Hitler's War (14 page)

If they were, what did they propose to do about it? Would they send more men out to this distant frontier to strengthen their Mongolian puppets? Or would they think the fight against Germany—which was, after all, much closer to their heartland—counted for more than this distant skirmish?

“Any intercepts?” Fujita asked the runner. The Russians were tough bastards—at least for Westerners—but they had horrible radio security. Half the time, they’d send in plain language what they should have encoded.

But this time the lance corporal shook his head. “Not that I heard about, anyhow,” he answered.

“All right,” Fujita said. “Any gossip about what
we’ll
do on account of this news?”

“Not that I heard about, Sergeant-
san
,” the runner repeated.

“Too bad.” Fujita made himself shrug. “One way or another, we’ll find out sooner or later.”

Whatever Japan did, the sergeant suspected it wouldn’t happen at once. Fall and winter weren’t the best time for campaigning up here. As if to prove as much, the wind swung around to blow out of the west the next morning, and carried choking clouds of yellow-brown dust from the Mongolian heartland with it.

It blew hard for three days. Dust from Mongolia blew all the way down to Peking and beyond. So close to the source, the storm was appalling. When the sky finally cleared, when the sun no longer seemed to shine through billowing smoke, the whole landscape had changed. Dunes had shifted. Some had grown, others disappeared. Dust buried the scraggly patches of steppe grass.

Captain Hasegawa, the company commander, shook his head after coming by to survey the outpost. “Can you imagine living your whole life in country like this? Turn your back on it, and half of it blows away.”

The mere thought was enough to make Sergeant Fujita shudder. “Sir, as far as I’m concerned, the Mongols are welcome to it.” Then he
corrected himself before Hasegawa could: “Well, they’re welcome to all of it that doesn’t belong to Manchukuo, anyhow.”

“Hai
. To that much and not a centimeter more,” Captain Hasegawa said. Fujita let out a small sigh of relief—he wasn’t in trouble, anyhow. Hasegawa looked out over the altered countryside. “At least the Russians will have as much trouble seeing what we’re up to as we do with them.”

“Yes, sir.” Fujita didn’t care to argue, even if he wasn’t one hundred percent convinced. Oh, the captain was right—the Russians wouldn’t be able to operate as usual during dust storms, either. But what about the Mongols themselves? The Japanese in this miserable place were probably lucky the natives hadn’t sneaked through the dust and slit all their throats.

“You heard the Russians are really going after the Germans?” Captain Hasegawa asked.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Fujita said. “The runner got here the day before the storm started.”

“All right,” the company commander said. “Well, you can bet we’ll take advantage of that. We’d have to be idiots not to.”

And so? Officers are idiots all the time
. Fujita didn’t say that. Sergeants might take it for granted, but somebody with more gold and less red on his collar tabs wouldn’t. Fujita rubbed at his eyes, which still felt gritty. His teeth crunched every time he closed his mouth. He found something safe: “Whatever they want us to do, we’ll do it. You know you can count on that, sir.”

Of course we’ll do it. If we disobey the orders, they’ll kill us. And our families back in the Home Islands will be disgraced
. Sergeant Fujita knew exactly how things worked. For common soldiers and noncommissioned officers, the army was a cruel, harsh, brutal place. Officers didn’t have it so bad—but they necessarily looked the other way while noncoms kept privates in line.

Many Japanese soldiers began coming up toward the front a few
days later. Sergeant Fujita would rather have seen them move up during the dust storm, too. Pointing in the direction of the high ground on the other side of the Halha, he complained, “The Russians can watch everything we do.”

“For now,” Captain Hasegawa said. “Once we get moving, we’ll take their observation posts away from them,
neh?”

“Yes, sir.” Fujita said the only thing he could. He wished he were as confident as the company commander—and, presumably, the high command. But the Japanese and the Russians had been banging heads on the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia for a while now. The Red Army had more airplanes, more armor, and more artillery—and had had the better of the skirmishes. Why should anything change now?

As if plucking that thought out of his head, Captain Hasegawa said, “The round-eyed barbarians will worry more about the Germans than they do about us. This is our neighborhood. They look towards Europe. They can’t help it.”

