Hitler's war
- Автор: Тертлдав Гарри Норман
- Серия: The War that came early #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Альтернативная история
Электронная книга - «Hitler's war». Краткое содержание книги:
Now, in this thrilling, provocative, and fascinating alternate history by Harry Turtledove, another scenario is played out: What if Chamberlain had not signed the accord? What if Hitler had acted rashly, before his army was ready-would such impatience have helped him or doomed him faster? Here is an action-packed, blow-by-blow chronicle of the war that might have been-and the repercussions that might have echoed through history-had Hitler reached too far, too soon, and too fast.
Turtledove uses dozens of points of view to tell this story: from American marines serving in Japanese-occupied China to members of a Jewish German family with a proud history of war service to their nation, from ragtag volunteers fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain to an American woman desperately trying to escape Nazi-occupied territory-and witnessing the war from within the belly of the beast.
A novel that reveals the human face of war while simultaneously riding the twists and turns that make up the great acts of history, Hitler's War is the beginning of an exciting new alternate history saga. Here is a tale of powerful leaders and ordinary people, of spies, soldiers, and traitors, of the shifting alliances that draw some together while tearing others apart. At once authoritative, brilliantly imaginative, and hugely entertaining, Hitler's War captures the beginning of a very different World War II-with a very different fate for our world today.
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“You! Dernen!” Arno Baatz had a voice as effortlessly penetrating as a dentist’s drill.
“Yes, Corporal?” Willi Dernen did his best to sound meek and mild. He didn’t want trouble from a lousy Unteroffizier, not now, not when they were about to give the poilus the big one right in the teeth. Guys promoted to noncom went off to a special school for a while. Willi didn’t know what went on there, but he figured it was where they turned you into a son of a bitch if you weren’t one already.
Baatz glared at him, there in the gloom of earliest dawn. “Have you got your full ammunition supply?”
“Yes, Corporal,” Willi repeated-truthfully. Only a dope didn’t bring along as many rounds and as many rations as he could, and Frau Dernen hadn’t raised any dopes.
Had he been lying, Baatz would have had to feel him up to prove it. You still couldn’t see anything more than ten centimeters from the end of your nose. That didn’t bother Willi. A Frenchman who could see you was a Frenchman who could blow your brains out.
Muttering, the corporal stomped off to harass somebody else. Beside Willi, Wolfgang Storch chuckled almost silently. “Awful Arno’s on the rag early today, isn’t he?”
“What was that, Storch?” Baatz snapped. His ears stuck out like jug handles. Maybe that was what made them so sharp.
“Nothing, Corporal,” Wolfgang said. Baatz went right on muttering, but he didn’t come back. He might have heard, but he hadn’t understood. Just like a corporal, Willi thought.
Before Willi could say that out loud and get a laugh from Storch, hundreds-no, thousands-of German guns opened up. Everywhere from the North Sea to the Swiss border, they hurled death and devastation at the enemies of the Reich. Through the thunder, Willi heard the steadier rumble of aircraft engines overhead. Their takeoffs must have been timed so they’d cross the border just when the artillery bombardment opened. Right now, the damned Frenchies would be thinking hell had opened up on earth. And they wouldn’t be so far wrong.
Lieutenant Neustadt blew his whistle. He looked so young, it almost seemed a boy’s plaything when he did. But his voice, more bass than baritone, gave that the lie: “Forward! Now we get to see France for ourselves!”
The French had seen little bits of Germany. Willi aimed to do more than that. He wanted to goose-step through Paris in a victory parade. His great-grandfather had done it after the Franco-Prussian War. His father never stopped complaining that he hadn’t got the chance. Willi wanted it.
There was the place just on the German side of the border where the French troops had camped when he and Wolfgang spied on them. There was the crossing point the Germans had booby-trapped when they pulled back after the real war against Czechoslovakia started. Now Willi needed to look back over his shoulder to see it. That meant, that had to mean, he was in France.
If you stood on the other guy’s soil, you were winning. The last time around, the Allies never did drive Germany all the way out of France and Belgium. Things fell apart on the home front before they could. And here the Wehrmacht was again.
A rifle boomed up ahead. A French machine gun opened up, its fire noticeably slower than a German MG-34’s. Somebody not too far from Willi fell over and grabbed at his leg. He yelped and ki-yied like a dog hit by a car. “Medic!” The shout went up from half a dozen throats.
