Harry Turtledove - Alternate Generals

Would not want to explain himself at that debriefing.

Weird impulse to instruct them on the priority of targets.

He’d slowed to pull up. Queasy. The hounds were still baying on his tail. Closing now.

“Come back here, you coward! I got you now! I got you!”

You boys do know that I always fly with a wingman…?

“Reg! On your six! On your six!”

Karls voice: “AbschussI” Homeward to paint another mark on his wingman’s tail fin and review the mission.

Knew the news wasn’t all good. His daylight bombers received a proper pasting from the R.A.F and the USAAF fighters. There were simply too many of them, too eager.

He’d even lost a 262 to a propeller-driven crate. Been sucked into a tail chase with a Spitfire YO-D over Tangmere. Old tactics don’t work in a new aircraft.

The pilot did not survive. You can’t crawl out against g’s in a diving 262.

At least the wreckage had fallen into the water, riot into British hands.

The jets should have struck the Allies with terror. There was no terror in a Mustang’s heart. They made you feel rather like one of the royal stags at the Reichsjaegerhof.

Not something to be feared. Something to be bagged.

Keen. They were all keen. All the young men who had missed the Kanalkampf—the Battle of Britain, they called it on the far side of the Ditch. Those that had been too young. They were jolly eager to get into it now.

The overeager Tommies were good for taking out a few of their American friends. A Mustang had the same angular wings as Tommys old nemesis, the ME 109E.

Of course, Moelders knew he had sent no short-winded 109’s against England this time. So he told his Luftwaffe, if it looks like a 109, shoot it.

The next wave was a huge success. Bombers at 30,000 feet without fighter escort. The maiden ops of the Arado 234 jet bomber.

The Arados had scant defensive armament—two guns, rear-firing, the only view an Allied fighter would ever get of them. Didn’t have to fire them. No one even came close.

The Arados dropped their babies and came home unmolested. Landed under an umbrella of flak to beat back the Mustangs that dogged them home.

Could have used a dozen more squadrons of them.

But it was a miracle he had any. During Moelders’ tenure as Director General of Equipment it had been a battle to keep production focused on a few workable designs, while egos thick as enemy groundfire kept threatening to funnel resources off to someone else’s pet project.

The first day would prove to be his luckiest. From there he learned just how big and angry a hornets’ nest he’d kicked.

Still it had been the right decision. The only decision.

What else was there? Wait for the ground troops to come to shore? He shuddered. Wouldn’t that have been one of history’s colossal blunders? The Allies had to be thinking twice about launching all those men into the water now.

Dieppe. Hoped they remembered Dieppe.

The Allies were quick to bring the battle back to France.

Straightaway they rooted out the airfields with the long

runways to hit the jets on the ground. Rat-catching, they called it.

Pounding of 88-mm guns announced their coming.

And soon the humming of heavy engines.

Viermots. B-17’s. Saw them lumbering over the horizon under a Mustang cloud as his 262 surged into the air with racks of 55-mm rockets under either wing. Resist like hell punching the throttle. Felt like a land bound walrus on takeoff.

Became an archangel at altitude.

Even angels blanched at the sight of an oncoming box of B-17’s. A fortress of fortresses, bristling with weapons.

How to attack it? The top? From underneath? Sides?

They were already here and he had run out of options.

Head on it is.

Released the safety on the rockets, turned into the attack. Radioed Karl, “Follow me.”

“Vati, do you know what you’re doing?”

Knew full well he didn’t. No one had ever attacked a box of viermots with a jet before. Making up tactics as he went along.

Closing speed was ungodly. The big bombers loomed.

Got huge just like that.

Karl: “Vati, where are we going?”

“Don’t blink. And when you break, break upward.”

Screen full of B-17. Swear he could see the pilot’s eyes.

“Lost” Rockets away and wrench the column back.

Climb!

Vision narrowed into a tunnel. Tunnel to a dot. Grunt against gs. Ease out of the turn.

The tunnel widened. Swallow back nausea. Karl whooping in his ears.

“That’ll make you forget your wife!”

Not habit-forming. Blink. Swallow hard. Swallow again.

Look back where his B-17 hobbled, smoked, dropped from the box.

Waves of boxes behind it dropped bombs on his runway.

Prayed his Erk had found a safe place to hide.

Smell of J2 fuel doing loops in his stomach.

Trying to climb high enough to turn and hit again.

Anytime you give up speed, there’s always a Mustang waiting for you. It was a law of nature.

Lost track of the other half of his schwarm.

“Fritz, are you here?”

Fritz’s voice: “I have eighty-nine of them cornered.”

Turned. Raked up a straggling viermot with cannon fire.

Then searched for a place to put down.

His alternate airfield looked like the face of the moon.

Had a sudden memory of jabbing a landing on a muddy runway during the Phony War. Gear had stabbed in the soft ground. Done a truly capital nose-over. Do that in a jet, he’d get worse than a stiff back. Jets burned like hell. Like hell itself.

Couldn’t really picture himself without skin.

Still reluctant to abandon ship. Ended up landing on a highway, French farmer, sweating rivers, drove them back to their gutted airfield. Erks in black coveralls busy as ants.

Both sides had learned during the Kanalkampfthat a destroyed airfield does not stay destroyed. Put out the fires. Fill in the holes. Ferry the 262’s back to the field and we’re in it again.

Fighting more furious than he could ever remember.

Losses were staggering.

The objectives of the combatants were the same as they had been that summer of 1940; only reversed. Now, while the Allies needed to gain complete air superiority to cover their invasion force, the Luftwaffe need only survive until autumn when the English Channel grew teeth.

It was the kind of battle you don’t know you’ve won until much later. A thing not happening was certain only in retrospect.

The days of spring bled and smoldered and rained together. Worst weather in twenty years.

A day. A Tuesday. Like the rest. The weather was bad early. Sides cleared in patches through the afternoon.

More losses. English harbors choking up black clouds from burning oil spills. The Channel water was rough.

Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel telephoned before the line was cut again. He had slipped back to Berlin two days before—by car, as OKW didn’t like its commanders to fly. Rommel called because the tides were right, he said. Had a fear of the land battle starting without him.

Trusted Moelders to give him a straight, accurate answer.

“No. You’re not missing the show,” Moelders assured him.

“It’s still an air war. Try to enjoy your leave. You get few enough of them.” Glanced at the date in his diary. Remembered, before he rang off, “Say happy birthday to Lucie.” That was June 6.

By November everyone knew there would be no invasion from the West this year. Hitler was calling it a victory, the fatal blow to all their enemies—as if a buildup of forces did not yet threaten on the far side of the Alps, or the Bear’s millions weren’t pushing back in force, or bombs from Britain did not still rain from the sky every night.

Hitler swore revenge on that warmonger Roosevelt.