The War That Came Early: West and East (3 page)

“It’s not going to happen, chum,” Walsh declared, not without relief. “They’re slanging away at each other on the far edge of Poland. You ask me, anyone who wants Poland enough to fight over it has to be daft.”

“Anyone who’s not a Pole, you mean,” Nigel said.

“Them, too,” Walsh said with more than a little heat. “Look at that bloody Bosnian maniac Princip in 1914. He got millions and millions killed because he couldn’t stand the damned Austrian Archduke. Suppose that was worth it, do you? Just as bloody fucking stupid to go to war over Poland.”

“There you go.” Bill grinned at him from under the dented brim of his tin hat. “Now you’ve solved all the world’s problems, you have. Go tell the
Boches
to quit shooting at us—’twas all a misunderstanding, like. Then get on your airplane and fly off to wherever the hell you go to pick up your Nobel Prize.”

Walsh told him where the hell he could go, and where he could stuff the Nobel Prize. They all laughed. They smoked another cigarette or two. And then they were ready to get on with the war again.

SERGEANT HIDEKI FUJITA HAD SPENT
more time than he cared to remember in Manchukuo. He’d got used to all kinds of noises he never would have heard in Japan. Wolves could howl. Foxes could yip. If he was wrapped in a blanket out where the steppe gave way to the desert, he’d fall asleep regardless. And he’d stay asleep no matter what kind of racket the animals made. Out there, he lived like an animal himself.

He also lived like an animal here in the pine woods on the Russian side of the Ussuri, the river that formed the northeastern border between Manchukuo and the Soviet Union. He dug himself a hole, he jumped down into it, and he slept. Howling wolves? Yipping foxes? Hooting owls? They didn’t bother him a bit.

Tigers? Tigers were a different story. When a tiger roared or screamed, even gunfire seemed to hesitate for a moment. Those noises always woke him up, too, though he’d sleep through gunshots or through artillery that didn’t come too close. You had to learn to fear gunshots. Not tigers. If you heard that roar, you
were
afraid, and on the double.

Fujita quickly found out he wasn’t the only one who felt the same way. One of the superior privates in his squad, a student called Shinjiro Hayashi, said, “Something deep down inside your head knows that whatever makes that noise wants to eat people.”

“Hai!”
Fujita exclaimed. “That’s just it!” He came off a farm himself. He often had the feeling that Hayashi looked down his nose at him, though a Japanese private who let his sergeant know for sure that he looked down his nose at him was asking for all the trouble in the world and a little more besides. Hayashi wasn’t dumb enough to do that. And there were times when having a guy who knew things came in handy: Hayashi spoke some Chinese, for instance.

“When we came here from the Mongolian border, they said there’d be tigers here,” said Shigeru Nakayama, another private. “I thought it was more of the same old crap they always give new people, but they meant it.”

A major in the regiment had had his men drag in an enormous tiger carcass. He hadn’t killed it; Russian artillery had. But he took possession of the hide—and of the innards. A tiger’s gall bladder was worth plenty to the people who cooked up Chinese and Japanese medicines. You could probably get something for the rest of the organs, too.

But Hayashi spoke another truth when he said, “The tiger will make noise to let you know it’s there. You never hear the damn Russian who puts a bullet in your back.”

As if on cue, Russian mortar bombs started landing on the Japanese position. Like any soldier with even a little experience in the field, Fujita hated mortars. You couldn’t hear them coming till they were almost there. Then they sliced you up like a sashimi chef taking a knife to a fine chunk of
toro
. Unlike the tuna belly, you weren’t dead before they started. You sure could be by the time they got done, though.

Fujita jumped into a hole. He had more uses for them than sleep alone. Fragments snarled by overhead. A couple of hundred meters away, a Japanese soldier started screaming as if a tiger had clamped its jaws on his leg. Several rifle shots rang out a few seconds later. Another soldier shrieked.

