Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away

One of the signs Gurevich was still wet behind the ears was that he could bring out propaganda slogans as if they were part of his ordinary language. He hadn’t seen enough of the real world to know that slogans were like the old newspaper you wrapped around makhorka to roll yourself a cigarette. They held things together, but they weren’t why you smoked. The tobacco was.

“If the Americans use atomic bombs, we will, too?” Morozov asked, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t know much about them. But from everything he’d heard, the best way to live through one was not to be there when it went off.

“We will take whatever steps the wise Comrade Stalin decides we have to take,” Captain Gurevich replied, so he didn’t know, either. Chances were no one did, except the longtime leader of the Soviet Union.

Something else occurred to Morozov: “If our tanks head west and go over the border, will the Americans drop one of these bombs on us? Or more than one?” One will be all it takes, he thought unhappily.

“We will not go forward alone if we get the order to liberate the American zone,” Gurevich said. “The Red Air Force will move with us, and will give us the air support we need.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Konstantin said once more. That was more polite than You’ve got to be out of your goddamn mind, sir, even if, here, it meant the same thing. By the way Captain Gurevich turned red, he understood the words behind the words. That could be good. Maybe he wasn’t a total dope after all.

–

An Air Force base was like a little bit of the Midwest plopped down in whatever foreign country happened to hold it. First Lieutenant Bill Staley had been born and raised in Nebraska before moving to Washington state. He knew the Midwest when he ran into it, even if he ran into it in South Korea near the port of Pusan.

Scrambled eggs. Fried eggs. Bacon. Coffee with cream and sugar. Hash browns. Toast with butter and jam. Ham sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Fried chicken. Steak. Baked potatoes. Canned string beans. Canned peas. Apple pie. Canned fruit salad.

Movies. Touch football in the snow. If there was barbed wire around the perimeter, if guards with grease guns kept North Korean infiltrators from getting too close, you didn’t have to think about that. You also didn’t have to remember that your Aunt Susie would have hanged herself for shame at the miserable mattresses on the cots in the barracks.

The one un-Midwestern thing about the base that you couldn’t ignore was the B-29s. Without them, after all, the base wouldn’t have been there to begin with.

They were also too damn big to ignore, sitting there like a herd of four-engined dinosaurs at the end of the snow-dappled runway. The trouble was, they were like dinosaurs in more than just size. In a world of quick, nimble biting mammals, the hulking brutes got more obsolete by the day.

They’d flattened Japan. They’d had the Japs on their knees even before the A-bombs that cooked Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second World War. But what the generals who gave orders in Korea hadn’t understood was that Japan was already staggering even before the B-29s zoomed in to finish the job.

Day bombing raids against air defenses that hadn’t been smashed? Against guns and planes and radar tougher and more modern than any the Japs had had? Those didn’t work so well. The American commanders took longer than they should have to figure that out. A lot of four-engined dinosaurs and a lot of good aircrews got lost teaching them the lesson.

Bill thanked heaven he hadn’t gone down in flames or had to hit the silk over North Korea. Night missions gave the Superforts the chance to come back and try again. Even with fighter escorts, though, they were no piece of cake. He assumed Russian pilots flew the enemy’s night fighters. The North Koreans were brave, but they didn’t have the sophisticated training that kind of mission took.

When the Russians got in trouble, they scooted back across the Yalu into Red China. American planes weren’t allowed to follow them. The Russian pilots had a sanctuary on the other side of the river. Chinese troops? Same story.

No wonder they were kicking our tails in North Korea. Letting them have free rein till they crossed the Yalu made no military sense. None. Zero. Zip. You didn’t have to be General of the Army Douglas MacArthur to see that. It was as clear as clear could be to First Lieutenant Bill Staley, and to any American private on the ground up there-any the Chinks hadn’t killed or captured, anyhow.

So far, Harry Truman had said it made political sense. The President hadn’t wanted to get the United States into a big Asian war. Bill Staley could see that, too. The logistics of a war like that would have to get a lot better to reach merely terrible.

But not getting into a big Asian land war didn’t mean losing the smaller Asian land war the USA was already in. Or it had damn well better not, anyway. The horrible things the Chinese had done to the American ground forces up near the Yalu-and to the British and other UN troops that fought at their side-made losing the war and the peninsula seem much too possible.

By all the signs, losing the smaller war wasn’t going to happen, not if Truman had anything to say about it. Just that morning, a convoy from Pusan had entered the air base. Columns of trucks bringing in food and fuel and ordnance came in all the time. Bill hardly even noticed them.

This one was…different. Trucks full of chicken pieces or crates of.50-caliber ammo, tanker trucks full of avgas, were usually escorted by nothing more than halftracks or jeeps. This convoy was only three or four trucks long. It had halftracks riding shotgun fore and aft, sure, and clearing a path through the snow. And it had four top-of-the-line Pershing tanks in front of the trucks and four more behind.

Whatever that convoy was bringing in, the people who’d sent it wanted to keep it safe till it got where it was going. Those people sure as hell knew how to get what they wanted, too.

Bill Staley suspected he knew what the trucks were carrying. He wasn’t sure. He could easily have been wrong. He kept telling himself how easily he could be wrong. He hoped like anything he was.

Two days later, Brigadier General Matt Harrison, the base commander, summoned all the B-29 crews to a meeting. Some of the men-even some of the officers who sat in the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs-wondered out loud what was going on. Maybe they hadn’t seen the convoy coming in, though even a dead man should have had trouble missing it. Maybe they just had trouble adding two and two. Bill didn’t, and not just because he was a bookkeeper in the civilian world. He was pretty sure he knew why Harrison had called the meeting, no matter how he wished he didn’t. Ignorance really would have been bliss.

Harrison was in his late forties. Among the ribbons on his chest was one for the Distinguished Service Cross. The only higher decoration was the Medal of Honor. He’d done something special in the last war.

He whapped the lectern he stood behind with a pointer. It wasn’t quite a judge using his gavel, but it came close enough. Harrison drew all eyes to himself.

“Some of you will be wondering what came into the base the other day,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you. Our A-bombs now have pits. We can use them. If the President gives the order, we will use them.”

A few of the men-the clueless ones-exclaimed in surprise. Bill Staley only sighed and nodded; that was what he’d expected. The pit looked like an hourglass outline in steel. It had radioactives where the sand would have run from one side of the glass to the other. The bombardier manually inserted it into the bulky casing of an atomic bomb while the bomber was on its way to the target. Without it, the bomb wouldn’t vaporize a city. With it in place, hell could literally come forth on earth.