Hitler's War Read online

  “I see ‘em.” Sergei nodded. “Let’s hope they stay that way.” The SB-2 was a robust warplane. It could take a beating. Sergei didn’t want it to this time around.

  On he flew with his buddies. Down below, bursting shells and bombs told when they entered the combat zone. The Czechs were still pulling back through the gap between the Nazi armies advancing from the north and south. If the Czechs got enough men and matériel into eastern Moravia and Slovakia before the Germans finally sealed that gap, they could keep fighting a while longer.

  When Sergei said as much to Anastas Mouradian, the copilot—who also served as gunner and bomb-aimer and navigator—nodded. “Da,” he said, for all the world as if he were a real Russian. Then he added, “If they don’t, they’re fucked.” Any Russian might have said that, too. He sure wouldn’t have been wrong if he did.

  Antiaircraft fire started bursting around the bombers. Yaroslavsky jinked, going up and down to the left and right at random and slowing down and speeding up to keep the German gunners from being able to lead him like a duck. When a shell filled the air with nasty black smoke close by, it was as if he drove over a big pothole. His teeth came together with a click.

  Mouradian growled something in what had to be Armenian. Then he came back to words Sergei could understand: “Too damn close.”

  “No kidding,” the pilot said. Just then, another shell went off even closer to the SB-2. A fragment clanged off—or, more likely, bit through—the fuselage. Yaroslavsky checked the controls to the rudder and elevator. They answered—no cables cut. He yelled into the speaking tube to the bombardier: “You all right, Ivan?”

  “Khorosho,” Kuchkov answered. “A little draftier, but no damage.”

  “Get ready,” Sergei told him. “We’re almost there.”

  They were almost there if Mouradian’s navigating was worth a kopek, anyway. He’d got them where they were supposed to go before. The target this time was just outside of Brno, the biggest factory town in Moravia. The Czechs were still holding out there, still holding up the Nazis. If 600 kilos of high explosive could help them hang on a little longer, Sergei would deliver the goods.

  That thick cloud of smoke ahead had to be Brno. Who needs navigation? Sergei thought wryly. The Germans were bombing the crap out of Czechoslovakian civilians. Thousands and thousands were supposed to be dead in Prague. Brno was catching it, too.

  “So where’s our target from here?” Yaroslavsky asked.

  “Southwest, Comrade Pilot,” Mouradian answered from the nose—he was ready to fight now.

  That made sense: it was the direction from which the Nazis were advancing. Sergei didn’t want his bombs coming down on the Czechs’ heads. He spotted something ahead that looked like a division HQ. “Aim for those tents,” he ordered. “I’ll bring us in low and straight.”

  “We’ll get ‘em,” Ivan Kuchkov said. And maybe they would, and maybe they wouldn’t. But they’d scare the crap out of the Nazis if they didn’t.

  The bomb bay opened. The extra drag slowed the SB-2 and made it sluggish in the air. At Mouradian’s shouted command, the bombs tumbled free, one after another. The plane would be livelier with them gone: they made up about a tenth of the weight it was carrying.

  And the Tupolev bomber would need to be livelier, too. German fighters jumped the Russians just as they were finishing their bombing runs. These Messerschmitts were terrifying. They could have been more maneuverable, but they were well armed and fast as the Devil’s godson. And diving down on the SB-2s made them faster yet.

  One of the bombers fell out of the sky. By the way it dove, the pilot was dead at the controls. Fire filled the left wing. Another SB-2 fled east with smoke trailing from one engine. Maybe it could get down safely in Czech-held territory. Maybe the Germans would hack it down first.

  Sergei couldn’t worry much about the other SB-2s. He had to worry about his own. The Chimp started blazing away from the dorsal turret. Tracers snarled past the bomber from behind.

  But Ivan made the 109 pull up. From the nose, Mouradian squeezed off a long burst at the lean, predatory shape. The enemy fighter didn’t catch fire or go down. But it didn’t try another attack, either.

  With all the throttle he could use, Sergei got out of there. Then he had another bad moment, when two Czech Avias buzzed up in what might have been another attack. At the last second, they saw he was no Nazi and swung away. One of the pilots waved from his cockpit. Yaroslavsky returned the compliment.

