Days of Infamy

by Harry Turtledove

  The truck convoy burned merrily. Soldiers scrambled out of some of the vehicles. Some of them fired into the sky. Others ran for cover. He shot up not only the convoy but as many cars on the street as he could. Now he wasn’t just aiming to impede military traffic, though he wanted to do that. His orders were to make Honolulu howl. The louder the city howled, the likelier the American commanders were to raise the white flag.

  As Lieutenant Shindo pulled up, acceleration and a contemptuous grin thrust his lips back from his teeth. Japanese officers wouldn’t give a damn about how loud civilians howled. They’d fight to the last man, whatever the odds. But the Americans were soft, decadent, effeminate. They let extraneous factors like civilians affect even important things like war. Well, they would pay for it.

  Shindo automatically checked six. A pilot who didn’t do that all the time would regret it. Even though he didn’t think the Americans could put any more fighters in the air, habit was unbreakable.

  One of his Zeros went down. It sent a fireball and a column of black smoke up into the sky. The building it had hit was starting to burn, too. Even in death, the pilot did damage. Shindo nodded, saluting his courage. The dead man’s spirit would go to the Yasukuni-jinja—the Shrine for Establishing Peace in the Empire—at Kudan Hill in Tokyo.

  The Nakajimas and Aichis that flew with the fighters were bombing the city now. What civilian terror could do, it would do. Shindo hoped it would make the Americans give up. He was an economical warrior. He didn’t believe in expending more on objectives than he had to.

  Shindo spoke to his fellow fighter pilots on the all-planes circuit: “Mission accomplished. Now we return to the carriers.” They mostly weren’t landing on carrier decks any more; still, security persisted.

  Oahu was so small, it made the war seem a miniature painting. Even Haleiwa airstrip, on the north coast of the island, was less than ten minutes’ flying time from Honolulu. The front wasn’t that far north of the local capital and Pearl Harbor. The gap between the Waianae Range and the Koolau Range widened from north to south, which meant the Americans had to hold a longer line and stretch themselves thinner as they fell back. Japanese soldiers might have been the best in the world at taking advantage of weak spots in the enemy’s defenses. Other armies had more in the way of heavy equipment, yes. If Japanese pilots hadn’t had complete control of the air and smashed up a lot of American heavy equipment before it got into action, this would have been a much tougher fight. But nobody could match the Japanese at infiltrating.

  Shells burst on and near the roads north of the front. Sensibly, the Americans were trying to deny the Japanese the use of them. The Yankees had fought reasonably well and with considerable courage since the first crippling blows they’d suffered. But those were plenty to bury them in a deep, deep hole.

  Here came Haleiwa. It had the advantage of being out of range of most American artillery. The Japanese still couldn’t use Wheeler Field. Even U.S. mortars could reach the runways south of Schofield Barracks. But the more planes and fuel and equipment the Navy ferried off the carriers and onto dry land, the sooner some of the precious big ships could be released for other duty.

  Down came the Zero for a smooth landing. Not for the first time, Shindo thought how easy landing at an ordinary airstrip was compared to a carrier landing. He got out of the fighter and jumped down. Groundcrew men in khaki coveralls dragged his Zero into a revetment. One after another, the fighters that had followed him to Honolulu came in. He counted them, nodding as the last plane’s landing gear kicked up dust. He’d lost one, but no more.

  He went to the command tent. Commanders Genda and Fuchida sat in front of a card table probably purloined from a Haleiwa house. The map they were examining also had to be local, for it was printed in English. It was larger and more detailed than any Japanese-language map of Oahu that Shindo had seen. He pointed. “Where did you get it?”

  Minoru Genda looked up, a smile half mischievous, half bemused on his face. “From a service station,” he answered. “They give them away.”

  “Bako yaro,” Shindo said, thinking anyone had to be a stupid jerk to give away something that strategically valuable.

  “How did it go?” Genda asked.

  “Routine, for the most part,” Shindo answered. A stolid man, he’d described the opening day’s raids on Pearl Harbor much the same way. He went on, “We lost one fighter; I saw it go down. I don’t know if the antiaircraft got any of the bombers. And how do things look on your fancy new map?”

