The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (20 page)

SB-2s flying out of the base near Khabarovsk bombed towns in northern Manchukuo. They flew across the Tartar Strait and bombed Karafuto. That was what the Japanese called the southern half of Sakhalin Island, which they’d taken in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War. The bombers also flew patrols over the Tartar Strait and down into the Sea of Japan. Orders on those missions were to attack and sink any warships they spotted.

German Stukas were ugly, ungainly planes. But Mouradian had been on the receiving end of their dives, and knew how accurately they could place their bombs. SB-2s weren’t made for work like that. Stas was willing to try, but a long way from optimistic about the results.

Come to that, he was a long way from optimistic about finding warships, much less hitting them. This was the first time he’d ever seen the ocean, any ocean. It was as illimitably vast as the Russian steppe he’d traveled to get to Siberia. How were you supposed to find anything as small as a ship in all that wave-chopped gray-green sea? Clouds inconsiderately drifting across it didn’t help, either.

Damned if they didn’t, though. Nikolai Chernenko whooped like a savage. “There!” he said, pointing a dramatic forefinger. “A fucking battleship!”

Stas didn’t know if it was a battleship or only a destroyer. He was no connoisseur of warships. But he knew damn well a warship it was. It bristled with guns and turrets, and its hull arrogantly knifed through the water. In these parts, it could only be Japanese.

“We’ll go in low,” he declared. The SB-2 was no Stuka, but maybe it could impersonate one in the cinema.

Chernenko frowned. “We have no orders to do that, Comrade Pilot.”

He was a Russian, all right. And he was a New Soviet Man. Anything without orders was right up there with doubting Marxism-Leninism in the USSR’s catalogue of heresies. But Mouradian answered, “We have no orders
not
to do it. And it gives us the best chance for a hit.”

He watched his copilot and bomb-aimer chew. If he had to, he
vowed to make the attack run himself, his way. But Chernenko’s face cleared. Stas had shown himself to be orthodox, or at least not unorthodox. “I serve the Soviet Union!” Chernenko exclaimed.

Mouradian spoke into the voice tube to the bomb bay so Sergeant Suslov would know what was going on. “Just tell me when,” Suslov said. “I’ll drop ’em right down the whore’s cunt.” He even talked like the Chimp.

Shove the stick forward. Watch the nose drop. Not too steep, or you’d never pull out again. This
wasn’t
a dive-bomber. When the airframe groaned, you needed to listen to it.

The ship swelled from bathtub toy to full-sized fearsomeness much too fast. Blue-clad Japanese sailors ran every which way like angry ants. Antiaircraft guns started filling the sky around the SB-2 with puffs of black smoke with fire at their heart.

“Five degrees to the left, Comrade Pilot. I say again, five degrees left.” With business to attend to, Chernenko was a competent professional. Mouradian obeyed without question. “Da,” Chernenko said. “That’ll do it.” Stas thought so, too—they’d pass over the ship from bow to stern. A near miss from a shell shook the SB-2. The copilot ignored it, calling through the tube, “Be ready, Innokenty! At my order!”

“Ready, Comrade Bomb-Aimer! Let’s fuck ’em!” Suslov answered.

“Now!” Chernenko shouted.

As soon as the bombs fell free, Mouradian pulled back sharply on the stick, climbing away from the antiaircraft fire. He heard soggy thumps when the bombs went off. When he could see the ship again, smoke rose from the stern. “We did something to it, anyhow,” he said, although it was still steaming.

“We should have done more.” Chernenko sounded absurdly disappointed. “I wanted to
sink
the son of a bitch.”

“We’ll have more chances.” Mouradian was just glad they’d got away in once piece. He’d never dreamt a ship could throw that many shells. It almost tempted him to go after the next one from several thousand meters up. Almost.

