Hitler's war

Chapter 6

Two 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.

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.

The Dutch soldiers were too busy trying to drive the paratroopers off the bridge so they could blow it to pay much attention to advancing panzers-several other machines had come with Ludwig’s. One of them was a great honking Panzer III-a fifteen-and-a-half-tonne monster with two machine guns and a 37mm cannon that could fire a useful high-explosive shell.

It could, and it did. Three or four rounds from that cannon put two Dutch guns out of action. “Gott im Himmel, I wish we had one of those!” Ludwig knew he sounded jealous. He didn’t care. He wished the Wehrmacht had more of the big panzers, too. They could do things his lighter machine couldn’t-and they could take punishment that would turn the Panzer II into scrap metal…or into a bonfire.

He opened up with his machine gun. The Dutch soldiers scattered. They hadn’t looked for an attack from the rear. Well, too damn bad. They also seemed less willing than the Czechs had been to hold in place till they got killed. Say what you would about the Czechs, they had balls.

Three or four He-123s swooped down on the Dutch troops. Next to Ju-87s, the Henschel biplanes looked like last week’s-hell, last war’s-news. That didn’t mean they couldn’t do the job. They shot up the Dutchmen and dropped bombs on their heads. The bombs weren’t big ones-Ju-87s could carry a lot more-but the Henschels put them right on the money.

Ju-87s had sirens to make them sound even scarier than they were. The He-123s didn’t. But, when they dove, they might have been firing God’s machine guns. Ludwig had heard that just the right engine RPMs on those babies could make them as demoralizing as all get-out. A lot of what you heard was bullshit. Not this. He forgot who’d told him, but the guy had the straight goods.

He stood up in the turret to get a better look around. A Dutchman fired a couple of wild rifle shots at him. He gunned the enemy soldier down with his MG34. Two more Dutch soldiers dropped their weapons and raised their hands.

Ludwig almost killed them in cold blood. At the last second, he caught himself. He pointed brusquely toward the rear. Keeping their hands high over their heads, they stumbled off into captivity…if they didn’t run into some other trigger-happy German soldier before anybody took charge of them.

Not my worry, Rothe thought. He was glad he hadn’t squeezed the trigger. They’d fought fair, and so had he. Sometimes, in the heat of battle, you did things you wished you hadn’t later. This time, Ludwig didn’t-quite.

His panzer stopped at the eastern end of the bridge. A paratrooper waved to him. “Good to see you, by God,” the fellow called. “It was getting a little hairy here.” His helmet fit his head more closely than the standard Wehrmacht model. He wore a coverall over his tunic, along with rubber knee and elbow pads.

And he wasn’t kidding. Several of his buddies lay sprawled or twisted in death. A medic tended to a wounded trooper. Other groaning men waited for whatever he could do for them.

“Can we cross the bridge?” Ludwig asked.

“Ja,” the paratrooper answered. “We pulled the wires on the demolition charges before the Dutchmen could set them off. And we’ve cleared the mines on the roadway and chucked them in the river. I think we got ‘em all.”

“Thanks a bunch.” Ludwig wished the paratrooper hadn’t added the last few words. The son of a bitch only laughed at him. He bent down and shouted into the speaking tube: “Take us across, Fritz.”

“Will do,” the driver said. “What’s on the other side?”

“More Dutchmen with guns,” Ludwig told him. “What the hell do you expect?”

“How about some gals with big tits?”

“Yeah, how about that?” Rothe said dryly. He wished he had a control that would let him pour ice water on Fritz. The driver was the horniest guy he’d ever run into. The worst part was, he did get laid a lot. Ludwig knew that if he used a no-holds-barred approach like that, all he’d get was his face slapped.

The Panzer II rumbled forward. Fritz did have the sense to take the bridge slowly. If the paratroopers had missed a surprise or two, he’d have a chance to stop or to go around it. Ludwig gave the roadway a once-over, too. They didn’t blow up, so he and Fritz didn’t miss anything important.

They went past not only dead German paratroopers but also quite a few dead Dutchmen. Some of them were in what looked like police uniforms. No, they hadn’t looked for soldiers to fall out of the sky so far behind their front. These must have been second-, or maybe third-, line defenders. Whoever they were, they’d fought hard. It hadn’t done them any good, though.

As soon as Ludwig heard a machine gun rattle to malignant life, he ducked down into the turret again. But the Dutch had put up a better fight on the east side of the bridge than they did here. Maybe losing it had broken their spirit. Or maybe they simply didn’t have what they needed for a proper defense here.

