The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (62 page)

She squeezed another chuckle out of him. This one might in fact have been amused. “They may hate us, but they’ll need us.”

Maybe he was right, maybe wrong. Maybe the Army wouldn’t take him back. Peggy hoped it wouldn’t and feared it would. She said, “I don’t remember the last time I wanted a drink so bad first thing in the morning.”

To her amazement, Herb built her a strong one and himself one stronger yet. “What the dickens?” he said. “We don’t go to war every day, thank God. And if we get sleepy later on, so what? It’s Sunday.” Ice cubes clinked as he raised his glass. “Here’s to the USA!”

“To the USA!” Peggy echoed. The bourbon hit her hard in spite of her morning coffee. But Herb couldn’t have put it any better.
What the dickens? So what?
They both had another hefty knock after the first one. The newspaper stopped being interesting. Reading felt like too much effort. And, on the morning the United States found itself at war, the funnies weren’t very funny.

Peggy turned on the radio. She and Herb took turns spinning the dial. Music and prayers—many of them hastily and badly written to take account of suddenly changed circumstances—and confused war news came from one station after another. Peggy didn’t worry about any of it. She was paying attention to the state of the nation, which was what the times called for.

A little before noon, Herb turned the dial to 610 for WIP, the Mutual Broadcasting System’s local affiliate. No doubt most stations would
carry FDR, but you could count on that one. Right on the hour, an announcer spoke in hushed tones: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States addressing a joint session of Congress … Here is the President.”

“Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, yesterday the Empire of Japan attacked American possessions without warning or provocation,” Roosevelt said, his voice raspy with anger. “The Empire’s despicable action shows that its leaders think us weak and irresolute. Like it or not—and no sane man can relish war—we are at war with the Japanese. They have started this fight. We will finish it, and we will win it.”

A great cheer rose from the members of Congress. FDR went on to ask them to make a formal declaration of war against Japan. That cheer told Peggy he’d get exactly what he asked for.

he Ivans were getting frisky. Somewhere a long way ahead lay Smolensk. The orders for Willi Dernen’s regiment said it was one part of a giant pincer that would help encircle the Russian city. But to encircle a place, you first had to nip round behind it. The orders came out of Berlin, and Berlin didn’t get what was going on all these kilometers to the east.

Willi hadn’t shaved since … he couldn’t remember quite when. His face fungus helped a little when it came to keeping his cheeks and chin warm. It would have done more if it weren’t full of rime from his breath. And he was better off than many. He had his greatcoat and the sheepskin vest underneath. And he had a pair of fine felt boots some Russian didn’t need any more. His feet wouldn’t freeze … too soon.

Compared to those of his buddies still stuck with
Wehrmacht
-issue gear, he was well off. Compared to the French and English, whose cold-weather clothing was nowhere near so good as what the Germans made, he was incredibly lucky.

But the Poles didn’t have to scrounge to get their hands on stuff like this. They knew ahead of time what these winters were like. Seeing German
troops collect pitying stares from a bunch of damn Poles was galling, to say the least.

Red Army men had clothes made for this hideous weather, too. They also had gun oil that didn’t freeze up when it got really cold, unlike the fancy shit the Germans used. Willi carried a little tube of that, taken from the dead Russian who’d supplied him with
valenki
. The action on his Mauser still worked just fine.

He shared the gun oil with his friends. He even shared it with Awful Arno, more from expediency than affection. Baatz might be the world’s biggest pain in the ass, but he was almost as dangerous to the bastards on the other side as he was to his own men.

Fighting went back and forth, back and forth. German panzer lubricants didn’t like the bitter weather any better than German gun oil did. Sometimes you could get panzer support, sometimes not. Russian panzers didn’t seem bothered. They had wider tracks than German machines, too. They could go through or over mud and snowdrifts that made German panzers bog down.

Squatting by a fire in a hut in a wrecked village, Willi said, “If the Ivans even halfway knew what the fuck they were doing, they could run us back into Poland in about a week and a half.”

“Nah.” Adam Pfaff shook his head. He was as grimy and shaggy as Willi. “We’d hang on for two weeks, easy.”

Arno Baatz crouched by that crackling blaze, too. He didn’t growl at Pfaff for defeatism. He just bummed a
papiros
off of him. There might not be much tobacco in the damn things, but what there was was a lot stronger than German-issue smokes. Willi also had some
papirosi
in a greatcoat pocket. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of dead Russians to frisk.

“Poor brave stupid shitheads,” he went on. “Their officers tell ’em to do something, they keep on trying to do it, no matter how dumb it is.”

“You mean, like charging off to surround Smolensk?” Adam Pfaff inquired. Awful Arno stirred at that, but for a wonder he didn’t say anything. Maybe he was taking mental notes. If he was—well, fuck him.

And Willi shook his head. “No, not like that. We’re trying all kinds of ways to do it.”

“None of ’em’s come close to working yet,” Pfaff said. Arno Baatz stirred again.

Willi ignored him. “But they’re all different,” he said. “The Russians keep doing the same goddamn thing over and over, no matter how many of ’em get killed. It’s like they don’t care, or they don’t dare get any ideas for themselves.”

“Always more Russians to throw in,” Baatz said. For once in his life, he wasn’t even close to wrong. Soviet generals spent men the way a sailor on leave spent money on girls.
More where those came from
seemed to be their guiding principle. The Germans always killed more enemies than they lost themselves. But the Ivans kept on coming.

