Hitler's War Read online

  “Danke.” Ludwig blew on his share, then took a bite. It tasted about the same as bacon would have back home. He might have had it boiled there, but he might not, too. He gulped. “Yeah, maybe we will,” he said, and bit into the bacon again.

  Theo stared at the orange glow inside the tube he’d just swapped in. “That does it,” he said. “Now we’ll be able to hear all the stupid orders we’ll get from the shitheads back of the lines—and from Lieutenant Priller, too.” His faith in those set over him had, well, limits. Ludwig suspected Theo didn’t have much use for him, either. He also suspected—no, he was sure—he wouldn’t lose any sleep about it.

  The French 75s quieted down. Had somebody given them a target, or were they shooting at some jumpy officer’s imagination? Ludwig laughed. He had no use for French higher-ups. Why did he think the men who ran the Wehrmacht had a better handle on what they were doing?

  Because we’re in France, and the damned Frenchmen aren’t in Germany, he answered himself. And maybe that meant something and maybe it didn’t. They’d all find out some time not long after 0600.

  He slept by the Panzer II. So did the driver and the radioman. If shelling came close, they could dive under the panzer. The treads and the armored body would keep out anything this side of a direct hit.

  Lieutenant Priller came along at half past four to make sure they were alert and ready to go. “We can do it,” he said. “We’re going to do it, too.”

  “Have we got any coffee?” Ludwig asked plaintively. And damned if they didn’t. It wasn’t the ersatz that came with army rations, mixed with burnt barley and chicory. It came from the real bean, no doubt taken from the French. It was dark and mean and strong. Ludwig dumped sugar into it so he could choke it down. Sure as hell, it pried his eyelids open.

  As they had in the runup to the strike against Czechoslovakia, engineers had set out white tapes here to guide the panzers forward without showing a light. Rothe cupped a hand behind his ear, trying to hear if the French up ahead had any idea they were coming. He couldn’t tell. Fritz had the engine throttled back, but its low rumble still drowned out the little sounds he was looking for. Nobody was shooting at the Germans as they moved up to the start line, anyhow.

  Ludwig glanced down at the radium-glowing dial on his watch. 0530. A couple of hours later, he checked again. 0550. He laughed at himself. Time stretched like a rubber band when you were waiting for the balloon to go up.

  When it did go up, it went all at once. One second, quiet above the engine noise. The next, German artillery crashed behind the panzers. German machine guns stuttered to life, spitting fire to either side. “Let’s go!” Rothe yelled through the din. The engine grew deeper and louder. It had to work like a bastard to shove all that armored weight around.

  A couple of French Hotchkiss machine guns returned fire, but not for long. The panzers and assault teams with submachine guns and grenades silenced them. Standing head and shoulders out of the turret, Ludwig whooped. The last thing he wanted was tracers probing toward him.

  The Germans had jumped off just before earliest dawn. As day broke, the French landscape seemed to stretch out ever farther before them. Rothe fired a few machine-gun bursts at soldiers in khaki. If they were here, they were bound to be enemies. He was at the spearpoint of the field-gray forces pressing down from the northeast.

  Bam! A French antitank gun belched flame. The 37mm round missed the Panzer II. A good thing—a hit would have turned it into blazing scrap metal. Rothe almost shit himself even so.

  More to the point, he traversed the turret and fired several short bursts at the gun. Seeing bullets spark off its steel shielding, he gave it a few rounds from the 20mm cannon. Those got through. French artillerymen tumbled like ninepins. “There you go!” Fritz shouted. Theo, tending to his radio in the bowels of the Panzer II, couldn’t see a damned thing.

  But one stubborn Frenchman fired the gun again. The 37mm shot snarled past, a few meters over Ludwig’s head. He shot back with the panzer’s main armament. And he gave an order you didn’t hear every day in armored warfare: “Charge! Run that gun down!”

  “Jawohl!” Fritz said. The Panzer II’s engine snarled. The stubborn French soldier was still alive behind the riddled shield, trying to serve the gun by himself. Seeing the panzer bearing down on him, he finally turned and fled. Ludwig shot him in the back with the machine gun. A guy like that was too dangerous to leave alive.

