Days of Infamy doi-1

by Harry Turtledove

  “I can make a guess,” Shindo said. Fuchida gestured for him to go on. He did: “When we attacked the first American carrier-the one that turned out to be the Enterprise — she had fighters up and waiting for us before we got there. We didn’t see any American patrol planes as we flew toward her. I don’t think there were any. I think the Americans have instruments that let them spot planes at some very long distance.”

  Fuchida frowned thoughtfully. “And you think the Opana installation is one of these?”

  “Opana is a logical place for one,” Shindo replied. “It’s as far north as you can go on Oahu, near enough. Any attack was likeliest to come from the north. And the Yankees would do a good job of destroying something that important.”

  “If they had that kind of device there, why didn’t it find our first attack wave?” Fuchida asked. “It didn’t, you know. Our surprise was complete.”

  Lieutenant Shindo shrugged this time. “Maybe something went wrong with it. Maybe the Americans just didn’t pay any attention to it. They were like those big birds that stick their heads in the sand.”

  “Ostriches,” Fuchida supplied. “They don’t really do that, you know.”

  “So what?” Shindo shrugged once more. “The Americans did, and that’s what counts.”

  “Yes.” Fuchida turned toward the northeast once more. “They did a bad job of scouting, and it cost them. We’d better not imitate them, or it will cost us, too. We’ll need long-range patrols to make sure they don’t try to cause trouble.”

  “Can we afford the fuel to do a proper job of it?” Shindo asked.

  “The cost of using up the fuel is one thing. The cost of not using it up is liable to be something else again,” Fuchida said. “Or do you think I’m wrong? If you do, don’t be shy.”

  Lieutenant Shindo was seldom shy. He was, if anything, unusually forthright for a Japanese. Because he didn’t ruffle easily, he didn’t think anyone else should, either. But he shook his head now. “No, sir, you’re not wrong. It’s just one of the things we’ve got to think about.”

  “Oh, yes.” Fuchida mimed letting his shoulders sag, as if the weight of the world lay heavy upon them. But then he gestured, not just at the technicians stripping U.S. airplanes but at all of Wheeler Field. “So many things to think about. And this would be much harder if not for everything we’ve captured from the Americans.”

  “I’ve thought the same thing ever since I saw the bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment we used to fix the airstrip up at Haleiwa,” Shindo said.

  “And that was just civilian stuff: what the local builders used,” Fuchida said. “The military gear is even better, though a lot of it got ruined in the fighting and the Americans sabotaged what they could of the rest.”

  “By what I’ve seen, they might have done a better job with that,” Shindo said.

  Now Commander Fuchida shrugged again. “They’re rich,” he said, and said no more. Lieutenant Shindo inclined his head in silent agreement. He understood exactly what his superior meant. Because the Yankees had so much, they didn’t seem to realize how valuable even their scraps and leavings were to the Japanese. Along with the earth-moving machinery, they’d left plenty of automobiles behind as they fell back from the northern part of Oahu, and they hadn’t torched all the filling stations, either. The Japanese had made good use of both the cars and the precious gasoline.

  The same held true elsewhere. Hawaii had an astonishing telephone network: there was a phone for every ten people in the islands. In Japan, the figure was more like one for every sixty people; outside of Tokyo, it wasn’t far from one for every hundred people. You could talk to anyone here, or any place on the islands, almost instantly. The Americans took that so much for granted, they hadn’t bothered to destroy the phone lines or the switching system. That would make it much easier for Japan to defend its conquests. Japanese soldiers slept in U.S. barracks that hadn’t been blown up to deny them to the invaders. They lived softer than they would have at home. The list went on and on.

  Fuchida kept looking toward the American mainland. “Sooner or later, they will try to come back,” he predicted.

  “Let them try,” Shindo said. “We’ll give them a set of lumps for their troubles, and then they can try again.” He and Fuchida smiled at each other. The sun shone down brightly. It was a perfect morning. But then, what morning wasn’t perfect in Hawaii?

  ONCE UPON A time, in the dim and vanished days before the war came to Oahu, Kapiolani Park had been a place where tourists and locals could get away from the frenzy of Waikiki for a little while. Lying by the road out to Diamond Head, the expanse of grass and trees had featured, among other things, a fancy band shell where the Royal Hawaiian Band played on Sunday afternoons.