“Zakennayo!”
Fujita muttered under his breath. The Russians sent
elaborately camouflaged snipers high up into pines that overlooked Japanese positions. Soldiers must have come out to pick up the man the mortars wounded—whereupon the snipers did more damage.

In the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese had accepted surrenders and treated enemy prisoners as well as any of the soft Western powers did, even if yielding was a disgrace in Japanese eyes. Things hadn’t worked like that on the Mongolian border. If you gave up there, you took your chances. And the Mongolians and Soviets weren’t what anybody would call gentle, either.

The game was rough here, too. For that matter, Fujita didn’t think any army in the world casually accepted surrenders from snipers, any more than most soldiers were willing to let machine gunners give up.

Japanese guns began to move. The Russians had the edge in artillery here, as they did on the edge of the Gobi. The Soviets might not believe in God, but they believed in firepower. And some of the dugouts they built would take a direct hit without collapsing. What they didn’t know about field fortifications wasn’t worth knowing. They got to show that off in this forest fighting, too.

Somewhere up ahead lay the Trans-Siberian Railroad and victory. Cut the railroad line, and Vladivostok would start to wither away. That would leave the USSR without its great Pacific port, which was exactly what Japan had in mind.

Unfortunately, the Russians could read maps, too. They were going to defend the railway line with everything they had. And if they didn’t have more than the generals in the Kwantung Army thought before they started this war, Fujita would have been amazed.

Somewhere up ahead lay Hill 391, the latest strong point the Japanese needed to subdue before they pushed on toward the two parallel lengths of iron track that were the main reason for the attack. Main reason? Sergeant Fujita shook his head. Absent the railroad, this was terrain only tiger hunters would ever want to visit.

The Russians had more of their seemingly limitless cannon up at the top of Hill 391. Down toward the bottom, they had machine-gun nests, barbed wire to guide troops into the machine guns’ lines of fire, and
minefields to maim any soldiers the machine guns happened to miss. Fujita had already stormed one of the Red Army’s fortified hills. He didn’t want to do it again. Of course, his superiors cared not a sen’s worth about what he or any other enlisted man wanted. Enlisted men were tools, to be used—or used up—as officers saw fit.

Airplane engines droned overhead. Fujita could see only bits of sky through the tall pines and firs and spruces and other trees he had trouble naming. He couldn’t make out what was going on up there. Japanese planes had an engine note different from that of their Russian foes: a little higher, a little thinner. Everybody said so. Fujita believed it, but he had trouble hearing it himself.

When bombs started bursting on top of Hill 391 and on the west-facing slope, he felt like cheering. That would give the Russians something to think about! Airplanes full of bombs could counteract their superiority in cannon.

His excitement didn’t last long. Once the planes got done pounding the Russian position, what would happen next? Infantry would go forward and try to clean it out—that was what. And then all the Red Army men the bombs hadn’t killed would grab their rifles and wait at their machine guns and slaughter as many Japanese as they could.

Sure enough, Lieutenant Hanafusa’s whistle squealed. “Come on!” the platoon leader shouted. “Time to dig them out! We can do it! May the Emperor live ten thousand years!” He trotted forward.

“Banzai!”
Fujita echoed as he scrambled out of his hole. He didn’t care about living 10,000 years himself, though he certainly hoped the Emperor would. He did hope he would last another thirty or forty. Going up against another one of these hills made that a lot less likely.

But he couldn’t hang back. It wasn’t just that his own superiors would do worse to him than anything the Russians could dream up. They would, yes, but that wasn’t what got him moving. You couldn’t seem a slacker in front of your men. You were brave because they watched you being brave. And they were brave because you had your eye on them—and because they didn’t want to let their buddies down.

Ahead, machine guns started hammering. Fujita shook his head as he
dodged around trees. No, the bombers hadn’t cleared out everybody on the ground. They never did. By the nature of things, they couldn’t. That was up to the infantry.

