So did the tall bronze statue of Oliver Hazard Perry. The folding chairs for the ceremony were set up in front of it. “This is a good place for doing what we’re doing,” Joe said to Orson Sharp.
Sharp nodded. “I’ll say. ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours!’ ” he quoted.
Joe had forgotten that. He suddenly laughed. “And the enemy he was fighting was England, and she’s the best friend we’ve got.”
“Yeah.” The young man from Utah laughed, too. “And do you remember who his younger brother was?”
“Afraid not,” Joe admitted. He’d done okay in history, but he hadn’t set the world on fire.
“Matthew Perry—the guy who opened up Japan,” Sharp said.
“Holy Jesus!” Joe said. “Boy, he never knew how much he has to answer for, did he? He should have left it closed. That would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.”
“Places, gentlemen, places,” someone called in an official-sounding voice.
Places were in alphabetical order. Joe sat up near the front, his roomie toward the back. The mayor of Buffalo made a speech praising all the bright young patriots who passed through his city on their way to knocking the stuffing out of the Axis. It sounded like every other political speech Joe had ever heard until his Honor pointed to the bridge spanning the Niagara River at the north end of the Front. “That’s the Peace Bridge,” he said. “This end is in the United States; the other end is in Canada. We want peace all through the world, but we will have to win this war before we can get it.”
Along with the other cadets, Joe applauded. Most of the clapping sounded dutiful. Joe’s was a little more than that. The mayor’s words echoed what he’d been thinking himself. What would Oliver Perry have made of a Peace Bridge between the USA and what was still a dominion of the British Empire? And what would Matthew Perry have made of a war between the United States and what had been a backward, hermit kingdom—especially of a war the Japanese looked to be winning at the moment? Which of the old sea dogs would have been more surprised?
After the mayor sat down, another speaker limped up to the microphone. The cadets greeted him with a hand much more heartfelt than the one they’d given his Honor. Lieutenant Zachary Gunston was a Buffalo native. Like Jack Hadley, he’d also been a Wildcat pilot in the battle in the North Pacific the summer before. Also like Hadley, he’d had to ditch his fighter, and a destroyer had plucked him from the drink.
He pointed out to the cadets. “It’s up to you to carry the ball,” he said. “My buddies and I, we took it as far as we could go. We didn’t quite have the machines we needed, and we didn’t quite have the techniques we needed, either. You’ve learned in your training a lot of what we had to find out the hard way. Your ships will be better. Your planes will be better—I hear the fighters aboard the new carriers are a long step up from Wildcats. But in the end”—he pointed again—“it’s going to be up to you, and what you’ve got inside you.
“We made a mistake,” Gunston went on. “We figured the Japs were patsies, pushovers. We’ve been paying for that mistake ever since we made it. They’re tougher and smarter than we ever dreamt they could be. Now it’s going to be up to you to teach ’em a lesson: no matter how tough they are, no matter how smart they are, nobody sucker-punches the United States of America and gets away with it. Nobody! Am I right or am I wrong?”
“Right!” The word came out as a fierce growl from the throat of every graduating cadet. Joe felt like a dog snarling at another dog on the street—and God help that other sorry mutt, too!
“Okay, then, gentlemen. I think you are about ready to be commissioned now,” Lieutenant Gunston said. “Please rise, raise your right hands, and repeat the oath after me.” Along with his classmates, his squadmates, Joe Crosetti did. Pride tingled through him. If he had to blink rapidly several times to keep tears from forming and running down his face, he wasn’t the only one. Beside him, another kid’s eyelids were marching doubletime, too. When the oath was complete, Gunston looked out at the brand-new officers. “Welcome to the Navy, Ensigns! You’ve got a big job ahead of you.”
Joe looked down at the gold stripe on his sleeve. He was as junior an officer as possible—an ensign with no seniority—but he was, by God, an officer! Crosetti the fisherman’s son, an officer in the U.S. Navy! If this wasn’t one hell of a country, he didn’t know what would be.
