Hitler's War (18 page)

Everybody got a good supper: one more sign things would start any minute. The panzer commander stuffed himself. After this, it would be whatever he could get his hands on: iron rations and horsemeat and whatever he could steal from houses and shops. He shrugged. Holland was supposed to be rich. If he hadn’t starved in Czechoslovakia, he wouldn’t over there, either.

Nobody’d bothered to tell him why Germany needed to invade its smaller neighbor. He didn’t worry about it. Why should he? He was just
a sergeant. When the officers pointed him in some direction and said
Go
, he went. An attack dog would have done the same thing. That was what he was: the
Führer
’
s
attack dog.

He lay down to sleep by his panzer. So did Fritz Bittenfeld and Theo Hossbach. But Fritz wasn’t all that interested in sleeping. He kept going on about what Dutch women would be like, and Belgian women, and French women.…

Theo didn’t say anything. He hardly ever did, except when he had to. Fritz
wouldn’t
shut up, though. Finally, Ludwig said, “You can’t screw them all.”

“I can try,” the driver said valiantly.

Ludwig laughed. Next thing he knew, Captain Elsner was shaking him awake. What seemed like a million engines throbbed overhead: the
Luftwaffe
, flying west to soften up whatever the Dutchmen had set up to try to slow the attack.

He was gnawing on black bread and sausage when his panzer rolled out—at 0600 on the dot. Artillery thundered all around him. The noise was terrific. He wouldn’t have wanted to be a green-uniformed Dutch soldier with all that coming down on his head. No, indeed. He was on the right side—the one giving the pounding, not the poor sons of bitches taking it.

T
wo and a half weeks before Christmas. As Hans-Ulrich Rudel scrambled into the pilot’s seat of his Ju-87, he was damn glad the campaign in the West was finally getting started. His squadron commander didn’t like him. If the major had had the chance, he would have shipped Rudel off to operational reconnaissance training. But not even an officer with an ice cube for a heart like the squadron CO wanted to be a man short when the big fight started.

And so Hans-Ulrich, a milk drinker, a minister’s son, a new-minted twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant, looked out through the Stuka’s armored windshield. “You ready, Albert?” he asked the rear gunner and radioman.

“You bet,
Herr Leutnant.”
Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst’s voice came back tinnily through the speaking tube. Dieselhorst was at least ten years older than Rudel. He drank all kinds of things, but milk wasn’t any of them.

Groundcrew men in khaki overalls fitted a crank into the socket on the port side of each Ju-87. They looked at their wristwatches. Either they’d synchronized them or someone gave an order Hans-Ulrich couldn’t hear through the thick glass and metal shielding the cockpit. They all yanked the cranks at the same instant.

Hans-Ulrich stabbed the starter button with his forefinger at the same time. Thanks to one or the other or both, the big twelve-cylinder Junkers Jumo 211 engine thundered to life at once. It put out 1,100 horsepower. The squadron flew brand-new Ju-87Bs, which had almost twice the power of the older, slower A model a lot of units were still using.

Fuel…good. Oil pressure…good. Rudel methodically went down the list. He gave the groundcrew man a thumbs-up. The fellow grinned and returned it. Hans-Ulrich looked around. All the props were spinning.

Sergeant Dieselhorst said, “Everybody goes today, even the guys who have to flap their arms to take off.”

“
Ja
,” Rudel said, laughing. He was damned if he would have let any minor mechanical flaw ground him on this day of days.

One by one, the big monoplanes with the inverted gull wings taxied down the dirt runway and took off. Finding west was simple: all they had to do was fly away from the rising sun. Holland lay only a few minutes away. Hans-Ulrich had a 250kg bomb under the Stuka’s belly and a pair of 50kg bombs on each wing. The squadron was supposed to go after concentrations of Dutch infantry and artillery. He thought they could do that.

“Orange triangle,” he muttered to himself. That was the emblem Dutch fighters used on fuselage and wings. A lot of them painted the rudder orange, too. The Ju-87 wasn’t the fastest or most graceful plane, especially when weighted down with almost half a tonne of bombs. He had to hope the Me-109s would keep most of the enemy aircraft away.

