The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (15 page)

“You’re the sergeant.” Vaclav steadied his piece of light artillery in the fork between a tree trunk and a stout branch. He had a good notion of the range. Next to no windage … He took a deep, steadying breath, then pressed the trigger.

As always, the report was hellacious. So was the kick. But one of those distant German figures spun and fell over. Vaclav had another round chambered in only a few seconds. The Fritzes were good, though. They flattened out and dragged the mortar off to where Vaclav couldn’t see it.

“Now we find our foxhole,” he said, and scurried back to suit action to word.

Halévy scooted along with him. “Their first few shots from the first position won’t be real accurate. But …”

“Yeah. But,” Jezek agreed. He put his butt, and the rest of him, inside the foxhole. Halévy’s was only a few meters away. When you knew you’d get shelled, you didn’t want to stay above ground, not when you didn’t have to.

Yes, those Germans were good. The Czech and the French Jew with Czech Jewish parents had barely dug in when mortar bombs started whispering down into the woods. The flat, harsh cracks as they went off and the whining shriek of fragments slashing through the air made Vaclav wish Czechoslovakia had never heard of conscription.
Wish for the moon while you’re at it
, he thought, and tried to fold himself even smaller.

Not all the shrieks in among the trees came from the bombs bursting there. Some were torn from the throats of the Czechs and Frenchmen the bombs wounded. “You all right?” Vaclav called.

“Depends on how you look at things,” Halévy answered. “They haven’t wounded me. But I’m not drinking champagne and smoking a fat cigar and feeling up the barmaid, either.”

Jezek snorted. “Barmaids!” It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried slipping his hand under their skirts now and then. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t succeeded, and gone on from there, a few times. But he couldn’t think about them when he was getting shelled. He wondered why not. Even when they cussed you out for groping them, they were a hell of a lot more fun than what was really going on.

“Heads up!” Halévy said urgently. “You pissed the Fritzes off good.”

Vaclav came up from his foxhole and discovered what the Jew meant. A couple of armored cars with German crosses painted on them were edging out from around the back of the slag pile the mortar had topped. Soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets loped along with them. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. His antitank rifle wouldn’t always do for tanks. But armored cars weren’t armored against more than small-arms fire. He could make some poor damned German draftees thinking about the feel of a barmaid’s stockinged thigh under their fingers even more unhappy than they were already.

He could, and he did. He knew where the driver sat in an armored car. After he sent two rounds into the first machine, it swung hard left and tried to drive up the manmade hill. The other armored car kept coming. Its toy cannon and machine gun sent death snarling through the woods, hunting him. Ducking back into the foxhole seemed the better part of valor.

He couldn’t stay down there, though, not unless he wanted the
Landsers
moving with the armored cars to get in among the trees and pull him out with a bayonet like Frenchmen spearing
escargots
from their shells with skinny little forks. Life wasn’t much fun when your choices lay between bad and worse.

Worse was, well, worse. He popped up again, glumly certain the assholes in that second armored car were just waiting to see him. And they were. Machine-gun rounds cracked past, a meter or two above his head. But he got off a couple of shots of his own before taking cover once more.

Benjamin Halévy’s whoop told him they’d done some good. Cautiously,
he peered out to see for himself. The other armored car had gone nose-down in a shell hole. If that didn’t say he’d punched the driver’s ticket, he didn’t know what would. He chambered another round. Going after infantrymen with an antitank rifle was a lot like murder, but not enough to stop him.

But he didn’t have to. Some of the Allied soldiers who’d come into the woods had a mortar of their own with them. The bombs started dropping among the sorry bastards in
Feldgrau
. Some of the Germans dove for the craters that pocked the landscape. Others beat it back toward the cover of the artificial hillock.

A couple of Fritzes did neither. One lay ominously still, right out in the open. The other writhed like an earthworm after a marching boot came down. Thin in the distance, his screams sounded just like the ones that would come from a wounded Czech or Frenchmen. Torment was a universal brotherhood.

Halévy’s rifle barked: once, twice. The German stopped thrashing and yelling. He lay as quiet as his comrade a few meters off. Vaclav glanced over to Halévy’s foxhole. The Jew looked faintly embarrassed. “I didn’t want to listen to that racket any more,” he said.

