our side.”
“Sir?” Hans-Ulrich repeated in surprise.
“The Poles are not on our side,” Steinbrenner repeated. “If they sent troops to France to fight alongside our men there, those troops would be on our side. In Poland, we’re on their side. They asked us in to help against the Russians. We have to play by their rules here, not by ours.”
“No matter how stupid those rules are,” Rudel said.
“No matter,” the wing commander agreed. “The only reason the Poles don’t hate us worse than the Ivans is, the Ivans hit them first. We can’t afford to give them an excuse to turn on us.”
That did make military sense. Even so, Hans-Ulrich said, “They ought to be grateful we’re giving them a hand. Without us, the Russians would be in Warsaw by now, and how would the Poles like that?”
“Not much. They’d probably fall to pieces-and then we’d have the Red Army on our border,” Steinbrenner said. “That would be just what we need, wouldn’t it? With us up to our eyebrows in the west, they could give us one straight up the ass. They’d do it, too. In a heartbeat, they would.”
Rudel didn’t argue with him. When you were a first lieutenant, arguing with a colonel was a losing proposition. Besides, here Steinbrenner was pretty plainly right. “I guess so, sir,” Hans-Ulrich said. “And everybody could see we were going to take a whack at the Bolsheviks sooner or later.”
“That’s what the Fuhrer ’s always wanted to do, all right,” Steinbrenner said.
“But he’s always wanted to pay the Jews back for betraying the Vaterland at the end of the last war, too.”
“One thing at a time-when you can, anyhow,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. “That’s only good strategy. First we win the war. Then we take care of anything else that needs doing. You can count on the General Staff to have the sense to see as much.”
Most of the high-ranking officers who’d tried to overthrow Hitler at Christmastime the year before served on the General Staff. Hans-Ulrich Rudel was not the most politic of men, but even he could see that pointing out as much to his superior would win him no points. Besides, he knew Steinbrenner was loyal. The wing commander had replaced another officer in France: one suspected of insufficient enthusiasm for the National Socialist cause. Where was the other fellow now? Dachau? Belsen? A hole in the ground? Better not to wonder about such things.
When the weather cleared enough to let him fly, Rudel felt nothing but relief. In the air, he didn’t have to think about Jews or politics or the price of being mistrusted by the government. He had to look for Red Army panzers. That was it. When he found them, he had to dive on them and shoot them up. His Ju-87 carried a 37mm cannon under each wing. The extra weight and drag made the Stuka even more of a lumbering pig in the air than it would have been otherwise. If Red Air Force fighters jumped him, he’d go into some Russian pilot’s trophy case. Till that evil day came, if it ever did, he was very bad news.
“Everything clear behind us, Albert?” he asked through the brass speaking tube.
“If it weren’t, I’d be screaming my head off.” Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst was rear gunner and radioman. He and Rudel sat back-to-back, separated by an armored bulkhead. If anyone had a better understanding than Hans- Ulrich of how limited the Stuka was in the air, Dieselhorst was the man.
The Ivans were masters of camouflage. Whitewash and concealment under trees or white cloth could make it hard to spot a panzer on the ground at a hundred meters, let alone from several thousand up in the air. But not even the Russians could hide the long shadows panzers cast on the snow. “There they are!” Hans-Ulrich yipped excitedly.
“Go get ’em, Lieutenant,” Dieselhorst said. It was all news to him. Like Epimetheus in the Greek myth, he could see only where he’d already been.
Hans-Ulrich heeled the Ju-87 into a dive. He hung suspended against his harness for a moment. Then building acceleration shoved him back into his seat. It would be trying to tear the rear gunner from his and throw him out of the plane over his machine gun.
Down on the ground, the panzers swelled from specks to toys to real, deadly whitewashed machines. He dove from behind. When he struck, he fired a round from each gun at the engine compartment. The steel on the decking there was thin, and pierced to let heat escape. He hauled back on the stick as hard as he could to pull the Stuka out of the dive.