  Now, barbed wire and machine-gun towers ringed Kapiolani Park. Japanese soldiers patrolled the perimeter. In the park itself, tents sprouted like a swarm of toadstools. This was what being a prisoner of war meant.

  A mynah hopped along the grass between the tents, head cocked to one side as it studied the ground for worms and grubs. Fletcher Armitage studied the mynah the same way the bird studied the ground, and with the same hunger. He had a rock in his hand.

  He also watched his fellow captives. If he knocked the bird over, could one of them grab it before he did?

  That was an important question. Everybody on Oahu was going to get hungry by and by. Fletch had seen as much before the surrender. For POWs, though, by and by was already here. The Japanese fed them a little rice or noodles every day. Sometimes green leaves of one sort or another were mixed in with the mess. More rarely, so were bits of fish. Even when they were, the day’s ration wouldn’t have kept a four-year-old healthy, let along a grown man.

  “Come a little closer, you stupid bird,” Fletch murmured. Mynahs took people pretty much for granted. Why not? People had always let them alone. People had… till they started getting hungry.

  Fletch’s belly growled at the thought of mynah meat. He’d never been fat. He was getting skinnier by the day. He’d traded his belt for a length of rope and half a dozen cigarettes. He’d smoked all the cigarettes the day he got them. The rope would go on holding up his pants after he got too skinny for the belt to do him any good.

  Closer came the mynah, and closer still, till it got within about six feet of him. Then it paused, tilting its head to one side and watching him with a beady black eye. It was fairly tame, yes, but not suicidally so like a zebra dove.

  “Come on,” Fletch crooned. “Come on, baby.” The mynah bird kept on casing him. It came no closer. He crooned curses when he decided it wasn’t going to. He’d just have to take his best shot.

  He let fly with the rock. The motion of his arm startled the bird. It was already on the wing and squawking when the rock thudded down somewhere close to where it had been. Would he have hit it if it hadn’t taken off? Maybe. Maybe not, too.

  Coming out with some curses that weren’t crooned at all, Fletch turned away in disgust. “Too bad, buddy,” said a soldier in a tent across the narrow track. “Woulda been good, I bet.”

  “Yeah,” Fletch said. “It would’ve been.” The rest of the day looked black and gloomy. If he’d made the kill, he could have had a few bites of real meat, even if mynahs weren’t anything to make you forget fried chicken. Now he’d have to get by on rations alone. The only trouble with that was, a man couldn’t possibly do it.

  He went over and picked up the rock before somebody else got hold of it. It was a good size for clouting birds. Some time before too long, he’d get another chance. Don’t blow it, he told himself sternly.

  How smart were birds? How long would they take to figure out that they’d suddenly become fair game? How long before they started staying away from Kapiolani Park? If they did, that would be very bad.

  The Japs didn’t bother bringing drinking water into the park. They just left the drinking fountains in place. Generous of them, Fletch thought sourly. If a man had to stand in line for an hour just to wet
his whistle… well, so what? That was no skin off the Japs’ noses.

  Anyone who wanted to wash had to do it at the drinking fountains, too. That meant anything resembling real washing was impossible. Fletch noticed the stink less than he’d thought he would. When everybody smelled, nobody smelled. And everybody sure smelled here.

  Rank had no privileges in line. As far as Fletch could see, rank had no privileges anywhere in the camp any more. If enlisted men obeyed officers, it was because they respected them or liked them, not because they thought they had to. And if they didn’t, what could the officers do about it? Not much. The Japs wouldn’t back them up. The Japs didn’t care what happened here.

  Slowly, slowly, the line snaked forward. Fletch sighed. He was thirsty. He was tired. And he was hungry. Anyone who was hungry enough to want to eat a mynah bird was hungry, all right. Unless he caught a mynah or a dove, he’d stay hungry till he got supper. He shook his head. He’d stay hungry after he got supper, too, because it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

  His turn at the water fountain finally came. He drank and drank and drank. If he drank enough, he could trick his belly into thinking he was full, at least for a little while. He splashed water on his face and hands, too.

