Hitler's War Read online

  The air might be cool and moist, but he smelled burning bridges all the same. Diplomats were going home by plane and train. Armies that hadn’t been mobilized were getting ready for the big plunge. The Poles, damn them, were concentrating opposite Teschen (spelled three different ways, depending on whether you were a German, a Czech, or a Pole). Didn’t they see they were the next course on Hitler’s menu? If they didn’t, how stupid were they?

  “Got a smoke on you, Corporal?” asked Jan Dzurinda, one of the soldiers in Vaclav’s squad.

  “Sure.” Jezek held out the pack. Dzurinda took a cigarette, then waited expectantly for a light. With a small sigh, Vaclav struck a match.

  Dzurinda leaned close and got the cigarette started. He took a deep drag, then blew out two perfect smoke rings. “Thanks a bunch. Much obliged.”

  “Any time,” Vaclav said. Dzurinda puffed away without a care in the world, blowing more smoke rings. Just hearing his voice made Corporal Jezek worry. Jan was a Slovak, not a Czech. Czech and Slovak were brother languages, but they weren’t the same. Czechs and Slovaks could tell what you were as soon as you opened your mouth.

  And Czechs and Slovaks weren’t the same, either. Czechs thought of Slovaks as hicks, rubes, country bumpkins. Before the World War, Slovakia had been in the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary, and the Hungarians made a point of keeping the Slovaks ignorant and down on the farm. Things had changed since 1918, but only so much. The Czechoslovakian Army had something like 140 general officers. Just one was a Slovak.

  If Slovaks were rubes to Czechs, Czechs were city slickers to Slovaks. A lot of Slovaks thought the Czechs, who were twice as numerous, ran Czechoslovakia for their own benefit. They thought Slovakia got hind tit, and wanted more autonomy—maybe outright independence—for it.

  Vaclav had no idea whether Jan belonged to Father Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, the main nationalist outfit. Hlinka had died six weeks before, but another cleric, Father Tiso, was heading the party now. The Nazis had brownshirts; the Slovak People’s Party had Hlinka Guards.

  If the shooting started, how hard would Jan Dzurinda and thousands more like him fight for Czechoslovakia? A lot of Slovak People’s Party men figured Berlin would give them what they wanted if Prague didn’t. If you thought that way, how loyal would you be toward your nominal country?

  Since Vaclav didn’t know and didn’t want to ask straight out, he lit a cigarette of his own. The harsh smoke relaxed him…a little. He said, “At least we’ve weeded most of the Germans out of the Army.” The Sudetens damn well weren’t loyal. They’d made that plain enough.

  “Well, sure,” Jan Dzurinda said, which might mean anything or nothing.

  Corporal Jezek decided to push a little harder. If the Slovaks were going to run off or give up first chance they got, how could the army hope to defend Czechoslovakia? The noncom said, “Now we have to run off the buggers on the other side of the frontier, eh?”

  “Reckon so.” Dammit, Dzurinda did sound like a hick. He went on, “Anybody tries to shoot me, I expect I better nail him first.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Jezek decided he had to be content with that. He could have heard plenty worse from a Slovak. Up and down the lines, how many worried Czech noncoms and lieutenants and captains were hearing worse from Slovaks right about now? How many who weren’t hearing worse were being lied to? He muttered to himself and lit another cigarette and wished his canteen held something stronger than water.

  “FORWARD!” SERGEANT LUDWIG ROTHE CALLED softly. He laughed at himself as the Panzer II crawled toward the start line through the darkness of the wee small hours. With all the motors belching and farting around him, he could have yelled his head off without giving himself away to the Czechs on the other side of the border.

  He rode head and shoulders out of the turret. He had to, if he wanted to see where he was going. They said later models of the Panzer II would boast a cupola with episcopes so the commander could look around without risking his life whenever he did. That didn’t do him any good. All he had was a two-flapped steel hatch in the top of the turret.

  Engineers had set up white tapes to guide panzers and personnel carriers to their assigned jumping-off points. The whole Third Panzer Division was on the move. Hell, the whole Wehrmacht was on the move, near enough. Oh, there were covering forces on the border with France, and smaller ones on the Polish frontier and inside East Prussia, but everything that mattered was going to teach the Czechs they couldn’t mess around with good Germans unlucky enough to be stuck inside their lousy country.