  Crunch! The panzer clattered over the antitank gun. For a nasty moment, Ludwig feared the panzer would flip over, but it didn’t. When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw the new kink in the gun’s barrel. Nobody would use that one against the Reich any more, which was the point.

  Here and there, infantrymen with rifles fired at the panzers, trying to pick off their commanders. Every once in a while, they managed to do it, too. But the panzers had a whole slew of advantages. They were on the move. Their commanders could duck behind armor. And they carried a machine gun and a light cannon against a bolt-action rifle.

  Staying on the move was the biggest edge. Even if you didn’t take out an infantryman, you left him behind in a matter of seconds. Sooner or later, your own foot soldiers could deal with him. In the meanwhile, the panzers charged ahead, flowing around enemy hell in the rear.

  But Coucy-le-Château was too big and too strong to go around. Some of the soldiers Ludwig shot at in the outskirts wore lighter khaki and steel derbies in place of darker uniforms and domed helms with vestigial crests. Englishmen! They didn’t like machine-gun bursts any better than the French (or Ludwig, come to that).

  A machine gun chattered from the middle of an apple orchard. The gun moved. Ludwig realized it was mounted on some sort of tank. He gulped, wondering if the enemy machine’s cannon was taking dead aim at his panzer. Not nearly enough steel separated him from the slings and arrows of outrageous gunners.

  But he realized little by little that the other panzer didn’t carry a cannon. All it had was that machine gun—it might as well have been a German Panzer I.

  It waddled out of the apple grove. It didn’t seem able to do anything but waddle—a man running fast would have had no trouble outdistancing it. He fired three quick rounds from the 20mm gun. Two of them hit the turret, but they didn’t come close to punching through. The Matilda might be slow. It might have a laughable armament—even a Panzer I sported a pair of machine guns, not a singleton. But it was damned hard to wreck.

  It was if you tried to kill the crew, anyway. If you crippled it, though…Ludwig fired the 20mm at the Matilda’s tracks and road wheels. Before long, the ungainly thing slewed sideways and stopped. Ludwig’s panzer clanked past it. Now it was nothing but a well-armored machine-gun position. The infantry could deal with that.

  Medieval-looking ramparts surrounded Coucy-le-Château. The hilltop château that gave the town its name had had chunks bitten out of it, probably in the last war. Mortar bombs from the château started falling among the German panzers. Half wrecked or not, the place had poilus or Tommies in it.

  “Theo!” Ludwig said. “Let the artillery know they’re firing from the ruin.”

  “Right,” the radioman answered, which might have meant anything.

  He—or somebody—must have done it, because 105s started knocking more pieces off the château. Then a flight of Stukas screamed down on it. Their bombs did what guns could only dream about. The enemy mortars fell silent.

  More Stukas worked over Coucy-le-Château. One of them got shot down and crashed into the town, turning itself into a bomb. The rest roared away. The onslaught stunned the defenders. With narrow, winding streets, Coucy-le-Château might have been a nasty place to try to take. But some of the garrison fled west and south, while the rest couldn’t surrender fast enough.

  Breakthrough? Ludwig didn’t know, but he had hopes.

  January. The North Atlantic. A U-boat. The combination was not made in heaven, as Lieutenant Julius Lemp knew only too well.

  Oh, he could take the U-30 do
wn below periscope depth, and she’d escape the fearsome waves topside. The only trouble was, down below periscope depth she’d be about as useful to the war effort as if she were a five-year-old’s toy in a Berlin bathtub.

  A five-year-old splashing around couldn’t whip up a worse storm in that tiny tub than God was kicking up out here on the broad ocean. One ten-meter wave after another rolled down on the U-30. Because she was so much smaller and had so much less freeboard than a surface warship, it was like taking one soggy right to the chin after another.

  Lemp tied himself to the rail atop the conning tower so an extra-big wave wouldn’t sweep him out to sea. He wore oilskins, of course. He knew he’d get soaked anyhow. This way, it would take a little longer, though.

  He wondered why he’d bothered bringing the binoculars with him. So much spray and stray water splashed the lenses, he might as well have peered through a couple of full beer steins. You had to try all the same. Why else did they send you out in filthy weather like this?

