Harry Turtledove: The Big Switch

After the barrage let up, the Fritzes came forward on foot. Machine guns and accurate rifle fire soon persuaded them that they hadn’t blasted their foes to kingdom come. They pulled back, leaving a few bloody bodies on the snow between the two sides’ lines. By the same token, wounded Tommies and poilus and squareheads went back toward Namsos for treatment, as Jock had before them.

Walsh hoped he could deliver on his promise to the Yorkshireman. Doctors were nominally officers. They didn’t have to listen to a career noncom, though the ones with any sense commonly did.

Captain Beverly Murdoch seemed typical of the breed. Though overworked and indifferently shaved, his accent and the way he looked at Walsh declared him a member of the upper classes. Chaps like him, it’s no wonder a bloke like Trotsky gets a hearing, Walsh thought irreverently.

“I am given to understand you wish this man treated for his social disease in an informal fashion.” Murdoch’s tone said that ought to be a hanging matter on the off chance it wasn’t.

“Yes, sir.” Walsh kept his response as simple as he could.

“Why?” The word sounded colder than the Norwegian winter enfolding them.

“He’s a good soldier, sir. I’ve known him a long time. He took what he could get, but plenty of others would’ve done the same. I might myself, if the lady was pretty. So might you.” Walsh hoped the quack wasn’t a fairy. That would queer his pitch. “And the way things are right now, we need all the men we can find, and we need them with the best morale they can get. Since you have your pills-”

“I’d do better using them on wounded men than on those who diseased themselves,” Murdoch broke in.

“Sir, he’s wounded in war, too, in a manner of speaking. He never would have met that woman if we hadn’t been posted to Norway,” Walsh said.

“No, he would have got his dose from some French twist instead.” Murdoch sent him an unfriendly look. “And I suppose you’ll find ways to make my life miserable if I don’t play along.”

“How can I do that, sir? I’m only a staff sergeant.” Walsh might have been innocence personified.

He might have been, but the doctor knew he wasn’t. “People like you have their ways,” he said sourly. “Half the time, I think officers run the army on the sufferance of sergeants.”

Walsh thought the same thing, but more often than half the time. All the same, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Yes, likely tell.” Murdoch made a disgusted gesture. “All right. Have your way, dammit. He’ll get the bloody sulfanilamide, and I’ll write it up as a skin infection.”

“Much obliged to you, sir.” Walsh knew he might have to pay the sawbones back one day, but he’d worry about that when the time came. He had got his way, and Jock wasn’t in a jam on account of it. Except for the Norwegian winter and the advancing Nazis, everything was fine.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel had thought he’d flown his Ju-87 under primitive conditions in France. And so he had: with its heavy, fixed undercarriage, the Stuka was made for taking off and landing on dirt airstrips. All the same, he’d been flying in France, and France was a civilized country. Poland, now…

The pilot came from Silesia. He knew about Poles: knew what Germans in that part of the Reich knew about them, anyhow. They were lazy, shiftless, drunken, sneaky, not to be trusted behind your back. Nothing he saw in this village east of Warsaw made him want to change his mind. If anything, the Poles here were even worse because they hadn’t been leavened by Germans the way they had in Silesia. They were well on their way to being Russians, and how could you say anything worse about a folk?

With no Germans in these parts till the Wehrmacht came to pull the Poles’ chestnuts out of the fire, the only leavening they got was from Jews. A Jew named Fink ran the local pharmacy. Another one named Grinszpan was the village bookkeeper. Yet another named Cohen pulled teeth. A Pole owned the newspaper in Bialystok, the nearest real city, but his editor was a Jew named Blum. And on and on.

Rudel thought the Jews in the Reich had got what was coming to them after the Fuhrer took over. He knew for a fact that Poles liked Jews even less than Germans did. But he and his comrades were forbidden from giving Jews what-for here. The Poles hadn’t cleared them out of their own armed forces, even if they didn’t like them. And, no matter how the Poles felt, Jews still had legal equality in Poland.

“Orders are orders,” said Colonel Steinbrenner, the wing commander. “All we have to do is follow them.”

“They’re crazy orders,” Hans-Ulrich complained. “The Poles are on our side, but the way they act, they might as well be Bolsheviks. Plenty of Jew officers in the Red Army.”

Steinbrenner shook his head. He preferred a German-issue tent to a house in the village, which would probably be full of vermin. Hans-Ulrich felt the same way. The colonel said, “No, Lieutenant, the Poles are not on 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.