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.
“Jesus!” Vaclav exclaimed. “I’m just glad it was this easy once.” Halevy laughed, for all the world as if he were joking.
* * *
Lieutenant Julius Lemp stood at stiff attention. When a rear admiral reamed you out, you had to stand there and take it and pretend it didn’t hurt. The process was a lot like picking up dueling scars, except you had no sword of your own.
“You thick-skinned idiot!” Karl Donitz didn’t raise his voice, which only made things worse. “Did you want to drag the United States into this war?”
“No, sir,” Lemp replied woodenly He stared straight at a spot three centimeters in front of Donitz’s nose.
The round-faced chief of U-boat operations was not a man who stood out in a crowd. Donitz was supposed to be a pretty good guy, too. He had a reputation for sticking up for his captains. But nobody would stick up for you when you screwed up the way Lemp had.
“U-boats brought the Americans in the last time,” Donitz said. “We try not to make the same mistakes twice, you know.” He waited.
“Yes, sir.” Again, something mechanical might have spoken through Lemp.
“I’ve had to calm down Goebbels and von Ribbentrop and the Fuhrer,” Donitz said. “They all wanted your scalp.” He waited.
What am I supposed to say now? Lemp wondered. He tried, “I’m honored, sir.” In a way, he was. If the Propaganda Minister and the Foreign Minister and Hitler himself noticed you, you’d done something out of the ordinary, no doubt about it.
Rear Admiral Donitz’s pale eyes grew cold as the seas off Greenland. “I wouldn’t be, if I were you,” he said, and his voice was as icy as his face. “Dr. Goebbels had to put together a whole propaganda campaign to shift the blame away from us. Now there’s some doubt about who sank the Athenia -but not among us, eh?”
“No, sir. I did it, all right.” Lemp still didn’t change expression. Yeah, sometimes you had to stand there and take it. This was one of those times.
“I’d run you out of my office if you told me anything else,” Donitz said. “If you screw up like this again, I won’t be able to help you. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, sir.” Men who served on U-boats weren’t normally long on military discipline. This was one of those occasions where formality was mandatory, though. You took your abuse by the numbers.
“A notation about your error will go into your service jacket,” Donitz said, which meant Lemp would be a long time seeing another promotion.
“Yes, sir,” Lemp said one more time. He couldn’t get into more trouble as long as he kept saying that, and he was in plenty already.
“Next time we send you out, for God’s sake try not to sink anything flying the Stars and Stripes,” Donitz said.
“I will, sir,” Lemp replied. But he couldn’t help adding, “You are going to send me out again?”
“Yes, yes.” The commander of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat forces sounded impatient. “You’ve proved you can hit what you aim at. We need that in our skippers. I have to dress you down, because you aimed at the wrong ship. I have my orders, too, you understand.”
Did that mean he’d been going through the motions before? It sure sounded that way to Lemp. If he had, he could take his act on stage. He’d make more money with it than he ever could in a naval career. “I see,” the U-boat skipper said cautiously-one more phrase that stayed pretty safe.
Donitz looked altogether different when he smiled. “All right, then,” he said. “Dismissed. And you can tell your crew we won’t send them to a camp.”
Lemp saluted. “Yes, sir. I’ll do that. Some of them have been worried about it.” Some of them had been scared shitless. You didn’t want to say that to a rear admiral, though. Lemp didn’t like the idea of living in a place where making an honest mistake could land you in this much trouble. But, no matter what else the Vaterland was, it was the Vaterland.
“Go on, go on.” Donitz had spent all the time with him he was going to. Stacks of papers smothered the admiral’s desk. It wasn’t as if he had nothing else going on.
After one more salute, Lemp made his escape. He was glad he’d worn his greatcoat. Germany had enough coal to keep furnaces going and heat buildings, but Wilhelmshaven was bloody cold outside. Screeching gulls wheeled overhead. The air smelled of the sea and, more faintly, of fuel oil-familiar odors to a U-boat skipper.
Donitz’s office wasn’t far from the harbor, and from the seaside barracks that housed U-boat crewmen when they came in to port. Lemp made for the two-story red-brick building with dormer windows where the sailors from the U-30 were staying. A sailor wearing a Stahlhelm and carrying a rifle stood guard outside. He saluted Lemp. The skipper and his crew weren’t quite under arrest-but they weren’t quite not under arrest, either.
Returning the salute, Lemp said, “You can relax, Jochen. I think they’ll give you some other duty soon.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Jochen said.
Lemp walked on in. The sailors crowded the wardroom, smoking and playing cards and reading newspapers. It wasn’t nearly so crowded as the long steel tube of the U-30 would have been, though. Everything stopped when the men saw Lemp. They searched his face as anxiously as they would have searched the horizon when Royal Navy destroyers were in the neighborhood.
“It’s over,” Lemp said. “The admiral read me the riot act, but they’ll let us put to sea again.”
The sailors cheered. They stamped their feet. A couple of them whistled shrilly. Only later did Lemp wonder why. As long as they stayed in harbor, they were safe. Any time they went hunting, they laid their lives on the line. And they were glad to do it. If that wasn’t madness…
Of course it was. He had a case of the same disease. So did the British sailors who tried to bring merchantmen into their harbors, and the other sailors who set out to sink U-boats. So did the soldiers in German Feldgrau, and so did the bastards in assorted shades of khaki who tried their best to stop the Wehrmacht.
Without that kind of madness, you couldn’t have a war. Julius Lemp took it for granted. So did men far more important than he.
“What did Donitz say?” asked a machinist’s mate.
“That we were bad boys for sinking an American liner. That we could have got the Reich into all kinds of trouble. But we didn’t,” Lemp answered. “He also said he needed people who could shoot straight.”
More cheers rose. These were so loud and raucous, Jochen stuck his nose into the wardroom to see what was going on. Nobody told him. Miffed, he slouched back outside. The soldiers started clapping and stomping again.
“We’ll go out there and do some more straight shooting,” Lemp said. The men shouted agreement. They were good fellows, all right-and crazy the same way he was.
Chapter Fifteen
For more than two years, the war in Spain had electrified the world. Everybody could see it foretold what would happen when Fascism squared off against Marxism. Both sides threw what they could into the struggle. Italian troops, German planes, Russian tanks…Most of the bodies, on both sides, stayed Spanish.
Not all. Chaim Weinberg wouldn’t have left New York City without a strong feeling that something had to be done to stop Fascism before it exploded all over Europe. He wasn’t the only one: the International Brigades were proof of that. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Republic remained a going concern despite everything Marshal Sanjurjo could do to crush it.
And then, when the Internationals were about to get pulled from the line, the big war did break out in Europe. Spain’s fight was suddenly Britain and France’s fight, too. Materiel flooded south across the Pyrenees as the French border opened up. It seemed too good to be true.
It was. As soon as Hitler turned his troops on the Low Countries and France rather than Czechoslovakia, the flood didn’t go back to being a trickle. It dried up altogether. Everything the French could make, they shipped northeast to shoot at the Boches.