Boom!
A black puff of smoke appeared in the sky below and in front of his plane. The Stuka staggered in the air, like a car driving over a fat pothole.

“They know we’re here,” Albert Dieselhorst said dryly.

“They only think they do,” Hans-Ulrich said. “We haven’t started showing them yet.”

Looking down from 2,500 meters, he watched smoke rise from artillery bursts. He could see panzers moving forward. They were tiny, like tin toys. But when they fired their guns, fire belched out. No tin toy could match that.

No Dutch panzers met the German machines. Either the Dutch didn’t have them or didn’t know how to deploy them. Hans-Ulrich wondered why not. Holland was a rich country. It hadn’t even had its economy wrecked in the last war. Why wouldn’t it pony up the cash to defend itself properly?

Weak. Decadent. Probably full of Jews
, Rudel thought.
Always trying to do things on the cheap. I’ll bet they’re sorry now, when it’s too late
.

The Dutch did have some field guns—75s or 105s—close enough to the frontier to help their infantry resist the German onslaught. That was where the Stukas came in. The squadron leader put a wing over and dove on the gun positions. One after another, the rest of the Ju-87s followed.

Acceleration shoved Hans-Ulrich against the back of his armored seat. He hoped Sergeant Dieselhorst was well strapped in—that same acceleration would be trying to tear him out of his rear-facing seat.

Hans-Ulrich spotted three or four gun pits close together. He steered toward them as his altimeter unwound. You had to be careful to pull up. In Spain, a whole flight of Stukas had smashed into the ground because they didn’t start to come out of their dives till too late.

There was an automatic gadget that was supposed to make you pull up. Hans-Ulrich had quietly disconnected it. He wanted to stay in control himself, not trust his life to a bunch of cams and cogs.

As he dove, the wind-driven sirens on his mainwheel legs screamed. Even inside the cockpit, the noise was unearthly. During training, he’d heard it from the ground. Coupled with the engine’s roar, it sounded as if a pack of demons and the hounds of hell were stooping on the target.

He watched the Dutch artillerymen scatter like ants from a kicked anthill. They weren’t cowards, not in any ordinary sense of the word. The poor bastards were just up against something they’d never known, never imagined, before. Rudel had wanted to run, too, that day on the training field.

And nobody had bombed him. He yanked the switch that loosed the bombs, then pulled back on the stick for all he was worth. The Stuka’s airframe groaned as it went from dive to climb, but the plane was built to take it. His own vision went red for a few seconds. That was the danger point. The dive bomber could pull more g’s than the pilot could.

But color came back to the world. Clarity came back to Hans-Ulrich’s thoughts. For a little while there, all he’d remembered was that he had to hang on to the stick. He gathered himself. “You good back there, Albert?”

“Hell of a roller coaster,
Herr Leutnant,”
Dieselhorst answered. “You blew that battery to kingdom come, too. I saw the bombs go off. Right on target.”

“Good. Good,” Rudel said. “I thought I aimed them right, but I’m pulling up by the time they go off.”

“You’d better be,” Sergeant Dieselhorst said. They both laughed. Why not? Laughing came easy when the war was going well.

And then tracers flamed past the cockpit. Dieselhorst’s machine gun chattered. A Dutch Fokker fighter—like the Ju-87, a monoplane with landing wheels that didn’t retract—zoomed past, much too close for comfort. The enemy pilot sent Rudel an obscene gesture as the Fokker flew off.

“Gott im Himmel!”
Hans-Ulrich said. “Where the devil did he come from?”

“Beats me,” the rear gunner answered. “I thought our fighter pilots were supposed to keep that kind of
Scheisse
from happening.”

“Theory is wonderful,” Rudel said. Sergeant Dieselhorst laughed again, but shakily.