“Sure. I know what you mean,” Vaclav answered. Sometimes the only favor you could do a man was kill him. Vaclav hoped even a Fritz would be kind enough to take care of that for him if he ever caught a nasty one.

Not yet, thank God! Benjamin Halévy was eyeing the hill made from industrial rubble. “How the devil are we supposed to clear the Germans off of that?”

Vaclav replied without hesitation: “Have to flank ’em out of it. They could slaughter a regiment that tried to go straight over.”

“Too right they could,” Halévy agreed mournfully. “But do you know how many positions just like this one there are all over this part of France?”

“Too fucking many. I’ve already seen too fucking many,” Jezek said.

“Now that you mention it, so have I,” Halévy said. “And at every goddamn one of them, the foot sloggers stuck in front of it are going, ‘Have to flank it out.’ But a lot of the time there’s no room to go around the flank of one without bumping into another one head on.”

“And so?” Vaclav said. “Infantrymen aren’t dumb. They want to go on living just like anybody else.”

“Uh-huh.” The Jew nodded. “But the generals want to throw the Nazis out of France. And you know what that means.”

“It means a lot of us end up dead whether we like it or not,” Vaclav said.

“Yup. I’m afraid that’s just what it means.” Halévy nodded one more time.

CAREFULLY, JULIUS LEMP
brought the U-30 into the harbor at Namsos. Except for a few diehard Norwegians up in the still-frozen far north—not enough men to matter—Norway lay in German hands. U-boats could put in and depart from any Norwegian port. That made it much harder for the Royal Navy to defend against them. It tore the North Sea wide open, and gave the submarines a running start on getting out into the Atlantic.

Well, up to a point, anyhow. Namsos wasn’t worth much yet, not so far as the
Kriegsmarine
was concerned. English engineers had done their best to wreck whatever the new occupants might find useful, and to booby-trap whatever they couldn’t wreck. As was usually true in cases like this, English engineers’ best was all too good.

German engineers and labor gangs—some from the
Reich
’s
Organization Todt
, others made up of drafted local men—prowled the harbor, trying to set things right. Lemp supposed they would manage sooner or later. Given the battered state of everything he could see, he would have bet on later.

A man in naval officer’s uniform waved to him from a half-burned pier. “You didn’t see any mines in the fjord, did you?” the fellow called.

“Jesus Christ!” Lemp yelled back from the conning tower. “Haven’t you cleared them yet?”

“Well, we think so,” the other man answered.

That did not fill his heart with confidence. In fact, it made him clap a hand to his forehead.
“Heilige Scheisse!”
he said. “Why did you let me come in here if you weren’t sure?”

“You made it, didn’t you?” the officer on the pier said soothingly. “The marked channel was all right.”

“Sure—and it was about a meter wider than my boat,” Lemp said.

“What more do you need?” the other fellow said, proving he hadn’t done any shiphandling lately. Lemp wanted to inquire about his mother, but didn’t think the man on the pier would take it in the proper spirit.

He didn’t care to quarrel with the ignorant fellow, anyhow. He could get food and water and fuel and ammunition for his guns here. Pretty soon, no doubt, the
Reich
would start shipping torpedoes up to the Norwegian ports, too. If the boats didn’t have to go back to the
Vaterland
, they could stay at sea longer and travel farther—and they could hit the enemy harder.

If only France had gone belly-up like Norway! The French coast lay a lot farther west and south than Norway did. Lemp imagined U-boats staging out of Brest and St. Nazaire and Bordeaux. How long would England have lasted had that happened? The
Reich
almost starved the British Isles into submission in 1917. With that kind of advantage working for it, making England knuckle under would have been easy this time around.

Would have been, yes. Things hadn’t worked out exactly the way the
Führer
had in mind. That was why there’d been machine-gun fire in Kiel when the U-30 came in at the end of last year. That was why so many high-ranking Army and Navy officers (only a few from the
Luftwaffe
, which had belonged to Göring from the start) were either dead or in places designed to make them wish they were.