The thought had hardly crossed Willi’s mind before a sentry out at the edge of the village yelled, “Halt! Who goes there?” Only a burst from a Russian submachine gun answered him. The burst must have missed, because the German fired back and an MG-34—not too frozen to operate—chattered to irate life.

“Fuck!” Awful Arno grabbed his rifle. Like Willi, he’d slapped whitewash on the stock and barrel so the piece wouldn’t stand out against the snow. Adam Pfaff’s remained gray—not perfect camouflage, but not bad, either. Since whitewashing his own Mauser, Baatz had quit riding Pfaff about it.

“Urra! Urra!”
The Russian battle shout dinned through the village. The Red Army soldiers were probably liquored up—their daily ration was a hundred grams of vodka, and their officers upped it when they went into action. Booze drove fear into the background.

Willi wished for a hundred grams of potent spirits himself. He burst out of the hut, Pfaff and Baatz at his heels. Bullets cracked past them. They ran toward the heaviest fighting at the eastern edge of the village.

Most of the Ivans wore white snow smocks, on the same principle as the whitewashed Mausers. The Poles had them, too. German quartermasters kept promising to produce some, and kept breaking promises. Some
Landsers
improvised their own from captured bedsheets, but there weren’t nearly enough of those to go around. Willi wished he had one. His
Feldgrau
greatcoat turned him into a big blot against the snowy background.

He flopped down behind the burnt and mashed wreckage of another hut and snapped off a shot at the oncoming Russians. One of the snowsuited figures went down. Was he hit or just taking cover himself? No way to tell, not from where Willi sprawled.

Adam Pfaff lay on his belly ten or fifteen meters away, also firing at the Ivans. “After we capture Smolensk …” he said, slapping a fresh five-round magazine onto his rifle.

“Fuck that shit,” Willi answered. “All I want to do is get out of this lousy place in one piece.”

“That’s on account of you’ve got your head on straight,” Pfaff said. “Now if the clowns in Berlin did, too …”

“Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” Willi fired at another Russian.

Enemy fire eased off. None of the Germans in the little village relaxed. The Russians loved to play games like this, to lull their foes into a false sense of security and then jump on them again from a new direction.

Sure as hell, the next attack came in from the south. Mortar bombs burst here and there. Then it was another wave of drunken Ivans bawling
“Urra!”
at the top of their lungs.

This time, the Russians broke into the village. No matter how frigid the weather was, the work got very warm for a while. The MG-34 worked fearful execution among the Ivans. They couldn’t bring their heavier, clumsier machine guns up for close combat, but raked the village with them at long range.

Willi’s head might have been on a swivel. He tried to look every which way at once. “Adam!” he screamed. “Behind you!”

Pfaff heard. And the gray Mauser knocked over a Russian who would have rammed a bayonet through his kidney in another few seconds. Pfaff shot the Russian again, deliberately this time, to make sure he wasn’t shamming. He wouldn’t pull a Lazarus now, not with the top of his head blown off. His blood steamed in the snow.

“Obliged,” Pfaff said. “This is a whole bunch of fun, isn’t it?”

“If you say so,” Willi answered. The other
Gefreiter
chuckled.

Sullenly, the Russians pulled back. Bodies littered the ground, some in snow smocks over khaki, others wearing
Feldgrau
. Wounded men
wailed. Injured Russians and Germans sounded pretty much alike. The
Landsers
kept a few wounded Ivans for questioning and disposed of the rest. It wasn’t as if the Red Army men wouldn’t have done the same to them.

Willi went back to that hut, hoping the fire was still burning. As a matter of fact, the hut was on fire—it had taken a direct hit from a mortar. Anything but fussy, Willi got as close to the flames as he could stand. Warmth meant more than anything else he could think of.

Adam Pfaff came up beside him, also soaking in heat like a lizard in the sun. “Smolensk … Moscow … All easy, right?” Pfaff said.

“Well, sure,” Willi drawled in a way that left no doubt about what he really thought. They both grinned. It wasn’t as if they could do anything about where fate—and the
Wehrmacht
—had stuck them. A Russian machine gun fired a burst from the woods beyond the fields that surrounded the village. Willi flopped down in the snow again, but no quicker than his friend.

“REDS BOMB SCAPA FLOW!
Read all about it!” a newsboy shouted, waving a paper on a London street corner. Alistair Walsh handed him a broad copper penny and got a
Times
in exchange.

Sure as the devil, the Russians had hit the great British naval base in the Orkneys. Walsh couldn’t imagine how they’d done it. The story told him. They evidently had some huge, lumbering four-engined bombers to which no one in the Royal Navy had given a second thought … till they lumbered southwest from Murmansk, struck the great anchorage, and droned away homeward before the RAF could give chase.

Radio Moscow’s claims as to the damage inflicted on our ships are grossly exaggerated, a Royal Navy spokesman has stated
, the
Times
story said primly. Once upon a time not so long ago—before he resigned from the Army—Walsh would have been sure that was true. Trust the Russians ahead of his own government? Not a chance!

But there was a chance, and maybe a good chance. If a Bentley could run down a prominent critic of the government’s policy, what was safe after that? Not a thing, not so far as Walsh could see.

Not for the first time, he wondered if he was safe himself. He supposed
so—he was too small a fish to worry the likes of Sir Horace Wilson. The same didn’t hold, though, for his newfound friends. That he should be friends with MPs still amazed him. If the wind had blown Rudolf Hess’ parachute a few fields over, odds were he’d still be a senior noncom today.