A car with half a dozen Dutch officers screamed up the road toward the bridge-and toward the panzer. “Aren’t you going to blast those shitheads?” Fritz demanded.

“Let’s see what they do first,” Ludwig answered.

They stopped right in front of the panzer. One of the officers started shouting at Ludwig in Dutch. He understood maybe one word in five. He thought they were telling him to turn around and drive the Nazis away. That was pretty goddamn funny.

“Sorry, friend,” he said. “We are the Nazis. And you’re prisoners, as of now.”

He might not have known Dutch, but the Dutch officers understood German. The looks on their faces when they realized that panzer wasn’t theirs…“You should let us go,” said the one who’d yelled in Dutch before-he spoke good German, too. “We made an honest mistake.”

“In your dreams, pal,” Ludwig said sweetly. The panzer’s machine gun and cannon were mighty persuasive.

* * *

“You! Dernen!” Arno Baatz had a voice as effortlessly penetrating as a dentist’s drill.

“Yes, Corporal?” Willi Dernen did his best to sound meek and mild. He didn’t want trouble from a lousy Unteroffizier, not now, not when they were about to give the poilus the big one right in the teeth. Guys promoted to noncom went off to a special school for a while. Willi didn’t know what went on there, but he figured it was where they turned you into a son of a bitch if you weren’t one already.

Baatz glared at him, there in the gloom of earliest dawn. “Have you got your full ammunition supply?”

“Yes, Corporal,” Willi repeated-truthfully. Only a dope didn’t bring along as many rounds and as many rations as he could, and Frau Dernen hadn’t raised any dopes.

Had he been lying, Baatz would have had to feel him up to prove it. You still couldn’t see anything more than ten centimeters from the end of your nose. That didn’t bother Willi. A Frenchman who could see you was a Frenchman who could blow your brains out.

Muttering, the corporal stomped off to harass somebody else. Beside Willi, Wolfgang Storch chuckled almost silently. “Awful Arno’s on the rag early today, isn’t he?”

“What was that, Storch?” Baatz snapped. His ears stuck out like jug handles. Maybe that was what made them so sharp.

“Nothing, Corporal,” Wolfgang said. Baatz went right on muttering, but he didn’t come back. He might have heard, but he hadn’t understood. Just like a corporal, Willi thought.

Before Willi could say that out loud and get a laugh from Storch, hundreds-no, thousands-of German guns opened up. Everywhere from the North Sea to the Swiss border, they hurled death and devastation at the enemies of the Reich. Through the thunder, Willi heard the steadier rumble of aircraft engines overhead. Their takeoffs must have been timed so they’d cross the border just when the artillery bombardment opened. Right now, the damned Frenchies would be thinking hell had opened up on earth. And they wouldn’t be so far wrong.

Lieutenant Neustadt blew his whistle. He looked so young, it almost seemed a boy’s plaything when he did. But his voice, more bass than baritone, gave that the lie: “Forward! Now we get to see France for ourselves!”

The French had seen little bits of Germany. Willi aimed to do more than that. He wanted to goose-step through Paris in a victory parade. His great-grandfather had done it after the Franco-Prussian War. His father never stopped complaining that he hadn’t got the chance. Willi wanted it.

There was the place just on the German side of the border where the French troops had camped when he and Wolfgang spied on them. There was the crossing point the Germans had booby-trapped when they pulled back after the real war against Czechoslovakia started. Now Willi needed to look back over his shoulder to see it. That meant, that had to mean, he was in France.

If you stood on the other guy’s soil, you were winning. The last time around, the Allies never did drive Germany all the way out of France and Belgium. Things fell apart on the home front before they could. And here the Wehrmacht was again.

A rifle boomed up ahead. A French machine gun opened up, its fire noticeably slower than a German MG-34’s. Somebody not too far from Willi fell over and grabbed at his leg. He yelped and ki-yied like a dog hit by a car. “Medic!” The shout went up from half a dozen throats.

“Keep moving!” Arno Baatz yelled. “Even if they’ve mined the fields, keep moving!”

Even if they’ve mined the fields? Willi thought. He suddenly didn’t want to move at all. Corporal Baatz had a way of encouraging his men, all right. Lieutenant Neustadt’s whistle shrilled. “We need to go forward!” he called. “Victory lies ahead! Paris, too!” That made a pretty good antidote to Baatz’s minefields.