  Other panzers—more IIs and the smaller Panzer Is—were dim shapes in the night. Ludwig affectionately patted his machine. The Panzer II was a great improvement over the I.

  The driver’s voice floated out through the speaking tube: “Kinda hate to leave Katscher. Found this little waitress there—she doesn’t know how to say no.”

  “Jesus, Fritz!” Rothe said. “D’you pass shortarm inspection?”

  Fritz Bittenfeld chuckled. “Doesn’t hurt when I piss, so I guess everything’s all right.”

  “Wonderful,” the panzer commander muttered. Fritz only laughed. The third member of the crew—the radio operator, Theo Kessler—sat in the back of the fighting compartment. The only way he could see out was through peepholes. Ludwig wasn’t sure whether he couldn’t hear the conversation or just ignored it. But then, he wasn’t sure about Theo a lot of the time.

  “Halt!” The command floated out of the night. Rothe relayed it to Bittenfeld, who was driving buttoned up. The panzer stopped. They were where they were supposed to be…unless some Czech infiltrator was screwing them over. Rothe shook his head. Natural to be nervous before the balloon went up, but that was pushing things.

  Nothing left to do but wait. Ludwig pushed back the sleeve of his black panzer coveralls to get a look at the radium-glowing hands on his watch. A quarter to four. Right on time. Everything was supposed to start at 0600. That gave him something else to worry about. It would still be almost dark. If the clouds overhead lingered, it might really be dark.

  And if the clouds lingered, the Luftwaffe wouldn’t be able to do as much as it was supposed to. How could you see what to bomb and shoot up if low clouds and fog blotted out the landscape?

  This kind of weather was normal for this time of year. Ludwig hoped the fellows with the General Staff’s red stripes on their trousers knew what the hell they were up to. If they didn’t, a lot of good Landers would get buried in makeshift graves with only a rifle and a helmet for a headstone.

  As if picking that thought out of his head, Fritz said, “The Führer knows what he’s doing. Those dirty Czechs, they deserve everything we’ll give ‘em. They can’t go murdering people inside Germany.”

  “Sure,” Ludwig said. He thought the Czechs had a lot of nerve bumping off Konrad Henlein, too. But he was fretting about how much the Wehrmacht would take, not what it would dish out.

  Again, Theo didn’t say a thing. Well, he didn’t have a speaking tube to Fritz. And he’d been wearing his earphones. Rothe wondered why. Radio silence was bound to be tighter than Fritz’s waitress’ works. The only signal that might come was one calling everything off because peace had broken out. The panzer commander didn’t expect that. Nobody else did, either.

  Ludwig looked at his watch again. 0400. At this rate, he’d feel as if he’d aged a year before things started happening. He couldn’t even smoke. Somebody out there would skin him alive if he showed a match. And you had to be even more desperate for a butt than he was to light up inside the turret, what with all the ammo in there. Nothing to do but wait and fidget.

  As 0600 neared, the sky slowly began to get light. A few minutes before the hour, he thought he heard thunder in the air. Then he realized it was nothing of the sort: it was untold hundreds or thousands of airplane engines, all of them roaring toward Czechoslovakia.

  Fritz heard them, too. You’d have to be deaf not to. “Boy, those Czech assholes are really gonna catch it,” he said
happily.

  “Ja,” Ludwig said, and let it go at that.

  Behind them, artillery started bellowing. Red flares leaped into the sky—the go signal! Without waiting for an order, Fritz put the Panzer II in gear and started forward. Other panzers were heading for the border—heading over the border—too. Half-seen German soldiers trotted along with them, clutching Mausers and hunching low to make themselves smaller targets.

  A shell burst a couple of hundred meters away. Maybe it was a short round. More likely, it was the goddamn Czechs shooting back. Dirt and a couple of men flew up into the air. Poor bastards, Ludwig thought. He wondered what would happen if a 75 or a 105 hit his panzer. Then he wished he hadn’t.

