Hitler's War (19 page)

Planes flew off toward the east. That, at least, was reassuring. Till now, the RAF had left the Germans alone. The
Luftwaffe
had also left the BEF alone, but Walsh didn’t think about what that meant. He got his first lesson a little past noon.

The day was chilly, but only partly cloudy. The sun had risen late and would set early. It hung low in the sky, a bit west of south. The English soldiers were trying to fight their way through yet another clot of refugees. These people were gabbling in Flemish, or possibly Dutch. Whichever it was, it sounded enough like German to raise Sergeant Walsh’s hackles.

“Don’t they know we’ve got to get up there so we can fight?” he demanded of nobody in particular, or possibly of God.

His soldiers weren’t listening. They were too busy yelling and swearing at the frightened people in front of them. As for God…When Walsh heard the rumble in the sky, he thought at first it was more RAF planes going over. The poor damn refugees knew better. That sound scattered them faster than all the yelling and swearing the British troops had done.

That timbre wasn’t quite the same as the one Walsh had heard before. And those shark-nosed planes with the kinked wings had never come out of British factories. They dove almost vertically, like hawks after rabbits. And as they dove, they also screamed. The sound alone was plenty to make the sergeant want to piss himself.

“Get down!” he screamed. “Hit the dirt! Get—!” He followed his own order, just in the nick of time.

Blast picked him up and flung him around. He did piss himself then, but realized it only later. A lorry caught by a bomb turned into a fireball. Men and pieces of men flew through the air. A marching boot thudded down six inches in front of Walsh’s nose. It still had a foot in it. He stared, then retched. He’d seen such things twenty years earlier, but he’d done his damnedest to block them out of his mind ever since.

More bombs went off among the refugees and the marching troops. Shrieks rang out through and even over the stunning
crump!s
of explosives. Wounded soldiers screamed for medics and stretcher-bearers. Wounded civilians simply screamed.

The nasty dive-bombers roared away toward the east, the direction from which they’d come. Alistair Walsh was just getting to his feet when more planes flew in from that direction. At first, he thought they were RAF fighters returning from strikes against the Nazis—their lines weren’t so aggressively unfamiliar as those of the previous attackers. But then fire spurted from their wings and from their propeller hubs. They
were shooting at—shooting up—the British column and the poor damned hapless refugees.

“Down!” Walsh yelled again, and fit action to word.

When a bullet struck flesh, it made a wet, slapping noise. He remembered that from the last time around, however much he wished he didn’t. German airplanes had strafed trenches in 1918. It hadn’t seemed nearly so horrid or dangerous then. For one thing, he’d been a fool of a kid twenty years earlier. For another, the German air force, like the Kaiser’s army, had been on the ropes. And, for one more, he wasn’t
in
a trench now.

More screaming engines made him grab his entrenching tool to see what he could do about digging in. Then a few people started cheering as if they’d lost their minds. Suspecting they had, he warily looked up. British Hurricane fighters were mixing it up with the bastards with the hooked crosses on their tails. Walsh started cheering, too.

A Hurricane went into a flat spin and slammed into the ground, maybe half a mile away. A black, greasy column of smoke marked the pilot’s pyre. Then, trailing smoke and flames, one of the German fighters crashed into a stand of trees even closer to where Walsh lay.

He yelled like a man possessed. So the Germans
could
die. That cloud of smoke, broader and lower than the one rising from the Hurricane, was the first proof of it he’d seen in this war.

Another Hurricane, also smoking but not so badly, limped off to the west, out of the fight. Sergeant Walsh hoped the pilot managed to put it down safely, or at least to bail out if he couldn’t land it. To his vast relief, the German fighters seemed to have had enough. Like the dive-bombers before them, they flew back toward the
Vaterland
.

He tried standing up again. As he did, he noticed he wasn’t the only bloke emerging from a half-dug scrape. The other chaps in khaki weren’t so bloody stupid. If the buggers on the other side started banging away at you, of course you’d do what you could to keep from getting ventilated.

But the advancing column had stuck its dick in the meat grinder.
One tank lay on its side, blown off its tracks by a bomb that burst right next to it. Several trucks burned. Others weren’t going anywhere soon, not with from one to four flat tires or with bullets through the engine block…or with dead or wounded drivers. What bombs and machine-gun bullets had done to the foot soldiers was even worse. And as for that mob of refugees…

A woman who might have been pretty if she weren’t dirty and exhausted and terrified screamed in Dutch or Flemish. She wasn’t wounded—not as far as Walsh could see, anyhow. She was just half crazy, maybe more than half, because of everything that had happened to her.

