The Big Switch

Chapter 6

Most German officers and enlisted men stationed in Poland went into the towns there to drink and to get their ashes hauled. So far, Hans-Ulrich Rudel had resisted temptation. He didn’t drink anything they sold in a Polish tavern. Women… Going to an officers’ brothel was always a way to let off steam, as it had been in the Low Countries and France. Up till now, he’d stayed away here.

“It’s not bad,” another pilot from his squadron told him. “Yeah, you feel like you’re back around 1910, but it’s not bad. A lot of Poles speak German. When you can’t find one who does, there’s always some Jew who’ll translate for you. Yiddish sounds awful, but the Hebes follow regular Deutsch, too.”

“Millions of them here!” Hans-Ulrich exclaimed. “I mean, millions! How can we put them in their place inside the Reich and ally with them here?” By the way he said it, he might have been talking about a sexual perversion. Fair enough: that was how he felt about it.

His comrade, a captain named Ernst Lau, was a couple of years older and far more worldly-wise. “How? Diplomacy, that’s how. Every Ivan a Polish Jew kills is one we don’t have to worry about ourselves. And every Jew a Russian shoots… Well, there’s a bullet that doesn’t hit one of us.”

“But it’s crazy,” Rudel said. “How can we trust them, with so many Jews in Moscow running things for the Russians?”

“Here’s how. Listen, now,” Lau said. “If somebody invades you, he’s the enemy. Doesn’t matter if he’s got the same religion. He’s still the enemy, ’cause he’s trying to kill your wife and take your house away from you. Anybody who helps you throw him out is the good guy in the movie. That’s the way it looks to me, anyhow.”

It didn’t look that way to Hans-Ulrich. He would have bet it didn’t look that way to the Fuhrer, either. He also would have bet Hitler had hardly more use for Poles than for Jews. The way things were these days, for Captain Lau to say anything else could be seen as disloyalty to the Reich. Rudel had no trouble seeing it that way-none at all. He was sure the SS and the SD wouldn’t, either.

Then again, Lau was a brave flyer. Hans-Ulrich had seen as much, and would have been convinced of it even without the Iron Cross First Class on the other pilot’s left breast pocket. Reporting him would cost Germany a man who could do the Russians-or any other enemy of the Reich -a lot of harm.

More than a few men fought bravely for the Vaterland while disliking the National Socialists who led the country. The paradox perplexed Hans-Ulrich, but he’d seen it before. Which came first, the country’s needs or the Party’s? Most of the time, Rudel would have said they were one and the same. Most of the time, but not always. Not here, for instance.

He wouldn’t report Ernst Lau. Back in France, before this fight with the Russians heated up, he might have. But Germany was plainly going to need every man she could get her hands on. After the Ivans learned their lesson… That would be the time for Lau to learn his.

Rudel had thought they would fly more as the weather began to warm up at last. Instead, they found themselves stuck on the ground-literally. Poland’s unpaved airstrips (smoothed-over lines in fields, basically) turned into swamps as the snow that had lain on them for months melted and soaked in. The same thing happened in France, but it wasn’t so bad there, and there were more strips with concrete runways to help the combatants get around it. Hans-Ulrich gathered this was bad even by Polish standards, which was saying something-something unpleasant.

Panzers stuck in the mud, too. Germany had perfected the art of striking like lightning. It overwhelmed Czechoslovakia. It drove the Low Countries into quick surrender. It almost-what a painful word!-extinguished France. It did take the Channel ports and partly sever France’s lifeline to England: a better showing than the Kaiser’s army made a generation earlier.

And, here in Poland facing the Russians, it stopped with a wet squelch. When tracked vehicles got stuck, when horses and infantrymen went into muck up to their bellies, neither side could move fast. As often as not, neither side could move at all.

No wonder the pilots and groundcrew men who drank drank a lot, then. And no wonder the handful who didn’t, like Hans-Ulrich, looked for something, anything, else to do. He finally decided to go into Bialystok with Lau and some of the other officers. Even looking around seemed appealing. He didn’t have to carouse. He didn’t intend to, either, even if they tried to inveigle him into it. Odds were they would, too. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen that before.

