the Middle Ages, knights went on quests for the Holy Grail. In the twentieth century, Paris was the Holy Grail for Germany. The Kaiser’s army had come so close. Armchair generals kept talking about von Kluck’s turn. If he hadn’t made it, or if the Russians hadn’t caused so much trouble off in the East…

  Russia was making trouble again. The Wehrmacht had done well here, or Ludwig thought it had. In a month, it had knocked Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg out of the fight. The radio said German bombers were giving England hell to pay back the British terror raids on German cities. Maybe this attack would have gone smoother in better weather. Only God could know something like that, though.

  “Tell your men,” Priller said. “We go at 0600.”

  It would still be dark. Somebody’d get a surprise, all right. Well, what could you do? Rothe went back to his panzer. Fritz was toasting some bacon he’d liberated from a farmhouse. Theo was swapping tubes in and out of the radio, trying to figure out which one was bad.

  Fritz looked up from the little cookfire. “It’s going to be bad,” he said. “I can see it on your face. How bad is it?”

  “We hit the town up ahead at 0600,” Ludwig answered bluntly.

  Theo paused with a tube in each hand. He looked down at them, muttering; Rothe guessed he was remembering which one he’d just pulled and which was about to go in. Fritz stared up from the sizzling slab of bacon. “Fuck,” he said.

  “I know,” Ludwig said. “What can you do, though?” He pointed to the bacon. “Is that done? Let me have some if it is.”

  Off in the distance, some guns opened up. French 75s, Ludwig thought, recognizing the reports. The damned things dated back to before the turn of the century. They’d been the great workhorses of the French artillery during the last war; Ludwig’s father swore whenever he talked about them. They could fire obscenely fast. This time around, German 105s outranged them. That did you no good if you ended up on the wrong end of things, though.

  These shells came down a good distance away. Fritz cut the bacon into three pieces. “Well, maybe we’ll surprise them,” he said. “They don’t seem to know where we’re at.…Here you go, Sergeant.”