  “They’re sending more and more sailors up from Pearl Harbor to fight in their line as infantry—trying to get some use out of them,” Mitsuo Fuchida said. “You can give a man a rifle, but that doesn’t turn him into a soldier.”

  “Hai. Honto.” Shindo bent closer to the map. English meant nothing to him, but he knew the topography of Oahu—and his superiors had already started marking up the map in Japanese. “What’s our next move? Another raid on Honolulu, or does some part of the front need special softening up . . . ?”

  OSCAR VAN DER KIRK’s parents had raised him to be polite no matter what. He paid no attention to a lot of what they’d taught him, especially the stuff they’d tried to drive home with a sledgehammer. But being—and staying—polite was part of what they were, and they’d made it part of what he was. Most of the time, it didn’t matter. If anything, it was an asset more often than not.

  It handicapped him with Susie Higgins.

  He rapidly figured out why she’d got divorced. He’d had trouble living with her for even a few days, and he was a hell of a lot more easygoing than most guys. What did puzzle him was how she’d got married in the first place. Oh, she was cute, and she was fun in the sack, but lots of girls were cute and fun in the sack. Who knew that better than a Waikiki beach bum?

  She was also all smiles and happiness—as long as you did exactly what she wanted. When you didn’t, you soon discovered she was hard and rough as a steel file underneath. Hadn’t the guy she’d briefly been hitched to figured that out before she marched him down the aisle and got him to say I do?

  Evidently not, poor bastard.

  She quickly lost interest in surf-riding, even though she could have been good at it. “Why do you want to go out there every single day?” she demanded. “Don’t you get bored?”

  He stared at her as if she’d suggested getting bored with sex. “Good Lord, no,” he said. “Besides, some of the people stuck in the hotels still want lessons. How else am I going to make any money?”

  Susie sent him a suspicious stare. “You just want to meet some gal who’ll give you a throw,” she whined.

  “I’ve got a gal,” he said. “Don’t I?”

  “You damn well won’t if you don’t pay more attention to me,” Susie said.

  “You come with me,” Oscar suggested—reasonably, he thought.

  “You come shopping with me,” Susie said.

  That wasn’t reasonable, not to him. “The Japs have blown up half the stores, and how are you going to get anything you buy back to the mainland?” Oahu would fall. He could see it, even if Susie couldn’t.

  She started to cry, which left him flummoxed—he’d never had to worry about that with stray kittens. “God damn you,” she choked out. “You don’t care about anything, do you? You didn’t even care that yesterday was New Year’s.”

  “Was it?” Oscar knew when Christmas had been. To celebrate, he’d bought some tuna from a Jap fisherman so he and Susie could have a Christmas dinner that didn’t come out of a can. He wasn’t much of a cook, but he could manage tuna steaks. Till Susie came to Hawaii, she’d never set eyes on fresh tuna. Remembering when the tuna dinner had been, Oscar had to count on his fingers to work out that yesterday really had been January first. A little sheepishly, he said, “Well, happy 1942.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Susie said bitterly. “I wish to God I’d never come here. The Japs are gonna . . .” She didn’t say what the Japs were going to do. Instead, she dissolved into fresh tears. Ma
ybe she could see the writing on the wall. She wasn’t dumb, just spoiled as three-day-old potato salad.

  Oscar realized he was supposed to do something, even if he wasn’t quite sure what. He tried stroking her hair, which was what they did in the movies when a girl started crying. Susie turned and snapped. She didn’t actually bite, but only because he jerked his hand away in a hell of a hurry.

  “What do you care? Why do you give a damn?” she demanded. “As long as you can ride your stinking surfboard, so what if the Japs are in charge of things?”

  He gave her a dirty look, but no more than a dirty look. He was too easygoing to relish screaming rows, let alone to smack her in the jaw. He wondered if something like that would knock some sense into her stubborn little head, but all he did was wonder.

  Tears came harder than ever. “What are we going to do?” she wailed.