“Congratulations, Ensign Crosetti,” said that youngster beside Joe who’d also been blinking. He was blond and handsome and looked as if he came from a Main Line family. Maybe he did. But he wasn’t any more an ensign than Joe was.
“Thanks, Ensign Cooper. Same to you,” Joe said. Nobody was ragging on anybody today, and who your father was, what he did for a living, or how big a bankroll he had didn’t matter. The way it looked to Joe, that they didn’t, or shouldn’t, matter was a big part of what the war was about.
Twisting, he looked back towards Orson Sharp. He couldn’t see his roomie. Too many other newly minted officers stood between them. Guys were starting to move around and find their special friends. Even when Joe did, he had trouble seeing past the taller people in his class. But he knew about where Sharp would be, and headed back there. Sharp was coming up toward him. They clasped hands.
“We’ve been waiting a long time,” Joe said—it seemed like forever since he’d volunteered. “Now—”
“We get to wait some more,” the ensign from Utah finished for him. “We have to get a ship. We have to get trained up on whatever we fly, whether it’s a Wildcat or one of these new jobs Lieutenant Gunston was talking about. And we have to wait till enough carriers are ready to give us the best shot at licking the Japanese.”
Every word of that was eminently sensible. Joe liked it no more because of that. If anything, he liked it less. “You’re no fun,” he said.
“I know,” said Sharp, who laughed at the wet-blanket reputation he’d had all the way through the training program. “Before too long, though, the Japs will say the same thing.”
“Yeah!” Joe said.
WATCHING SOME OF THE PILOTS who’d come to Hawaii as replacements, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo wondered how they’d ever made it out of flight school. They had trouble finding Haleiwa, let alone landing at the airstrip there. A few of them might never have made the acquaintance of their airplanes before these flights, or so it seemed to Shindo.
When he finally couldn’t stand watching any more, he got on the telephone to Commander Fuchida. “Moshi-moshi,” the head of the Japanese naval air effort said. “Fuchida here.”
“This is Shindo, Fuchida-san. What the devil’s happened to flight school since we went through it?”
Mitsuo Fuchida laughed, not all together comfortably. “By all I’ve heard from Japan, nothing much has happened to it.”
“Then what’s wrong with the chowderheads it’s turning out?” Shindo demanded. “Plenty of the Americans we faced were good pilots. We had better planes, and that helped a lot, but we had better fliers, too. These people . . . Yes, a Zero is better than a Wildcat, but it’s not that much better—not enough to let these people go up against Wildcats with good pilots and hope to beat them.”
“They’re about the same as we were when we got out of flight school,” Fuchida said.
“No!” Shindo denied the mere possibility.
But Fuchida said, “Hai. The difference, Shindo-san, is that we had plenty of combat experience against the Chinese and the Russians who flew for them before we took on the Americans. We were veterans. We were ready.”
Shindo thought about it. Had he been that green when he left the flight school at Kasumigaura? He didn’t want to believe it. He’d certainly thought he knew what he was doing. Of course, so did these gas-wasting idiots. “Maybe,” he said, most grudgingly.
“With some experience, they’ll do fine.” Fuchida’s voice was soothing. “And remember, the Yankees have taken worse combat losses than we have. If they come at us, they’ll have more inexperienced pilots in the air tha
n we do.”
“I suppose so.” Shindo still wasn’t happy. “Have you seen these new ones, though? They haven’t had much time up there, and they sure fly like it. Fuel still must be tighter than a mouse’s asshole back in the home islands.”
“Er—yes.” Fuchida, a straitlaced sort, made heavy going of the comparison. He continued, “It shouldn’t be. With the Dutch East Indies in our hands . . . That’s why we fought the war in the first place.”
“If the problem isn’t fuel, the program’s gone to the dogs,” Shindo said. “It’s as simple as that. I tell you, some of these people aren’t ready to fly combat missions against pilots who know what they’re doing.”
“Get them as ready as you can, Shindo-san, and do it as fast as you can, too,” Fuchida said. “Things are stirring in the United States. The Yankees keep launching new carriers, and they’re supposed to be getting new fighters, too.”
