Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

“Okay,” Pete said, which committed him to nothing.

But Bob Cullum proved as good as his word. By the time the carrier did get to Hawaii, Pete had clothes that fit better than approximately. He had a wallet with five dollars in it. He had an obligation, too, and he knew it. When he and Cullum got some liberty, he’d be doing the buying.

He didn’t mind. The other sergeant was plainly a guy with an eye for the main chance. If Cullum figured Pete might be connected to the main chance one way or another … What am I supposed to do? Pete thought. Hope the son of a bitch is wrong?

Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s flying suit was made from fur and leather. No matter where you took off from, up above 5,000 meters the air was not only thin but far below freezing cold. In Russian winter, that flying suit came in handy when you were still down on terra firma . Rudel all but lived in it from first snowfall to spring’s grudging arrival months later.

He sat in the cockpit of his Ju-87 at the end of a runway made by flattening out a long, narrow strip of wheatfield. The fall rains and the thick, gluey mud they brought were over. The ground under the Stuka’s landing gear was frozen as hard as Stalin’s heart.

He spoke into the voice tube: “Radio behaving, Albert?”

“Seems to be, sir,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered, voice brassy through the tube. Along with the radio, he was in charge of a rear-facing machine gun. Both he and Hans-Ulrich always hoped he didn’t have to use it. The Stuka was a fine dive-bomber, but it had been in trouble against even the Czech biplane fighters it faced at the very beginning of the war. Fighters these days were a lot nastier-although the Ivans still threw biplanes at the Luftwaffe . The Ivans, from everything Hans-Ulrich had seen, threw whatever they could get their hands on at their foes. If not all of it was top quality, it could still do some damage before it went down in flames. That was how they seemed to think, anyhow.

A groundcrew man yanked at the starting crank in front of the port wing. The crank was hard to move; another mechanic joined the first fellow in coveralls. The Junkers Jumo engine roared to life. Smoke and flame belched from the exhaust pipes. The prop blurred into invisibility. The groundcrew men carefully stepped away from the plane. If you weren’t careful around a spinning prop, it could cost you your head-literally. At least one groundcrew man had been shipped home from Russia in a coffin sealed tight because of a split second’s inattention.

“Everything look good, Herr Oberleutnant ?” Dieselhorst asked-shouted, really, because the racket was terrific even inside the sound-proofed cockpit. Outside … Like artillerymen, a lot of the Luftwaffe troops in the groundcrew wore earplugs to try to save some of their hearing.

Hans-Ulrich checked the instrument panel. “All green, Albert,” he answered, and gave the guys outside a thumbs-up to let them know the Stuka was ready to take off. They waved back.

The dive-bomber lumbered down the unpaved airstrip (as far as Rudel knew, there were no paved ones this side of Warsaw). When it reached takeoff speed, Hans-Ulrich hauled back on the stick, hard. The Stuka’s nose came up. It sedately started to fly, rather like a fat old man doing a slow breaststroke across a public pool.

No Ju-87 ever made was or would be or could be a hot performer. All the same, Hans-Ulrich wished that particular comparison hadn’t occurred to him. The weight and drag of the twin 37mm panzer-busting cannon under his wings only made his Stuka even more of a beast than it would have been anyhow. He’d used guns like this pair to blast enemy panzers here and, earlier, in France. He’d even knocked down a couple of fighters with them, more from desperation than tactical brilliance.

And he’d been shot down twice, once in France and once here in Russia. He and Sergeant Dieselhorst had both managed to bail out twice, and hadn’t hurt themselves too badly either time. No enemy pilot had machine-gunned them while they hung helpless under their big silk canopies, either. The Frenchman who’d got Rudel’s first Stuka must not have thought that was sporting. Victorious German pilots also didn’t murder defenseless French flyers.

The Ivans … There were no guarantees with the Ivans, none at all. Hans-Ulrich knew how lucky they were not to have got perforated when the Russian pilot shot them down.

He spiraled slowly upwards. He wanted to gain altitude before he crossed the front and went hunting on the Soviet side. You couldn’t die of old age waiting for your altimeter to unwind. It only seemed as if you could.

“Three thousand meters,” he said at last to Dieselhorst. “Oxygen time.”

“I’m doing it,” the rear gunner/radioman answered. “Delicious.”

“Well, that’s one word,” Hans-Ulrich said with a laugh. Sucked in through a rubber hose, the bottled oxygen always reminded him of gnawing on a tire tread.

He flew north and east, in the general direction of Smolensk. If everything had gone the way the Fuhrer and the General Staff wanted, the city would have fallen to the Wehrmacht before the fall rains slowed everyone’s operations to a crawl. (Of course, if everything had gone the way the Fuhrer and the General Staff wanted, Paris would have fallen to German blitzkrieg before winter 1939 turned to spring. You had to deal with what you got, not with what you wanted.)

Other Stukas droned on in the same general direction. They spread across the sky too loosely to be in anything worth dignifying by the name of formation. They had no set target. If someone spotted something that seemed worth going after down on the snowy ground, he’d attack it. If not, he’d keep going.

If someone spotted something … The Russians had forgotten more about the art of camouflage than Germany knew. That was one of the reasons the hammer and sickle still flew above Smolensk: one of the reasons Smolensk still shielded Moscow from attack. The Wehrmacht had got more than its share of bloody noses on the way east from forces whose existence it hadn’t suspected till it ran into them face-first.

“Hello!” Rudel exclaimed. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” Sergeant Dieselhorst asked. Like Epimetheus in the myth, he could see only what already lay behind him.

“Train heading north,” Hans-Ulrich said. “They’ve whitewashed the cars and the locomotive, but you can’t whitewash the smoke plume coming up out of the stack.” He spoke into the radio, too, alerting his squadron CO to what he’d found and where he thought it was.

“Go get it, Rudel,” Colonel Steinbrenner answered. “Somebody may show up to give you a hand, too. Here’s hoping it’s a troop train full of French traitors on their way up to Murmansk or Arkhangelsk.”

“Yes, sir. Here’s hoping.” Rudel switched off the radio and called into the speaking tube: “I’m going to shoot up the cars and then give the engine a couple of 37mm rounds through the boiler.”

“That ought to do it, by God,” Dieselhorst declared.

“It had better. And when I pull up, give the train a burst from your machine gun, too,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“It’ll be a pleasure,” the rear gunner replied.

Hans-Ulrich didn’t have to stand the Stuka on its nose to attack the train. He came in at a shallow angle, flying slowly, and shot it up from back to front and from only a few meters above the cars. Then, as he’d promised, he blasted the locomotive the way he was in the habit of shooting up enemy panzers through the thin engine decking that didn’t do enough to protect them from attack from the air.

As he pulled back the stick to climb for another attack if he needed one, Dieselhorst did rake the train with a long burst from his MG-34. “That engine’s blowing steam like a whale,” the sergeant reported. “They won’t be able to keep going like that for long.… Ja , the fucker’s already slowing down.”