Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away

Joe Summers offered a suggestion about where Stalin could put the bomb. Aaron thought it was too big around to fit there, even if the boss Red greased it the way Jim said he should. He let the subject drop. You did better talking politics with Jim than you did if you talked with your dog, but not a whole lot.

They drove east on Colorado Boulevard, then south on Hill Street past the California Institute of Technology. Jim Summers’ comment on that was, “Buncha Hebes with hair they forgot to comb playin’ with slide rules.” He wouldn’t have known what to do with a slide rule if it slid up and bit him in the leg. Aaron didn’t know much himself, but he’d picked up some when he got promoted to acting assistant engineer on one of the Liberty ships he’d crewed.

The house that got the washer and dryer was of white-painted stucco with a red Spanish tile roof. Aaron was smoother than Jim at hooking up the water and gas connections, so he did that. He showed the housewife both machines were in good working order. “You have any trouble, you just call us,” he told her. “The number’s on the carbon for your form there.”

“Thank you very much,” she said, and tipped each of them a dollar. Aaron didn’t like taking money for doing what he was supposed to do, but Jim pocketed his single with the air of a man who wouldn’t have minded a fin. Declining after that would have been awkward, so Aaron kept quiet. One look at the size of the house and at the furniture told him the lady wasn’t giving them anything she couldn’t afford.

They brought the big blue truck back to the warehouse a few minutes before five-thirty. Herschel Weissman nodded to them and said, “Go on home, boys. I’ll clock you out at the bottom of the hour.”

“Obliged,” Jim told him. And he’d resent being obliged, too. His mental circuits would have trouble with the notion of a Jew being generous, and that would make him angry.

“Thanks, boss,” Aaron added. When they were by themselves, they sometimes talked to each other in Yiddish. Aaron would do that with Ruth, too-but, with her as with Weissman, never when anyone who spoke only English was around. You didn’t want to show American Americans you remembered old-country ways at all.

He went out and got into his elderly gray Nash. The rented house on Irving was only a few blocks away. Aaron smiled as he lit another Chesterfield. He wondered what little Leon had been up to today.

–

Bill Staley parked his behind on a metal folding chair. The seat felt like what it was: steel painted Air Force blue-gray. The chairs must have been ordered by the carload lot, on a contract that put cheapness ahead of everything else-certainly a long way ahead of comfort.

He had the bad feeling he knew what was coming. General Harrison wasn’t the sort to call all his aircrews together unless he had some urgent reason to do so. Urgent reasons did keep offering themselves, dammit. The Red Chinese went right on pushing forward. They spent men in gruesome heaps for every mile they advanced. The next sign they gave that that bothered them would be the first.

An American commander who used, and used up, his troops like that would have been court-martialed. He would have won himself a newspaper nickname like “Butcher” before the brass landed on him, too. Bill figured even a Russian general in the last big war would have thought twice before he expended soldiers as if they were cartridges. The Chinese had men to burn, and burned them.

General Harrison thwacked his lectern with a pointer, the way he had to open the last big meeting. “Gentlemen, I have important news,” he said as soon as the officers and noncoms quieted. “President Truman has authorized the use of atomic bombs against the Chinese inside China. He has not directly ordered us to use them, but he has given General MacArthur permission to send out such strikes if, in his view, the situation on the ground can be improved in no other way.”

Sighs, whistles, and soft hisses floated up from the aircrews. Just like everyone else, Bill Staley knew what that meant. The only word for the present situation on the ground was fubar. The Red Chinese were in Seoul. North Korea’s flag flew above the city, or what was left of it, but the men who’d taken it didn’t belong to Kim Il-sung. They got their marching orders from Mao Tse-tung.

If they hadn’t done such horrible things to the UN forces after they swarmed across the Yalu…If they hadn’t, maybe some kind of stalemate would have developed. Stalemate wasn’t the smashing victory Douglas MacArthur had looked for, but it beat hell out of the fiasco he’d got.

Bombing on this side of the Yalu hadn’t kept the Chinese from flooding down into Korea. No ordinary weapons had. But the United States had extraordinary weapons, and it had decided that repairing things here was important enough to be worth using them.

“So…What we wait for now is the command from General MacArthur,” Matt Harrison said. “I don’t know when that will come, but I don’t think we’ll have to wait very long.”

Bill didn’t think they’d have to wait long, either. MacArthur’s military reputation had been on a roller-coaster ride the past few months. He’d looked like a genius after the Inchon landing. That had retaken Seoul and forced the North Koreans to pull back out of the south to keep from getting cut off by the forces suddenly in their rear. He’d planned on wiping Kim Il-sung’s army-and maybe Kim Il-sung’s country-off the map right after that.

But he hadn’t planned on the Chinese incursion when the forces he led neared the Yalu. He hadn’t planned on it, and he hadn’t been able to stop it. Only stragglers had escaped from the army in the north. Resupplying by air just prolonged the agony, as it had for the Germans trapped in Stalingrad. And the German cargo planes hadn’t needed to worry about jet fighters tearing into them.

So if he was going to put Humpty-Dumpty together again, he’d have to break some Chinese eggs instead. Which was fine if nobody could retaliate. Japan hadn’t been able to when fire fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao didn’t have any atomic bombs. But Stalin did.

Whether he’d use them or not…was something everybody would find out. Maybe the show of force would overawe him. Maybe he would think Mao had gone in over his head and deserved what he got. Or maybe the world would find itself in the middle of a new big war when not all the scabs from the old big war had fallen off the wounds.

Brigadier General Harrison rapped the lectern one more time. “Something else you need to know, gentlemen,” he said. “Aerial reconnaissance shows that the Russians are moving fighters and bombers onto airstrips in southeastern Siberia, and in Manchuria as well. They are getting ready for trouble, and we are the trouble they’re getting ready for.”

“Great,” muttered a man sitting behind Bill Staley. That was about what he was thinking himself. By World War II standards, the B-29 was indeed the Superfortress. But World War II was over, even if its maladies lingered on. It was 1951. The state of the art had advanced.

In 1917, the Sopwith Camel had been a world-beating fighter. Run it up against a Messerschmitt 109 and it wouldn’t last long. For that matter, a Messerschmitt’s life expectancy against an F-86 would be just as brief.

Bill wished he didn’t think that way. A lot of guys simply did what they were told and didn’t worry about anything past the mission. His mind jumped here and there, every which way, like a frog on a hot sidewalk.

He wasn’t the only one. A flyer stuck up his hand and asked, “Sir, what happens if they try and bomb this air base before we move?”

“Then they involve themselves directly in the fighting and have to take the consequences of that,” Harrison replied. Everybody knew most of the enemy MiG-15s that harassed American pilots had Russians in the cockpit. But those were unofficial Russians, as it were. You couldn’t stay unofficial when you dropped bombs on somebody’s head…could you? Harrison went on, “We do fly a day-and-night combat air patrol, and we have radar sweeping the sky. We won’t make it easy for them.”