They rode into town in a wagon driven by a Polish farmer. It had a boatlike body and big wheels, and handled the slop better than anything the Germans had brought with them. “We ought to make these ourselves,” Lau remarked. “If the mud’s this bad here, it’ll only be worse when we get into Russia.”

“How could it be worse?” Hans-Ulrich asked.

“I don’t know,” Lau answered. “But I’ll tell you something else, too-I don’t want to find out.” When Hans-Ulrich looked at it from that perspective, he decided he didn’t want to, either.

Bialystok was as bad as he’d thought it would be, or else worse. It was a Polish provincial town. It was a Polish provincial town that had been part of the Russian Empire before Poland revived like the mummy in the American movie, which meant it had always been cut off from German Kultur, even the diluted version that seeped into Austrian Poland. And it was a Polish provincial town packed full of Jews.

Long black coats, some trimmed with fox fur. Broad-brimmed black hats. Sidelocks. Bushy beards. Women in wigs and scarves and dresses that swept the sidewalks-when there were sidewalks. Gabble in Polish, which Hans-Ulrich didn’t understand, and in Yiddish, which he didn’t want to understand. He felt as if two hundred years had fallen off the calendar.

Some of the shops had signs in Yiddish. The strange characters might as well have been Chinese, for all the sense they made to him.

The Jews eyed the jackbooted Germans in Luftwaffe gray-blue as warily as the Germans looked at them. It wasn’t only past confronting present- past confronting future, Hans-Ulrich thought. The Jews knew what the National Socialist government of Germany thought of them. Even a Polish provincial town had its newspaper (yes, edited by a Jew) and its radio sets. The Jews knew, all right.

But Stalin’s greed had put Poland and Germany on the same side. And so, no matter what they might be thinking, some of the Jews in their long coats nodded to the Luftwaffe officers. Along with his comrades, Hans-Ulrich found himself nodding back.

A big blond Pole-he looked like a big blond bear-ran the tavern the Germans picked. Rudel couldn’t tell what the barmaid who came over to their table was. She was pretty-he could tell that. She understood German well enough, too. “Mineral water,” he told her when she glanced his way.

She nodded. “With what?”

“Just mineral water, please.”

She raised an eyebrow. He nodded back at her to show he meant it. Helpfully, Ernst Lau explained, “He gets his long trousers pretty soon, sweetheart, but he doesn’t have ’em yet.”

She raised that eyebrow again. What color were her eyes? Not quite brown, not quite green. Hazel wasn’t exactly right, either, but it came closer than any other word Hans-Ulrich could find. “He can drink what he wants,” she said, her voice cool. Did Yiddish flavor her German, or only Polish? Once more, Hans-Ulrich had trouble being sure. On thirty seconds’ acquaintance, he got the feeling he’d always have trouble being sure about her.

When she brought back the mineral water, she took the top off the bottle where he could watch her do it. The barman hadn’t spiked it, she was saying without words. “Thanks,” he told her, both for the bottle and for the courtesy. Then he asked, “What’s your name?” The worst thing she could do was walk away without answering.

For a second, he thought she’d do just that. But, after the momentary hesitation, she said, “Sofia.”

“Sofia what?”

“How did you know?” she said, and did walk off. What was he supposed to do with that? Try to find out more, he told himself, wondering if he could. He’d found one thing, anyhow: a fresh, good reason to come back to Bialystok. He wouldn’t have bet on that when he climbed into the wagon.

“Moscow speaking,” the radio declared. Sergei Yaroslavsky didn’t think he was likely to be listening to any other station. For one thing, he recognized the announcer’s voice. For another, this was a Soviet radio set, and picked up only the frequencies of which the government approved.

The samovar in the corner of the Red Air Force officers’ wardroom bubbled softly to itself. More officers drank vodka than tea, though. Sergei hadn’t known Poland shared the rasputitsa -the mud time-with Russia. But the squadron’s SB-2s weren’t going anywhere for a while. Neither was anything else for a few hundred kilometers in any direction you chose.

“Happy day,” somebody said. “What’s gone wrong since this morning?”