Walsh had a devil of a time blaming her. A few days ago, she’d been a shopkeeper’s wife or a secretary or something else safe and comfortable. Then the roof fell in on her life—literally, odds were. Now she had nothing but the clothes on her back and whatever was in the cute little handbag she carried. How long before she’d start selling herself for a chunk of black bread or a mess of fried potatoes?

How many more just like her were there? Thousands, tens of thousands, all over Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg and eastern France. And their husbands, and their brats, and…“Oh, bloody hell.
Bloody
hell,” Walsh muttered under his breath.

Still, civilians
weren’t
his worry, except when they got in the way and kept him from getting to where he needed to be to do his job. Sorting out his soldiers and keeping them moving damn well was.

Captain Ted Peters came over to him. The young officer looked as if he’d just walked into a haymaker. This was his introduction to combat, after all.
Combat, meet Captain Peters. Peters, this is combat
. Walsh shook his head. He had to be punchy himself, or his brain wouldn’t be whirling like that.

“Well, Sergeant, I’m afraid you’re the new platoon commander,” Peters said. “Lieutenant Gunston stopped a large fragment of bomb casing with his belly. Gutted him like a sucking pig.”

“Christ!” Walsh said.

“A bit of a rum go, I’m afraid,” Peters said, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came down the pike. He did his best to ignore the ammunition cooking off in burning vehicles, the cries of wounded men and women and kids and animals, and the stenches of burning paint and burning rubber and burning flesh and fear and shit.

When the company commander didn’t say anything more, Walsh did: “I should say so! We’ve got ourselves all smashed up, and we haven’t even set eyes on a goddamn German.”

“I did,” Captain Peters answered, not without pride. “One of those dive-bombers was so low when he pulled up that I could see him through the glass of his cockpit. And I got a
good
look at his rear gunner. The bastard almost punctured me after the plane pulled out of its dive.”

“What are we going to do when we have to fight them face to face, sir?” Walsh asked. “How the devil can we, when it looks like they’ve got more airplanes than we do?”

“We shot down one of their fighters, after all,” the officer said. “I’m sure we’ll do better with practice, too.”

“Right…sir,” Sergeant Walsh said tightly. He wasn’t sure of any such thing. England’s chosen method of fighting seemed to be stumbling from one disaster to the next till she figured out how to beat the set of foes who had been beating her. It worked the last time around only because the USA stuck its oar in the water. Things were moving faster now, much faster. Would—could—muddling through work at all?

Captain Peters had no doubts. Or, if he did, he didn’t let them show, which was the mark of a good officer. Walsh didn’t let the privates and corporals he led see his doubts, either—or he hoped like hell he didn’t, anyhow. “All we can do is go on,” Peters said. “We have to clear these civilians out of the way and take up our assigned positions. We’ll have
the French and the Belgians fighting along with us. The
Boches
will end up sorry they ever started this war—you mark my words.”

“Right…sir,” Alistair Walsh said again. No, he didn’t believe a word of it. But you also couldn’t let your superiors see your doubts. You couldn’t even—or maybe you especially couldn’t—let yourself see them.

SERGEANT LUDWIG ROTHE SPOTTED A TRUCK
out somewhere close to a kilometer away. He raised his field glasses to his eyes. The last thing he wanted to do was shoot up his own side by mistake. But the magnified image showed it was a French model, and bound to be full of Dutchmen.

“Panzer halt!” he yelled into the speaking tube.

“Jawohl!
Halting,” Fritz Bittenfeld answered. The Panzer II jerked to a stop.

Rothe peered through the TZF4 sighting telescope. It was only two and a half power—downright anemic after the binoculars. But it let him draw a bead with the 20mm cannon. He wouldn’t have opened up on enemy armor from farther out than 600 meters. The panzer’s main armament wouldn’t penetrate serious protection from farther out than that. It would chew up soft-skinned vehicles as far as it could reach, though.

The trigger was on the elevating handwheel, to the left of the gun. Ludwig fired a three-round burst. The Dutch truck stopped as if it had run into a stone wall. Smoke poured out from under the hood. Rothe fired another burst, which emptied the magazine. He slapped in another ten-round clip. The other guys might—hell, they did—use bigger rounds in their main armament, but he could shoot a lot quicker than they could. Sometimes that made all the difference in the world.