  More shells fell on the Germans. He’d thought the opening bombardment would silence the enemy guns. Evidently not. One shell did hit a little Panzer I. It slewed sideways and started to burn. Machine-gun ammunition inside started cooking off—pop-pop-pop! It sounded absurdly cheerful.

  Somebody in a khaki uniform—almost brown, really—popped up from a hole in the ground and fired at the Germans. They were over the border, then. Ludwig traversed the turret and squeezed off a burst of machine-gun fire at the Czech soldier. He didn’t know whether he hit the man. If he made him duck and stop shooting, that would do.

  Things inside Czechoslovakia didn’t look much different from the way they did on the German side of the line. The terrain was rugged. One reason the Czechs didn’t want to give back the Sudetenland was that the rough ground and the forts they’d built in it gave them their best shield against attack. Best or not, it wouldn’t be good enough…Ludwig hoped.

  The panzer clanked past a house. It looked like the ones inside the Reich, too. Well, why not? Germans were Germans, on that side of the frontier or on this one. Past the house was a forest. Ludwig thought it seemed wilder than woods in Germany would have. The Czechs probably didn’t care for it the way they should.

  Or maybe they wanted it all jungly and overgrown. A machine gun in there started spraying death at the German infantry. When a bullet cracked past Ludwig’s ear, he realized that machine gun could kill him, too. He ducked reflexively. He almost pissed himself. The Czechs were playing for keeps, all right.

  They had more than machine guns in the woods, too. An antitank gun spat a long tongue of flame. A Panzer II just like Ludwig’s caught fire. A perfect smoke ring came out through the commander’s hatch. Ludwig didn’t see any of the crew get away.

  “Do we go into that, Sergeant?” Fritz asked.

  Ludwig understood why he hesitated. Open country was best for panzers. Out on the plains and meadows, you could see trouble coming. But somebody’d forgotten to issue a whole lot of plains and meadows to this part of Czechoslovakia. “Yes, we do,” Rothe answered. “Our job is to smash through their defensive lines. Once we do that, the rest of the country falls into our lap.”

  “If they don’t blow our balls off first.” That wasn’t Fritz; it was Theo. So the radioman was listening after all. Ludwig would have come down on him for sounding defeatist if he weren’t so likely to be right.

  Into the woods. Other panzers were pushing forward, too. Things were better—or seemed better, anyhow—when you had company. There was, of course, the saying about misery.

  A bullet struck sparks as it spanged off the panzer’s hull. That left Ludwig with a couple of really unpleasant choices. If he stayed where he was, he was much too likely to get shot. But if he ducked down inside the turret and shut the hatch, he would have the devil’s own time seeing where he was going. All kinds of bad things were liable to happen to the panzer then.

  He stayed where he was. Every so often, he fired a short burst from his machine gun. The other panzer commanders were doing the same thing. Foot soldiers banged away, too. With enough lead in the air, the Czechs would be too busy taking cover and dying to shoot back much.

  He hoped. Boy, did he!

  The Panzer II emerged from the woods onto open ground that had taken a beating from bombs and artillery. As soon as it did, Ludwig wished it hadn’t, because there sat a Panzer I, burning like nobody’s business. The commander had tried to get out of the turret, but he hadn’t made it. Something nasty lurked in the next stretch of trees.

  “There it is!” Fritz screamed. “One o’clock! Panzer! Goddamn Czech panzer!”

  The Czech LT-35 was a light tank, as its initials suggested. It was still bigger and heavier and better armored than a Panzer II. And the bastard carried a 37mm gun: a real cannon that could fire a real HE round as well as armor-piercing ammo. The Panzer II’s 2cm main armament had decent AP rounds, but they just weren’t big enough to carry a useful amount of high explosive.

  One good thing about the Panzer II’s little gun, though: it was an automatic weapon, firing from ten-round magazines. Ludwig traversed the turret toward the LT-35, all the while wishing for a power assist. He’d just about brought the gun on target when the Czechs fired. Their AP round chewed a groove in the field a few meters to his left. They’d be reloading as fast as they could.…

  His 2.5X sight brought the target a lot closer. The trigger was on the elevating wheel. He squeezed off a four-round burst. Smoke rose from the Czech tank. “Hit!” Fritz yelled. “You hit the son of a bitch!”

