There can be no peace, he thought, morbidly.
“Field Marshal,” he said. “Could we win before the first snowfall?”
Voss looked unsurprised by the question. Volker rather suspected he’d been considering the issue himself.
“Perhaps,” he said, finally. “We don’t know when the snow is going to fall.”
“But we could still chew them to ribbons,” Volker mused. “They’d either have to abandon vast tracts of land or fight us.”
He scowled at the thought. The SS — and the Heer — was good at slotting newcomers into units and relying on the old hands to teach them the ropes. There was no such thing as a unit completely composed of soldiers — or stormtroopers — fresh out of basic training. But if the SS’s combat veterans were killed, the SS would have fewer experienced soldiers to teach the newcomers how to fight. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but it was one that had to be faced. A campaign — even a limited thrust eastwards — would make it harder for the enemy to regenerate their forces.
“Yes, Herr Chancellor,” Voss said. “But if we waited six months, we would also be far stronger.”
Volker had his doubts. Germany Prime might possess most of the Reich’s industry, but Hans Krueger had made it clear that their industrial base was on its last legs. The demands of the war hadn’t helped, either. They needed to give the machinery a rest; instead, they’d upped the demands to support the military. Pushing the industry any harder might result in a general collapse. And even if they didn’t have a wave of large-scale failures, they’d still pay a terrifying price for occupying Germany East.
And they might get their atomic bombs up and running, he thought. It was anyone’s guess just how long it would be before the SS unlocked their own bombs. A trained engineer, he’d been warned, might just be able to remove the PAL system and improvise a replacement detonator of his own. What will they do if they have working atomic bombs?
He cursed under his breath. The Siberian missile fields probably couldn’t be turned on Germany Prime, but they could be pointed at America. And Karl Holliston was insane. Who knew what he’d do if he thought he was losing the war? Taking the United States down too might make perfect sense to him. Or perhaps he’d reason that the Americans would retaliate against Germany Prime, giving Germany East a chance to rebuild. Stopping him from using the damned things was worth almost any price.
“We have to move now,” he said, softly. “If we give them too much time, they will use it against us.”
“Yes, Herr Chancellor,” Voss said. “But I should caution you that we need more manpower.”
Volker sighed. Almost every male German in the Reich had some military skills — thanks to the Hitler Youth — but not all of them had gone into the military. They’d started training volunteers even before the siege of Berlin had begun, yet it would take months before the new recruits were ready for the demands of modern war. There was an entire army in South Africa, but getting it back to the mainland in time for the big offensive was impossible. Even disengaging from the South African War was proving tricky.
“See what you can drag up,” he said, finally.
“My staff did have an idea,” Voss said. “We could approach the French or the Italians for manpower.”
Volker looked up at him, sharply. “Are they mad?”
“Italy and France both have good reason to want to keep Holliston out of power,” Voss pointed out, dryly. “Fighting beside us would be better than fighting Holliston on his own, later.”
“Hah,” Volker said.
In truth, he wasn’t sure how to react. The French could fight well, he’d been told, but they’d lost so badly in 1940 that they’d never recovered. Their infantry had a great deal of experience fighting in North Africa, yet could they stand up to combat in Germany East without panzers and jet fighters of their own? And the Italians were laughable. They’d been jokes back in 1940 and they were still jokes. Their empire would have fallen apart long ago if they hadn’t been backed up by the Reich.
And they weren’t interested in crushing the life out of their territories, he acknowledged, ruefully. They might have lost their empires if their subjects hadn’t realised that they were better masters than us.
“If you can convince them to send troops, do so,” he said, finally. “But see what they want in exchange.”
He shook his head in frustration. The Reich simply didn’t have many diplomats. A year ago, the subject nations had known to obey — or else — while the North Atlantic Alliance had known better than to lower its guard, no matter what honeyed words came out of Berlin and the Reich. Now… he didn’t know quite how to talk to the French. Barking orders was no longer possible, but he didn’t want to let the French walk all over him either…
“They’ll want political freedom,” Voss predicted. “And the return of Alsace-Lorraine.”
Volker nodded. The French had made that demand before, back when Gudrun had tried to come to terms with them. And it was politically impossible. There wasn’t a single ethnic Frenchman living in Alsace-Lorraine, not now. They’d all been driven out in 1950, when the Reich had been reshaping Western Europe after the war. The French hadn’t even had the worst of it. Countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands had completely disappeared from the map. The lucky ones — the ones who couldn’t pass for German — had been shipped into French North Africa.
And the unlucky ones were exterminated, he thought, grimly.
He’d been in the SS. He knew how Untermenschen were treated. And yet it had been a shock to realise just how many Untermenschen had been slaughtered. The dispassionate remarks in school textbooks utterly failed to convey the sheer horror of what the Reich had done. Volker wouldn’t shed any tears for Untermenschen who had opposed the Reich, but how many of the Reich’s victims had been enemies? How many of the dead had been Germans who had been wounded in combat or born with defects?
“See what they say,” he said. “But we can’t give them Alsace-Lorraine.”
It was going to be a nightmare, he predicted. The Reich knew how to handle subject states — they supported the Reich and did as they were told, in exchange for what scraps the Reich offered them — but independent states? What would happen when the French started to build up their armoured divisions? Or produce their own jet fighters? Or even develop their own nuclear weapons? Would they want revenge for forty years of oppression?
“They may be satisfied merely to know that the SS beast has been slain,” Voss offered. He didn’t sound confident. “We will see.”
Volker sighed. “Begin drawing up the plans to take the offensive as soon as possible,” he said. “Even if we don’t have the French and Italians in support, we need to move anyway.”