Hitler's War (27 page)

“Philadelphia,” she answered. Homesickness rose up inside her like a great choking cloud. She had to look down at the tabletop and blink several times while tears stung her eyes.

“I know something of the port—I visited before the last war, and again three, no, four years ago now. But all I know of the city is that it is large.”

“Third biggest in the country,” Peggy agreed, not without pride.
And we don’t lock people up there even if they aren’t trusted by the government. And we never would, not unless they were niggers or Japs or something
.

The music on the radio got a little less syrupy than it had been. “Do you care to dance?” Reinberger asked.

She gave him a crooked grin. “Sure you wouldn’t rather ask the bar-girl? You’ve got a better chance with her.”

“I be not”—he shook his head—“I am not looking for that, not now. How do I expect Maria to stay for me if I do not stay for her?”

A lot of Germans had trouble with
Sauce for the goose
is
sauce for the gander
. Meeting one who didn’t made up Peggy’s mind for her. “Okay,” she said.

He danced well enough. He stayed with the beat, and he led firmly. If he lacked the inspiration, the sense of fun, that separated really good dancers from people who were just all right—then he did, that was all. He held Peggy tight without trying to mash himself against her or grope her. He was…correct, a diplomat would have called it.

“Thank you,” she said when the music stopped. “That was nice.”

“Ja.”
He nodded. “And thank you also.” As they went back to the table, he added, “Much better than shooting up Russian ships in the Baltic.”

“Well, gee! There’s a compliment!” Peggy exclaimed. Lieutenant Commander Reinberger laughed. He waved for another drink. Peggy nodded to show she wanted one, too. The barmaid in the startling outfit fluttered her fingers to show she saw. Peggy asked, “That’s what you were doing before you got leave? Shooting up Russian ships?”

“Ja,”
Reinberger said. “The Baltic in winter is perfectly filthy, too. Storms, fog, waves, ice…and always maybe a U-boat waits to give you a present. Anyone who enjoys combat a
Dummkopf is
.”

“Hitler did,” Peggy said incautiously. She wondered if she would find out more about what went on in Dachau than she ever wanted to know.
Your big mouth
, she told herself, not for the first time.

The barmaid came back with the fresh drinks then. She almost fell out of that dress as she bent over to give Reinberger his. He noticed. She wanted him to notice. But he didn’t do anything or say anything about it. She looked annoyed as she walked away.

“From everything I know, the
Führer
is braver than most men,”
Reinberger said. That was the straight Nazi line. From everything Peggy’d heard, it also happened to be true, which was discouraging.

“Did the Russians shoot back?” she asked.

“They tried. Wallowing freighters with popguns have not much chance against warships,” Reinberger answered. “They are brave enough themselves, no matter what the radio says.” So he didn’t think much of Dr. Goebbels’ endless propaganda barrage. That was interesting. “No matter how brave you are, though, you must have the tools to do the job.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than air-raid sirens started wailing. The headwaiter shouted, “The basement is our bomb shelter. Everyone go to the basement at once.”

“Have the English and French begun to bomb Berlin, then?” Reinberger asked as people headed for the door.

“Not even once, not since I’ve been here,” Peggy answered. “Do you suppose it’s the Russians?”

The German naval officer looked almost comically surprised. “I never dreamt they could,” he answered, starting down the stairs. “Not impossible, I suppose, but it didn’t once cross my mind.” Somewhere not far away, bombs
crump!ed
outside. Peggy knew that hateful, terrifying sound much too well.

Even though it was New Year’s Eve—no, New Year’s Day now—some people hadn’t gone dancing into 1939. Grumpy, sleepy-looking men in bathrobes over pajamas and women in housecoats over nightgowns joined the more alert crowd from the party. A mustachioed man who spoke German with a Bela Lugosi accent said, “They told me this could not happen.” Whoever they were, more bomb bursts said they didn’t know what they were talking about.

A woman added, “Göring said you could call him Meyer if the enemy ever bombed Berlin.”

Crump! Crump! Boom!
As far as Peggy could see, the fat
Luftwaffe
boss had just saddled himself with a Jewish-sounding name. As far as
she could see, he deserved it. He deserved worse, but he wasn’t likely to get it. People didn’t get what they deserved often enough.