  What do you mean we, Kemo Sabe? thought Oscar, who’d followed The Lone Ranger on the radio till he ended up in Hawaii—the local stations didn’t carry it. But that wasn’t fair. Nobody’d held a gun on him when he invited Susie here after the bomb blew her room to hell and gone. Oh, he’d had ulterior motives, but still. . . .

  “I’ll take care of you the best I can,” he said.

  Scorn blazed from her blue, blue eyes. “You can’t even take care of yourself, Oscar.”

  “Oh, yeah? What do you call this?” His wave encompassed the apartment.

  “What do I call it?” Susie spoke with deadly precision. “Not much, that’s what I call it. This isn’t life. This is just . . . drifting. Existing.”

  She was right, of course. Oscar knew that. It was part of what had attracted him to Hawaii in the first place. “Happens I like it,” he said mildly. And even the most easygoing temper can fray. His voice rose: “If you don’t, sweetheart, you can just darn well hit the highway.” He pointed to the door.

  He more than half hoped Susie would storm out through it. She didn’t. She went pale under her sunburn. “Where would I go? What would I do?”

  Go down to Hotel Street. Stand on a corner. Show a lot of leg. I don’t care if the Japs are bombing downtown Honolulu right this minute—somebody’ll pick you up in jig time. But Oscar swallowed that instead of saying it. Susie might have round heels—she hadn’t wasted any time falling into bed with him—but she wasn’t a pro.

  What Oscar did say was, “Well, if you want to keep on staying here, try acting like it, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said in an unwontedly small voice. Off in the distance—not so very far in the distance—artillery rumbled. Susie involuntarily turned toward the sound. Then, with what looked like a distinct effort of will, she looked back to Oscar. “What do we do if . . . the Japs win?”

  No, she wasn’t so dumb. She could see what was in front of her nose, anyhow. “I don’t know, babe,” Oscar answered. “The best we can, I guess.”

  “They’re going to, aren’t they?”

  “Sure looks like it to me.” He didn’t fancy it any more than she did. He didn’t see much point in lying to her, though.

  “I wish I’d never come here!” She’d said that before.

  “Yeah, well . . .” Oscar shrugged. “A little too late to worry about it now, don’t you think?” He thought it was a lot too late himself. He didn’t tell her so. It would only have upset her more, and what could either one of them do about it? Not a damn thing, not that he could see.

  JIM PETERSON HAD been eager to get into the fighting. He’d been so eager, he’d volunteered to go from Navy officer to doughboy in one fell swoop. Now he’d seen some of the war up close, and he had only one conclusion—he’d been out of his goddamn mind.

  He crouched somewhere in the cane fields north of Pearl City. A Jap machine gun was hammering away much too close. Bullets snarled past him. He’d acquired an entrenching tool from a skinny blond corporal who wouldn’t need it any more. He dug like a man possessed. In an air fight, you had the advantage if you got the edge in altitude. Here on the ground, the deeper your hole, the better off you were.

  By the time I’m done, this one will be deep enough to bury me in, he thought. Then he swore under his breath. That wasn’t how he’d wanted to put it. No matter what he’d wanted, though, it was liable to be true.

  Half the men holding this part of the line were sailors. They had plenty of spunk. As he’d been, they were eager for a crack at the enemy. But they didn’t know the first thing about taking cover or supporting one another or . . . anything about being an infantryman. Peterson didn’t know much: only what he’d learned falling back from Kolekole Pass. But what he’d learned since the Japs sent their men into the Army’s rear made him a seasoned veteran next to most of these guys.

  He’d trained and trained and trained to fly a Wildcat. He knew how hard, how complex, that was. He’d never dreamt there was anything particularly hard about being an infantryman. He knew better now. Quite a few of these gobs would turn into pretty fair foot soldiers if they lived long enough. A hell of a lot of them would get killed before they learned what they needed to know.

  A wet, slapping noise meant a bullet had struck home somewhere close by. The howl the wounded man let out meant it hadn’t killed him right away. “Hang in there, Andy!” an American yelled. “I’ll bring you in!” He came crashing forward through the growing sugarcane. All he thought about was saving his buddy. Saving himself never crossed his mind—either that or, more likely, he had not the foggiest idea how to do it.