In a different-perhaps not such a very different-tone of voice, a question like that might have earned the bigmouth who came out with it a trip to the gulag. It also might have done that if the pilots and copilots hadn’t started drinking. You made allowances for somebody who got plastered, especially when you were on the way to getting plastered yourself.

“Valiant Red Army forces continue to press attacks against the subhuman Fascist German beasts and their Polish stooges. Considerable territory has been gained,” the newsreader declared. If you’d never heard of the rasputitsa, you might believe that. Or if the considerable territory was to be considered in meters and not kilometers, it might even prove technically true. The war in Poland had really and truly bogged down.

But when they gave the fellow on the radio the lying copy, what was he supposed to do? Tell the truth instead, assuming he knew what it was? They’d shoot him. They’d do horrible things to him first, and worse things to his loved ones, no doubt where he could listen to them scream. He went along, the same way everybody else did.

“A Committee of Polish National Liberation was announced today in Pinsk,” the man with the smooth voice continued. “Its role will expand as the workers and peasants of the peace-loving Soviet Union free their Polish brethren from the oppression they have suffered at the hands of the Smigly-Ridz cabal.”

Smigly-Ridz was turning out to be Hitler’s puppet, though odds were he would deny that if anyone called him on it. And the Poles on the Committee of National Liberation were Stalin’s puppets. Sergei wondered if he would have seen things so clearly without the vodka sparkling through him.

“Yet another Japanese attack on the outworks of Vladivostok was repelled with loss yesterday,” the newsreader said. “Red Air Force bombers punished the aggressors.”

Sergei raised his tumbler. “Here’s to Stas!” he said. The other flyers drank with him.

“In daring strikes, Soviet bombers also brought the fighting home to Tsitsihar and Harbin,” the man continued. “The Japanese lackeys of the so-called state of Manchukuo had the gall to protest, but General Secretary Stalin and Foreign Commissar Litvinov rejected their foolish babbling out of hand.”

“Good for Stalin!” growled Colonel Borisov, the squadron commander. The vodka made his nose red as a strawberry. It also made him sound even more sure of himself than he would have otherwise.

Heads bobbed up and down all along the table, Sergei’s among them. He wasn’t currying favor-he thought Borisov was right. So-called state of Manchukuo was right! The Manchukuans were just as much puppets of the Japanese… as those Poles in Pinsk were of Stalin. What went around came around, sure enough.

“In western Europe, France and England both claim gains against the Nazi hyenas,” the announcer said. “German radio denies the claims. Dr. Goebbels, of course, is the prince of liars, but the degenerate capitalists of western Europe are not far behind. Be it noted that neither France nor England has properly suppressed its native Fascist movement. Significant factions within both countries favor abandoning the fight against the Hitlerites and banding together with them for a crusade against the stronghold of the proletariat on the march.”

“Bring on the French swine! Bring on the Englishmen, too! We beat them after the last capitalist war, and we’ll smash ’em again! See if we don’t!” Yes, Borisov had taken a lot of vodka on board.

Vladimir Federov politely called him on it: “But, Comrade Colonel! Imagine the Nazis with no enemy in their rear. If they throw everything they have at us…” He let his voice trail away.

“We’ll fucking smash ’em, I tell you!” Colonel Borisov thundered.

Federov wanted to argue more. Sergei could see as much. His gesture urged his copilot to take it easy. If Borisov remembered this after he sobered up, or if somebody reminded him of it, Federov would not be happy.

Anastas Mouradian would have shown what he thought with a lift of a few millimeters from one black, bushy eyebrow. Everyone but Borisov would have noticed, and nobody would have been able to prove a thing. Southerners had that subtlety. Federov, plainly, didn’t.

The newsreader talked about overfulfillment of steel-production norms. He praised the Stakhanovite shock workers of Magnitogorsk, and added, “No German bombing plane will ever be able to reach them and disrupt their labors!”

He was bound to be right about that. How many factory towns beyond the Urals belched smoke into the sky around the clock as they made all the things the Soviet Union needed? Hundreds, maybe thousands. They would have been villages before the Revolution, if they were there at all. Distance kept them safe from Nazi bombardiers.