Sometimes it didn’t matter a pfennig’s worth. Not far away, another
Panzer II burned like billy-be-damned. It had stopped a 105mm shell fired over open sights at point-blank range. None of the crew had got out. That was no surprise—hitting a Panzer II with a 105 was like swatting a mosquito with a table. The Dutch artillerymen who’d fought the gun were dead now, which didn’t do that panzer crew one goddamn bit of good.

“Can we get going again, Sergeant?” Fritz asked pointedly. A halted panzer was a panzer waiting to stop something.

“Wait a second.” Ludwig looked through the TZF4 again. Yes, the Dutch truck was definitely laid up. “Go ahead,” he said.

As soon as he gave permission, the panzer seemed to bound forward. The flat Dutch plains made ideal panzer country. But the buildings and trees up ahead made equally ideal places to hide antitank guns. Even if the Dutch had taken a big punch at the start of the fight, they were still in there swinging.

Ludwig felt a tap on the back of his left leg. He ducked down into the turret.
“Was ist los?”
he asked the radio operator.

“Bridge up ahead,” Theo Hossbach answered. “We’ve got paratroops holding it. The Dutchmen are giving them a hard time.”

“I bet they are,” Rothe said. They hadn’t been ready for soldiers jumping out of Ju-52s and taking bridges and airports away from them. Well, who would have been? Nobody in the last war fought like that. Hell, in the last war even pilots didn’t wear parachutes. As far as Ludwig was concerned, that meant everybody who’d got into an airplane during the last war was out of his goddamn mind. The panzer commander brought his mind back to the business at hand. “Up ahead, huh? Which map square?”

“C-9,” Theo told him.

“C-9?” Ludwig repeated, and the radioman nodded. Rothe unfolded the map so he could see where he was—or where he thought he was, anyhow. Wrestling with the map inside the cramped turret made him feel like a one-armed paper hanger with the hives. At last, though, he
got it open. “Well, Jesus Christ! We’re in C-10 now. Tell ‘em we’re on our way.”

“Will do.” Theo shouted into the microphone that connected the panzer to the platoon, company, regiment, and division commanders. Everybody could tell Ludwig what to do. Half the time, everybody seemed to be trying to tell him at once. But all German panzers came with radios, so they could work together. That hadn’t been true of the Czechs. The
Wehrmacht
was using captured Czech panzers—the more, the merrier. Before they went into German service, technicians installed radio sets in the machines that lacked them.

Machine-gun bullets clattered off the Panzer II’s steel flank. Ludwig did some shouting of his own: to Fritz, through the speaking tube. “Got you, Sergeant!” the driver yelled back. The panzer swung a little south of west.

That damned Dutch machine gun kept banging away. Ludwig wondered why. A Panzer II had less armor than it should have—he’d seen as much. One hit with any kind of cannon shell and you bought yourself a plot. But, by God, the beast did carry enough steel to keep out machine-gun bullets. And every round the silly Dutchmen wasted on the Panzer II was a round they weren’t shooting at the foot soldiers they could really hurt.

Most of the time, Rothe would have stuck his head out so he could see what was going on. Right this minute, that looked like a bad idea.
Yeah, just a little
, he thought with a wry chuckle. He had four vision ports in the turret: two on the left, one on the right, and one at the back. The bullets were spanging off the left side of the turret, so.…

There it was! The machine gun’s muzzle spat flame from the front of an apple orchard. Ludwig traversed the turret. He fired back at the enemy gun. The Dutch crew manning it had run for cover by the time his weapons bore on it. They’d seen danger coming and got out of there. That meant they’d harass somebody else pretty soon, but he didn’t know what he could do about it.

“That’s got to be the bridge, Sergeant.” Fritz’s voice came back through the speaking tube.

“It does?” With the turret swung to the left, Rothe couldn’t see much of what the driver was talking about. He brought it back to face straight ahead again. Sure enough, there was a bridge. And the people around it were shooting at the people on it and right by it. The soldiers hanging on to the bridge wore field-gray. The bastards attacking them were in Dutch gray-green. With leaves off the trees and grass going yellow, neither uniform offered a whole hell of a lot of camouflage.