Hitler's War by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Alternate History
Publisher: Del Ray
Published: 2011-04-19T19:25:56+00:00

IT WAS A FINE, BRIGHT MORNING in western Belgium—colder than an outhouse in East Prussia in February, but sunny and clear. The sun came up a little earlier than it had a month earlier, at the end of December. Chances were spring would get here eventually: no time real soon, but eventually.

Breath smoking in the chilly sunrise air, Hans-Ulrich Rudel walked to the squadron commander’s hut to see what was up. Something would be. He was sure of that. This time of year, days with decent flying weather were too few and far between to waste.

Other Stuka pilots nodded to him. He nodded back. He didn’t have a lot of buddies here. Not likely a milk drinker would, not when most of the flyers preferred brandy and loose women. But he kept going out and doing his job and coming back. That won him respect, if no great liking.

Cigarette smoke blued the air inside the hut. Hans-Ulrich didn’t like that, either, but complaining was hopeless. He tried not to breathe deeply.

“We’re going to bomb England again,” Major Bleyle announced. That got everyone’s attention, as he must have known it would. He went on, “They’ve been hitting our cities—miserable air pirates. What can we do but pay them back? We will strike at Dover and Folkestone and Canterbury, just on the other side of the Channel. Questions?”

Hands flew up, Rudel’s among them. The squadron commander pointed to somebody else—he didn’t much like Hans-Ulrich, either. But the other pilot said about what Rudel would have: “How are we going to come back in one piece? Stukas are sitting ducks for English fighters.”

“We’ll have an escort,” Bleyle said.

“We had an escort the last time, too,” the pilot pointed out. “Some of the enemy planes kept the 109s busy, and the rest came after us.”

“We’ll have a better escort this time,” the squadron commander answered. “Not just 109s, but 110s, too.”

The pilots all paused thoughtfully. Bf-110s were brand new. If half what people said was so, they were formidable, no doubt about it. The big, two-engined fighters mounted two 20mm cannon and four machine guns in the nose, plus another, rear-facing machine gun on a mount like the one in the Stuka. If all that firepower hit an enemy aircraft, the poor devil would go down.

“And there’ll be Heinkels and Dorniers overhead,” Major Bleyle added. “The enemy won’t be able to concentrate on us the way he did before. We’re going to knock eastern England flat. Let’s see how they like it.”

One by one, the Stuka pilots nodded. Most of them had seen enough to know war wasn’t always as easy as they wished it would be. They’d signed up to take whatever happened, the bad along with the good. Hans-Ulrich suspected things would turn out to be harder than the squadron CO made them sound. By the thoughtful looks on the other men’s faces, so did they. But if the people set over you told you to try, what else could you do?

He took the word to Sergeant Dieselhorst.

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