  Another wave smashed over the bow. It splashed past the 88mm deck gun and crashed into the conning tower. Lemp got himself a faceful of ocean. “Fuck,” he said, spitting salt water. He would have made a bigger fuss had it been the first time, or even the fifth.

  He looked at the binoculars. They were good and wet now. Ironically, that might make them easier to look through than when they’d just been spray-splashed. He raised them to his eyes and swept the horizon with a hunter’s intent patience.

  He or one of the other watchstanders did this as long as there was enough daylight to see by. At night, he did take the boat down twenty-five or thirty meters so the men could cook a little and could rest without getting pitched out of their cramped bunks and hammocks.

  Something glided past him on the wind: a petrel, on the prowl for fish, not ships. Stormy weather didn’t bother the bird. Lemp wished he could say the same.

  The U-boat’s bow sank down into a trough. That meant the following wave would be worse than usual. And it was. If not for the fastening—and for his holding on to the rail for dear life—it would have swept him into the Atlantic. Would he have drowned before he froze? That was the only question there.

  He wanted to ride on top of a crest, not get buried by one. Eventually, the U-30 did. That gave him those extra ten meters from which to look around. He didn’t expect to see anything but the scudding gray clouds that had kept him company ever since leaving Germany. His watch would be up pretty soon. Then he could descend into the U-boat’s crowded, stinking pressure hull, dry off, and change into his other, slightly less soaked, uniform.

  When you didn’t expect to see something, you probably wouldn’t, even if it was there. Lemp almost missed the smoke trail to the northwest. His hands were smarter than his head. They snapped back of themselves and gave him another look at it. Without even noticing he’d done it, he stopped shivering. He stopped caring he was wet clean through.

  He pulled out the plug on the speaking tube that let him talk to the helmsman and the engine room. “Change course to 310,” he ordered. “All ahead full.”

  Hollow and brassy, the answer came back: “Changing course to 310, skipper. You found something?”

  “I sure did,” Lemp said as the diesels’ building throb told him their crew had got the command, too. “Now we have to see what it is and whether we can run it down.”

  He thought they had a decent chance. Not many freighters could match the U-30’s surface speed. And he could get mighty close before the ship spotted his exhaust: diesel fuel burned much cleaner than heavy oil, to say nothing of coal. The U-boat’s low, sharkish silhouette shouldn’t be easy to pick up, either.

  The other side of the coin was, he couldn’t make seventeen knots in seas like this. Now that the U-30 had turned away from taking the swells bow-on, she got slapped in the port side instead. British corvettes—U-boat hunters—were said to roll on wet grass. The U-30 was doing the same thing. As long as she straightened up every time, Lemp couldn’t complain.

  His stomach could, and did. He was a good sailor, but he seldom faced a challenge like this. He gulped, hoping lunch would stay down. If he was going to sink that ship, he had to get ahead of her before submerging to wait for her to reach him where he lay in wait. A U-boat’s greatest weakness was that it was slower submerged than its quarry was on the surface.

  He ordered another course change, swinging closer to due north. The ship was making a very respectable turn of speed. In turn, that argued she was big and important: a ship England particularly wouldn’t want to see lost.

  When the U-boat rose to the crest of another wave, Lemp got a good look at the enemy vessel. He whistled softly, though he couldn’t even hear himself through the howling wind. She had to be 15,000 tons if she was a gram!

  “A Q-ship,” he muttered under his breath. In the last war, England had put disguised guns on several merchantmen. They looked like ordinary freighters…till an unwary U-boat skipper approached them on the surface, confident of an easy kill. Several such skippers had paid with their boats—and with their lives. Lemp shook his head. “Not me, by God! Not me.”

  The enemy wasn’t zigzagging. She didn’t know he was around, then. Good, he thought, imagining what 15cm guns could do to his hull. And the U-30 was overhauling her. He smiled wolfishly Yes, she’d get a nasty surprise before long.

  He went below. No time to change now. After the hunt would have to do. He’d kept his sausage and noodles down on the conning tower. He almost lost them for a second time leaving the cold, pure ocean air for the stinks and smokes of the pressure hull. His eyes also needed a moment to adjust from gray daylight to the dim orange lamps the U-boat used.