And it was why, even in the notoriously easygoing U-boat service, people had to watch what they said these days. Every boat had a man or two aboard who would blab to the authorities ashore. Even a joke told the wrong way could get a good seaman hauled off between a couple of hatchet-faced
Sicherheitsdienst
officials. Men who were hauled off like that didn’t come back again.

For now, Lemp refused to dwell on such things. What was the point, when he couldn’t do anything about them? If he complained to his superiors, he’d find out for himself what the inside of a concentration camp was like. You might not care for everything the people running the country did, but it was still the
Vaterland
. You had to serve it as best you could.

Once the U-30 had tied up at the pier, Lemp asked one of the men who’d made the boat fast, “Do the Tommies ever pay you a call? Not very far from England to here—a lot closer than from England to Germany.”

“Yes, sir,” the rating agreed. “They’ve come over a few times. But the nights are getting short even faster than they are back home—we’re a long way north, you know. We’ve got good flak, and we’ve got fighter cover. One thing that’s plain as the nose on my face”—he grinned, being the owner of a pretty impressive honker—“is that the bombers can’t fight fighters and can’t run, either.”

“That’s not what people thought before the war started,” Lemp said.

“I know.” The rating lowered his voice a little: “If it weren’t so, though, we would’ve knocked England flat by now, eh?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Lemp said, also quietly. They smiled at each other and went about their business. A man could feel he was bucking the system just by speaking a few plain truths.

A man could also feel good about getting back to
terra firma
. Supper was chicken stew with fresh vegetables. The crew of the U-30 had been living off sausage and beans and sauerkraut long enough to get sick of them. They kept body and soul together, which was as far as praise would reach. The beer that went with supper was mighty welcome, too.

So were the showers in the barracks. Saltwater soap didn’t get a man clean. Gerhart Beilharz toweled himself off with a blissful grin on his face. “I don’t have to smell myself for a while, let alone everybody else,” the
Schnorkel
expert said in delight.

“Harder for you to knock your brains out, too,” Lemp replied. Beilharz was two meters tall,
not
the ideal height for a submariner.

One of the ratings added, “Now I can go to sleep without Heinz sticking his shoe in my ear—and Jens can curl up without my shoe in his.”

“Now I can sleep without curling up,” Beilharz said. As an officer, he got more sleeping room than ordinary sailors, but not enough for a man his size. Even Lemp’s cabin—only a curtain shut it off from the rest of the boat—was tiny and cramped. Everything on a U-boat was cramped.

But none of the men got as much sleep as they all craved, because
the RAF did come over that night. Air-raid sirens started screaming about the same time as the antiaircraft guns began to thunder. Between them, they made music to wake the dead. Lemp and the rest of the men from the U-30 staggered toward the zigzag trenches as bombs whistling down added one more horrible note to the symphony.

It was cold out there. Did Namsos
ever
warm up? Shivering, Lemp had trouble believing it. Next to him stood Beilharz, also shivering, in his white cotton undershirt and long johns. Lemp pointed at him. “Look!” he said dramatically. “A polar bear!”

“Oh, shut up … sir,” Beilharz said.

Crump! Crump! Crump!
The bombs went off one after another, not really close but not far enough away, either. Night bombing on both sides was more a matter of luck than of skill. Bad luck for Germany, and some of those bombs would hit the harbor. Bad luck for the U-30’s crew, and some of them would hit right here.

Where were the fighters that dockside rating had bragged about? Night might not last long at this season up here, but it was nighttime now. How was a fighter supposed to find a bomber when he couldn’t see it till he was on the point of running into it? The flak was firing by ear-sight, too: no searchlights working yet to pin bombers in their beams.

After half an hour or so, the engine drone overhead eased toward quiet. The antiaircraft guns banged away for another ten minutes. If falling shrapnel fractured somebody’s skull—or smashed it—well, it was a tough old war for everybody, wasn’t it?

“I wonder if I can go back to sleep,” Gerhart Beilharz said as the sailors trooped into the barracks again. The yawn that followed declared he wasn’t too worried about it.

Neither was Lemp. Some infantrymen were supposed to be able to sleep through air raids. He couldn’t do that, but he wasn’t so far away, either. He hurried to his cot.