Germany couldn’t hide like that. Soviet aircraft had already delivered stinging blows to East Prussia, and had even raided Berlin a few times. The great powers of the West were supposed to be mighty in the air. Why weren’t they pounding Hitler’s manufacturing centers harder? Didn’t it prove how halfhearted they were in their war against the Fascists?

When the announcer started going on about wheat and barley production, Sergei stopped listening. Yes, the people of the USSR had to eat. Try as the fellow on the radio would, he couldn’t make figures detailing the number of hectares to be planted anything but deadly dull.

“Collectivization continues to advance,” he said proudly. “The very idea of personal property will soon fade away.”

Sergei owned nothing. His flying suit, his rations, his billet, his bomber… all from the state. The vodka? He wasn’t sure where the vodka came from. He’d downed enough of it so he didn’t care, either. As long as he could get his hands on some whenever he felt the urge, nothing else mattered.

Once the newsreader got into the production reports and the economic news, you could talk over him without fear of being seen as uninterested in the life-and-death struggle on behalf of the workers and peasants-and without everybody frantically shushing you for opening your big trap. One of the pilots said, “Well, we’ve got a few weeks till things dry out. What happens then?”

“It should be the same kind of war it was last year,” Colonel Borisov said. “And the Devil take England and France.”

He was the squadron commander. Because he was, Sergei said only, “Here’s hoping you’re right, Comrade Colonel.” The USSR was a classless society in law. In law, yes. But you’d still get the shitty end of the stick if you pissed off the fellow entitled to tell you what to do. Drunk or sober, Sergei knew that.

And, if he’d spoken his mind, he would have pissed Borisov off. Hitler hated the Soviet Union the way Stalin hated Germany. If the Wehrmacht had to stand on the defensive in the West so it could hit harder here, he feared it would do exactly that. If it did, could the USSR withstand the blow?

He had to hope so. Everyone who served the Soviet Union had to hope so. If not, it would be a rugged spring and a worse summer. The USSR was finally over the horrors of the Revolution. Even the purges… Well, they hadn’t stopped, but they’d slowed down. Sergei thought they had, at any rate. Did the country really need a big, hard foreign war right now?

Need one or not, the USSR was liable to get one. No doubt history and diplomacy justified Stalin’s demand for that little chunk of northeastern Poland last year. But the price for it might prove higher than anyone in his right mind would want to pay.

Back in the days before the draft sucked Vaclav Jezek into the Czechoslovak army, when he’d thought about France he’d pictured Paris and the Riviera-the parts you saw when you went on holiday. Imagining pretty girls wearing not enough clothes bronzing on the beach under the hot Mediterranean sun… Hell, it made you want to pack your bags and buy a train ticket right away.

Reality, at the moment, was rather different, as reality had a way of being. The harsh landscape of northeastern France was as much a monument to industrial man as the worst parts of Czechoslovakia, and that was saying a mouthful. It was as cold as it would have been back there, too.

Towns were jammed too close together. Piles of coal and slag heaps towered tall as church steeples and factory smokestacks. The dirt looked gray. Even though the war had shut down most of the factories, the air still held a chemical tang that made you want to cough. The foulness must have soaked into the soil.

And, to make things more enjoyable yet, the Germans seemed to plant a machine gun or a mortar on top of every hillock, natural or manmade. They had spotters in the steeples. For all Vaclav knew, they had them in the smokestacks, too. They had lots of artillery, and the gunners were very alert. They’d had time to dig in, in other words, and they weren’t planning to go anywhere.

A mortar crew in Feldgrau up on top of a long hillock of rubble must have imagined they were lords of all they surveyed. Which only proved their imagination was as wild as Vaclav’s had been when he thought about the Riviera. He’d sneaked through a sad, scabby-looking wood till he sprawled no more than a kilometer from the Nazis and their pet stovepipe.

“Can you hit them?” Benjamin Halevy asked quietly.

“With this baby? Sure.” Vaclav patted the antitank rifle. “Question is, is it worth it? Once the first guy goes down, they’ll take cover. And they can shoot back over the top of that thing. I can’t hit them once they move.”