Since Fujita had had pretty much the same notion—and since Hasegawa was his superior—he couldn’t very well disagree. All he could do was hope it was true…and hope his own side brought in enough force to win once the serious fighting started.

Artillery did come forward along with the foot soldiers. So did sleek, modern monoplane fighters. Sitting on the ground, they looked as if they ought to sweep the Soviet biplanes from the sky.

Armored cars and a few tanks also rattled up to the front line. Fujita was glad to see them, and wished he were seeing more of them. This might be the back of beyond for the Russians, but they had plenty of tanks here.

“Don’t worry about it,” Captain Hasegawa told him when he cautiously expressed misgivings. “This isn’t the only place where we’ll be facing off against the Russians. We’ll put our tanks where we need them most.”

And where would that be?
Fujita wondered. But a moment’s thought gave him the answer. If Japanese armor would strike anywhere, it would strike at the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Back before the Russo-Japanese War, the Tsar had been able to ship troops down through Manchuria. The Soviets couldn’t do that any more; Japan controlled the railroads in what was now Manchukuo. But, just on the other side of the border, the railroad was Stalin’s key to defending Vladivostok and the rest of eastern Siberia. Break the line, take it away from the Reds, and the port and the whole vast country would fall into Japanese hands like a ripe persimmon.

The Russians weren’t blind. They could see that, too. They would fight as hard as they could to protect the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But the Russian heartland lay thousands of kilometers off to the west. Japan lay right across the sea that bore her name. The Amur separated Manchukuo from the USSR, the Yalu divided Chosen—Korea, to old people—from Stalin’s ramshackle Asiatic empire. Logistics, then, were all on Japan’s side.

So the big fight would be there, along the border between Japan’s mainland possessions and Soviet Siberia. This Mongol business was only a sideshow. It would never be anything but a sideshow—that was how it looked to Sergeant Fujita, anyhow.

He sighed. “We’re stuck here,
neh?”

“Yes, I think we are.” Captain Hasegawa sent him a shrewd look. “Why? Would you rather be on the Amur?”

“Yes, sir, I would.” Fujita didn’t beat around the bush. “What happens there really means something. This…This is nothing but a bunch of crap. Please excuse me for saying so, sir, but it’s true.”

He waited for a reprimand, or maybe even a slap in the face. You weren’t supposed to complain about your assignment. Oh, you could grouse with your buddies. But to a superior you were supposed to pretend everything was fine. Well, things weren’t fine. And, dammit, the
company commander asked. All Fujita did was tell the truth. Of course, sometimes that was the most dangerous thing you could do, even more dangerous than charging a Russian machine-gun nest.

“We do need men here. We can’t let the Russians and Mongols steal what’s ours,” Hasegawa said. “But I admit, I wish I weren’t one of them, too.” He shrugged. “Somebody has to do it, though, and it looks like we’re the ones.”

Sergeant Fujita sighed one more time: a martyr’s sigh. “Yes, sir.”

JOAQUIN DELGADILLO WATCHED ITALIAN TANKS
clank toward the front. The crews looked impressive in their black coveralls. Delgadillo didn’t let the stylish uniforms fool him. The Italians looked much less impressive in full retreat, and he’d seen that move more often than he cared to remember.

Mussolini’s soldiers didn’t want to be in Spain. They cared nothing for Marshal Sanjurjo’s war. And they fought like it, too. If the Reds who fought for the Republic didn’t run away, the Italians would.

The Condor Legion, now…The Condor Legion was different. Joaquin Delgadillo didn’t like Germans. He didn’t see how you could. To him, as to any Spaniard with a working set of
cojones
, Germans were technicians, not warriors. They made no bones about why they’d come to Spain: to learn what they needed to know for the upcoming European war. Now that war wasn’t upcoming. It was here.

But the armored forces and machine-gun units in the Condor Legion had never got a name for cutting and running, the way the Italians had. Maybe courage wasn’t what kept them in the field. Maybe it was just professional self-respect. Whatever it was, you had to admire it. This might not have been the Germans’ fight, but they performed as if it were.

Now the Germans in Spain had the same enemies as the ones back in Germany: Communists, freethinkers, republicans, liberals of every
stripe. And they, and the Italians, and Marshal Sanjurjo, were doing everything they could to crush the enemy here before the aid flooding in from France and England let the Red Republic seize the initiative.

