panzers.
“Most of them are Polish units,” he said. “Remember that, for God’s sake, and don’t shoot them by mistake. They wear a darker, greener khaki than the Russians, and their helmet is almost like the Czech pot-it doesn’t have a brim like the Russian model.”
“Tell us something we didn’t know,” Adi muttered. Theo heard him, and maybe Witt did, too, but nobody else. Theo was patient with these lectures. One reason you walked barefoot through the obvious was that people did forget, especially when other people were trying to kill them.
“Give the Poles a hand where you can,” Griehl said. “They’re good troops. They’re brave troops. The only thing that’s really wrong with them is, they don’t have as many toys as we do. Infantry, machine guns-they’ve got those. But they’re light on artillery and panzers and planes. That’s why they called us in to help against the Reds. So we’ll do it.” He grinned again. “It’s not like the Fuhrer hasn’t got his own reasons for going after Russia. If you’ve read Mein Kampf, you’ll know that.”
He got more nods. Hitler’s book was Holy Writ to the Party. Theo had looked at it, found it bombastic and badly written, and put it aside. But you didn’t have to have gone through page by page to know he talked about Russia as Germany’s Lebensraum. Stalin doubtless had a different view of that, which didn’t bother the Fuhrer.
“We go at 0430 tomorrow,” the colonel finished. “Good luck to every one of you. Believe you me, Ivan will never know what hit him.”
When the big push in the West started a little before Christmas 1938, officers promised men the showgirls and bars of Paris. They didn’t quite deliver; Theo lost the end of that finger in the last failed effort at a breakthrough. Maybe this time everything would work out the way Colonel Griehl said. Theo had his doubts. He didn’t voice them. For one thing, what was the point? For another, he hardly ever voiced anything.
He was in the panzer before the appointed hour. He squeezed meat paste from a tinfoil tube onto a chunk of black bread. Not the kind of breakfast he’d eaten before conscription called, but he didn’t raise his voice to complain, either. And that meat paste was one of the best rations the Germans had. Tommies on patrol stole tubes of it from dead Landsers.
Where he sat, he couldn’t see what was going on. All he could see were his radio set, the machine pistol next to it, and the panzer commander’s behind and legs. He didn’t care. He had his own little world. He heard the order to go forward, and relayed it to Hermann Witt. And, through the Panzer II’s armor and through his earphones, he heard the thunder of the German artillery as it pounded Soviet positions to the east. Stukas would be screaming out of the sky to take out strongpoints too tough for artillery. Theo couldn’t hear them, but he knew how an attack worked.
No. He knew how an attack should work. Things always went wrong. Neither side had really known what it was doing when the Wehrmacht drove into Czechoslovakia. A good thing the Czechs were as thumb-fingered as the Germans, or that one might have failed. On the Western front, they’d tried to go too far too fast. Looking back, he could see that. At the time, it seemed easy-until, all of a sudden, it didn’t any more.
Now… The Panzer II squashed barbed wire under its tracks. Foot soldiers, whether in Feldgrau or dark Polish khaki, would be able to follow. Sergeant Witt sprayed short bursts of machine-gun fire ahead of the panzer. If the Russians had to keep their heads down, the infantrymen with the German armor would have an easier time disposing of them.
Rat-a-tat-tat! Except is wasn’t rat-a-tat-tat!, or not exactly. It was clangety-clangety-clang!, as if somebody were attacking the panzer with a rivet gun. Machine gunners couldn’t resist panzers. They also couldn’t hurt them, if you didn’t count scaring the crew half to death.
“Panzer halt!” Witt shouted. Adalbert Stoss obediently hit the brakes. The panzer commander fired a three- round burst from the 20mm main armament. “All right,” he said. “Drive on!”