“When they slide back to the other side, they can’t see what’s going on over here, right?” The Jew answered his own question: “Right. Not without an observer, they can’t. And you can plug an observer. So, yeah, make ’em move.”

“You’re the sergeant.” Vaclav steadied his piece of light artillery in the fork between a tree trunk and a stout branch. He had a good notion of the range. Next to no windage… He took a deep, steadying breath, then pressed the trigger.

As always, the report was hellacious. So was the kick. But one of those distant German figures spun and fell over. Vaclav had another round chambered in only a few seconds. The Fritzes were good, though. They flattened out and dragged the mortar off to where Vaclav couldn’t see it.

“Now we find our foxhole,” he said, and scurried back to suit action to word.

Halevy scooted along with him. “Their first few shots from the first position won’t be real accurate. But…”

“Yeah. But,” Jezek agreed. He put his butt, and the rest of him, inside the foxhole. Halevy’s was only a few meters away. When you knew you’d get shelled, you didn’t want to stay above ground, not when you didn’t have to.

Yes, those Germans were good. The Czech and the French Jew with Czech Jewish parents had barely dug in when mortar bombs started whispering down into the woods. The flat, harsh cracks as they went off and the whining shriek of fragments slashing through the air made Vaclav wish Czechoslovakia had never heard of conscription. Wish for the moon while you’re at it, he thought, and tried to fold himself even smaller.

Not all the shrieks in among the trees came from the bombs bursting there. Some were torn from the throats of the Czechs and Frenchmen the bombs wounded. “You all right?” Vaclav called.

“Depends on how you look at things,” Halevy answered. “They haven’t wounded me. But I’m not drinking champagne and smoking a fat cigar and feeling up the barmaid, either.”

Jezek snorted. “Barmaids!” It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried slipping his hand under their skirts now and then. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t succeeded, and gone on from there, a few times. But he couldn’t think about them when he was getting shelled. He wondered why not. Even when they cussed you out for groping them, they were a hell of a lot more fun than what was really going on.

“Heads up!” Halevy said urgently. “You pissed the Fritzes off good.”

Vaclav came up from his foxhole and discovered what the Jew meant. A couple of armored cars with German crosses painted on them were edging out from around the back of the slag pile the mortar had topped. Soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets loped along with them. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. His antitank rifle wouldn’t always do for tanks. But armored cars weren’t armored against more than small-arms fire. He could make some poor damned German draftees thinking about the feel of a barmaid’s stockinged thigh under their fingers even more unhappy than they were already.

He could, and he did. He knew where the driver sat in an armored car. After he sent two rounds into the first machine, it swung hard left and tried to drive up the manmade hill. The other armored car kept coming. Its toy cannon and machine gun sent death snarling through the woods, hunting him. Ducking back into the foxhole seemed the better part of valor.

He couldn’t stay down there, though, not unless he wanted the Landsers moving with the armored cars to get in among the trees and pull him out with a bayonet like Frenchmen spearing escargots from their shells with skinny little forks. Life wasn’t much fun when your choices lay between bad and worse.

Worse was, well, worse. He popped up again, glumly certain the assholes in that second armored car were just waiting to see him. And they were. Machine-gun rounds cracked past, a meter or two above his head. But he got off a couple of shots of his own before taking cover once more.

Benjamin Halevy’s whoop told him they’d done some good. Cautiously, he peered out to see for himself. The other armored car had gone nose-down in a shell hole. If that didn’t say he’d punched the driver’s ticket, he didn’t know what would. He chambered another round. Going after infantrymen with an antitank rifle was a lot like murder, but not enough to stop him.

But he didn’t have to. Some of the Allied soldiers who’d come into the woods had a mortar of their own with them. The bombs started dropping among the sorry bastards in Feldgrau. Some of the Germans dove for the craters that pocked the landscape. Others beat it back toward the cover of the artificial hillock.

A couple of Fritzes did neither. One lay ominously still, right out in the open. The other writhed like an earthworm after a marching boot came down. Thin in the distance, his screams sounded just like the ones that would come from a wounded Czech or Frenchmen. Torment was a universal brotherhood.