Those Italian tanks kept rattling forward. Vinaroz, on the eastern coast, lay a few kilometers to the north. Sanjurjo’s men had already taken the town once, when they cut the Republic in half. Now an enemy drive down from Catalonia, one backed by French armor and aircraft, had recaptured it.

“What do you think?” Delgadillo asked his sergeant. “Can we get it back?”

Miguel Carrasquel shrugged. “That’s what our orders are,” he answered, which meant,
We’ll keep trying till we’re all dead, or till the orders change—and don’t expect the orders to change
. Carrasquel had bad teeth and was missing half his left ear. His grin, then, looked most unpleasant. “What’s the matter, Prettyboy? Don’t want to get messed up?”

Joaquin didn’t think he was especially handsome. But the sergeant called anybody who hadn’t been wounded
Prettyboy
. You didn’t want to get mad about it. Carrasquel was a good man with a knife.

Machine-gun bullets spanged off the Italian tanks and tankettes. The commanders in the impressive black coveralls ducked down behind the shelter of their armor. One or two of them waited too long, and got hit before they could. The armored fighting vehicles clattered forward anyhow. Joaquin nodded to himself. He didn’t mind people ducking when the enemy shot at them. He did it himself—who didn’t? As long as you carried on regardless, you earned your pay.

Tanks were magnets for machine-gun fire. He’d seen that before. Fewer bullets fought the Nationalist foot soldiers who loped along with the mechanical monsters. Since Joaquin was one of those soldiers, he approved of that. One bullet hitting you was one too many.

Most of the men up ahead didn’t wear uniforms at all: not what he
thought of as uniforms, anyhow. They had on overalls instead, as if they were factory workers. That made them Catalan Communists or anarchists. Up till the war started, they had been factory workers. The ones still alive after two and a half years of fighting knew their business as well as any other veterans.

Clang!
That cry of metal against tortured metal wasn’t a machine-gun bullet. That was an AP shell from a cannon striking home. Sure as the devil, a tankette came to an abrupt halt. Smoke and then fire poured from it. Ammunition inside started cooking off. Joaquin didn’t think either Italian got out.

“Tanks!” Somebody pointed ahead. The man’s voice wasn’t panicked, but it wasn’t far removed, either. More often than not, the Nationalists had had tanks and the Republicans hadn’t. With aid flooding over the Pyrenees from France, the miserable Reds were getting more of their own.

These machines were French, all right. By the look of them, they’d been around since the last war. But they had turrets and treads and cannon and enough steel to keep out small-arms fire. If they weren’t exactly swift…well, so what?

One of them fired at an Italian tank.
Clang!
There was that horrible bell-like sound again. The Italian machine’s armor wasn’t thick enough to hold out an armor-piercing round. Somebody got out of an escape hatch in the turret before the tank brewed up. It didn’t do him much good—a burst from a machine gun cut him down before he’d run ten meters.

Tanks on both sides stopped to fire at foes, then got moving again to make themselves harder to hit. The Italian tankettes kept on moving and shooting. They mounted only machine guns, and weren’t dangerous to real tanks. They could do horrible things to infantry, though.

As the tanks slowed, so did the rest of the Nationalist advance. Joaquin flopped onto his belly behind a pile of rubble that had been a stone barn. Every so often, he rose up enough to fire. Then he crawled
somewhere else before squeezing off another round. No sniper would draw an easy bead on him. Veterans learned things like that. The guys who didn’t…didn’t get to be veterans.

Sergeant Carrasquel crouched behind a fence not far away. Delgadillo waited for the sergeant to order him forward again. But the squad leader stayed where he was, firing every now and then. He kept his mouth shut. Maybe he’d decided the attack wouldn’t get much farther no matter what.

Joaquin Delgadillo sure felt that way. The Republicans had been tough even while outnumbered and outgunned. This push, plainly, aimed to take back as much as possible from them while they still were.

It also seemed designed to get a lot of Nationalist soldiers killed. Mortar bombs started whispering down around Joaquin and Sergeant Carrasquel. Both men dug like moles. Joaquin hated mortars. The Republicans had been using a Russian model for a long time. Now they also had French tubes, and those were just as good or maybe even better.