“You’re full of good news today,” Shindo said. “Where are our new fighters?”
Fuchida didn’t answer that. Shindo knew why, too. The replacement for the Zero had been on the drawing boards for a couple of years. It seemed unlikely to come off the drawing boards any time soon. The Army was starting to get a new fighter. The Hien, with an engine based on the one that powered the German Me-109, was a much tougher plane than the Hayabusa. But it was also much less reliable, needed skilled mechanics—always in short supply—to keep it running, and was available in much smaller numbers than the older machine.
“One thing that will give the new pilots flight time is antisubmarine patrolling,” Fuchida said. “The more enemy boats we can sink, the better off we are. You know that.”
“I know something about it,” Shindo said. Despite the sub he’d sunk, the Yankees hadn’t left Hawaiian waters. They kept on with their part of the war as if nothing had happened. Americans owned more stubbornness and more courage than Shindo or most Japanese had expected.
“All we can do about this is the best we can,” Fuchida said. “I constantly work with the destroyer skippers so they can do a better job of attacking the American boats. The problem is not easy. Ask the Americans themselves, or the British, if you don’t believe me. They have it in the Atlantic.”
“I have more urgent things to worry about—like why my so-called replacement pilots aren’t as good as they ought to be,” Shindo said. “And another one occurs to me, too: when the Americans try again, they’re going to throw more ships and planes at us than they did last time, neh?”
Commander Fuchida was silent for a moment. “I don’t know that for a fact,” he answered cautiously when he did speak.
Shindo gave him a scornful snort. “I don’t know it for a fact, either, but it’s the way to bet, eh?”
“Yes, probably,” Fuchida admitted.
“All right—we’re thinking the same way, then,” Shindo said. “When we came to Hawaii, we hit with everything we had. The Americans didn’t the last time, and it cost them. It was three carriers against three last time. We only have two in these waters now. If they bring more than three, two may not be enough. When do the reinforcements come, and how many will there be?”
Mitsuo Fuchida was silent quite a bit longer this time. “Well, that’s not such an easy question to answer, Shindo-san.”
With another snort, Shindo said, “I’m afraid you just did.”
“Things are . . . difficult.” Fuchida sounded defensive, not a good sign. “The Americans in Australia are bombing the southern coast of New Guinea as heavily as they can. And the British are kicking up their heels in the Indian Ocean. Admiral Nagumo’s raid a year ago didn’t clear them out of there. They bombed Rangoon and even Singapore not long ago.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Shindo said.
“We don’t go out of our way to advertise it,” Fuchida said. Shindo grunted. The other officer went on, “But what it boils down to is, our carrier forces are stretched thinner than we wish they were.”
“Wonderful,” Shindo said sardonically. “The Americans are building new carriers as fast as they can, aren’t they?” He didn’t wait for an answer, not that Fuchida tried to deny it. Instead, not trying to hide his anger, he plowed ahead: “Where the devil are our new carriers, Fuchida-san?”
“We’ve launched Taiho,” Fuchida told him. “She’s supposed to be a step up from Shokaku and Zuikaku.”
A step up from Japan’s newest, strongest fleet carriers would make Taiho a formidable ship indeed. But launching a carrier and putting her into action were two different things, as Shindo knew only too well. “When will we be able to get some use out of her?” he asked.
Unhappily, Fuchida answered, “Early next year, I hear.”
“Wonderful,” Shindo said again, with even more sarcasm than before. “All right, then. Let me ask a different question, sir. When do we get Zuikaku back? It’s been a long time since she limped off to the home islands to get fixed up.”
“Now there I really do have good news,” Fuchida said. “She is ready to return to duty now.”
“Well, fine—that is good news. Took them long enough, but it is,” Shindo agreed. “So we still have the same six fleet carriers that started the war, plus a few light carriers for small change. What can the Yankees throw at us?” He refused to count Taiho. She would be worth something—with luck, worth a lot—later on, but not yet.