Halevy’s rifle barked: once, twice. The German stopped thrashing and yelling. He lay as quiet as his comrade a few meters off. Vaclav glanced over to Halevy’s foxhole. The Jew looked faintly embarrassed. “I didn’t want to listen to that racket any more,” he said.

“Sure. I know what you mean,” Vaclav answered. Sometimes the only favor you could do a man was kill him. Vaclav hoped even a Fritz would be kind enough to take care of that for him if he ever caught a nasty one.

Not yet, thank God! Benjamin Halevy was eyeing the hill made from industrial rubble. “How the devil are we supposed to clear the Germans off of that?”

Vaclav replied without hesitation: “Have to flank ’em out of it. They could slaughter a regiment that tried to go straight over.”

“Too right they could,” Halevy agreed mournfully. “But do you know how many positions just like this one there are all over this part of France?”

“Too fucking many. I’ve already seen too fucking many,” Jezek said.

“Now that you mention it, so have I,” Halevy said. “And at every goddamn one of them, the foot sloggers stuck in front of it are going, ‘Have to flank it out.’ But a lot of the time there’s no room to go around the flank of one without bumping into another one head on.”

“And so?” Vaclav said. “Infantrymen aren’t dumb. They want to go on living just like anybody else.”

“Uh-huh.” The Jew nodded. “But the generals want to throw the Nazis out of France. And you know what that means.”

“It means a lot of us end up dead whether we like it or not,” Vaclav said.

“Yup. I’m afraid that’s just what it means.” Halevy nodded one more time.

Carefully, Julius Lemp brought the U-30 into the harbor at Namsos. Except for a few diehard Norwegians up in the still-frozen far north-not enough men to matter-Norway lay in German hands. U-boats could put in and depart from any Norwegian port. That made it much harder for the Royal Navy to defend against them. It tore the North Sea wide open, and gave the submarines a running start on getting out into the Atlantic.

Well, up to a point, anyhow. Namsos wasn’t worth much yet, not so far as the Kriegsmarine was concerned. English engineers had done their best to wreck whatever the new occupants might find useful, and to booby-trap whatever they couldn’t wreck. As was usually true in cases like this, English engineers’ best was all too good.

German engineers and labor gangs-some from the Reich ’s Organization Todt, others made up of drafted local men-prowled the harbor, trying to set things right. Lemp supposed they would manage sooner or later. Given the battered state of everything he could see, he would have bet on later.

A man in naval officer’s uniform waved to him from a half-burned pier. “You didn’t see any mines in the fjord, did you?” the fellow called.

“Jesus Christ!” Lemp yelled back from the conning tower. “Haven’t you cleared them yet?”

“Well, we think so,” the other man answered.

That did not fill his heart with confidence. In fact, it made him clap a hand to his forehead. “Heilige Scheisse!” he said. “Why did you let me come in here if you weren’t sure?”

“You made it, didn’t you?” the officer on the pier said soothingly. “The marked channel was all right.”

“Sure-and it was about a meter wider than my boat,” Lemp said.

“What more do you need?” the other fellow said, proving he hadn’t done any shiphandling lately. Lemp wanted to inquire about his mother, but didn’t think the man on the pier would take it in the proper spirit.

He didn’t care to quarrel with the ignorant fellow, anyhow. He could get food and water and fuel and ammunition for his guns here. Pretty soon, no doubt, the Reich would start shipping torpedoes up to the Norwegian ports, too. If the boats didn’t have to go back to the Vaterland, they could stay at sea longer and travel farther-and they could hit the enemy harder.

If only France had gone belly-up like Norway! The French coast lay a lot farther west and south than Norway did. Lemp imagined U-boats staging out of Brest and St. Nazaire and Bordeaux. How long would England have lasted had that happened? The Reich almost starved the British Isles into submission in 1917. With that kind of advantage working for it, making England knuckle under would have been easy this time around.

Would have been, yes. Things hadn’t worked out exactly the way the Fuhrer had in mind. That was why there’d been machine-gun fire in Kiel when the U-30 came in at the end of last year. That was why so many high-ranking Army and Navy officers (only a few from the Luftwaffe, which had belonged to Goring from the start) were either dead or in places designed to make them wish they were.