“Nailed him!” Sergeant Dieselhorst yelled through the tube. “He’s on fire!”
“Good.” Hans-Ulrich climbed as steeply as he could. He picked another camouflaged panzer and dove on it. Two more rounds. Another burning machine, or so the rear gunner assured him. Some of the crewmen on the other panzers popped out of hatches to blaze away at the Ju-87 with pistols and submachine guns, but Rudel wouldn’t lose any sleep over that. Small-arms fire could bring down an airplane, but it didn’t happen every day, or every month, either.
He blasted three more Russian panzers. The rest started up and skedaddled for the nearest trees. Then Dieselhorst said, “I’m getting reports of planes in the neighborhood.”
“All right. We’ll go home.” Hans-Ulrich had heard the reports in his earphones, too. He hadn’t wanted to do anything about that. Sometimes discretion was the better part of valor, though. He could gas up again and hit the Ivans on a stretch of front where they didn’t have any air cover.
A flak shell burst under the Stuka, staggering it in the sky. No, the Russians didn’t want him around anymore. He gave the plane more throttle. If they’d got set up a little sooner, they might have knocked him down. Not now.
“Just another morning at the office,” Sergeant Dieselhorst said.
“Aber naturlich.” Hans-Ulrich laughed. Why not? Just another day at the office, sure-and they’d lived through it.
Sergeant Hideki Fujita had thought winter in the Siberian forests was about as bad as anything could be. It was worse than winter on the border with Mongolia, which made it pretty appalling. But winter in front of Vladivostok turned out to be worse yet. It was as cold as the rest of Siberia, with the same wet, heavy snowfall. But it was out in the open-nowhere to hide from the relentlessly probing Russian artillery.
The Red Army was always ass-deep in guns. Russian artillerymen had harried the Japanese on the frontier between Manchukuo and Mongolia. They’d fused their shells to burst as soon as they touched the treetops in the woods, showering Japanese forces astride the Trans-Siberian Railway with deadly fragments. And, here in front of their Far Eastern port, they tried to murder anything that moved.
They came much too close to succeeding. Kilometer upon kilometer of barbed wire and entrenchments ringed Vladivostok. The Soviet Union had always known it might have to fight for the place one day. If Japan was going to take it, her soldiers would have to winkle out the Red Army men one foxhole at a time.
More than a generation earlier, the fight for Port Arthur had gone the same way. Some of the men commanding at Vladivostok would have been junior officers in the earlier fight. Fujita hoped they’d learned something in the intervening years. By everything he could see, it didn’t seem likely.
He mostly huddled in a dugout scraped from the forward wall of a trench. Digging was anything but easy. The ground was frozen hard as stone. It wouldn’t collapse under shellfire, which was something. Not enough, not as far as Fujita was concerned.
Japanese and Russian cannon dueled with one another. Machine guns made sticking your head up over the parapet tantamount to committing seppuku. Runners who brought rice and other food up from the field kitchens risked their life with every trip. Even when they made it through, meals were commonly cold by the time they reached the frontline soldiers.
Rumors flew thick and fast as bullets. Some people said the Russian commander was about to surrender, the way the nobleman in charge of Port Arthur had in 1905. Fujita didn’t believe that one. He’d spent too long fighting the Russians to doubt they were in earnest. They might bungle things-they weren’t always skillful soldiers. But, no matter what they’d been like in 1905, no one who fought them now could think they’d quit so easily.
Other rumors claimed the Japanese would soon charge the works in front of them again. Fujita had to hope those weren’t true. Too many frozen corpses still sprawled suspended in the wire ahead. Along with solidifying the ground, the cold meant dead bodies didn’t stink. Having said those two things, you exhausted its virtues.
Fujita wanted the generals to come up with something brilliant, or at least clever. If they tried something like that, he was less likely to get killed or maimed than if they just pounded away. They didn’t seem to worry about that. As far as generals were concerned, soldiers were only munitions of war, expendable as machine-gun bullets or