Boom!
That one sounded as if it came down right on top of the hotel. The lights in the cellar flickered and went out. People screamed on notes ranging from bass to shrill soprano. The Germans and their friends sounded an awful lot like the international crowd at Marianske Lazne. When you dropped bombs on them, people were all pretty much alike. Peggy would have been perfectly happy never to have learned that lesson.

Everyone cheered when, after about half a minute, the lights came on again. A few minutes later, sirens shrilled the all-clear. “Happy New Year,” Lieutenant Commander Reinberger said dryly.

“Hey, we’re alive,” Peggy answered. “Anybody wants to know what I think, that makes it happy enough.”

WHEN JOAQUIN DELGADILLO JOINED THE
Nationalist army in Spain, he didn’t do it to meet General Sanjurjo. He did it because he couldn’t stand the Spanish Republic. He probably would have done it even if someone as dull and cautious as General Franco commanded his side.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t delighted to get a glimpse of Sanjurjo. The story was that the general’s airplane had almost crashed coming from Portugal to Spain when the revolt against the Republic broke out. People said Sanjurjo didn’t want to leave all his fancy clothes behind. So what if they would have weighed down the plane? A real man, a real Spaniard, didn’t worry about things like that.

Still, Joaquin was willing to admit it was probably good that the pilot
had
worried about them. The youngster had seen too many men on both sides throw away their lives for no good reason. The Republicans were bastards, but no denying they were brave bastards. And his own side didn’t put up with cowards, not even for a minute.

Now General Sanjurjo stood on a low swell of ground and pointed
south. He wasn’t any too impressive to look at. He was old and short and squat and dumpy. But he had a good voice. And he had some of the same gifts Germans said Hitler did: while he was talking, you believed him.

“More than two hundred years ago, Britain stole part of our fatherland from us,” Sanjurjo said. “Ever since, Gibraltar has been a thorn in Spain’s side. Now it is full of Communists and fellow travelers, people who ran away there so they wouldn’t get what was coming to them.”

General Sanjurjo laughed a very unpleasant laugh. “Well, they’re going to get it whether they want it or not. And you,
soldados de España
, you’re going to give it to them. Will you stop before you reach complete victory?”

“No!” Joaquin shouted with everyone else in the detachment.

“Will you teach England a lesson the likes of which she hasn’t had for hundreds of years?”

“Yes!” the men yelled.

“With Italy and Germany and God on our side, can anyone hold us back?”

“No!” Joaquin shouted once more.

“Then strike!” General Sanjurjo cried. “Strike hard for Spain!”

As if on cue—and it probably was—Spanish guns opened up on Gibraltar’s border defenses. Motors thrummed overhead as German and Italian bombers flew off to pound what the British insisted was one of their crown colonies.

Down inside Gibraltar, antiaircraft guns filled the air with puffs of black smoke. Other guns fired back at the Spanish artillery. How many ships did the Royal Navy have inside the harbor? They were vulnerable to air attack—no doubt about it. But they could put out impressive firepower till the bombers silenced them.

Joaquin knew what shells screaming in meant. He didn’t wait for orders before he hit the dirt and started digging. The British shells
landed several hundred meters away, but why take chances? He wasn’t the only guy who started scraping a foxhole out of the hard, grayish-brown ground, either. Anyone who’d ever seen any action knew what to do.

“Come on! Get up! Get moving!” Sergeant Carrasquel shouted. Plenty of people did, without even thinking. A good sergeant was one you feared worse than enemy fire. Joaquin stayed right where he was. Then Carrasquel kicked him in the ass. “You, too, Delgadillo? You think the Pope gave you a dispensation?”

However much Joaquin wished his Holiness would do exactly that, he couldn’t very well claim it was true. Running all hunched over—as if that did a peseta’s worth of good—he hurried toward the border. Along with Spaniards in mustard-yellow khaki, he also saw other troops wearing gray uniforms.

Germans! Maybe they were from the Condor Legion, the force of “volunteers” doing what they could for the Spanish Nationalists. Or maybe they were
Wehrmacht
regulars. The Nazis and the Nationalists had the same enemies these days, after all. Putting Gibraltar out of action would hurt England all over the Mediterranean.