And it was why, even in the notoriously easygoing U-boat service, people had to watch what they said these days. Every boat had a man or two aboard who would blab to the authorities ashore. Even a joke told the wrong way could get a good seaman hauled off between a couple of hatchet-faced Sicherheitsdienst officials. Men who were hauled off like that didn’t come back again.

For now, Lemp refused to dwell on such things. What was the point, when he couldn’t do anything about them? If he complained to his superiors, he’d find out for himself what the inside of a concentration camp was like. You might not care for everything the people running the country did, but it was still the Vaterland. You had to serve it as best you could.

Once the U-30 had tied up at the pier, Lemp asked one of the men who’d made the boat fast, “Do the Tommies ever pay you a call? Not very far from England to here-a lot closer than from England to Germany.”

“Yes, sir,” the rating agreed. “They’ve come over a few times. But the nights are getting short even faster than they are back home-we’re a long way north, you know. We’ve got good flak, and we’ve got fighter cover. One thing that’s plain as the nose on my face”-he grinned, being the owner of a pretty impressive honker-“is that the bombers can’t fight fighters and can’t run, either.”

“That’s not what people thought before the war started,” Lemp said.

“I know.” The rating lowered his voice a little: “If it weren’t so, though, we would’ve knocked England flat by now, eh?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Lemp said, also quietly. They smiled at each other and went about their business. A man could feel he was bucking the system just by speaking a few plain truths.

A man could also feel good about getting back to terra firma. Supper was chicken stew with fresh vegetables. The crew of the U-30 had been living off sausage and beans and sauerkraut long enough to get sick of them. They kept body and soul together, which was as far as praise would reach. The beer that went with supper was mighty welcome, too.

So were the showers in the barracks. Saltwater soap didn’t get a man clean. Gerhart Beilharz toweled himself off with a blissful grin on his face. “I don’t have to smell myself for a while, let alone everybody else,” the Schnorkel expert said in delight.

“Harder for you to knock your brains out, too,” Lemp replied. Beilharz was two meters tall, not the ideal height for a submariner.

One of the ratings added, “Now I can go to sleep without Heinz sticking his shoe in my ear-and Jens can curl up without my shoe in his.”

“Now I can sleep without curling up,” Beilharz said. As an officer, he got more sleeping room than ordinary sailors, but not enough for a man his size. Even Lemp’s cabin-only a curtain shut it off from the rest of the boat-was tiny and cramped. Everything on a U-boat was cramped.

But none of the men got as much sleep as they all craved, because the RAF did come over that night. Air-raid sirens started screaming about the same time as the antiaircraft guns began to thunder. Between them, they made music to wake the dead. Lemp and the rest of the men from the U-30 staggered toward the zigzag trenches as bombs whistling down added one more horrible note to the symphony.

It was cold out there. Did Namsos ever warm up? Shivering, Lemp had trouble believing it. Next to him stood Beilharz, also shivering, in his white cotton undershirt and long johns. Lemp pointed at him. “Look!” he said dramatically. “A polar bear!”

“Oh, shut up… sir,” Beilharz said.

Crump! Crump! Crump! The bombs went off one after another, not really close but not far enough away, either. Night bombing on both sides was more a matter of luck than of skill. Bad luck for Germany, and some of those bombs would hit the harbor. Bad luck for the U-30’s crew, and some of them would hit right here.

Where were the fighters that dockside rating had bragged about? Night might not last long at this season up here, but it was nighttime now. How was a fighter supposed to find a bomber when he couldn’t see it till he was on the point of running into it? The flak was firing by ear-sight, too: no searchlights working yet to pin bombers in their beams.

After half an hour or so, the engine drone overhead eased toward quiet. The antiaircraft guns banged away for another ten minutes. If falling shrapnel fractured somebody’s skull-or smashed it-well, it was a tough old war for everybody, wasn’t it?

“I wonder if I can go back to sleep,” Gerhart Beilharz said as the sailors trooped into the barracks again. The yawn that followed declared he wasn’t too worried about it.

Neither was Lemp. Some infantrymen were supposed to be able to sleep through air raids. He couldn’t do that, but he wasn’t so far away, either. He hurried to his cot.