Hitler's War Read Online Free Page A

Chaim and Mike had to sneak over the border from France, dodging patrols every step of the way. Russia sent arms and advisers, though not enough to offset what the Fascists fed Sanjurjo.
    And the Republicans squabbled among themselves. Did they ever! Anarchists and Trotskyists didn’t like admitting that, since Stalin was paying the piper, he could call the tune. They also complained that Communist units got the best weapons. Chaim was a Party member, even if he’d left his card in New York City when he sailed. Most (though not all) of the foreign volunteers—men from every corner of the Earth—were. But the Spaniards themselves did the bulk of the fighting and dying.
    An airplane buzzed by overhead. Chaim automatically started to duck; German and Italian aircraft ruled the skies. But this was a Republican plane: a Russian biplane fighter. Its blunt forward profile made the Spaniards call it
Chato
—flat-nosed. It dove to shoot up the Nationalists’ trenches, then scooted off to the east.
    “‘Bout time those mothers caught it for a change,” Mike said.
    “Yeah,” Chaim agreed doubtfully. “But now we’ll get it twice as hard to make up, you know?” The Spaniards on both sides thought like that and fought like that. It made for a rugged kind of combat.
    Mike started to answer. Before he could, a runner came up from the rear yelling, “War! War!”
    Mike and Chaim started laughing like maniacs. “The fuck ya think we’re in now?” Chaim said. “A ladies’ sewing circle?”
    “No, goddammit—a big war,” the runner said. “The Munich giveaway just fell apart. A Czech murdered some Sudeten Nazi big shot inside Germany—that’s what Hitler says, anyway. And he’s gonna jump on Czechoslovakia, and England and France can’t back down now. And if they get in, the Russians do, too.”
    “Holy Jesus!” Mike said. Chaim nodded. If the gloves came off in the rest of Europe, they’d have to come off in Spain, too…wouldn’t they? No more noninterference? Hot damn! Maybe things here just evened up.

C orporal Vaclav Jezek crouched in a hastily dug trench just in front of Troppau. If the Germans came—when they came—this was one of the places they’d hit hardest. Slice through here in the north, push through from what had been Austria till a few months ago down in the south, and you would bite Czechoslovakia in half. Then you could settle with the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia—the important part of the country, as far as Vaclav was concerned—at your leisure.
    The Czechoslovakian General Staff wasn’t blind, or stupid. Some of the heaviest fortifications in the whole country lay along this stretch of the border. If Vaclav stood up in the trench, he could see them: big, rounded, squarish lumps of reinforced concrete that had good fields of fire from high ground and plugged valleys through which tanks might otherwise charge freely.
    He didn’t stand up. His khaki uniform and brown, bowl-shaped helmet offered good camouflage, but they weren’t perfect. Somewhere onthe other side of the border, some bastard in a field-gray uniform and a black coal-scuttle helmet would be sweeping the area with heavy-duty field glasses. Vaclav didn’t want him marking this position.
    Trucks and teams of horses rushed machine guns and cannon and ammunition to the Czechoslovak forts. Not all of them were done yet. The government hadn’t really got serious about them till the
Anschluss
. But with Nazi troops in Austria, Czechoslovakia was surrounded on three sides. Without fortifications, it wouldn’t last long. It might not last long with them, but they gave it the best—likely the only—chance it had.
    Maybe the German with the field glasses wouldn’t be able to see too much. It was cool and overcast, with a little mist in the air: autumn in Central Europe, sure as hell. But some of the Sudeten shitheads were bound to be sneaking over the border to tell their cousins on the other side what was going on here. If