Harry Turtledove: The Man with the Iron Heart

“Awful lot of guys just want to head on home an’ pick up their lives where they left off,” Sergeant Benton remarked. “Hell, I sure do.” He was a draftee, then.

“I know. So do I,” Lou said. He’d been teaching high school English in Jersey City when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. Nothing would make him happier than going back to diagramming sentences. But he was not the master of his fate or the captain of his soul. The master of his fate was back in Nuremberg, waiting to hear what he had to say about this. He sighed. What could he say that wasn’t obvious?

Benton’s eyes slid to what was left of the two GIs’ bodies. Those would either get buried in a military cemetery here or go back to the States in sealed coffins, probably with sandbags to keep them company and make them weigh what they should. Lou hoped the Graves Registration people would plant them here. The less these guys’ relatives knew about what had happened to them, the better.

He walked over to the jeep that had brought him out from Nuremberg. Benton had his own jeep. A bored-looking private sat in Lou’s machine, checking out a magazine full of girls in pinup poses. Reluctantly, the driver set down the literature. “Take you back now, sir?” he asked. Violation of the surrender terms? A honking big crater and two mangled bodies? He probably didn’t care much about anything, but he cared more about the leg art than this business.

And maybe he had the right attitude, too.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Lou said.

The driver started the engine. Jeeps were almost as reliable as Zippos. They fired up first time every time. Not much traffic on the road. What there was was nearly all U.S. military: olive-drab vehicles marked with a white star, usually inside a white circle.

Lou didn’t get his ass in an uproar about trucks and jeeps and halftracks that ran. He didn’t worry about the Germans he saw, either, even though a lot of them still wore Feldgrau and some hadn’t handed in their weapons yet. But he flinched whenever he rolled by crumpled metal wreckage-and there was plenty of it. If those Nazi schmucks had booby-trapped one dead truck, who could say they hadn’t done it to more than one?

Nuremberg looked as if God had jumped on it with both feet and then spent a while kicking it, like a kid throwing a tantrum. The town where the Nazis threw their big wingdings, the town where Leni What’s-her-name filmed Triumph of the Will, was the biggest rubble field in the world.

Or maybe not. Lou hadn’t seen Berlin yet. The Russians played for keeps. And well they might. Hitler’s team had come that close- that close-to doing unto them instead, and they had to know it. It never occurred to most Americans that they might have lost the war. The Atlantic and Pacific didn’t shield the USSR from nasty neighbors. Fighting their way west across their own smashed and shattered country, Red Army men could see what a narrow escape they’d had.

Lou suddenly snickered, which made the driver look at him as if he’d started picking his nose. He didn’t care. Suppose that truck had been sabotaged by organized diehards who weren’t ready to quit. Maybe they thought Americans were too soft to give them what they deserved. Maybe they were even right.

But he would have bet dollars to doughnuts that the surviving Nazis had too much sense to piss off the Russians. He laughed again, louder this time. If the krauts didn’t have that kind of sense, the Reds would be happy-fucking delighted-to pound it into them.

Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Koniev was about as unhappy as a jubilant man could be. His First Ukrainian Front had done everything an army group could do to smash the last German defenses in the east. It had broken into Berlin, and paid its share in blood to take Hitler’s capital away from him and throw the Third Reich into the coffin it deserved.

So far, so good. But Stalin’s orders gave the most important targets in Berlin to Marshal Zhukov’s First Byelorussian Front. “ Yob tvoyu mat’, Georgi Konstantinovich,” Koniev muttered.

No matter what he said about Zhukov’s mother, Koniev hadn’t really expected anything else. Hoped, yes; expected, no. Zhukov was Stalin’s fair-haired boy, and that was that. Stalin trusted Zhukov not to try to overthrow him: the kind of trust a dictator didn’t give lightly-or, sometimes, at all. Having given it, Stalin could afford to be extravagant in giving Zhukov anything else he fancied.

That Zhukov was a damned good general had nothing to do with anything, not so far as Koniev was concerned. Without false modesty, the commander of the First Ukrainian Front knew he was a damned good general himself. So did Zhukov. And so did Stalin.

All the same, Stalin had only one favorite. Koniev knew he wasn’t it. Zhukov was. So Zhukov’s men got the Chancellery and the Fuhrer ’s bunker. It seemed unfair. It certainly did to Koniev, whose men broke into Berlin ahead of the other marshal’s.

“Nichevo,” Koniev said. And it couldn’t be helped, not unless he felt like quarreling with Stalin. He might be-he was-irked, but he wasn’t suicidal.

Scrawny Germans, many still in threadbare uniforms, trudged gloomily through Berlin’s wreckage-strewn streets. They got out of the way in a hurry when Red Army men came by. If they didn’t, they’d pay for it. The stench of death hung in the air. Corpses still lay in the gutters, and sometimes in the middle of the street. Quite a few of them had got there after the surrender. No surviving Germans wanted to give the conquerors an excuse to add more.

Off in the distance, a woman shrieked. A Russian a few meters from Marshal Koniev chuckled. “One more cunt getting what she deserves,” he said. His buddies laughed out loud.

Koniev didn’t. The Red Army had avenged Nazi atrocities inside the USSR ever since it crossed the Reich ’s borders. Berlin was no exception. Who’d wanted to say the Russian and Asiatic soldiers couldn’t have their fun after the war’s last battle? They owed the Germans plenty. But discipline was supposed to be returning. That scream-and others like it Koniev had heard in the ten days since the surrender-argued it still wasn’t all the way back.

Which went a long way towards explaining why almost all the Germans Koniev could see were men. German women feared Red Army soldiers would drag them off and gang-rape them if they showed themselves. They might have been right, too. They’d be safe enough in a few weeks. Not yet.

A driver came up to Koniev and saluted. “Comrade Marshal, your car is ready,” the man said.

“Good,” Koniev said. “Very good. I won’t be sorry to get out of this place for a while. It stinks.”

“Sure does.” The driver didn’t seem to care. “If you’ll come with me, sir…”

The car was a captured Kubelwagen -the German equivalent of a U.S. jeep-with red stars painted all over it to keep trigger-happy Russians from shooting it up. The driver carried a PPSh41 submachine gun to fight off not only stupid friends but stubborn enemies. Little dying spatters of resistance went on. Massive reprisals killed plenty of Germans, and would eventually snuff out the resistance, too-Koniev was confident of that.

Even a couple of kilometers outside of Berlin, the air improved. And then, abruptly, it got worse again: the Kubelwagen rattled past the bloated carcasses of a dozen cows in a cratered meadow. Koniev scowled at the stink, and also at the waste. “Our men should have butchered those animals,” he said.

“Sorry, Comrade Marshal.” The driver sounded afraid Koniev would think it was his fault. He added, “I never saw the beasts till this minute.”

“All right, Corporal.” While the fighting was still going on, Koniev might have looked to blame…somebody, anyhow. With the war over, he could afford to be more easygoing.