COLONEL OTTO GRIEHL
looked out at the men of his black-clad regiment. The black-clad panzer crewmen stood waiting. Theo Hossbach
absentmindedly scratched an itch. Next to him, Adi Stoss puffed on a cigarette. Nobody seemed very excited. They all—even Theo—had a good idea of what was coming next.

Griehl scratched, too, at a scar on his chin. He was lean, almost hawk-faced, with hollow cheeks and close-cropped gray hair. Like his men, he wore pink-piped black collar patches with a silver
Totentkopf
in each one. The skull and crossbones had been the panzer emblem for as long as Germany’d had armored fighting vehicles.

“Well, boys, it’s time,” Griehl said. “We came into this fight by dribs and drabs, and then we had to put up with the worst winter even an old man like me can remember.” Theo wasn’t sure the colonel’s face had room for a grin, but it did. It made him look years younger—though still old, of course. It didn’t last long. He sobered as he went on, “But now we’re here in the East in proper force, and now the ground and the weather … aren’t too bad.” That was as much praise as he would dole out to Polish conditions. “And so—it’s time to show the Ivans what we can do.”

A low hum ran through the
Panzertruppen
. Here and there, men nodded: Adi did, and so did Sergeant Witt. Theo just stood, listening. He was ready, but he wasn’t eager. He knew what could happen when things went wrong. If he was ever tempted to forget, the missing joints on his ring finger reminded him.

“We’re going to drive them out of Poland,” Griehl said matter-of-factly. “Once we take care of that—well, we’ll see. I don’t know what the
Führer
and the High Command will want us to do then. One thing at a time, though. Let’s talk about our immediate objectives.”

And he did, detailing the routes the regiment would take as it pushed east and north from the vicinity of Bialystok. He talked about artillery and air support, and about the infantry who would move forward with the panzers.

“Most of them are Polish units,” he said. “Remember that, for God’s sake, and don’t shoot them by mistake. They wear a darker, greener khaki than the Russians, and their helmet is almost like the Czech pot—it doesn’t have a brim like the Russian model.”

“Tell us something we didn’t know,” Adi muttered. Theo heard him, and maybe Witt did, too, but nobody else. Theo was patient with these
lectures. One reason you walked barefoot through the obvious was that people
did
forget, especially when other people were trying to kill them.

“Give the Poles a hand where you can,” Griehl said. “They’re good troops. They’re brave troops. The only thing that’s really wrong with them is, they don’t have as many toys as we do. Infantry, machine guns—they’ve got those. But they’re light on artillery and panzers and planes. That’s why they called us in to help against the Reds. So we’ll do it.” He grinned again. “It’s not like the
Führer
hasn’t got his own reasons for going after Russia. If you’ve read
Mein Kampf
, you’ll know that.”

He got more nods. Hitler’s book was Holy Writ to the Party. Theo had looked at it, found it bombastic and badly written, and put it aside. But you didn’t have to have gone through page by page to know he talked about Russia as Germany’s
Lebensraum
. Stalin doubtless had a different view of that, which didn’t bother the
Führer
.

“We go at 0430 tomorrow,” the colonel finished. “Good luck to every one of you. Believe you me, Ivan will never know what hit him.”

When the big push in the West started a little before Christmas 1938, officers promised men the showgirls and bars of Paris. They didn’t quite deliver; Theo lost the end of that finger in the last failed effort at a breakthrough. Maybe this time everything would work out the way Colonel Griehl said. Theo had his doubts. He didn’t voice them. For one thing, what was the point? For another, he hardly ever voiced anything.

He was in the panzer before the appointed hour. He squeezed meat paste from a tinfoil tube onto a chunk of black bread. Not the kind of breakfast he’d eaten before conscription called, but he didn’t raise his voice to complain, either. And that meat paste was one of the best rations the Germans had. Tommies on patrol stole tubes of it from dead
Landsers
.