  “Take her down to periscope depth, Peter,” he said.

  “Periscope depth. Aye aye, skipper,” the helmsman said. Dive warnings hooted. Air hissed out of buoyancy tanks; water gurgled in to take its place. The U-30 could dive like an otter when she had to. The crew practiced all the time. If a destroyer or an airplane came after you, you had to disappear in a hurry or you’d disappear forever.

  Lemp raised the periscope. The instrument wasn’t perfect. It got out of alignment, and the upper lens took even more splashes and spray than his binoculars did. But the periscope didn’t need to be perfect this time. Here came the merchant cruiser, fat and happy as if she had the world by the tail.

  “Course 190. All ahead one third,” Lemp ordered, and the batteries that powered the U-30 underwater sent her toward her prey.

  The target was making about ten knots. The torpedoes could do better than thirty. If the range was down to…he peered through the periscope again…900 meters, he needed to launch…now!

  “Fire one!” he snapped, and then, “Fire two!” and then, “Fire three!”

  Wham!…Whoosh! One after another, the fish leaped away from the U-boat. “All three gone, skipper,” the torpedomen reported.

  “Ja,” Lemp agreed absently. In these waves, he couldn’t watch the wakes as well as he would have liked. On the other hand, the merchant cruiser would have a harder time seeing them coming, too.

  At the very last moment, she started to turn away. The very last moment proved much too late. The first torpedo caught her up near the bow. The dull Boom! filled the U-30. The soldiers whooped and cheered. Somebody pounded Lemp on the back. Discipline on a submarine wasn’t the same as it was on a surface ship—nowhere close. The skipper kept his eyes on the periscope, so he never knew who it was.

  A few seconds later, another, bigger, Boom! echoed through the water. The second torpedo hit the enemy ship just aft of amidships. “That does it.” Lemp spoke with quiet satisfaction. “We broke her back. She’s going down fast.”

  He waited for the impact of the third torpedo, but it didn’t come. That one must have missed. He was annoyed. He hated to miss. But the two hits were plenty to sink the merchant cruiser. And that, after all, was the point of the exercise. He wouldn’t be too hard on himself.

  A lot of boats out. A lot of heads
bobbing in the water as the ship slid under. The survivors wouldn’t last long, not in seas like this. Lemp wondered if he’d sunk a troopship bringing soldiers from Canada to England. That would be an even stronger blow against the enemy than he’d thought he struck.

  He also wondered if she’d got out an SOS. If destroyers, say, were hurrying this way on a rescue mission, he didn’t want to hang around any longer than he had to. “Surface,” he said. “Let’s skedaddle. We’ve done our job here.”

  PEGGY DRUCE FINALLY HAD HER bags packed. In a couple of hours, she would head for the train station. The train would take her out of Germany and into neutral Denmark. In Copenhagen, she would get on a lovely American liner, the Athenia. Before too long, she’d be in New York. Two hours by train from Philadelphia. A million billion miles from a Europe that had lost its mind.

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  A hotel flunky, she thought. As soon as she saw the uniform, she realized the man wasn’t from the hotel. It wasn’t a military uniform, but civilians in the Third Reich liked playing dress-up, too. This guy, unless she was wrong, came from the Foreign Ministry.

  And this guy, unless she was very, very wrong, was Trouble. With a capital T.

  “You are Miss, uh, Margaret Druce?” he asked in pretty good English.

  “Missus,” Peggy corrected automatically. Just as automatically, she flashed her ring.

  “Please to excuse me. And please to let me introduce myself. I am Konrad Hoppe, of the Sub-bureau for the Supervision of Interned Neutrals.” He didn’t click his heels, but he gave her a stiff little bow, something you’d never see in the States. As he straightened, he went on, “You were formerly scheduled to leave Germany today and to return to America in the near future.”

  Amazing how something as simple as an adverb could be scarier than the bombs that had rained down on Berlin at New Year’s. “What do you mean, formerly?” Peggy demanded, doing her goddamnedest not to show how frightened she was.