Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

“To find the dog,” Krause replied.

It was true. Their reconnaissance patrol had been hastily organized and sent into the wilderness after a supply convoy arrived in their village and described an odd encounter with an Alsatian wolf dog. Oster’s platoon leader, Leutnant Schaefer, had ordered Oster and his squad to locate the dog and capture it. He was worried the canine would fall into the hands of Russian partisans. A fine dog like that was a piece of military equipment valuable to the Wehrmacht.

Oster hated the Russian partisans, many of whom were refugees from the very village Oster’s platoon had captured. Unlike the more useful Russian peasants, who stayed behind to cook, clean, and labor for the German soldiers, the partisans ran away and hid in the woods. There they lurked like dangerous animals, waiting to prey upon solitary motorcycle couriers or poorly armed supply trucks, sniping with hunting rifles from the trees. Oster had never actually seen a partisan, but he’d spent more than one winter evening hungry and shivering because partisans had attacked a supply truck and stolen his platoon’s heating oil and food. If Oster had believed this dog-finding patrol would somehow help strike a blow against these troublesome partisans, who were really nothing more than glorified bandits, he would have been much more enthusiastic about the mission. But he knew all Schaefer’s talk about protecting military equipment from the Bolshevik bandits was nonsense. In truth, Schaefer just happened to love dogs.

Oster liked dogs, too, but not in the same way as his Prussian commander. Oster’s family had relied on dogs for generations. Oster’s business was cheese, a particular kind of goat cheese that was prized by Germans and had therefore kept his family financially secure for hundreds of years. Dogs were essential to the business of raising and herding goats, but they were simply a tool, like a hammer or a hoe. And they were a tool with extra, associated costs. You had to feed dogs. And so to maximize profit, you had to make sure that you fed the dogs who worked hard and got rid of the ones who didn’t. That task was made more difficult by the fact that dogs didn’t have just one or two pups; they had full litters. So whenever it was time to breed the dogs, Oster was faced with the task of identifying the hardworking puppies among the general rabble. That usually took a few months, at least. Oster then hiked the undesirable puppies out into the mountains, where he left them to starve in the wilderness.

It wasn’t much different from organizing a combat squad. Perhaps that was why he’d been promoted to squad leader. After all, Oster realized with satisfaction, it was how the German government was treating the Russians. Humans were just like animals, weren’t they? Those who could work and could contribute to the greater good should receive food and provisions so they could survive—such people, Oster believed, were the Germans. Those people who could not work efficiently—the slackers or naturally slovenly—should be eliminated. As Oster saw it, these people were the Russians, Bolsheviks, partisans, bohemians, and anyone else who didn’t agree with official German policy. These were the so-called undesirables. And it was good and proper that Oster and his companions were ridding the world of them. The world would become a more efficient, and more pleasant, place to live.

“The dog is merely a means to an end,” Oster explained to Krause after a long silence. “It is our manifest destiny to improve this land, to make it more productive. In order to achieve that goal, we must protect our army. In order to protect our army, we must reduce the capabilities of the Slavic partisans who seek to hinder our advance. In order to reduce those capabilities, we must find that dog.”

“Then maybe we should just whistle.” Krause halted, pursed his lips, and whistled a melodic call to the dog. The rest of the platoon broke into laughter.

Oster’s face burned with embarrassment. His speech had been ridiculous. These men didn’t care about manifest destiny. All they cared about was their own safety. “Keep that up and you’ll make an easy target for a partisan sniper,” Oster warned.

Krause stopped whistling at once, his face pale.

Oster turned to the rest of his squad. “Make no mistake. We may be behind our own lines, but this is still enemy territory.” Oster noted that his words were finally having the desired effect. The men were gripping their weapons now, nervously eyeing the trees. Oster smiled inwardly, knowing it was the perfect time to instill some discipline. “Krause, take point.”

Krause hesitated but didn’t dare question the Unteroffizier. He cocked the bolt on his rifle, grasped it in both hands, and stepped forward through the slush, trying to make as little noise as possible.