  “Come on, buddy. Shake a leg,” the soldier behind him growled. Reluctantly, Fletch moved away from the fountain. The breeze off the ocean a few hundred yards away dried the water on his face. As usual, the weather was perfect: not too hot, not too cold, moist but not too humid. Diamond Head towered in the middle distance. The inside of the dead volcano was supposed to be honeycombed with tunnels, fortified beyond belief. When the rest of Oahu was hostage to the Japs, though, that hadn’t turned out to matter a whole hell of a lot.

  A bunch of things everybody had thought would be important hadn’t turned out to matter a whole hell of a lot. The innate superiority of the white man to the Oriental was one that occurred to Fletch. Here in this POW camp, he didn’t feel very goddamn superior.

  The Japs went out of their way to rub it in that he wasn’t, too. A squad of guards strode through the camp, bayonets glittering on their rifles. Americans scrambled to get out of the soldiers’ way. Along with everybody else, Fletch bowed when the guards passed him. Everyone had learned that lesson in a hurry. The Japanese set on and savagely beat anybody who forgot. A couple of Americans were supposed to have died from their mistreatment. Fletch didn’t know if that was true, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. The Japs didn’t give a rat’s ass whether Americans lived or died.

  Fletch sat down in front of his tent. There wasn’t much else to do. In fact, there wasn’t anything else to do. Hunger left him slow and lethargic. A fly landed on his arm. Slowly and lethargically, he brushed it away. There seemed to be more flies in the POW camp every day. That only made sense; the latrines got fouler every day. Fletch didn’t know how many thousands of prisoners were jammed in here. Enough so that their wastes overwhelmed the lime chloride the Japs deigned to sprinkle into the latrine trenches.

  How long before they ran out of lime chloride altogether? How long before they ran out of chlorine for treating the drinking water? Probably not long-like damn near everything else, the chemicals came, or had come, from the mainland. What would happen when they did run out? Dysentery was the word that came to mind.

  After half an hour or so, Fletch heaved himself to his feet. The one drawback to filling yourself full of water was that you didn’t stay full. It worked its way through. He trudged off toward the slit trenches. He might as well have been moving in slow motion. He didn’t have the energy to hurry.

  He stood at the edge of a trench, unfastened his fly, and eased himself. Out beyond the barbed wire, Japanese soldiers kept an eye on him and on the other Americans using the slit trenches. Fletch caught a guard’s eye as he put himself back in his pants. Yeah, you son of a bitch, I’ve got a bigger one than you do, he thought. He turned away.

  Such games were dangerous. If he got too obvious, the Japs were liable to understand exactly what he meant. Then there’d be hell to pay. He ambled off. The guard didn’t start yelling or open fire, so he’d got away with it.

  “Fletch! Is that you? I thought sure you were dead!”

  “Gordy! I’ll be goddamned. I thought you were, too.” Fletch pumped Gordon Douglas’ hand. Then both men seemed to decide at the same instant that that wasn’t good enough. They clung to each other as if each were drowning and the other a life preserver. Douglas was dirty, and thinner than Fletch ever remembered seeing him. Seeing him at all was great, though. “How the hell did you end up in one piece?”

  The other artillery lieutenant shrugged. “Half the time I ask myself the same thing. They started shooting us up when we were just going out of Schofield Barracks.”

  “Yeah, us, too,” Fletch broke in. “You would have been in the truck convoy right in front of mine, or maybe right behind it.”

  “Behind it, I think.” Douglas rubbed at a nasty, half-healed scar on his arm. “But Jesus God, Fletch, you can’t do shit when the other guy’s got planes in the air and you don’t. You’re dead as what comes out of a Spam can.”

  “I found that out, too,” Armitage said. “We didn’t get to our position till the Japs were already hitting the beaches, and that was too late.”

  “Shit, you did better than we did,” Douglas said. “We never made it to Haleiwa at all. It can’t be more than fifteen fucking miles, but we never fucking got there. Air attacks, traffic on the road coming south, wrecks to try and go around-except sometimes you couldn’t go around them. You had to clear ’em-by hand-and that took forever.”

