“Comrade Pilot, I am switching the set to its American configuration,” the radioman replied.
Now, as far as any electronic snoopers could tell, they were an American B-29 going about its business. Gribkov flew across the Adriatic, across Italy, and came to the Ligurian Sea near Pisa. He stayed over the water, passing south of Marseille, and entered France near Perpignan. Had he gone too far south and come into Spain instead, Franco’s Fascists might have tried to meet him with leftover Messerschmitt-109s, though they probably couldn’t have reached his height.
“There’s the Garonne!” Tsederbaum sounded surprised and exultant at the same time. “Now all we have to do is follow it northwest to Bordeaux.”
Alexander Lavrov let the bomb fall free at Boris’ command. No one had wondered about them from Leningrad all the way here. Gribkov swung the Tu-4 into its escape turn. The parachute delayed the fall of the bomb. When hellfire burst out behind them, blast buffeted the Tu-4 but did it no harm.
“Now we see if we get back to the rodina,” Zorin said with a wry chuckle. “They may not have known we were here before, but I bet they do now.”
“They may,” Boris told the copilot, “but will their IFF?” He was betting his life-all their lives-it wouldn’t.
–
Cade Curtis had always admired George Orwell. Animal Farm told people what Stalin was like years before they wanted to hear it. Orwell’s new one, 1984, had come out just ahead of the day Cade traded in civvies for Army olive-drab. He read it in a night, and came away with his mind reeling at the totalitarian world and at the scrunched-down language that totalitarian world required. As far as he was concerned, 1984 was a doubleplusgood book.
And then there was Homage to Catalonia. Orwell hadn’t just talked about fighting Fascism. He’d gone and done it, and got himself shot in the doing. While he was in Republican Spain, he’d also noted and written about Marxist doctrinal splits and how they hampered the war against Franco. (These days, having outlasted his Fascist pals, Franco was an American ally. Politics could be a mighty peculiar business.)
One of the other things Orwell had seen while in the trenches was that the Spanish Civil War was the first loudspeaker war. Phalangists and Republicans threw loud, amplified lies across no-man’s-land at each other. Anyone on either side who believed the other’s propaganda would no doubt regret it in short order. Both made the effort, though.
At the start of the Second World War, the Phony War between the Western Allies and Germany (the Sitzkrieg, the Germans had called it) was mostly a loudspeaker war, too. Again, both sides also used them later.
And loudspeakers were very much in play here in Korea. The Red Chinese used them whenever the fighting bogged down, which was often. Sometimes what came out of them was pretty thick stuff: people going on about how wonderful Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Mao were, all in an accent straight out of a Chinese laundry back home. That kind of crap was easy to ignore.
As time went by, though, they got smoother. More people who really spoke English started giving spiels for them. If somebody who sounded like you said you were fighting for the wrong cause and that things on Mao’s side of the line were wonderful, you could be tempted to listen to him. You’d be a prime jerk if you did, but what army didn’t have some prime jerks in it?
Uneasily, Cade wondered how many American prisoners the Reds had taken south of the Chosin Reservoir. Not everybody they overran there would have died. When you were surrounded and cut off, you might throw down your M-1 and raise your hands and hope for the best.
And then, once you were a POW, what if they said they’d feed you better if you did some talking for them? What if they said they wouldn’t feed you at all if you didn’t? What if they worked on you the way O’Brien worked on Winston Smith in 1984? Would some prisoners start to love Big Brother? The garbage that sometimes came from the loudspeakers argued they would.
The Americans used loudspeakers themselves. What they shouted across the barbed wire sounded to Cade like cats in a sack when you kicked it. He didn’t find Chinese a beautiful language.
Every so often, though, one of the Reds would sneak across no-man’s-land and give himself up. It didn’t happen every day, but it happened often enough for Cade to notice. When his battalion CO came to the forward trenches to see how things were going, Cade asked, “Sir, what are we yelling at the Chinks? It seems to do something, anyway.”
Major Jeff Walpole grinned a sly grin. “Ah, you haven’t heard that story, huh?”
“No, sir,” Cade answered. “What is it?”
“What we yell on the loudspeakers is something a psy-ops colonel named Linebarger cooked up. He speaks perfect Chinese-he’s an American China big shot’s kid. I mean somebody with clout. Sun Yat-sen was Linebarger’s godfather, for cryin’ out loud.”
“Wow! Really?” Cade said.
“I wasn’t there to see it myself. I haven’t met Linebarger. From what I gather, he’s not an easy guy to meet. But that’s what I hear. And anyway, what we’re telling them is, they can come in to our lines yelling Chinese words like love and virtue and humanity. And when they yell ’em in the right order, it sounds like I surrender in English. Lets ’em give up without losing face, you know?”
“Wow,” Cade said again. “That’s one sneaky guy. I thought I heard something like I surrender in all the Chinese jibber-jabber, but who can tell? I mean, it’s Chinese, sir.”
“Yeah, it’s Greek to me, too.” Walpole grinned. Cade winced. The older man continued, “We drop leaflets on ’em with the same message. It works. From what they tell me, it works better than most of the rest of our propaganda.”
“If it works, we ought to stick with it,” Cade said.
“Feels the same way to me.” Like Curtis, Walpole wouldn’t look out at the Red Chinese positions from any of the loopholes set up so American soldiers could do exactly that. Nine times out of ten, maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred, you’d get away with it. The odd time, a sniper would be waiting and put one through the eye you used to do the looking. The battalion commander found his own observation points. “Quiet for the time being,” he remarked.
“Yes, sir, I think so,” Curtis replied. “They tried that armored assault on us, and the Corsairs came in and smashed it up. They were like kids with new toys-they’d got some tanks through! Then we went and broke the new toys, so they’ve been sulking ever since.”
“People who outrank me weren’t very happy when those tanks showed up,” Walpole said. “I mean to tell you, son-they were not happy. We dropped an atom bomb on Harbin, remember, and on the rail line through Harbin. And now the line’s a going concern again. Nobody figured the Chinks could drive it through there anywhere near so fast.”
Nobody had figured the Red Chinese would swarm over the Yalu the way they had, either. Nobody had figured they would be able to do such horrible things to the Americans and other UN troops south of the Chosin Reservoir. If they hadn’t cut them off from Hungnam and started grinding them to bits, maybe Truman wouldn’t have decided to use atom bombs in Manchuria. Underestimating Red China came with expensive consequences.
The major, though, wouldn’t care about the political and strategic views of a shavetail first looey too young to vote or buy himself a drink. So all Cade said was, “Lord help the poor suckers who rebuilt that railroad. I bet every one of ’em glows in the dark.”
“I bet you’re right,” Walpole said. “Considering how the Reds throw soldiers at us the way rich guys throw money at chorus girls-and considering how they lose ’em as fast as the rich guys burn through their cash-is it any wonder if they spend railroad workers the same way?”