"Well, sure," Willi said. "But when'll that be?"
Ludwig looked around. It was camouflage netting and dummy buildings as far as the eye could see. "Can't sit too long," he said. "We'll start feeling like moles in holes if they leave us here for weeks at a time. Besides, camouflage or no camouflage, pretty soon the French and the English will figure out something's going on. Or do you think I'm wrong?"
"Not me," the other sergeant said. "I think you hit the nail right on the head. I'd just as soon get going, too. I feel like moss'll start growing on my panzer if we wait around much longer."
"I'll tell you something else makes me think we're going to get rolling pretty damn quick," Ludwig said. Willi Maass made a questioning noise. Rothe explained: "I saw Waffen-SS units coming in yesterday. Those guys are like stormcrows-they don't show up till something's about to pop."
"Well, you've got that right," Willi said.
They both smoked for a while and let it rest right there. You never could tell who was listening. Ludwig didn't know what to think about the Waffen-SS. It looked like Himmler's effort to horn in on the Wehrmacht. Not many men in the army liked that idea. Rothe knew damn well he didn't. On the other hand, the guys with the SS runes on their right collar tabs had fought like mad bastards in Czechoslovakia. If there was trouble, they were nice to have around.
"It'll be interesting," Maass offered.
"Interesting. Yeah." Ludwig stubbed out his cigarette under his boot. "I better get back to work."
Willi Maass laughed. "Nice to know you're eager about it."
"Ah, fuck you-and your shitty cigarette," Ludwig said. Laughing, he and Maass both headed back to their panzers.
Captain Gerhard Elsner came by a few minutes later. He eyed the exposed motor and Rothe's grubby hands. "Can you be ready to move tomorrow at 0600?" the company commander asked.
"Sir, I can be ready to move in twenty minutes," Ludwig answered proudly. "I've got ammo. I've got gas. My driver and radioman are here. Let me slap the louvers down, button her up, and we go."
"That's what I want to hear," Elsner said. He'd been a noncom in the last war, and wore the Iron Cross Second Class. "Unless it rains or snows between now and then, we're going to give them what for."
"At 0600? We'll be there," Ludwig promised. "It'll still be dark, or close."
"No darker for us than for them," Captain Elsner said. "We'll be ready. We'll know where we're going and what we're up to. They won't."
"Ja." Ludwig hoped it would make a difference.
Everybody got a good supper: one more sign things would start any minute. The panzer commander stuffed himself. After this, it would be whatever he could get his hands on: iron rations and horsemeat and whatever he could steal from houses and shops. He shrugged. Holland was supposed to be rich. If he hadn't starved in Czechoslovakia, he wouldn't over there, either.
Nobody'd bothered to tell him why Germany needed to invade its smaller neighbor. He didn't worry about it. Why should he? He was just a sergeant. When the officers pointed him in some direction and said Go, he went. An attack dog would have done the same thing. That was what he was: the Fuhrer's attack dog.
He lay down to sleep by his panzer. So did Fritz Bittenfeld and Theo Hossbach. But Fritz wasn't all that interested in sleeping. He kept going on about what Dutch women would be like, and Belgian women, and French women…
Theo didn't say anything. He hardly ever did, except when he had to. Fritz wouldn't shut up, though. Finally, Ludwig said, "You can't screw them all."
"I can try," the driver said valiantly.
Ludwig laughed. Next thing he knew, Captain Elsner was shaking him awake. What seemed like a million engines throbbed overhead: the Luftwaffe, flying west to soften up whatever the Dutchmen had set up to try to slow the attack.
He was gnawing on black bread and sausage when his panzer rolled out-at 0600 on the dot. Artillery thundered all around him. The noise was terrific. He wouldn't have wanted to be a green-uniformed Dutch soldier with all that coming down on his head. No, indeed. He was on the right side-the one giving the pounding, not the poor sons of bitches taking it.
Two and a half weeks before Christmas. As Hans-Ulrich Rudel scrambled into the pilot's seat of his Ju-87, he was damn glad the campaign in the West was finally getting started. His squadron commander didn't like him. If the major had had the chance, he would have shipped Rudel off to operational reconnaissance training. But not even an officer with an ice cube for a heart like the squadron CO wanted to be a man short when the big fight started.
And so Hans-Ulrich, a milk drinker, a minister's son, a new-minted twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant, looked out through the Stuka's armored windshield. "You ready, Albert?" he asked the rear gunner and radioman.
"You bet, Herr Leutnant." Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst's voice came back tinnily through the speaking tube. Dieselhorst was at least ten years older than Rudel. He drank all kinds of things, but milk wasn't any of them.
Groundcrew men in khaki overalls fitted a crank into the socket on the port side of each Ju-87. They looked at their wristwatches. Either they'd synchronized them or someone gave an order Hans-Ulrich couldn't hear through the thick glass and metal shielding the cockpit. They all yanked the cranks at the same instant.
Hans-Ulrich stabbed the starter button with his forefinger at the same time. Thanks to one or the other or both, the big twelve-cylinder Junkers Jumo 211 engine thundered to life at once. It put out 1,100 horsepower. The squadron flew brand-new Ju-87Bs, which had almost twice the power of the older, slower A model a lot of units were still using.
Fuel…good. Oil pressure…good. Rudel methodically went down the list. He gave the groundcrew man a thumbs-up. The fellow grinned and returned it. Hans-Ulrich looked around. All the props were spinning.
Sergeant Dieselhorst said, "Everybody goes today, even the guys who have to flap their arms to take off."
"Ja," Rudel said, laughing. He was damned if he would have let any minor mechanical flaw ground him on this day of days.
One by one, the big monoplanes with the inverted gull wings taxied down the dirt runway and took off. Finding west was simple: all they had to do was fly away from the rising sun. Holland lay only a few minutes away. Hans-Ulrich had a 250kg bomb under the Stuka's belly and a pair of 50kg bombs on each wing. The squadron was supposed to go after concentrations of Dutch infantry and artillery. He thought they could do that.
"Orange triangle," he muttered to himself. That was the emblem Dutch fighters used on fuselage and wings. A lot of them painted the rudder orange, too. The Ju-87 wasn't the fastest or most graceful plane, especially when weighted down with almost half a tonne of bombs. He had to hope the Me-109s would keep most of the enemy aircraft away.
Boom! A black puff of smoke appeared in the sky below and in front of his plane. The Stuka staggered in the air, like a car driving over a fat pothole.
"They know we're here," Albert Dieselhorst said dryly.
"They only think they do," Hans-Ulrich said. "We haven't started showing them yet."
Looking down from 2,500 meters, he watched smoke rise from artillery bursts. He could see panzers moving forward. They were tiny, like tin toys. But when they fired their guns, fire belched out. No tin toy could match that.
No Dutch panzers met the German machines. Either the Dutch didn't have them or didn't know how to deploy them. Hans-Ulrich wondered why not. Holland was a rich country. It hadn't even had its economy wrecked in the last war. Why wouldn't it pony up the cash to defend itself properly?
Weak. Decadent. Probably full of Jews, Rudel thought. Always trying to do things on the cheap. I'll bet they're sorry now, when it's too late.
The Dutch did have some field guns-75s or 105s-close enough to the frontier to help their infantry resist the German onslaught. That was where the Stukas came in. The squadron leader put a wing over and dove on the gun positions. One after another, the rest of the Ju-87s followed.