Next thing he knew, he was living with men and getting shot at by gum-chewing Amis who’d come 5,000 miles just to kill him. Lice, dysentery, iron rations, cruel officers, and retreat. A year of savage fighting, and he barely remembered what Greta looked like, while he heard she’d married a Party official and was enthusiastically doing her part to make blue-eyed babies for the Reich.
Steiner no longer fought to impress her. He didn’t fight for the Fatherland and its superior ideology and wounded pride. He didn’t fight for all the pageantry designed to exalt the ridiculous into something deadly serious. He fought just to survive, ripping bullets from his MG42 to make the goddamn Amis stop trying to kill him. Just twenty years old. He’d barely lived.
For two years, his main concerns were staying dry, getting rid of body lice, thinking about women, bitching about officers, keeping his machine-gun working, sleep, scrounging food, writing letters, reading the same worn-out books, playing cards, and getting drunk whenever possible. He wanted to go home.
As the band played on, Steiner stared at the helmeted figures facing him across the courtyard and wondered how many of them had joined to impress a girl. Most, probably. Only a maniac liked killing and was willing to die for it. The biggest fools were like Muller standing next to him, wishing he could make love to the war. No, the average paratrooper wanted to be a hero, and nobody wanted to do what it took to be a hero unless he thought it would get him the pick of girls. And here they were, all dressed up and without a girl in sight.
Seeing the comedy of it all kept him sane, though the joke was also on him.
“Brave Fallschirmjäger!” Hauptmann Werner shouted after the band stopped playing. Wearing his Iron Cross on his throat and a black patch over his scarred left eye, the grizzled captain addressed them from the head of the formation. “Heroes and defenders of the Reich! I stand before you at the threshold of victory. The Führer’s super weapon has defeated the Allies in France. Daily, State Radio declares our triumph. Hostilities with the Allies have ceased.”
Werner glared at them all with his good eye, which gleamed a bright blue. “Generalmajor Schulz has issued orders.” Schulz commanded the 1st Fallschirm Division in the Adriatic Sector. “The 3rd Parachute Regiment is assembling. Transport has been organized to deliver us to the airfield. There, we will board planes and fly to England.”
The stoic paratroopers stirred before resuming their rigid attention. Steiner couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The lieutenant hadn’t been joking, he’d been serious. That or the captain was joking.
“Our orders are to form a joint task force with our American and British counterparts,” Werner said. “We will train together. We will fight a common foe. The English and the Amis were once our enemies, but no longer. In fact, they are now our allies in the struggle to contain the Red menace in the East.”
Werner nodded to Hauptfeldwebel Vogel, who barked, “Company dismissed!”
Muller smiled. “The Russian Front!”
“So much for going home,” Steiner said.
CHAPTER THREE
AIRFIELD
Oberfeldwebel Jurgen Wolff marched his squad back into the warehouse, where they fell out to collect their gear. Ungainly two-ton Opel Blitz trucks were already lining up in front of the ancient stone building, coughing acrid exhaust.
“What do you think, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller asked him. “Our new orders?”
“I’m a soldier,” Wolff said. “I don’t think. And I don’t engage in latrine talk. The only thing that matters is our orders.”
But he was also a man, and men thought, and the orders didn’t make sense. Right now, he thought the entire operation was too strange to take seriously. A combined division made up of paratroopers from nations who just weeks ago had been bitter enemies?
The Fallschirmjäger hated the British, though they respected their fighting ability. They didn’t hate the Americans, though they had little respect for them.
A joint task force against the Soviets? This was going to be interesting.
If the order hadn’t come through Hauptmann Werner, he wouldn’t have believed it. The captain had fought from the beginning of the war, one of the few survivors of the original regiment the man had trained with at Stendal. Wolff had seen a photo of him in Signal, which showed him charging during the invasion of Crete, the last big airborne operation of the war. The man was tough as nails and a genuine hero. His word commanded respect.
Too bad the Waffen-SS lieutenant was wrong, and the Führer’s new super weapon hadn’t worked on the Russians. Wolff was tired of it all. During his two years with the regiment, he’d fought in Russia and Italy. He’d trained and lost his squad four times over to the meat grinder. He was tired of seeing cocky and scared German boys like Muller and Beck die one by one, so many he forgot their names.
All he wanted now was to see these boys go home. He wanted it all to end.
He packed his gear, taking special care with his jump smock and old triangular RZ36 parachute. He’d volunteered for the paratroopers in late 1942 and had undergone eight weeks of training at Stendal-Borstel airfield.
Half basic training, half parachute instruction. All of it demanding. The paratroopers got the same training the infantry grunts got, only much harder. He remembered his first thirty-kilometer forced march. Brutal. Until he earned his parachute wings, he was nobody to the instructors, who never passed up an opportunity to demonstrate they were the best at everything.
Weapons, demolitions, tactics. Ground rolls from a height of three meters. Unhitching a parachute while being dragged by wind created by airplane propellers. Live-fire exercises and jumps with a one-percent fatality rate being accepted. Then jumps from moving aircraft, Junkers and Heinkel He-111s.
The drill instructors were tough and demanding, but their discipline wasn’t as harsh as with other unit types. They expected their boys to succeed based on inner strength. Many didn’t have it. Two of Wolff’s comrades committed suicide before their first jump out of fear of failure.
Wolff didn’t give up. Indoctrination, high expectations, unit pride, and inner strength had driven him to succeed. After six successful jumps, he earned his parachute wings. He was Fallschirm for life. Still, he’d never made a combat jump himself. After Crete, few major operations had been undertaken.
“What are the commies like, Herr Oberfeldwebel?” Muller called out.
“Hard men,” Wolff said. “And women, too. They fight like animals.”
Reiser sneered. “Afraid, jägers? Three months of idleness, and you’ve all gone soft. Plenty of fat for Ivan to carve up.” The man seemed to run on schadenfreude—harm-joy, happiness at others’ misfortune. “Training in England will make you commandos again.”
Reiser was showing them how not thinking was done. To him, orders followed an iron chain of command that led straight up to the Führer himself. Go to England and train with their enemies? Fine. If Hitler ordered him to jump in the nearest lake, he wouldn’t even ask how deep, and God help you if you tried to stop him.