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.
“Foreign Commissar Litvinov has protested to the Japanese government about its troop buildup between puppet Manchukuo and progressive Siberia,” the announcer went on.
Hearing that made Sergei’s headache get worse. This borderland between the USSR and Poland was nowhere in particular. He tried to imagine fighting a war at the eastern edge of Siberia. That was Nowhere in Particular with capital N and P. The only reason either the Soviet Union or Japan cared about it was because of strategy. Other than that, the whole area could go hang.
Vladivostok was the USSR’s window on the Pacific. It was a window frozen shut several months a year, but never mind that. Vladivostok also sat on the end of the world’s longest supply line: it was the place where the Trans-Siberian Railroad finally stopped. It wasn’t a million kilometers from Moscow-it only seemed that way.
What would happen if the little yellow monkeys who lived in Japan tried to seize the railroad and cut the town’s lifeline? How long before Vladivostok withered? How long before the Japanese could just walk in? Sergei was too young to remember the siege of Port Arthur and the Russo-Japanese War as a whole, but he knew about them. Few Soviet citizens didn’t. Even though the Tsar’s corrupt regime was to blame for the Russian defeat, it still rankled.
Brooding about it made him read some of what the radio newscaster was saying. When he started paying attention again, the man was saying, “And the French government has declared that the front is Paris. The French say they are determined to fight in the capital itself, and to fight on beyond it even if it falls. They did not have to do this during the last war. Whether they will live up to their promises, only time will tell.”
“If they’d done better by Czechoslovakia when the war started, they might not be in this mess now,” Anastas Mouradian said. “They’ll probably expect us to pull their chestnuts off the fire for them, too.”
“Too fucking bad if they do. We’ve got enough worries of our own,” Sergei said.
“German radio reports that Adolf Hitler has indignantly denied any military coup was attempted against him,” the announcer said. “Reliable sources inside Germany report that at least four prominent German generals have not been seen for several weeks, however.”
No one eating breakfast said anything to that. No one imagined anything could be safe to say. No one even wanted to look at anyone else. The look on your face could betray you, too.
Soviet generals-far more than four of them-started disappearing in 1937. Like some of the Old Bolsheviks who started getting it in the neck at the same time, a few confessed to treason in show trials before they were executed. Others were simply put to death, or vanished into the camps, or just…disappeared.
It wasn’t only generals, either. Officers of all ranks were purged. So were bureaucrats of all ranks, and so were doctors and professors and anyone who seemed dangerous to anyone else.
Now the same thing was happening in Germany? Sergei had sometimes thought that Communists and Nazis were mirror images of each other, one side’s left being the other’s right and conversely. He’d never shared that thought with anyone; had he tried, he would put his life in the other person’s hands. He wished the idea had never crossed his mind. Just having certain notions was deadly dangerous. They might show up on your face without your even realizing it. And if they did, you were dead.
Or maybe worse.
So did the enemy have to worry about the kinds of things that had convulsed the Soviet Union for the past couple of years? Good, Sergei thought. If both sides were screwed up the same way, the one he was on looked to have a better chance.
* * *
Ludwig Rothe lit a Gitane he’d got from a German infantryman who’d taken a pack from a dead French soldier. It was strong as the devil, but it tasted like real tobacco, not the hay and ersatz that went into German cigarettes these days.
“Have another one of those, Sergeant?” Fritz Bittenfeld asked plaintively.
“You look like a hungry baby blackbird trying to get a worm from its mama,” Ludwig said. Fritz opened his mouth very wide, as if he really were a nestling. Laughing, Ludwig gave the panzer driver a Gitane.
“Chirp!” Theo Hossbach said, flapping his arms. “Chirp!” He got a cigarette, too.
They’d all smoked them down to tiny butts when a blackshirt who’d been prowling around the panzer park finally got to them. “Can I talk to you boys for a minute?” he asked, a little too casually.
His shoulder straps were plain gray, with two gold pips. That made him the SS equivalent of a captain. How could you say no? You couldn’t. “What’s up, sir?” Ludwig tried to keep his voice as normal as he could.
“You men have served under Major Koral for some time-isn’t that so?” the SS man said.
“Ja,” Ludwig said. Fritz and Theo both nodded. No harm in admitting that, not when the blackshirt could check their records and find out for himself that Koral had led the panzer battalion since the war started.
“All right,” the SS man said, in now-we’re-getting-somewhere tones. “How often have you heard him express disloyalty toward the Fuhrer and the Reich?”
“Disloyalty?” Ludwig echoed. He had trouble believing his ears. But the SS man nodded importantly. He seemed as full of his own righteousness as the more disagreeable kind of preacher. Picking his words with care, Ludwig said, “Sir, you do know, don’t you, that Major Koral’s already been wounded in action twice?”
“Yes, yes.” The SS man nodded impatiently, as if that were of no account. To him, it probably wasn’t. He went on, “I’m not talking about his military behavior. I’m talking about his political behavior.” You idiot, his gaze added. You’re supposed to know things like that without being told.
Sergeant Rothe bristled at so obviously being thought a moron. But then he chuckled to himself. If the blackshirt figured him for a Dummkopf, a Dummkopf he would be, by God. “Sir, the major just gives me orders. He doesn’t waste his time talking politics with noncoms.”
“What’s going on, anyway?” Theo sounded as innocent as an un-weaned baby. His dreamy features let him get away with that more easily than Ludwig could have.
The SS man didn’t hesitate before answering, “You will have heard that certain Wehrmacht generals betrayed their country by viciously plotting against the Fuhrer?”
Ludwig had heard that, all right, from Hitler’s own lips. Telling the SS man as much struck him as the very worst of bad ideas. “Gott im Himmel!” he exclaimed, as if it were a complete surprise. “I heard it, ja, but I thought it was only enemy propaganda.” Beside him, Theo and Fritz nodded.
“It’s true, all right,” the blackshirt said. “They were disgraces to the uniform they wore, disgraces to the Volk, disgraces to the Reich. And so we must purify the army of all their associates and of everyone who might have shared their vicious views. Now do you understand why I am inquiring about Major Koral?”
“He wouldn’t do anything like that,” Fritz said. “He wouldn’t put up with anybody else who did, either.”
Theo nodded again. “That’s right.”
“I think so, too,” Ludwig said.
“You might be surprised. You might be very surprised indeed,” the SS man said. “We’ve found treason in some places where no one would have thought to look for it if these generals hadn’t disgraced themselves.”
If Ludwig hadn’t heard it from the Fuhrer, he would have wondered what that meant. He did wonder what the SS and the Gestapo were up to now. Had they sniffed out more real treason, or had they “discovered” it regardless of whether it was really there? He didn’t ask this fellow that kind of question. That it could occur to him might be plenty to mark him as disloyal.
He did ask, “Why do you think Major Koral might be mixed up in this…this Scheisse?”