But that wasn’t why seeing those big, fair men in field-gray so heartened Joaquin Delgadillo—and, no doubt, most of the other Nationalist troopers who recognized them. Spaniards on both sides were amateurs at war. The honest ones on both sides knew and admitted as much. Left to their own devices, they probably would have made a hash of the attack on Gibraltar. The British, whatever else you could say about them, weren’t amateurs.

And neither were the Germans. If they were involved in this, it would go the way it was supposed to. That didn’t mean Joaquin couldn’t get blown to cat’s-meat. He knew as much. But he could hope he wouldn’t get blown to cat’s-meat for no reason at all, the way he might with only Spaniards running the show.

Shells made freight-train noises overhead. Some of the trains
sounded enormous. And some of the shells, when they burst,
were
enormous. The ground shook under Joaquin’s feet. Great gouts of earth fountained skyward. And not just of earth: he saw a man, legs pumping as if he were still running, rise fifty or a hundred meters into the air and then plunge earthward again.

“Naval guns!” somebody shouted, as if explaining a thing somehow made it less fearful.

Did the British have battleships tied up at Gibraltar? Were the guns now firing on the advancing Spaniards and Germans designed to fight off battleships trying to batter their way into the harbor? Joaquin neither knew nor cared. He knew only that, whether designed for the job or not, those guns were terrifyingly good at murdering infantrymen.

Up ahead, machine guns started their deadly chatter. Joaquin dove for cover and started digging in again. If you wanted to stay alive in the vicinity of machine guns, you had to do that. Artillery was supposed to have taken out the British murder mills. Joaquin laughed bitterly. They told you that before every attack. They lied every goddamn time. And you were supposed to go on believing them? Sure you were!

Rumble of engines, rattle of tracks…The Condor Legion and the Italians had tanks. These were German machines, even if they carried Spanish markings.
Good
, Joaquin thought. The Germans handled their tanks as if they were fighting for their own country. The Italians handled theirs as if they’d been given a job they didn’t want to do. The least sign of trouble and they found an excuse for not going forward.

Clang…Boom!
That was the sound of an antitank round slaughtering a tank. Joaquin raised his head a few centimeters. Sure as hell, one of the German machines was ablaze, sending up orange flames and a tall column of greasy black smoke. If God was kind, the British round had killed the men in the tank right away. If He wasn’t, they’d burned like a roast when the slut who was supposed to be watching it got drunk and forgot it was on the fire.

Another tank hit a mine. This one didn’t catch fire, but it did throw
a track, slewing sideways and stopping in a horribly vulnerable position. If the attack suppressed the guns that could reach it, the men inside might yet live. Joaquin liked those odds…about as little as he liked his own.

“Forward!” an officer shouted. His whistle squealed. Delgadillo looked around again. He didn’t see the man giving the orders. If the bastard didn’t have the guts to stand up himself, who would stand up for him?

Then Sergeant Carrasquel rasped, “Come on, you lazy
puto!
You think I’m going to do this all by myself?”

He ran forward. The British machine guns didn’t cut him down right away. Joaquin knew why, too: only the good died young. Joaquin thought of himself as good. But he knew the sergeant wouldn’t agree. He also knew Carrasquel would hound him if alive and haunt him if dead. So he got up and loped after the noncom.

Crack! Crack!
Any bullet you heard like that came much too close to your one and only irreplaceable carcass. When you heard a bunch of them, you were mighty damn lucky if you didn’t get ventilated.

Tanks were good for taking out machine-gun nests, even the concrete positions the British had built near the border. Gibraltar wasn’t very big. If you could get past the frontier defenses, you could go ahead and overrun the place…couldn’t you?

Down by the harbor, or maybe in it, something blew up with a full-throated roar that staggered Joaquin. Maybe it was an ammunition dump, or maybe a cruiser. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t trouble the Spaniards any more.

More guns poured deadly fire down on them. Joaquin hit the dirt again. He didn’t care if Sergeant Carrasquel pitched a fit. What kind of defenses did England have here, anyway? A cannon or machine gun on every square centimeter of ground, and more buried to pop up and spew death? He wouldn’t have been surprised. This had to be more than General Sanjurjo expected.