Hitler’s War

He started his own dive for the railroad bridge sooner than he'd intended to, which also meant it had to be shallower. That gave the antiaircraft gu

Trying not to think about anything else, Hans-Ulrich bored in on the bridge. The viaduct had three levels, towering more than fifty meters above the river it overleaped. Some plump, pipe-smoking, mustachioed French engineer of the last century must have been proud of himself for designing it. Rudel yanked at the bomb-release lever. With a little luck, he'd make that Frenchman's grandchildren unhappy.

As soon as the bombs fell free, the Stuka got faster and friskier. More flak burst behind it, in front of it, all around it. And Sergeant Dieselhorst's voice rang ti

"Danken Gott dafur!" Rudel said. He sped back toward the east, keeping his gauges at the edge of the red till he was sure he'd made it to German-held territory. If one of the Hurricanes had chosen to chase him, red-lining the gauges wouldn't have done much good. The Stuka made a fine dive-bomber, but a poor tired donkey in a sprint on the flat.

He got down. To his surprise, Colonel Steinbre

They, whoever they were, hadn't tried it themselves. Hans-Ulrich shrugged. He hadn't thought-much-about going down. All he'd thought about was doing his job. Letting the other get in the way would have distracted him. It might have given him cold feet. Now that he'd made it through, he wondered why the devil it hadn't.

Shrugging again, he said, "I'm here. The bridge is down."

"There's an Iron Cross First Class!" Steinbre

Medals weren't the biggest thing on Rudel's mind-nowhere close. He did say, "Make sure Dieselhorst gets one, too. He kept the enemy fighters off my back."

"He'll be taken care of," the wing commander promised. Hans-Ulrich believed him. Back in the last war, enlisted men always got the shitty end of the stick. The Fuhrer understood that-he'd seen it for himself, in four years at the front. He'd sworn things would be different this time around, and he'd meant it. Some of the vons left over from the last round might not like it, but too bad for them.

Hans-Ulrich climbed out of the cockpit. Behind him, Sergeant Dieselhorst was coming out, too. "Made it," the noncom said with a wry grin.

"Ja." Hans-Ulrich nodded. "And do you know what we won? Besides the Eisenkreuz, I mean?"

"What's that?" Dieselhorst asked.

"A chance to have just as much fun again tomorrow, or maybe later on today," Rudel answered.

The rear gu

Posters slapped onto walls or fences still standing boasted of the return to Spanish sovereignty. OURS AGAIN! they shouted, and GOOD-BYE TO ENGLAND! Glum British POWs moped behind barbed wire. The people who'd lived in Gibraltar were mostly Spaniards. The ones left alive after the fight seemed just as disheartened as the enemy soldiers. General Sanjurjo's men were making them sorry they'd backed the Union Jack.

A couple of Condor Legion German airmen walked by, gabbing in their incomprehensible guttural language. Delgadillo wondered why they didn't choke to death every time they opened their mouths. One of them nodded to him and said, "Buenos dias." Sound by sound, the words were in Spanish, but no one who heard them would have dreamt they came from a Spaniard's throat.

"Buenos dias," Delgadillo answered politely. Even if they did talk as if their mouths were full of glue, they'd done Marshal Sanjurjo a lot of good. German bombers had helped flatten the British defenses here, for instance, and made British battleships keep their distance.

That thought made Joaquin look west instead of south. If the Royal Navy wanted to cause trouble, it still could. And it might: not only to pay Spain back for reclaiming Gibraltar but to keep the Straits open so British and French ships could pass into and out of the Mediterranean.

He'd faced fire from big naval guns before German planes pounded them into silence. If he never had to do that again, he'd light a grateful candle in church. Once was twice too often. They were much, much worse than land-based artillery-and that was more than bad enough.

The Condor Legion men were looking out to sea, too. One of them-not the one who'd spoken before-asked, "Where is your engineering officer?" He spoke better-not well, but better.

Delgadillo pointed north. "That way, about a kilometer and a half. Why do you need him?" He would never have asked that of one of his own officers. Spanish common soldiers didn't ask their officers anything. They existed to do as they were told. But the Germans were so foreign, so exotic, they might not know that.

Sure enough, this one answered readily enough: "We need spare parts to discuss. Since the big war in Europe began, we have from a shortage of them suffered."

Why didn't he put his verbs where they would do him some good? Did he hide them in his own language, too? He must have, or he wouldn't have done it in Spanish.

"I don't know if he'll be able to help you, Senor." Delgadillo was polite. He didn't tell the Condor Legion men the engineering officer didn't have a chance in hell of doing them any good. Lieutenant Lopez tried hard. Sometimes he could come up with a new bolt or a spring for a rifle. He'd done yeoman's duty repairing the broken axle on a horse-drawn wagon. But he knew no more about airplane parts than a goat knew about the miracle of transubstantiation.

"Well, we will out find. Many thanks. Much obliged," the German said. He and his pal headed north. A Spaniard, on a mission bound to be futile, would have taken his time. The Germans marched away as if they were on a parade ground. Why anybody would be so diligent without some superior's eye on him was more than Delgadillo could fathom. He shrugged. The foreigners might be a little bit crazy, but they were good at what they did, and they were on his side.

He looked west again. No British battleships. No smoke in the distance. No enormous shells crashing down like the end of the world. Nothing but one Spanish soldier with the jitters.

Well, no. That wasn't quite true. A couple of hundred meters away, an officer with enormous, tripod-mounted binoculars sca

If the battleships came and those Germans didn't have their spare parts…What would happen then? The same thing that would happen if there were no airplanes. The ships would pound the stuffing out of Gibraltar.

He laughed at himself. What could he do about it any which way? Jump into the closest foxhole, work his rosary for all it was worth, and pray to the Virgin to keep the guns from blowing him to dogmeat. A common soldier's life wasn't easy, but most of the time it was pretty simple.

Any common soldier, no matter whose army he belonged to, learned to look busy, even-often especially-when he wasn't. Sergeant Carrasquel turned his basilisk stare on Joaquin, but didn't put him to work. If you had a rag and a brush, you could look as if you were cleaning your rifle. No underofficer ever complained if he caught you doing that. And if you weren't so diligent as you might have been…well, how could a sergeant tell?