  Then he had to find the airstrip again. Mouradian came back to help him. Between them, they figured out where the hell Poprad was. They got down smoothly enough. One other plane from the flight came in a few minutes later. Sergei could hope some of the rest had landed elsewhere. The one that had plummeted to the ground…He shuddered. Better not to think of such things.

  He had to, though, because he needed to report to his superiors. “One of our planes damaged, one definitely lost,” he said.

  They nodded. All part of the game, as far as they were concerned. “We’ll keep banging away,” one of them said. Till you’re expended, too, Sergei thought, and made himself nod.

  VACLAV JEZEK DUG LIKE A MOLE. What was left of his company was trying to hold the Germans out of Kopecek, a little town six or eight kilometers northeast of Olomouc. In and of itself, Kopecek hardly mattered. But Olomouc did. Olomouc was the last surviving northern rampart against the Nazi flood. The Czech army was pulling back to the east between Olomouc and Brno. If Hitler’s bastards closed off that passageway…

  Then we’re fucked, Jezek though, making the dirt fly with his entrenching tool. Czechoslovakia was probably fucked anyway. No, scratch probably. Czechoslovakia was fucked anyway. But the stubborn Czechs were making Germany pay a hell of a high price.

  Artillery came down in and around Kopecek. The Nazis were shelling the pilgrimage church. It stood on a hill a couple of hundred meters above the plain, and made an observation post dangerous to them. Vaclav would have been surprised if his side didn’t have some guns of its own around the church.

  “Hey, Corporal! Got a smoke?” Otakar Prsemysl asked.

  “Everybody bums cigarettes off me,” Jezek grumbled, but he gave the private one. Back just before the shooting started, Jan Dzurinda had scrounged a butt from him. Vaclav didn’t know where Dzurinda was now. Maybe he’d got killed when the Germans dropped everything and the kitchen sink on the Czech lines by the border. Or maybe he’d just bugged out. A hell of a lot of Slovaks had. The miserable rubes didn’t think this was their fight—or else they thought they were on the wrong side when they wore Czech brown.

  “Tanks!” somebody shouted. Everyone who heard that yell grew fearfully alert. Without tanks, the Nazis would still be banging their heads against the Czech lines. But they had them, and they had more of them than Czechoslovakia did. Breakthrough machines, that’s what tanks were.

  A machine gun chattered. That was wasted ammo. Machine-gun bullets wouldn’t pierce a panzer’s steel hide. Tanks could kill you, and you couldn’t kill the sons of bitches inside them. Was that fair?

  Then Vaclav heard the bigger boom of an antitank rifle. Those fired heavy, large-caliber, armor-piercing bullets out of a long barrel that gave high muzzle velocity. They could get through…sometimes, anyhow. The rifles weigh a tonne and kicked like a jackass, but so what? They worked…again, sometimes.

  One of the panzers up ahead stopped. Smoke poured from the engine compartment. The two-man crew bailed out. Vaclav didn’t think either Nazi in black coveralls made it to shelter. Too bad, he thought. Yeah. Toooo bad.

  Avias and Messerschmitts dueled overhead. The German fighters were faster, but the Czech biplanes seemed more nimble. People cheered like maniacs when a 109 spun out of control and went down. It was like watching a football match, except you counted lives instead of goals. Score one for our side!

  Trouble was, not many Avias were left. The Nazis kept pounding the airfields from which they flew. The Messerschmitts came out of Germany, of c
ourse. A few Czech air raids on German soil had made Hitler and Goebbels scream and squeal, but the Luftwaffe had a big edge there.

  “Wish the French would push harder, take some pressure off us,” Private Prsemysl said.

  “Yeah, me, too,” Jezek agreed. “Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” He supposed the Czechs had to count themselves lucky France had moved at all. Great. Some luck.

  No sooner had that gloomy thought gone through his mind than cries of alarm came from the west. “They’re through! They’re through!” somebody howled, which sounded bad. Then someone else shouted, “They’re into Olomouc! Get away while you can!”

  Otakar Prsemysl crossed himself. That looked like a good idea to Vaclav, so he did the same thing. It couldn’t hurt, anyhow.