  “Get down!” Peterson shouted. “Get down, you stupid fool!” Maybe he said something stronger than fool; he didn’t remember afterwards. Whatever he said, it didn’t do a damn bit of good. The Japanese machine gunner was no doubt a louse, a stinker, a rotten, dirty son of a bitch. But he was no fool. If the American was generous enough to give him a perfect target, he’d take it. He squeezed off a quick, tidy burst—three or four rounds. The American who’d intended to rescue Andy crashed down before he got real close to him.

  He wasn’t dead, either. He started moaning for his mother. And another brave, stupid fellow hurried up to try to rescue both wounded men. He had no more idea how to go about it than the first would-be hero had, and he got shot, too.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Peterson muttered under his breath. They were liable to get bled white, greenhorns going forward and getting nailed till they ran out of greenhorns or the Japs ran out of ammo. The Japs hadn’t shown any signs of running short.

  If you want something done right, do it yourself, went through Peterson’s mind. He did some more muttering, this time of the sulfurous sort. All three of those wounded men were screaming and moaning. He couldn’t just leave them out there. They’d attract more suckers for that Jap to murder. Either that, or he’d start shooting them up for the fun of it. Peterson had seen a few samples of what the Japs called fun, and heard about more. He wouldn’t have wished them on a mad dog.

  Before he could ask himself what the hell he was doing, he scrambled out of his foxhole and crawled toward the wounded men. His belly scraped along the ground like a lizard’s. He’d learned a thing or two, if not three. He wished he didn’t have his rifle slung on his back. But one of the things he’d learned was that he couldn’t afford to be taken alive. If the Japs wanted him, they’d have to pay for him—and he intended to save the last bullet for himself.

  He almost bumped noses with a mongoose. Which of them was more surprised and appalled would have been hard to say. The mongoose scurried away. It reminded him of a weasel: all slithery grace. Heart thumping, he crawled on.

  The thrashing in the cane up ahead wasn’t coming from any mongoose. “Hey, up there!” Peterson hissed. “Who’s hit worst?”

  One of the men just kept calling for his mother. Another one, though, said, “Take Steve. He got a slug in the chest.” That took balls: lying there shot and saying somebody else was worse off than you.

  Steve turned out to be the one who wanted his mother. Andy had a wounded leg, the third guy a shattered right arm. �
�You can crawl,” Peterson told him. “Follow me back.”

  “I don’t want to leave Andy,” the sailor said through clenched teeth—he wore a U.S. Navy armband on the left sleeve of a khaki shirt. He couldn’t do much with one good arm, but Peterson didn’t waste time arguing with him. He figured Steve would buy his plot if he wasted time.

  Going back was ten times as bad as coming forward had been. He had to drag the wounded man behind him. After a while, Steve stopped moaning. Peterson wished he would start again. He didn’t want to think he might be dragging a corpse. And, just to make matters worse, the Japanese machine gunner started spraying bullets around again. They made little clip-clip-clip noises as they cut through the cane. Peterson knew what kind of noises one of them would make if it cut through him. He knew what kind of noises he would make then, too.

  A jumpy American almost shot him when he got back into the lines. He managed to persuade the kid that he wasn’t Hirohito’s brother-in-law. Steve was still breathing; Peterson managed some weary pride at that. Stretcher-bearers took the injured man away.

  “You did good, soldier,” a sergeant said to Peterson, and then, his voice rising in surprise, “Hey! Where the hell you going?”

  “Two more wounded out there,” Peterson answered. “If I bring one, the other can make it back on his own. He’s standing guard on his buddy.”

  “You bring him back and I’ll make you a corporal on the spot,” the sergeant promised.

  For a Navy lieutenant to be thrilled at the prospect of getting two stripes on his sleeve was one of the more surreal things that had happened since the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. But Peterson was. He crawled back into the cane, hoping he would find Andy and the man whose name he didn’t know.

  They were still making noise, so it wasn’t too hard. But he must have got overenthusiastic moving toward them, because the Jap machine gunner sent a long burst slicing after him. He flattened out like a toad after a truck ran over it.