The rest of the squad followed behind, Pfeiffer and his heavy machine gun dead center where he would be less vulnerable to ambush. Oster took up the rear. Despite their attempt at stealth, the soldiers’ boots crunched loudly through the crusty snow with every step.

A startled flock of birds chittered overhead, their beating wings drowning out the soldiers’ steps. Oster realized that those birds hadn’t come from the neighboring trees—they hadn’t been surprised by his squad patrolling. Something else had startled them. Oster mentally traced the trajectory of their flight back to its origin and pointed.

“There! Quickly!” He broke into a run, and his squad followed close behind.

Karen had heard the whistling and was trying to move away from whoever had made the sound. She suspected it was the German soldiers from the trucks, trying to find Duck. But when she startled a flock of birds, she froze in terror. The birds would give her away, and if she was right about the German soldiers, they would soon find her.

So she ran.

But that only made her an easier target. The sound of her coat flapping and her feet crunching thundered in the quiet forest. And she heard other feet crunching, the sounds coming up on her fast. She changed direction to throw off her pursuers, only to come around a bush only yards from a German soldier. She turned again into the forest, but the weakness resulting from months of hunger was beginning to affect her. She was tiring. She willed her legs to keep pumping, but there was no strength left in them. They collapsed under her, and she tumbled forward into the snow. Her arms still worked, so she began to crawl, dragging herself forward on her elbows. It was pointless. Moments after she collapsed, rough hands grabbed her coat and lifted her. Her spine jarred as they slammed her against a tree trunk. Her head swam. A German soldier pressed his forearm against her throat, preventing her from breathing, and said something to her in German she couldn’t understand. She shook her head.

“Who are you?” he asked in Russian.

She tried to answer, but she could only wheeze through the pressure on her throat.

He released his forearm and repeated, “Who are you?”

“Inna… my name is Inna.”

The soldier pulled her to him, spun her around, and quickly tied her wrists behind her back. Then he pushed her forward. Another soldier grumbled something in German, but her captor barked back, and the talking stopped. He pushed her onward, but again her legs collapsed. So the soldier lifted her and simply heaved her onto his shoulder.

As her mind raced, Karen realized this was the first time she’d seen a real German. Her muscles tensed in terror at that, and she could barely breathe as she bounced along, hanging off the German’s shoulder.

As Bobby flew, he kept expecting an ocean of sand below him. That was what he’d seen as a kid in those old Rudolph Valentino movies: giant dunes rising like waves over an endless sea of bleached white sand. But those films had been made on Southern California beaches, not here in North Africa. The real McCoy was more rock than beach, jutting up in toothy lines to create a broken landscape that looked like a nightmare to traverse. Steep hills shot up haphazardly, spreading in all directions, spotted with ugly brown bushes. No wonder the Valentino movies hadn’t been filmed here; it was hardly a landscape for making Hollywood dreams.

Bobby had been stationed at a secret US airbase in Eritrea for a little over a week. It was now April 1942. When they arrived, the pilots in Bobby’s squadron had been disappointed. The airbase was a dump. Tents and shacks guarded a gravel runway surrounded by hand-painted signs that warned of unexploded mines. Bomb craters were being used as pre-dug latrines that were simply bulldozed over when they got too disgusting.

The air base had once belonged to the Italians, which was the reason for the bomb damage and the mines. Once the British Royal Air Force drove the Italians out, they handed the base over to the Americans. At the time, the United States had not yet entered the war, and the British wanted a top-secret yet neutral ally who could repair British aircraft without the fear of being attacked by the Germans. Now America was in the war, and it wasn’t just repairing aircraft; it was supplying them—to England and the Soviet Union as well.

This was why Bobby had volunteered for the assignment. If he could help Russia, maybe in some way he’d also be helping Karen. So he and his new squadron had been shipped out on an oil tanker, their disassembled P-39 Airacobras packed in crates and disguised as tractor parts, bound for the oil fields of North Africa and the Middle East. In Eritrea a civilian crew assembled the fighter planes while Bobby and his squadron mates acclimated to the heat and the dust. Their job was flying the reassembled P-39s from Eritrea to Tehran, where the American pilots were to hand them over to Russia for use against the German invaders.