  “Do you have to sound so surprised?” Actually, Ludwig was surprised he’d hit the panzer at all. The gun was noisy enough to make him glad he was sober. “Come on—put the beast back in gear. We don’t want to hang around in one spot, or some other bastard’ll draw a bead on us.”

  He breathed a sigh of relief as the panzer raced toward the cover of the woods. He hadn’t wanted to go into the first belt, but he’d discovered being out in the open was dangerous, too. It was a war, for Christ’s sake. Everything was dangerous. He just hoped it would be more dangerous for the Czechs.

  • • •

  BOMBS STARTED FALLING ON MARIANSKE LAZNE—Marienbad, if you liked the old German name better—at six o’clock in the morning. Peggy Druce hadn’t gone to bed till three. Just because you were here to take the waters (which smelled like rotten eggs, tasted almost as bad, and kept you on the pot like you wouldn’t believe) didn’t mean you couldn’t do other things, too. Peggy’d been playing fiery bridge with an English couple and a young man who might have come from almost anywhere.

  Everyone thought she was crazy for coming over from Philadelphia with the war clouds thickening by the day. Even after Henlein got shot, she’d pooh-poohed the idea that things would actually go boom. “We already had one war this century,” she’d said. She remembered very precisely, because she was squeezing every trick from a small slam in diamonds. “Wasn’t that enough to teach the whole world we don’t need another one?”

  Well…no.

  The first explosions might almost have been mistaken for thunder. The couple right after that burst much too close to the Balmoral-Osborne Hotel de Luxe to leave any doubt about what they were. They knocked Peggy out of bed and onto the floor with a bump and a squawk. She said something most unladylike when she scrambled up again, because she’d cut both feet on shards of glass that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  People were yelling and screaming and—probably—jumping up and down. Peggy threw a robe over her silk peignoir. She made as if to rush for the door, then caught herself. Her feet would be raw meat and gore if she tried. The only shoes she could grab in a hurry were last night’s heels. They’d have to do.

  Out she went—but not without her handbag, which held passport and cash and traveler’s checks. Everybody else in the hall was in the same state of dishabille. People dashed for the elevator: the lift, everyone called it here, in the English fashion. Peggy was almost there when the lights went out.

  Shrieks filled the air as darkness descended. She turned around and went the other way, against the confused tide. If the lights weren’t working, the goddamn elevator wouldn’t, either. The stairs were…that way.

  Peggy liked to think she looked ten years younger than her forty-f
ive. She hadn’t put on weight, and peroxide kept her hair about the same color it had always been. But, in spite of her misplaced optimism the night before, she had a coldly practical streak. When she was Peggy Eubank, growing up a devil of a long way from the Main Line, her mother told her, “Kid, you’re eleven going on twenty-one.” If Mom had been half as smart as she thought she was, she would’ve been twice as smart as she really was. But she’d hit that nail right on the head.

  And so—the stairs. Peggy found the door as much by Braille as any other way. The stairwell wasn’t very light, either. Somebody bumped into her and said, “Excusez-moi.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Peggy said, and then, “C’est la guerre.” And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth?

  Gray early-morning light spilled out of the door that led to the lobby. Three flights of stairs had made Peggy’s feet start to hurt, but more broken glass crunched under her soles. She would hurt worse if she took off the heels.

  The lobby looked like hell, and smelled pretty bad, too. It reminded her of a butcher’s shop with a whole bunch of fresh meat. Some of this meat came in trousers and dresses and nightclothes, though. Stewards and bellhops—they had different titles here, but basically the same jobs—were doing what they could to help the wounded. One of them was noisily sick on the floor, which only made the stink worse.

  And, in what looked at first like a scene from a Three Stooges tworeeler, a couple of men near the front desk were punching and kicking each other and poking each other in the eye. Even with more bombs going off not terribly far away, they went at it hammer and tongs. But one of them swore in Czech, the other in guttural German. The big war had started, and so had their own little private one.

  “Mon Dieu!” exclaimed a man standing next to Peggy. His voice said he was the fellow who’d bumped her on the stairs. “C’est—” He broke off, at a loss for words.