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.
Sergeant Pieck sent a runner back. Before long, a mortar team came up. The men started dropping bombs on the machine gun nests. They silenced three of them. The soldiers stalked the fourth and put it out of action with grenades. One machine gunner came out with his hands up. Corporal Baatz shot him in the face. He fell over and never twitched again. Willi knew he might have done the same thing. You couldn’t use one of those murder mills and then expect to give up as if you’d got caught playing bridge.
Pieck looked as if he wanted to say something about it, but what could he say? Only the Last Trump would bring the Frenchman back to life. And Arno Baatz was a mean bastard who didn’t listen to anybody. Pieck pointed west instead. “Forward!” he commanded, and forward they went.
Chapter 7
Luc Harcourt had thought he knew what war was all about. He’d been in some skirmishes. He’d fired his rifle, and he’d come under fire. Artillery had gone off not too far from him. He’d had to worry about mines.
Now he discovered he’d been a virgin trying to figure out how to play with himself. He’d played at war. So had the Germans. Well, playtime was over. The bastards on the other side meant it. If he wanted to go on breathing, he had to mean it, too.
Shells bursting all around him had announced the new dispensation. This wasn’t just a little harassing fire. This was a storm of steel, the kind of thing men his father’s age talked about. The noise alone was enough to make you shriek-not only the thunderous bursts, but also the horrible screams and wails of fragments knifing through the air. Before long, the screams and wails of the wounded added to the chaos.
And he had to deal with things his old man’d never needed to worry about. Dive-bombers howled down out of the sky. If bursting artillery shells were terrifying, bombs were ten times worse. Shells could carry only so much explosive. Otherwise, they’d blow up before they got out of the gun barrel. Artillerymen disliked such misfortunes. The only limit to a bomb’s size, though, was whether a plane could get off the ground carrying it.
German fighters strafed French positions as soon as the bombers went away. Luc wondered where the devil the French fighters were. He didn’t see any.
Before long, he realized he’d shat himself somewhere during the bombardment. He tore off his drawers and threw them away. He wondered if he would ever be able to face his buddies. Then he wondered how many of them had fouled themselves, too.
He didn’t have long to worry about it. Somebody yelled, “Tanks!” If that wasn’t panic in the other soldier’s voice…well, why not?
He’d never seen a German tank-or, for that matter, a French one-in the earlier skirmishes. He’d never seen dive-bombers then, either. He hadn’t missed the dive-bombers one bit. He didn’t miss the tanks, either.
Better to hope they would miss him. Here they came, all right: snorting black monsters spitting fire from the guns in their turrets. German soldiers in field-gray loped along between them.
A shell from a French field gun hit a German tank. It spun sideways and stopped. Flame and greasy black smoke burst from it. A soldier scrambled out of an escape hatch, his black coveralls on fire. A burst of machine-gun fire cut him down before he could find somewhere to hide.
But the rest of the tanks kept coming. The machine gun fired at one of them. Bullets struck sparks from its armor, but that was all. Then the tank fired at the French machine gun. It fell silent.
Luc drew a bead on one of the German foot soldiers. He fired. The man went down. Dead? Wounded? Just scared shitless? (Luc knew too well how easy that was.) He never found out.
He did realize he’d have to fall back if he wanted to stay alive. The Nazis were going to overrun this forward position no matter what. Back in the last war, he would have had trenches to retreat through. They’d made positions kilometers deep. This one wasn’t. No one had taken the war, or the Germans, seriously enough to set up defenses in depth.
Oh, farther back, well out of artillery range, the Maginot Line was there to make sure no German advance got too far. That might end up making France happy. It didn’t do a goddamn thing for Luc.
Almost the first thing he saw when he scrambled out of the trench and fell back to the southwest was somebody else’s wadded-up underwear. Just for a minute, that made him feel much better. Then a tank’s machine gun stitched up the grass all around his feet. None of the bullets bit him, but he damn near- damn near-crapped himself again.
“Over here!” Sergeant Demange shouted. “We can still hold them off!”
Hold them off? Whatever the noncom was smoking, Luc didn’t think it came in Gauloises or Gitanes. But staying with somebody who had an idea about what to do next seemed better than running at random. Luc trotted toward Demange, who seemed in charge of a solid position anchored by a farmhouse.
“Jesus!” Luc said, huddling in the kitchen. None of the windows had any glass in them. He didn’t know why bombs and shells hadn’t flattened the farmhouse. Luck-had to be.
“Fuck Jesus,” Sergeant Demange said. “Fuck the Boches. Fuck everybody, especially our dumbshit generals.”
“What did the generals do?” Luc asked, trying to catch his breath.
“Rien,” Demange snarled with savage scorn. “Not a goddamn fucking thing. They let us sit here with our thumbs up our asses till the Germans were ready to hit us. And now the Germans are. And we’re ready, too-ready to take it on the chin.”
“We’ve got to fight hard for the sake of the international working class.” That was Valentin Laclos, one of the several Communists in the company.
Sergeant Demange withered him with a glare. “Fuck the international working class. And fuck you, too, Laclos. If Stalin was on Hitler’s side, you’d screech that we ought to lay down and open our legs for the Boches. You can’t even fart till Moscow tells you it’s okay.”
Luc admired the noncom’s seamless contempt for the world. De-mange despised everything and everybody. Chances were he even hated himself. If you had to ride herd on a bunch of snot-nosed soldiers, how could you do anything else?
More German artillery started landing around the farmhouse. As Luc had seen, the windows had already blown out, or rather, in; broken glass glinted on the floor. A shell fragment struck a stone wall and whined away.
“What do we do, Sergeant?” Luc asked.
“Fight, dammit,” Demange answered. “Not for the international whatever the hell. Fight because they’ll kill you for sure if you don’t.”
Not necessarily, Luc thought. If he threw down his rifle and threw up his hands, maybe he could sit out the rest of the war in a POW camp. Plenty of Frenchmen had done it the last time around. They’d had a thin time, though-literally. Black bread and turnips and cabbage and not enough of any of them…The Germans themselves were starving. They had precious little to spare for prisoners.
And there was no guarantee that surrendering meant becoming a POW. He’d heard French veterans talk about that. If you had the time, if you had the men, maybe you’d take captives back for interrogation. If you didn’t? It was their hard luck, that was all. He had no reason to believe the Boches acted any differently. He’d already seen you could kill somebody without hating him in the least.
One of the other guys in the farmhouse looked out a window. “Our side’s falling back again, Sergeant,” he reported.
Sergeant Demange muttered to himself. “We’d better do the same,” he said unhappily. “If we get surrounded and cut off, we’re liable to have to see if those Nazi cocksuckers’ll let us give up. I don’t like the odds.”
His thoughts came uncomfortably close to Luc’s. Once the sergeant made up his mind, he wasted no time. He divided the soldiers crowding the farmhouse into two groups. One he sent out. The other stayed behind in the strongpoint to give covering fire.