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.
Luc got put in the second group. He couldn’t even complain, because Sergeant Demange headed it. While their buddies got away, they fired out the windows. A few bullets came back, but only a few.
“Germans aren’t here in numbers. That’s something, anyhow,” De-mange said, slapping a new clip onto his Fusil MAS36 and lighting a fresh Gitane from the one that had burnt down almost to his lips. He spat out the tiny butt and stuck the new smoke in his mouth. Then he pointed to the west-facing doorway. “All right. Let’s get out of here.”
They trotted away. Out in the open, Luc felt horribly naked. A shell could slice him to dogmeat out here. Somebody yelled. He almost shat himself one more time. Then he realized the shout came in French, not German. His asshole unpuckered. His heart came down out of his throat.
“Our guys,” Demange said laconically.
The soldier who’d shouted stood in a halfway decent trench line. He and his pals had a couple of Hotchkiss machine guns and, better yet, a 37mm antitank gun in a sandbagged revetment. The gun had two rings painted on the barrel. Kill brags? Luc hoped so.
“As long as the dive-bombers don’t come, we’re fine,” somebody said.
“Where are our dive-bombers?” Luc asked plaintively. Nobody answered him.
That cannon did knock out a German tank at better than 300 meters. The machine guns settled the poor bastards who tried to bail out of it. Even so, Luc wondered again where the French panzers were. The next one he saw in this whole war would be the first.
And he wondered if blasting the one tank would bring a storm of vengeance down on everybody here. To his vast relief, it didn’t. Night came early. That would slow down the Germans…he hoped.
After dark, a runner jumped down into the trench. The French soldiers nearly killed him before they realized he was on their side. He brought orders: fall back once more.
“Why?” Sergeant Demange growled. “We’ve got ‘em stopped here.”
“Yes, but they’ve broken through on both sides of us. If we don’t retreat now, we won’t get the chance later,” the runner replied.
“Merde,” said the sergeant. Then he said something so foul, it made shit sound like an endearment. And then he said something he must have thought filthier yet: “All right, God damn it to hell and gone. We will retreat.”
* * *
The engine thundered to life. The big prop spun, then blurred into invisibility. The Ju-87 throbbed. “Alles gut?” Sergeant Dieselhorst shouted through the speaking tube.
“Alles gut, Albert,” Hans-Ulrich Rudel said after studying the gauges. You couldn’t trust them with everything. The way the plane sounded, the way it felt-those counted, too. They could warn of trouble the gauges didn’t know about yet. But everything did seem good this morning.
Groundcrew men pulled the chocks away from his wheels. A sergeant waved that he was cleared to take off. He pulled back on the stick. The dive-bomber sprang forward over the yellow, dying grass. The field was almost as smooth as concrete. The Dutchmen had done a devil of a job of keeping everything neat. Now Germany could take advantage of it.
Up went the Stuka’s sharklike nose. Rudel climbed as fast as he could. The sooner everybody got into formation, the sooner everybody could go do his job.
“Target-Rotterdam.” The squadron commander’s voice crackled in his earphones. “The Dutch there think they can go on eating herring and drinking beer while the war stays at the front. They’ve got the wrong idea, though. In this war, the front is everywhere.”
Hans-Ulrich grinned. “You hear that, Dieselhorst?”
“No, sir. What did he say?”
“‘In this war, the front is everywhere.’” The pilot quoted the squadron CO with savage relish.
His number-two wasn’t so impressed. “Not everywhere. Do they think the Tommies and the Ivans are going to bomb Berlin?”
“Don’t be silly,” Rudel said, though a tiny icicle of doubt slithered up his back. The Czechs had, there just before they quit. But that was only a last thumb of the nose, a defiant fleabite. It wasn’t as if they did any real damage.
One Stuka had to pull out of the formation with engine trouble. The rest droned on. The vibration filled every particle of Hans-Ulrich’s being, everything from his skin to his teeth to his spine to his balls. It wasn’t as much fun as getting laid, but it was as compelling.
Bf-109s loped along with the bombers to hold enemy fighters at bay. Four days into the assault on Holland, the air opposition wasn’t what it had been. The Dutch didn’t have many planes left, while English and French fighters didn’t seem to be operating this far forward.
Hans-Ulrich didn’t miss them a bit. The Ju-87 was terrific at smashing up ground targets. But even the Czech Avia biplanes had shot down too many dive bombers. For faster, more heavily armed fighters, Stukas were sitting ducks.
He could see where the front lay by the artillery bursts and by where the smoke was rising. General Staff officers with red Lampassen down the outside seams of their trousers scribed neat lines on maps and imagined they knew what war was all about. Even up here, buzzing along at 2,500 meters, Rudel could see and smell what war was doing to Holland. Better to Holland than to the Reich, he thought.
As soon as they crossed the front, Dutch AA opened up on them. All the Stuka pilots started jinking without waiting for orders. A little faster, a little slower, a little to the left or right, up a little, down a little-anything to keep from giving the gunners an easy target. The neat formation suffered. With luck, the planes wouldn’t.
But one of them, trailing smoke, turned back toward the east. That didn’t look good. Hans-Ulrich hoped the pilot and rear gunner came through all right. Next to that, getting the Ju-87 down in one piece was small potatoes.
A near miss made his own bus stagger in the sky like a man missing the last step on a flight of stairs. Shrapnel clanged against the left wing. Everything went on working. “Danke, Gott,” Rudel murmured. His father the minister would have come up with a fancy prayer, but that did the job.
“Alles gut?” Dieselhorst asked again.
“Alles gut,” Hans-Ulrich said firmly.
Holland wasn’t a big country. There lay Rotterdam, on both banks of the New Maas. It was a big shipping town, with the most important quays on the north side of the river. Most of the city, including the central square, was on the north bank, too.
“There’s the square we’re supposed to hit,” the squadron leader said. “Follow me down.” The underside of his wings flashed in the sun as he aimed his Ju-87 at Rotterdam’s heart like an arrow. One after another, the planes he led peeled off after him.
Acceleration shoved Hans-Ulrich against the back of his armored seat. Facing the other way, Albert Dieselhorst experienced dives very differently. He always thought the Stuka was trying to tear the straps off him and pitch him out over his machine gun and through the window behind him.
No antiaircraft fire here. The Dutch must not have thought Germany would attack the towns. Didn’t they pay attention to what happened in Czechoslovakia? If they didn’t, too bad for them.
Rudel yanked the bomb release lever. Suddenly, the Ju-87 was lighter and more aerodynamic. He pulled back on the stick to come out of the dive. The Stukas, he saw, weren’t the only planes working Rotterdam over. High above them, Do-17s-Flying Pencils to friend and foe alike-and He-111s sent bombs raining down on the port. They couldn’t put them just where they wanted them, the way a Ju-87 could. But all that high explosive was bound to blow somebody to hell and gone.
“Alles gut?” Dieselhorst asked one more time. “Sure looks good,” he added-he was the one who could see what the bombs had done.
“Couldn’t be better,” Hans-Ulrich answered, and flew back toward the airstrip from which he’d taken off.
* * *