French shells screamed in-not many, but enough to send men and pieces of men flying. Willi’s father had talked about the goddamn French 75s in the last war. Here they were again, and just as horrific if you were on the receiving end.

In the last war, Germany couldn’t do much about them. Now Stukas swooped down on the French batteries, underwing sirens wailing like damned souls. Bombs going off were much louder than shells. The French artillery quieted down in a hurry. Willi trotted past a gun pit a few minutes later. He looked at what was left of the 75 and its crew. Gulping, he wished he hadn’t.

More rifle fire came from behind a stone fence. The Landsers moved to outflank the defenders even before Corporal Baatz started yelling commands. Willi plopped down in a shell hole and banged away at the poilus by the fence. After a few minutes, one of them waved something white.

Neustadt shouted to them in French. Willi didn’t speak a word of it. The French soldiers stood up with their hands high. In their long greatcoats and crested helmets, they looked as if they’d come from the last war. The lieutenant jerked his thumb toward the east. Nodding, babbling with gratitude for not getting shot out of hand, the poilus stumbled away into captivity.

“They’ll have watches. They’ll have cash,” Wolfgang said discontentedly. “Now the rear-echelon assholes’ll clean ‘em out.”

“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” Willi said-he was less inclined to grumble than his friend. “You think they’re the only froggies we’ll catch?”

“Well…no,” Storch admitted. “But maybe they had extra-good stuff. We’ll never find out.”

Up ahead, a Panzer I was burning. Something heavier than a machine gun had hit the little panzer and knocked it out. One crewman in black coveralls lay dead a few meters away. The other-the driver-hadn’t made it all the way out. He was on fire, too. Willi gulped again. The stink reminded him of a pork roast forgotten in the oven.

But other panzers kept pushing forward. They shot up or ran over French machine-gun nests. That made life a lot easier for the foot soldiers who followed in their wake. Willi didn’t mind not facing machine guns, not even a little bit.

More Frenchmen surrendered. As he’d predicted, Willi got himself a small wad of francs and a watch with a case that looked like gold. There were corpses to plunder, too, if you had the stomach for it. Dead men and pieces of dead men…Willi was astonished at how fast he got used to them or developed a knack for not thinking about them. Definitely better not to wonder whether this crumpled chunk of shredded meat had played the concertina or that one always puked when he got plowed.

Some people didn’t care. He went past one body that had a finger on the left hand neatly sliced off, presumably so the slicer could get at a ring. Willi hoped he wouldn’t do anything like that. He also hoped he wouldn’t end up a body lying there for someone else to frisk.

It could happen. Not all the poilus were ready to give up. The French fought from foxholes and trenches. They fought from behind fences, and from farmhouses. They didn’t fight with the coordination of the German war machine, but they fought. They reminded Willi of a guy who got staggered in a barroom brawl but swung back instead of falling over.

Why didn’t they fall over, dammit? Life would have been so much simpler-to say nothing of easier-if they had.

More 75s screamed in. The Wehrmacht troops did some screaming of their own. One of the first things you learned in training was to flatten out when you got shelled. Willi tried to get flatter than a hedgehog squashed on the Autobahn.

“The lieutenant’s down!” somebody yelled. Willi looked around without raising his head. Sure as hell, there was Lieutenant Neustadt, both hands clapped to his belly and a godawful shriek coming out of his mouth. Stretcher-bearers ran up and lugged him away. Willi swore under his breath. That didn’t look good.

“We have to keep going!” Sandwiched between Neustadt and Corporal Baatz, Sergeant Lutz Pieck hadn’t shown much personality up till now. All of a sudden, the platoon was his, personality or not.

Keep going they did-till they ran up against four French machine guns with interlocking fields of fire. You couldn’t advance against those, not unless you’d written your suicide note. Willi took his entrenching tool and started digging a hole.

Sergeant Pieck sent a runner back. Before long, a mortar team came up. The men started dropping bombs on the machine gun nests. They silenced three of them. The soldiers stalked the fourth and put it out of action with grenades. One machine gunner came out with his hands up. Corporal Baatz shot him in the face. He fell over and never twitched again. Willi knew he might have done the same thing. You couldn’t use one of those murder mills and then expect to give up as if you’d got caught playing bridge.

Pieck looked as if he wanted to say something about it, but what could he say? Only the Last Trump would bring the Frenchman back to life. And Arno Baatz was a mean bastard who didn’t listen to anybody. Pieck pointed west instead. “Forward!” he commanded, and forward they went.