Where he sat, he couldn’t see what was going on. All he could see were his radio set, the machine pistol next to it, and the panzer commander’s behind and legs. He didn’t care. He had his own little world. He heard the order to go forward, and relayed it to Hermann Witt. And, through the Panzer II’s armor and through his earphones, he heard the thunder of the German artillery as it pounded Soviet positions to the east. Stukas would be screaming out of the sky to take out strongpoints
too tough for artillery. Theo couldn’t hear them, but he knew how an attack worked.

No. He knew how an attack should work. Things always went wrong. Neither side had really known what it was doing when the
Wehrmacht
drove into Czechoslovakia. A good thing the Czechs were as thumb-fingered as the Germans, or that one might have failed. On the Western front, they’d tried to go too far too fast. Looking back, he could see that. At the time, it seemed easy—until, all of a sudden, it didn’t any more.

Now … The Panzer II squashed barbed wire under its tracks. Foot soldiers, whether in
Feldgrau
or dark Polish khaki, would be able to follow. Sergeant Witt sprayed short bursts of machine-gun fire ahead of the panzer. If the Russians had to keep their heads down, the infantrymen with the German armor would have an easier time disposing of them.

Rat-a-tat-tat!
Except is wasn’t
rat-a-tat-tat!
, or not exactly. It was
clangety-clangety-clang!
, as if somebody were attacking the panzer with a rivet gun. Machine gunners couldn’t resist panzers. They also couldn’t hurt them, if you didn’t count scaring the crew half to death.

“Panzer halt!” Witt shouted. Adalbert Stoss obediently hit the brakes. The panzer commander fired a three-round burst from the 20mm main armament. “All right,” he said. “Drive on!”

Forward they went, with a whine of protest from the overstrained engine. A moving target was harder to hit, and the Panzer II’s armor, especially on the sides, wouldn’t keep out anything more than small-arms fire. Theo knew from experience what happened when something got through. His crewmates didn’t, and he hoped like hell they didn’t find out. He’d got away from his murdered first panzer in one piece. Too many guys weren’t so lucky. If he never smelled that thick reek of burnt pork …

“Enemy panzers ahead—two o’clock!” Witt shouted. Theo’s balls crawled up into his belly, not that that would save them. From what he’d seen, Russian panzer gunners weren’t very good, but they only had to be competent, or even lucky, once to slaughter a crew. But then Witt shouted again, in glad surprise: “Cancel that! They’re ours—Czech machines!”

No one but Theo heard his own sigh of relief. Of course the
Wehrmacht
had commandeered all the surviving Czech panzers it could. They were better than German Panzer Is and IIs, if not up to the standards of the new IIIs and IVs. But the new German panzers were still in short supply. Military administrators had got the Skoda works up and running again, turning out more of the Czech models for the
Reich
.

And if you were looking for the enemy, you’d see him whether he was there or not. Theo was happy Witt hadn’t opened up. One of war’s dirty little secrets that nobody liked to talk about was that you could kill friends as easily as foes. Friends could kill you, too. They’d be sorry afterwards, not that that did you a hell of a lot of good.

There
were
Russian panzers up ahead. Theo got the word on the radio, and relayed it to Witt. Then he heard the fearsome
clang!
of a round from a cannon smashing through hardened steel. It wasn’t his panzer, which was the only good thing he could say about it. That crew would never be the same.

“Panzer halt!” the commander ordered. Halt it did. He fired another three-round burst from the 20mm gun. “Got the fucker!” he yelled. “Drive on!”

On they went. Theo tried to figure out what was happening from the endless stream of radio reports he heard. They made up for not being able to see out. Everything seemed to be moving according to plan. Germans and Poles stormed forward. Russians fell back or died. Germans and Poles were dying, too. Theo knew that, but the radio didn’t talk about it.

olonel Borisov eyed the flyers in his squadron. He coughed a couple of times, like a man who’d smoked too many cigarettes. He probably had, but that wasn’t tobacco roughening his throat. Sergei Yaroslavsky would have bet gold against pig turds it was embarrassment.