Red Army khaki was a little darker, a little browner, than the color the Japanese used. Neither was very well suited to the deep greens and browns of these pine woods. Fujita scrambled behind a tree. He raised his rifle, made sure that the helmet had an unfamiliar outline, and pulled the trigger.

Down went the Russian.
One less round-eyed barbarian to worry about
, Fujita thought. Somebody ran past him, toward the higher ground ahead. A moment later, the Japanese soldier wailed in despair. He was hung up on barbed wire cleverly concealed among the ferns and bushes that grew under the trees. The way he jerked and struggled reminded Fujita of a bug trapped on flypaper.

A trapped bug might struggle for quite a while. One of the Russian machine guns soon found the Japanese soldier. He didn’t jerk any more after that, but hung limply, like a dead fly.

Fujita shivered. That could have been him, as easily as not. If that private hadn’t rushed forward, he might have done it himself. Rushing forward was what the Japanese Army taught its soldiers. Aggressiveness won battles. If it also got people killed, that was just part of the cost of doing business.

“Urra!”
The Russian shout rang through the woods. A submachine gun stuttered, somewhere off to Fujita’s left. The Japanese preferred rifles because of their longer range. The Russians liked weapons that could fire rapidly at close quarters. A lot of the fighting in these woods was at very close quarters, because half the time you didn’t see the other guy till you fell over him—or he fell over you.

“Advance toward the rear!” an officer shouted. The Japanese had no command for retreat. That one did the job, though. Hill 391 wouldn’t fall today. Neither would the railroad line—not here, anyhow.

Chapter 2

S
hanghai had seen better days. Pete McGill snorted when that piece of brilliance crossed his mind. It was a good thing he was a Marine corporal. He made a fine leatherneck. If he’d gone into the detective racket instead, his deductions wouldn’t have put Sherlock Holmes out of business any time soon.

Of course Shanghai had seen better days. He couldn’t think of one spot in China that hadn’t seen better days, better years, probably better centuries. Peking, where he’d been stationed till just a little while before, sure as hell wasn’t the same since the Japs occupied it.

Japan occupied Shanghai, too. The Japanese had dominated the area since the early 1930s, and threw the Chinese out in November ’37, a year and a half ago now. The battle, not far outside of town, was supposed to have cost 300,000 Chinese casualties and 40,000 Japanese. The ratio said a lot about the quality of the two armies involved. That the Chinese stayed in the fight after taking such losses again and again said how much they hated the Japs.

The USA had pulled most of its Marines out of Peking to help protect
Americans in Shanghai, who were far more numerous than in the former capital. That was what the United States loudly proclaimed, anyhow. If you read between the lines, you saw that Marines in Peking were trapped. If trouble with Japan flared up, the garrison at the U.S. Legation would have to be written off. Shanghai was a port. Troops here had some kind of chance of getting on a ship and heading for Hong Kong or Manila or … somewhere.

McGill didn’t worry about it. Worrying about foreign policy wasn’t in a corporal’s job description. He worried about making sergeant one of these days. He worried about the twenty bucks U.S. he’d lost in a poker game on the train down from Peking. He worried about finding a good, cheap whorehouse; he hadn’t much cared for the couple of places he’d visited here. Till he found some suckers and won back what he’d lost—how often did you run into four sixes, for crying out loud?—cheap came first.

He didn’t like worrying about the Japs anyway, so he did as little of it as he could. Like any Marine, he was convinced he was part of the best fighting outfit in the world. Back when Peking still belonged to China, he’d brawled with Japanese soldiers. He’d cheered the American baseball team against the Japanese nine.

But things weren’t the same any more. Now that the Japs were at war with China, they didn’t go in for friendly brawling. They’d mob you if you messed with them. It was an article of faith that one Marine was tougher than one Jap. One Marine sure as hell wasn’t tougher than six or eight or ten slant-eyed little yellow monkeys, and that was how things worked out nowadays.