Forward they went, with a whine of protest from the overstrained engine. A moving target was harder to hit, and the Panzer II’s armor, especially on the sides, wouldn’t keep out anything more than small-arms fire. Theo knew from experience what happened when something got through. His crewmates didn’t, and he hoped like hell they didn’t find out. He’d got away from his murdered first panzer in one piece. Too many guys weren’t so lucky. If he never smelled that thick reek of burnt pork…
“Enemy panzers ahead-two o’clock!” Witt shouted. Theo’s balls crawled up into his belly, not that that would save them. From what he’d seen, Russian panzer gunners weren’t very good, but they only had to be competent, or even lucky, once to slaughter a crew. But then Witt shouted again, in glad surprise: “Cancel that! They’re ours- Czech machines!”
No one but Theo heard his own sigh of relief. Of course the Wehrmacht had commandeered all the surviving Czech panzers it could. They were better than German Panzer Is and IIs, if not up to the standards of the new IIIs and IVs. But the new German panzers were still in short supply. Military administrators had got the Skoda works up and running again, turning out more of the Czech models for the Reich.
And if you were looking for the enemy, you’d see him whether he was there or not. Theo was happy Witt hadn’t opened up. One of war’s dirty little secrets that nobody liked to talk about was that you could kill friends as easily as foes. Friends could kill you, too. They’d be sorry afterwards, not that that did you a hell of a lot of good.
There were Russian panzers up ahead. Theo got the word on the radio, and relayed it to Witt. Then he heard the fearsome clang! of a round from a cannon smashing through hardened steel. It wasn’t his panzer, which was the only good thing he could say about it. That crew would never be the same.
“Panzer halt!” the commander ordered. Halt it did. He fired another three-round burst from the 20mm gun. “Got the fucker!” he yelled. “Drive on!”
On they went. Theo tried to figure out what was happening from the endless stream of radio reports he heard. They made up for not being able to see out. Everything seemed to be moving according to plan. Germans and Poles stormed forward. Russians fell back or died. Germans and Poles were dying, too. Theo knew that, but the radio didn’t talk about it. olonel Borisov eyed the flyers in his squadron. He coughed a couple of times, like a man who’d smoked too many cigarettes. He probably had, but that wasn’t tobacco roughening his throat. Sergei Yaroslavsky would have bet gold against pig turds it was embarrassment.
Just a couple of weeks before, Borisov had been loudly certain this year’s fight against the Nazis in Poland would look the same as last year’s. Well, not even a colonel was right all the time. Coughing once more, Borisov said, “The situation at the front has developed not necessarily to our advantage.”
He sounded like Radio Moscow. As it had when Vladivostok fell, the radio was doing its damnedest to make things sound better than they really were. Like the other SB-2 pilots, Sergei had flown over the front. He’d done everything he could to slow down the Germans. The radio would have faced a bigger challenge had it tried to make things out to be worse than they were.
“In certain places, the Nazis and their Polish running dogs have penetrated our lines to some degree,” Borisov went on. “Our assignment is to help whip them back to their kennels so the Red Army can resume-excuse me, can continue-its victorious offensive.”
No one laughed in his face, which proved discipline-or fear of the NKVD, assuming the two weren’t one and the same-ran deep. From the sky, you could see that the dark gray German tanks hadn’t just “penetrated” the Soviet line. They’d torn through, and were rampaging loose in the Russians’ rear. Enemy infantry moved up with them and behind them to finish off the pockets they carved out.
“Groundcrew men are fueling and bombing up our planes,” Borisov said. “We shall strike hard for the Rodina! We serve the Soviet Union!”
“We serve the Soviet Union!” the flyers echoed. They left the big tent in which he’d harangued them and hurried to their SB-2s. Sergei wondered whether he’d be able to land at this airstrip when he came back from the bombing run. The way the Germans were moving, it was almost in range of their guns. One more thing to worry about.
“Does he truly believe what he says?” Vladimir Federov asked in a troubled whisper.
Sergei would have whispered a question like that, too. “He does while he’s saying it, anyhow,” he answered, also quietly. “You can’t contradict the Party line.”
Off in the distance-not far enough in the distance-German artillery rumbled. It might have been distant thunder. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, not on this bright, sunny day. No thunderheads in the sky: only a few little white puffs. Federov jerked his head in the direction of the sound. “ That contradicts the Party line.”
Sergei didn’t feel like arguing with him. “Well, we’ll dispose of the contradictions, then, won’t we?”