“Keep moving!” Arno Baatz yelled. “Even if they’ve mined the fields, keep moving!”
Even if they’ve mined the fields? Willi thought. He suddenly didn’t want to move at all. Corporal Baatz had a way of encouraging his men, all right. Lieutenant Neustadt’s whistle shrilled. “We need to go forward!” he called. “Victory lies ahead! Paris, too!” That made a pretty good antidote to Baatz’s minefields.
French shells screamed in-not many, but enough to send men and pieces of men flying. Willi’s father had talked about the goddamn French 75s in the last war. Here they were again, and just as horrific if you were on the receiving end.
In the last war, Germany couldn’t do much about them. Now Stukas swooped down on the French batteries, underwing sirens wailing like damned souls. Bombs going off were much louder than shells. The French artillery quieted down in a hurry. Willi trotted past a gun pit a few minutes later. He looked at what was left of the 75 and its crew. Gulping, he wished he hadn’t.
More rifle fire came from behind a stone fence. The Landsers moved to outflank the defenders even before Corporal Baatz started yelling commands. Willi plopped down in a shell hole and banged away at the poilus by the fence. After a few minutes, one of them waved something white.
Neustadt shouted to them in French. Willi didn’t speak a word of it. The French soldiers stood up with their hands high. In their long greatcoats and crested helmets, they looked as if they’d come from the last war. The lieutenant jerked his thumb toward the east. Nodding, babbling with gratitude for not getting shot out of hand, the poilus stumbled away into captivity.
“They’ll have watches. They’ll have cash,” Wolfgang said discontentedly. “Now the rear-echelon assholes’ll clean ‘em out.”
“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” Willi said-he was less inclined to grumble than his friend. “You think they’re the only froggies we’ll catch?”
“Well…no,” Storch admitted. “But maybe they had extra-good stuff. We’ll never find out.”
Up ahead, a Panzer I was burning. Something heavier than a machine gun had hit the little panzer and knocked it out. One crewman in black coveralls lay dead a few meters away. The other-the driver-hadn’t made it all the way out. He was on fire, too. Willi gulped again. The stink reminded him of a pork roast forgotten in the oven.
But other panzers kept pushing forward. They shot up or ran over French machine-gun nests. That made life a lot easier for the foot soldiers who followed in their wake. Willi didn’t mind not facing machine guns, not even a little bit.
More Frenchmen surrendered. As he’d predicted, Willi got himself a small wad of francs and a watch with a case that looked like gold. There were corpses to plunder, too, if you had the stomach for it. Dead men and pieces of dead men…Willi was astonished at how fast he got used to them or developed a knack for not thinking about them. Definitely better not to wonder whether this crumpled chunk of shredded meat had played the concertina or that one always puked when he got plowed.
Some people didn’t care. He went past one body that had a finger on the left hand neatly sliced off, presumably so the slicer could get at a ring. Willi hoped he wouldn’t do anything like that. He also hoped he wouldn’t end up a body lying there for someone else to frisk.
It could happen. Not all the poilus were ready to give up. The French fought from foxholes and trenches. They fought from behind fences, and from farmhouses. They didn’t fight with the coordination of the German war machine, but they fought. They reminded Willi of a guy who got staggered in a barroom brawl but swung back instead of falling over.
Why didn’t they fall over, dammit? Life would have been so much simpler-to say nothing of easier-if they had.
More 75s screamed in. The Wehrmacht troops did some screaming of their own. One of the first things you learned in training was to flatten out when you got shelled. Willi tried to get flatter than a hedgehog squashed on the Autobahn.
“The lieutenant’s down!” somebody yelled. Willi looked around without raising his head. Sure as hell, there was Lieutenant Neustadt, both hands clapped to his belly and a godawful shriek coming out of his mouth. Stretcher-bearers ran up and lugged him away. Willi swore under his breath. That didn’t look good.
“We have to keep going!” Sandwiched between Neustadt and Corporal Baatz, Sergeant Lutz Pieck hadn’t shown much personality up till now. All of a sudden, the platoon was his, personality or not.
Keep going they did-till they ran up against four French machine guns with interlocking fields of fire. You couldn’t advance against those, not unless you’d written your suicide note. Willi took his entrenching tool and started digging a hole.