The Stuka flew back toward the
Reich
for more fuel and more bombs. Hans-Ulrich spotted a column of trucks and buses heading east, toward the fighting. The trucks were painted the grayish green of Dutch army uniforms. A convoy bringing troops and supplies to the front—had to be.

Hans-Ulrich dove again, not so steeply this time. His thumb rested on the firing button atop the stick. He had two forward-firing machine guns mounted in his wings. The Ju-87 seemed to stagger in the air as his bullets stitched through the convoy.

A bus ran into a truck. The bus caught fire. Another bus rolled off the road and into a ditch. Soldiers bailed out of their vehicles and ran like hell. It was almost like going after partridges with a shotgun.

Almost. Some of the Dutch soldiers didn’t run very far. They un-slung their rifles and started shooting at the Stuka as it roared away. Infantrymen didn’t have much of a chance against aircraft, but no denying the balls on these guys. And damned if a bullet from somewhere didn’t clang through the Stuka’s tail assembly. A few meters farther forward…

My armor would have stopped it
, Hans-Ulrich thought.
That’s what it’s there for
. Reassuring to remember you had eight millimeters of steel at your back, five millimeters under you, and four millimeters to either side. It wouldn’t keep everything out, but it beat the hell out of not having any.

Soldiers fired green flares. That was the German recognition signal. They didn’t want their own Stukas shooting them up. Hans-Ulrich waggled his wings to show he’d seen.

He bounced in on a dirt strip a few kilometers inside the German border. Groundcrew men and armorers cared for the Stuka. Hans-Ulrich rolled back the canopy so he could stand up and stretch. “You’ve got a couple of bullet holes, sir,” a groundcrew man reported.

“I know I got hit at least once,” Rudel answered. “Anything leaking? All my gauges are good, and the controls answer.”

“No leaks,” the man assured him.

“Well, then, I’ll worry about it later,” he said.
“Mach schnell, bitte
. We’ve got a war to fight, and no time to waste.”

Five minutes later, he was airborne again.

ONE OF THE THINGS ALISTAIR WALSH
had forgotten about war was what a bloody balls-up it made of traffic. Or maybe things had been different in 1918. By the time he got to the front then, all the civilians had run off. Either that or they’d got killed. Anyhow, they weren’t around to get in the way.

Things were different now. The Dutch and the Belgians hadn’t expected the Nazis to jump on them. Sergeant Walsh didn’t know why they hadn’t—his opinion was that they were a pack of goddamn fools—but they hadn’t. Now that the shells were bursting and the bombs came whistling down, half of the locals decided they really wanted to go to some place where things like that didn’t happen.

And so they did. Whatever small respect Walsh had acquired for the Belgian army during the last go-round dissolved like his stomach lining in the presence of cheap whiskey. He didn’t particularly expect the Brussels Sprouts to fight. (He knew damn well the Germans would fight, and hoped the French would, too. About all other foreigners he remained deeply pessimistic.) But couldn’t they at least act like traffic police?

On the evidence, no. Now that the balloon had gone up, the Belgians weren’t threatening to shoot at anybody who crossed their sacred border.
The British Expeditionary Force, the French Seventh Army to its left, and the French First Army to its right were moving into Belgium to take up positions to throw back the Germans. They should have done that sooner, but King Leopold kept saying no. So they were doing it now.

Or they were trying to.

When lorries and tanks and long columns of khaki-clad men on foot headed east, and when mad swarms of autos and horsecarts and donkey carts and handcarts and terrified men, women, and children on foot headed west, and when they all ran headlong into one another…

Nobody went anywhere. The lorries and tanks tried to push forward. Drivers screamed in English, which mostly didn’t help. Not many Englishmen knew enough French to do them any good—if French would have done them any good, which wasn’t obvious. If Belgian troops had channeled the refugees down a few roads and left the rest open for the soldiers who were trying to save their miserable country for the second time in a generation…

Too much to hope for, plainly.

“We’re not going to make our stage line today, are we, sir?” Walsh asked before the first day was very old.

“Too bloody right we’re not,” his company commander agreed.