Hitler's War by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

bad, and he picked up five bucks crunching it.
    Out went the Cubs again. A singing commercial came on. Szulc fiddled with the radio dial. “What the hell you doing?” McGill asked.
    “Seeing if I can find some news between innings,” Szulc answered. “Check what’s up with the war.”
    “Oh. Okay,” McGill said. The war was as important as the Series. Back in the States, people wouldn’t have believed it. McGill was sure of that. But back in the States, people weren’t right around the corner from the Japanese Legation and its garrison of tough bastards—not as tough as Marines, McGill was sure, but tough. Back in the States, people were doing their best to forget the Japs had bombed the crap out of the
Panay
the December before, even though she was flying the American flag.
    Japan apologized, didn’t she? She paid an indemnity, didn’t she? That made everything all right, didn’t it? Maybe so—back in the States. Not in Peking. Not even close.
    Back in the States, people forgot the Japs had a zillion more soldiers sitting in Manchuria. Manchukuo, they called the puppet state there these days. If they decided they wanted a war with the USA, how long would this garrison last? Hell, back in the States, most people didn’t know it existed.
    If the balloon goes up with the Japs, it’s my ass
, McGill thought.
    Szulc got a couple of bursts of static. Then he found the BBC. The announcer had a much posher accent than most of the Royal Marines at the British Legation. They called themselves leathernecks, too, and they made damn fine drinking buddies even if they did talk funny.
    “—vakia continues to offer stout resistance to Hitler’s aggression,” the announcer said. “Russian volunteers and aircraft have begun appearingin Ruthenia and Slovakia. Both Poland and Romania deny consenting to their crossing.”
    “Fuck, I would, too,” Szulc said. “Picking between Hitler and Stalin’s gotta be worse’n the devil and the deep blue sea.”
    “Shut up already, if you want to listen to the news,” somebody told him.
    That supercivilized-sounding BBC announcer was continuing: “—another day of fierce air raids against Prague. Civilian casualties are said to be very heavy. The Czechoslovak government has condemned what it calls ‘the barbarous German onslaught against defenseless non-combatants.’”
    “Nice war,” McGill muttered. Blasting the crap out of anything that got in your way wasn’t anything the Marines hadn’t heard about and seen before. The Japs did it all the time here, now that their war against China had heated up. But you expected better from Europeans, somehow. Then again, the difference between what you expected and what you got made a pretty good measure of how fucked up the world was.
    “Czechoslovakia insists that reports of unrest in Slovakia are greatly exaggerated. Uprisings by the so-called Hlinka Guard”—the announcer read the name with fastidious distaste—“are being suppressed in Bratislava, Radio Prague declares, and elsewhere in that area.”
    “C’mon—put the ballgame back on,” said a big, burly PFC named Puccinelli and inevitably called Pooch.
    “In a second,” Szulc said. “He’ll get to the rest of the shit, and then we’ll go back.” Pooch muttered to himself, but didn’t reach for the tuning dial himself.
    “France continues its advance into Germany. German resistance is termed light,” the BBC newsman said. “France has occupied the Warndt Forest, and seized the towns of Lauterwald and Bübingen.”
    “Wherever the hell those are,” McGill put in. He’d never heard ofeither one of them before. That probably meant you could piss across them.
    The limey’s voice grew stern. “For the second night in a row, air pirates from Spain bombed Hendaye and Biarritz in southwestern France. It is not yet known whether the bombers were flown by native Spanish Fascists of the Sanjurjo junta or by Nazis of the Condor Legion mercenary group. In any case,