  “South and east! South and east!” That was an officer’s authoritative shout. “We pull back farther into Moravia and keep fighting. They haven’t whipped us yet, by God!”

  No, but how much longer will it be? And what good will keeping up the fight do except get more of us killed? Still, Corporal Jezek had no better ideas. The only other choices were surrendering, which he couldn’t stomach, and dying in place, which also struck him as unattractive.

  He got out of his foxhole and stumbled through the streets of Kopecek. To his surprise, trucks—mostly commandeered civilian jobs—waited on the southern edge of town. He piled into one of them. A moment later, he saw Otakar and pulled him into it, too. A moment after that, the truck rattled away.

  “Where are we going?” Prsemysl asked.

  “Beats me,” Vaclav answered. “But did you want to stay where we were?” The other man shook his head. This couldn’t be worse…Unless we get bombed, of course. One more thought Jezek could have done without.

  Another gray day in Münster. People in the Westphalian town said it was either raining or the church bells were ringing. Sarah Goldman could hear the bells, but it was raining anyhow. That didn’t seem fair.

  Of course, for Sarah the past five years had seemed gray and gloomy and weepy even when the sun did come out. Since she was only seventeen, that seemed like forever. She hadn’t understood why the Nazis decided they had to clamp down on Jews—she and her family weren’t hurting anybody. She still didn’t understand, not really. But the time since Hitler took over had been plenty to teach her that people could act like vicious idiots without having any good reason for it.

  Her mother had the radio on. She was listening to a German station. Listening to foreign broadcasts was illegal for everybody. But ordinary Germans who did something like that might escape with a warning if they got caught—the first time, anyway. Any infraction at all would send Jews straight to Dachau or Buchenwald.

  “German storm troops fight today on the outskirts of Prague!” the announcer shouted. He had a hoarse, braying voice and a strong Berlin accent. Sarah thought he sounded like a Prussian jackass, which he probably was. “Czech air pirates dropped bombs on a school in Dresden, murdering seventeen innocent children at play!”

  “Why were children playing during an air raid?” Hanna Goldman asked. The same question had formed in Sarah’s mind. She wondered how many people thought that way. Not very many, evidently, or the announcer couldn’t have got away with spewing such nonsense.

  “Farther east, our victorious soldiers advancing from north and south have met in Moravia, sealing the fate of the Czech army and of what was the vicious bandit state of Czechoslovakia!” he trumpeted. “Now we can help the Slovaks achieve their national aspirations and whip the Bolshevik dogs back to their Russian kennel.”

  “Do you hear that, Sarah?” her mother called from the kitchen. She was trying to make meager, bland rations into something worth eating for supper. Most of the time, she did it, too.

  “Ja, I hear it,” Sarah answered.

  “Such rubbish,” her mother said. “Listening to that crap makes me embarrassed to be a German.”

  “I know what you mean.” And Sarah did, too. In spite of everything, she still felt like a German. Why shouldn’t she? Her father had fought in the World War (the First World War, she supposed you would have to call it now) like every other German man his age. He’d won an Iron Cross, too. And he had an amazing scar on his arm where a French bullet had gouged a furrow in his flesh.

  Her older brother was such a good football player, the Aryans didn’t want him taken off their team. They cared more about winning than about whether Saul was circumcised. That made nothing but sense to Sarah, but it had scandalized a lot of people in Münster. Tough men in black uniforms had paid some unofficial visits. Saul didn’t play for the Foresters any more.

  But he still thought he was a German, too, in spite of everything. He and Samuel Goldman were doing their best to prove it today. Sarah didn’t know whether to hope they would fail or succeed.

  The braying announcer didn’t say anything about the fighting on the Western Front. He hardly ever did. The Czechs were giving the war everything they had in them. The French and the English didn’t seem to have their hearts in it.

  After an almost tearful appeal to buy war bonds, the newsman finally went away. The radio started playing music again. That was a relief. Music was—mostly—harmless. But you never heard jazz any more. The government said it was degenerate, like modern art. If the government didn’t like it, Sarah thought she should.

  She was working on an essay on Goethe—Münster’s Jewish school naturally taught the German poets—when the front door opened. She put down her pen and dashed downstairs.