  “Tell me about it!” Fletch exclaimed. “Our truck got shot up. We commandeered a civilian car. You should’ve heard the Nips in it howl when we threw ’em the hell out. Try towing a 105 with one of those babies if you want a fun time.”

  “You kept your piece? You don’t know how lucky you are,” Douglas said. “We had a bomb burst right under ours early that second morning. Took out most of my crew. I was farther away-that’s when I got this.” He rubbed the scar again. “They slapped a bandage on it, but after that I was an infantryman, and a piss-poor infantryman, too, let me be the first to tell you.”

  “I had all ground-pounders on the gun except for me by the time we folded up,” Fletch said. “They learned the ropes pretty good.”

  “When it’s root, hog, or die you learn or you go under.” Douglas shrugged. “I learned, too, or learned enough. I must’ve-I’m still here.”

  Fletch didn’t say anything to that. From what he’d seen, who lived and who died when bombs and bullets started flying was often-not always, but often-a matter of luck. Instead, he waved at what had been the charming Kapiolani Park and was now the anything but charming POW camp. “Yeah, we’re here, all right, and ain’t it a garden spot?”

  Gordon Douglas only shrugged again. “The goddamn monkeys didn’t murder us all after we surrendered. Far as I’m concerned, that’s a step up from what they could’ve done. Step up from what I figured they’d do, too. Some of the shit I saw-” He spat, but didn’t go into detail.

  All Fletch did was nod and say, “Yeah.” He scratched at himself. He was itching more and more as time went by. Fleas? Lice? Bedbugs? All of the above? Probably all of the above. Then he waved at the camp again. “They didn’t need to murder us all at once. Looks like they’re gonna do it by inches instead.” He poked Douglas in the belly. The other man had always had trouble keeping the pounds off. He didn’t any more. “You’re skinnier than you used to be. So am I.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Douglas said. “They give us this horrible slop, and they don’t give us enough of it, and it’s the most delicious stuff in the world when you get it, on account of then you feel a little less empty for a little while.”

  “I know. I know. Oh, God, do I know.” Fletch looked toward the kitchen tents. He knew how long it was till supper, too-knew to the minute even without a watch. Too long. Too goddamn long.

  WHEN OSCAR VAN de
r Kirk and Charlie Kaapu got their surfboards from the Outrigger Club, Charlie asked, “You giving lessons today?”

  “This afternoon, yeah. Not now,” Oscar answered. “How about you?”

  His hapa — Hawaiian buddy only shrugged. “Not now.”

  Oscar always thought of himself as a happy-go-lucky guy. Next to most of the population of Hawaii, much less the mainland, he was. Next to Charlie Kaapu, he might have been a Rockefeller or a du Pont. “Charlie, what the hell do you do for money?” he asked.

  Charlie shrugged. “Never have much. Never worry much. Too much worry, too much huhu, waste time.” He slapped his rock-hard belly. “I don’t starve yet.”

  “Yeah.” Oscar’s voice rang a little hollow. Before the Japs took over, that would have been a joke. It wasn’t so funny now. People were short of everything from pasta and tomatoes to toilet paper. That wouldn’t get better, only worse. Every once in a while, even though she’d walked out on him, he wondered how Susie Higgins was doing and where her next meal was coming from. He didn’t waste a whole lot of grief on her, though. She was the kind who’d always land on her feet-or, if she had to, on her back.

  His toes dug into the sand as he and Charlie walked down to the Pacific. Waikiki Beach was crowded this morning-not with tourists, the way it usually was, but with fishermen. Swarms of people with a rod and reel, and quite a few people with just a rod and a length of line and a hook, were out trying their luck.

  A man in a straw hat, a loud floral shirt, and Bermuda shorts hauled a silvery fish out of the water. It wasn’t very big, but all his neighbors stared jealously. He stashed the fish in a creel he kept between his feet. Nobody was going to take his prize away from him.

  “Excuse us. ’Scuse us,” Oscar said over and over, pushing past the fishermen to get into the sea. Charlie was more direct. He used his surfboard’s nose to clear a path for himself. A couple of fishermen gave him nasty looks. He looked right back at them. They muttered to themselves, but that was all they did. Charlie hardly ever got into fights. That was mostly because nobody was crazy enough to want to take him on.