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.
Cautiously, he raised his head. When he did, he forgot about his own little wound. One or two of the German shells had come down right by-maybe even among-the raw troops. They didn’t know anything about flattening out. You could scream at them, but they needed a few seconds to get what you were saying and a few more to figure out what they should do.
All of which added up to a few fatal seconds too long.
Some of the soldiers were still standing. More were on the ground now-men and pieces of men. The air was thick with the stink of blood, as it might have been after explosions in a slaughterhouse. This wasn’t quite that. This was explosions that produced a slaughterhouse.
A soldier stared stupidly at the spouting stump of his arm. Not three meters from him, the kid lieutenant stood there with his face white and twisted into a rictus of horror. “Merde,” Luc muttered. He scrambled to his feet and ran over to the maimed kid. A leather bootlace did duty for a tourniquet. The spout became a tiny trickle.
And the soldier came out of shock and started to shriek. Luc dug the morphine syrette out of the fellow’s wound kit and jabbed him with it. The drug hit hard and fast. The soldier’s eyes closed and he passed out. Luc thought he would live if he hadn’t bled too much. Unlike most battlefield wounds, the amputation was almost as neat as if a surgeon had done it.
The poor lieutenant still hadn’t unfrozen. Some of his men were helping the veterans help their buddies, but he stood rooted to the spot. “You all right, sir?” Luc heard the rough sympathy in his own voice. This wasn’t the first freeze-up he’d seen. It was a bad one, though. He tried again, louder this time: “You all right?”
“I-” The officer shook himself like a dog coming out of cold water. Then, violently, he crossed himself. And then he bent over and was sick. Spitting and coughing, he choked out, “I regret to say I am not all right at all.”
“Well, this is pretty bad.” Luc held out his canteen. “Here. Rinse your mouth. Get rid of the taste.”
“Merci.” The lieutenant did. As he handed the canteen back to Luc, he suddenly looked horrified and took off for the closest bushes at a dead run.
“He just realize he shat himself?” Sergeant Demange asked dryly.
“That’s my guess,” Luc said.
“He’s not the first. He won’t be the last, either,” Demange said. “I’ve done it in both wars, Christ knows. You?”
“Oui.” If the sergeant hadn’t admitted it, Luc wouldn’t have, either. But since he had…Luc knew that was a big brotherhood, sure as hell. It probably included more than half the people who’d ever come under machine-gun or artillery fire. More than half the people who’d ever been up to the front, in other words. “War’s a bitch.”
“And a poxed bitch to boot,” Demange agreed. Luc found himself nodding.
* * *
Snow flew as near horizontally as made no difference. The wind howled out of the north. Anastas Mouradian looked out the window of the flimsy hut by the airstrip and shuddered. “I wish I were back in Armenia,” he said in his accented Russian. “We have civilized weather down there.”
Another officer swigged from a bottle of vodka and then set it down. They weren’t going to fly today-why not drink? “Shit, this isn’t so bad.”
That was too much for Sergei Yaroslavsky “The Devil’s grandmother, it’s not! Bozhemoi, man! Where d’you come from?”
“Strelka-Chunya,” the other man answered.
“Where the hell is that?”
“About a thousand kilometers north of Irkutsk.”
“A thousand kilometers…north of Irkutsk?” Sergei echoed. Then he said, “Bozehmoi!” again. Irkutsk lay next to Lake Baikal, in the heart of Siberia. Go north from there and you’d just get colder. He hadn’t imagined such a thing was possible, which only went to show your imagination reached so far and no further. He made as if to doff his fur cap. “All right, pal. If you come from there, this isn’t so bad-for you.”
“But why would anybody want to go there in the first place?” Mouradian asked. That struck Sergei as a damn good question, too.
And the Siberian flyer-his name was Bogdan Koroteyev-had an answer for it: “My people are trappers. If you’re going to do that, you have to go where the animals live.”
Through the roaring wind, Sergei heard, or thought he heard, a low rumble in the distance. “Is that guns?” he asked.
“Or bombs going off.” The Siberian had put away enough vodka so he didn’t much care. “Damn Poles are stubborn bastards.” He shoved the bottle across the rickety table. “Want a slug?”
“Sure.” Sergei poured some liquid fire down his throat. “Damn Poles.”
Things in northeastern Poland weren’t going as well as they might have. The radio and the newspapers didn’t say that, but anyone with a gram of sense could read between the lines. The Red Army kept attacking the same places over and over again. Every attack sounded like a victory. If they were victories, though, why weren’t the glorious and peace-loving soldiers of the Soviet Union advancing instead of spinning their wheels?
Not that wheels wanted to spin in weather like this. Supplies moved forward on sledges-when they moved forward at all. Bombers and fighters had long since traded conventional landing gear for ski undercarriages. Men wore skis or snowshoes whenever they went outside.
One of the flyers wound up a phonograph and put on a record. It was Debussy. Sergei relaxed. Nobody listened to Chopin or Mozart or Beethoven any more. Nobody dared. Listening to music by a composer from a country at war with the USSR might be enough to make the NKVD question your loyalty. Who could say for sure why people disappeared? Who wanted to take a chance and find out? But Debussy, a Frenchman, was safe enough.
More explosions, these not so distant. The windows in the hut rattled. “Those are bombs,” Mouradian said. “The weather somewhere off to the west is good enough to let airplanes get up.”
“Fuck ‘em,” Koroteyev said. “They’re trying to rattle our cage, that’s all. They can’t find anything to hit, so they drop things anywhere and hope they’ll do some good. Fat chance!” He belched and lit a cigarette.
“Even when you can see it, hitting what you aim at isn’t easy,” Sergei said.
“Turn on the radio, somebody,” Mouradian said. “It’s just about time for the news.”
The flyer closest to the set clicked on the knob. The dial lit up. Half a minute later-once the tubes warmed up-music started blaring out of the speaker. It wasn’t quite the top of the hour. The march wasn’t to Sergei’s taste, but you could put up with anything for a couple of minutes.
“Here is the news,” the announcer said.
“Moo,” Koroteyev added irreverently. Chuckles ran through the hut. The announcer’s accent said he came from the middle reaches of the Volga: he turned a lot of a sounds into o ’s. It really did make him sound as if he ought to be out in a field chewing his cud.
But what he had to say grabbed everybody’s attention: “Spreading their vicious campaign of terror ever more widely, the reactionary Polish junta under the thuggish leadership of Marshal Smigly-Ridz bombed both Minsk and Zhitomir yesterday. Casualties are reported heavy, because neither city was prepared for such treachery and murder. Numbers of innocent schoolchildren are among the slain.”
One of the pilots swore violently. He spoke Russian with a Ukrainian accent, so that some of his g ’ s turned into h ’s. Sergei wondered if he was from Zhitomir or had family there.
“General Secretary Stalin has vowed vengeance against the evil Polish regime,” the announcer went on. “Our bombers have targeted Warsaw for retaliation.”
Our bombers taking off from where? Sergei wondered. He would have bet piles of rubles that nobody could fly from anywhere near Minsk. Maybe things were better farther south, down toward the Ukraine. He supposed they must have been, or the Poles couldn’t have struck at it. In this blizzard, they must have been bombing by dead reckoning-and damned lucky to boot-to hit Minsk at all.