“They have Hornet, if she’s been repaired by now. They have Ranger. They have Wasp. They also have some light carriers. And they have whatever new fleet carriers they’ve built. We are just about certain of two.”
Shindo brightened. “That’s better than I thought. They have two oceans to cover, too.”
“But the British help them in the Atlantic and cause us trouble in the Indian Ocean,” Fuchida said. “This is a world war, Shindo-san. And their advantage is that they can join hands. There’s too much space between us and Germany to make that easy on our side.”
“Hai,” Shindo said. The Germans had managed to get their fancy aircraft engine and the drawings that went with it to Japan by submarine. Such ventures were all too rare, though, while America and England might have been in bed with each other. Shindo sighed. “If only the Russians had gone down. . . .”
“Yes. If,” Fuchida said heavily.
That seemed unlikely to happen now. For a while there, after the disaster at Stalingrad, it had looked as if Germany would go down instead. But the Germans were nothing if not resilient. They’d stabilized the front and even regained a lot of ground. That fight had a long way to go; it remained up in the air. Even so, the quick German victory on which Japan had pinned so many hopes was nothing but a pipe dream.
And, while Germany and Russia remained locked in a death embrace, Russia and Japan were neutral. That created all kinds of ironies. Russian freighters from Vladivostok freely crossed the Pacific to the West Coast of the USA even though Japan and America battled to see who would dominate the ocean. Japan did nothing to interfere with those ships. When they got to Seattle or San Francisco or Los Angeles, they took on American planes and tanks and trucks and munitions the Russians would use against Germany, Japan’s ally. Then they sailed back across the Pacific, and Japan still did nothing to interfere. It was a strange business.
It was also one for which Shindo had no taste. He went back to the things over which he did have some control: “Fuchida-san, can you get me some extra fuel up here?”
“I don’t know,” Fuchida answered cautiously. “Why do you need it?”
“I want to take these puppies up and let them get some practice dogfighting me,” Shindo answered. “Once they see I can shoot them down whenever I please, or near enough, they’ll start to realize they don’t know everything there is to know.”
“That would be good,” Fuchida said. “I can’t promise you anything—you know how tight the gasoline situation is. But I’ll try.”
“We can’t fight the Americans if we don’t have the gas to train our pilots,” Shindo said.
“Yes
, I understand that,” Fuchida replied. “But we can’t fight them if we don’t have the gas to get our planes off the ground, either. The more we use beforehand, the less we’re liable to have when we need it most.”
“This is no way to fight a war,” Shindo said. Commander Fuchida didn’t contradict him. Fuchida said nothing to reassure him, either.
IN JIM PETERSON’S MILITARY EDUCATION, he’d never learned the difference between dry beriberi and wet. Somehow, the instructors at Annapolis hadn’t thought either kind important enough to put on the curriculum. That only went to show they hadn’t realized slowly starving to death might form part of a naval officer’s career.
Only goes to show what a bunch of ignorant bastards they were, Peterson thought as he lay in the miserable bamboo hut in the Kalihi Valley. It was raining. Of course it was raining. As far as Peterson could see, it always rained in the valley. The roof leaked. Since the Japs didn’t let the POWs use anything but leaves to cover it and didn’t give them much time even to put on more leaves, that wasn’t the world’s hottest headline, either.
Looking around, he had no trouble telling the wet beriberi cases from the dry. Men who had wet beriberi retained fluid. They swelled up in a grotesque and horrible parody of good health. Swollen or not, though, they were starving, too.
Prisoners with dry beriberi, by contrast, had a lean and hungry look. Like mine, Peterson thought through his usual haze of exhaustion. The pins and needles in his hands and feet were red-hot fishhooks and spikes.
The really alarming thing was, he could have been worse off. When cholera went through the camp a few weeks earlier, he hadn’t caught it. He’d buried some of the dark, shrunken corpses of men who had—after he put in his usual shift at the tunnel, of course. Cholera killed with horrifying speed. You could be normal in the morning—well, as normal as POWs got, which wasn’t very—and shriveled and dead by the afternoon.
End of the Beginning Page 19