  One glance at her father’s face, and her brother’s, told her everything she needed to know. “They wouldn’t take you?” she blurted.

  “Bastards!” Saul seemed ready to kick something that wasn’t a football.

  He towered over Father, who looked more sad than angry. “I had my discharge papers. I had my medal. I had my wound certificate. I had a letter from Max Lambert, who was my captain during the war. I had everything,” he said. “And we went into Wehrkreis headquarters, and they wouldn’t let us joint the Wehrmacht.”

  “Bastards!” Saul said again.

  Wehrkreis—Military District VI—was centered on Münster. It drew in recruits from all over Westphalia and from western Hanover. But it didn’t want a couple of Jews, even if one was a veteran and the other a fine physical specimen.

  Sarah’s mother came out of the kitchen. “What did they tell you?” she asked.

  “They told us no, that’s what. There’s a law, it seems, from 1935, that says Jews can’t join up,” Samuel Goldman answered. One corner of his mouth curled up in a wry smile. “Even so, I don’t think they expected to see us sticking our heads into the lion’s mouth.”

  “We didn’t,” Saul said. “If we’d tried to join the SS, now…”

  In spite of five years of ever harder times, in spite of a day of crushing disappointment, Father started to laugh. When he did, the rest of the Goldmans did, too. He lit a cigarette. German tobacco smelled nastier than it had a couple of years before. Sarah didn’t smoke, but Father said it tasted worse, too. Fewer imports…

  Father blew out a gray cloud. “In fact, I’m sure they didn’t expect anyone like us,” he said.

  “Why are you so sure?” Mother asked, as she was supposed to.

  “Why? I’ll tell you why.” Samuel Goldman’s mouth quirked again, but this time it was more grimace than smile. “Because the Feldwebel we talked to wasn’t even mean to us. He just said it was impossible, and he kept on saying it, and he finally went and got a captain who said the same thing. The captain was polite, too—turns out he knows Max. If they had orders about how to deal with Jews trying to volunteer, they would have screamed at us and called us filthy Jewish pigdogs and maybe said we’d just volunteered to clean toilets—”

  “With our tongues,” Saul broke in.

  “That’s disgusting!” Sarah exclaimed.

  “That’s why they do it,” her brother said, and then, “Bastards!” again.

  “Anyhow, they
looked at my papers. I showed them my scar,” Samuel Goldman said. “I showed them the letter. I showed them the Iron Cross, but it was only Second Class, not First.” He shrugged. “I was a corporal. Almost impossible for an enlisted man to get an Iron Cross, First Class, in the last war.”

  “The Führer did,” Sarah said. He was proud of it, too. He wore it on his left breast pocket all the time.

  Father sighed. “I know. But he was one of a handful. The Feldwebel told me to be sure to hang on to the papers. ‘You can’t wear the uniform again,’ he said, ‘but that stuff may save your bacon anyway.’ Then he laughed like a loon, because he thought saving a Jew’s bacon was funny.”

  “What do you think he meant?” Sarah asked.

  “Well, things aren’t as bad for us because I’m a veteran,” Father answered. “Even the Nazis respect that some. Not enough, but some.”

  “I can’t say I’m really sorry they did turn you down,” Mother said. “Now I won’t have to worry about the two of you off at the ends of the earth with nasty people shooting at you.”

  Father only sighed. “Plenty of things closer to home to worry about. Where are we going to find money? What will they do to us? We should have got out before the war started. Too late now. One of the things I thought was—” He broke off.

  “What?” Sarah asked it before Mother could. Or, more likely, Mother already knew.

  Samuel Goldman looked at her. “If your brother and I—or even one of us—got into the Wehrmacht, nobody could say we weren’t proper Germans. Nobody would do anything to the family because we weren’t proper Germans, either.” He gave Mother an ironic nod. “We might have been safer at the front than here in Münster, you know.”

  Mother’s mouth twisted. “Don’t talk about such things.”

  “Why not? It’s not as if talking about them makes them come true.” But then Father was the one who looked as if he’d bitten down on a lemon. Hitler had spent years talking about all the things he wanted to do to Jews. He talked about them, and talked about them, and talked about them—and the more he talked, the more of them did come true.