Free The Man with the Iron Heart by Harry Turtledove

waving the
Stars and Stripes.
“Look at this!” the guy shouted. “Look what we done to the goddamn Japs!”
    “Hold the stupid thing still, willya?” somebody else said, more irritably than Lou would have—maybe this fellow hadn’t had his coffee yet. “Give us a chance to see what it says.”
    “Oh. Sorry.” The guy with the paper did hold it still—and upside down. After assorted hoots from the soldiers shoveling food into their faces, he turned it right side up.
    Upside down or right side up, the headline screamed about an atom bomb. “What the hell is that?” a major asked.
    “They dropped one on this, uh, Hiroshima place, and the town is gone. Right off the map,” said the man with the
Stars and Stripes.
    “Well, they firebombed the living shit out of Tokyo not long ago, too, and they pretty much burned it off the map. So what’s such a big deal about this?” The major seemed determined not to be impressed—or maybe he didn’t fully grasp what was going on.
    Either way, the guy with the paper spelled it out for him: “Yes, sir, but that was hundreds of planes and gazillions of incendiaries—Christ only knows how many. This Hiroshima place, this was one plane and one bomb. One.”
    “What? One bomb? A whole city? My ass! That’s impossible!” the major said. If not for the enormous headline, Lou would have felt the same way.”
    “Here’s what the President said.” The man with the
Stars and Stripes
opened it and read from a story: “‘Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the power of the British “Grand Slam” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.’”
    The guy beside Lou stubbed out his cigarette and crossed himself. Lou knew just how he felt.
    “‘The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold,’” read the fellow with the paper. “‘And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.
    “‘It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.’”
    “Son of a bitch,” the skeptical major whispered. That summed up what Lou was feeling, too.
    “‘Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But no one knew any practical method of doing it.’” The guy who had the
Stars and Stripes
didn’t read especially well. Or maybe he was as flummoxed as everybody else. He went on, “‘By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1’s and V-2’s late and in limited quantities and that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.’”
    “Oh, son of a bitch.” From Lou, it came out as more prayer than curse. Imagining the Nazis with a bomb that could take out a city at one shot scared him worse than anything he’d seen in the war, which was saying a lot.
    “‘The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land, and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.’” The soldier folded the
Stars and Stripes
shut again.
    “Wow,” said somebody at another table. “I wouldn’t believe a story like that if it was in
Superman,
and here it is in
Stars and Stripes.
”
    All through the mess hall, heads solemnly bobbed up and down. Lou understood what the other American