Days of Infamy

by Harry Turtledove

  Working a Springfield one-handed was a bastard, especially if that one hand was your left. But Andy’s buddy had found a way. He’d propped the muzzle end of the rifle on a rock and aimed it in the direction of the Japanese. “Look at young Tom Edison,” Peterson said. The man with the wounded arm managed a grin.

  Instead of dragging Andy, Peterson got him up on his back. Andy was healthy enough to let out a yelp when he did. The Jap with the machine gun started shooting again.

  A bullet hit. Peterson heard it. He didn’t feel it, though. Andy didn’t jerk. Awkwardly, Peterson looked behind him. The man with the wounded arm had been coming after him and Andy. Now the fellow sprawled bonelessly, his brains splashed over the dirt.

  “Aw, shit,” Peterson said softly. He brought Andy in. That sergeant saw him do it, and gave him the two stripes and a threaded needle. Two out of three wasn’t bad. So he told himself, again and again. But remembering the guy who’d stopped a machine-gun round with his ear sucked all the pride out of the promotion. That could have been me, dinned in Peterson’s head. Sweet Jesus, that could have been me.

  COMMANDER MITSUO FUCHIDA looked down on Honolulu from his Nakajima B5N1. “Now, remember,” Fuchida told his bombardier, “we don’t want to hit too far inland this time, and we don’t want to hit too far west. That’s the Japanese part of town.”

  “Yes, sir.” The bombardier sounded more resigned than anything else. Fuchida tried to remember how many times he’d told the man the same thing. More than he should have? Probably.

  The Americans kept throwing up antiaircraft fire. They showed more spirit than Fuchida had expected. He’d thought they would surrender once they realized Japan had got the upper hand. But they were still putting up the best fight they could. It wouldn’t be enough. Fuchida could see that. He suspected the enemy could, too. That didn’t keep the Americans from making the fight.

  A shell burst near the Nakajima. The plane staggered in the air. Fuchida didn’t hear any shrapnel bang the fuselage or wing. “There’s the Aloha Tower,” he told the bombardier. “Do you see it?”

  “Yes, sir,” the man replied. “Shall we go after the docks again?”

  “Yes. Plenty of warehouses there. The sooner the Americans get hungry, the sooner they do what we want.”

  Down went the stick of bombs. The B5N1 bounced in the air, not so rudely as it had from the near miss by the shell. Fuchida watched the bombs tumble toward their target. The bursts sent up clouds of smoke and dust. “Ha!” the bombardier said. “I think one of those hit the tower itself.”

  “Nicely done.” Fuchida wanted to keep his crewman happy. He didn’t care about the Aloha Tower one way or the other. It mounted no guns; as far as he knew, it stored no food. Still . . . “If you did hit it, that will be a blow to the Americans’ pride.”

  “Hai,” the bombardier said. “Pride is about all they have left, neh?”

  “They still have soldiers and guns,” Fuchida pointed out.

  The bombardier laughed. “Fat lot of good those have done them.”

  In a strictly military sense, he was right. But the Japanese were monitoring radio stories from the mainland about the “Heroes of Hawaii.” The Americans here might be doomed to failure. They still made good propaganda, and helped distract the people of the USA from the advances General Homma’s army was making in the Philippines and the rapid push down the Malayan peninsula toward Singapore against the British.

  Things are going our way, Fuchida thought. We have to keep moving fast. If we let up, if we let our enemies catch their balance, we could be in trouble. But so far, everything is fine.

  Other bombers were pounding the docks and the area just inland from them. Unopposed bombers could do dreadful things to cities. The Germans had shown as much over Rotterdam and Belgrade. Now Japan, having swept away American air power in Hawaii and the Philippines, was teaching the same lesson to Honolulu and Manila.

  Fuchida wondered if the rumors he’d heard could be true. Had the Americans in the Philippines really let their planes get caught on the ground? The Japanese hadn’t hit them from Formosa till a day after fighting opened here in Hawaii. People said General MacArthur was supposed to be a good commander. If he’d been caught with his pants down like that, though . . . A Japanese officer would have slit his belly to atone for the disgrace. The Americans seemed to lack the idea of seeking an honorable death.

  They lacked all sorts of notions of honor. And yet no one could fault the courage with which they’d fought here in Hawaii. The contrast left Fuchida puzzled. How could courage come into being without honor?

  The other thing that puzzled him was how so much courage sprang from so much wealth. The homes, the swarms of motorcars, the vast numbers of telephones and radios . . . All of it made a Japanese stare in astonished disbelief. The meat and vegetables in the shops had been a surprise, too, but they were starting to run low. Put everything together and it was amazing the Yankees weren’t too soft to fight. Somehow, though, they weren’t.

  Fuchida swung the B5N1 back to the north for the short hop back to Haleiwa. All hops here were short, which saved fuel. Not all of what the bomber was burning had come off the Akagi. Quite a bit was taken from captured filling stations. The Americans, with all the petroleum in the world at their fingertips, hadn’t thought to destroy much of what was in that stock to keep the Japanese from using it.

  More antiaircraft shells burst around the bomber as Fuchida flew over the front. The Americans were falling back into the high ground that covered Honolulu from the north. They might be hard to root out of there. Fuchida shrugged in the privacy of the cockpit. The Army had done a good job so far—better than he’d expected. It should be up to this, too.

  “Wish we had some more bombs on board, sir, so we could drop some on these fellows’ heads,” the bombardier said.

  “We have people paying attention to them, I promise,” Fuchida said dryly.

  “I know that, sir,” the bombardier answered. “But I want to do it myself.”

  “Every man in his place,” Fuchida said. But the bombardier showed fine martial spirit. Of course the Japanese had it. They were a warrior race, schooled in the ways of bushido. It was the Americans who should have been without it. But they made warriors, too. Fuchida shrugged again. However strange that was, it was the truth.

  He landed at that first captured airstrip by Haleiwa. Elsewhere in the north, combat engineers were making new runways with captured earth-moving equipment. Ordinary American builders had more bulldozers and other heavy machinery than Japanese military engineers—another example of American prodigality, or maybe just of American wealth.

  “How did it go, sir?” a groundcrew man asked as Fuchida climbed out of the bomber.

  “According to plan,” he answered, and laughed—he sounded like Lieutenant Shindo. But it was true. “Just according to plan.”

  “LOUSY JAP!” KENZO TAKAHASHI heard that shout every time he stuck his nose outside. “Lousy stinking Jap!”

  It had been bad before. It was worse now that the Japanese were bombing Honolulu. That brought the war home to people for whom, even after Pearl Harbor, it hadn’t seemed quite real. Hard to deny reality when you were out on the street because your house, and maybe your wife or your son, too, had been blown to smithereens.

  The only good thing about being out on the street in Honolulu in January was that you wouldn’t freeze, the way you might somewhere on the mainland. If you had a sweater, that was plenty. Even if you didn’t, you’d get by. But if you were on the street and you saw a young man with golden-brown skin, high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and coarse black hair, you weren’t going to wish him the top of the morning and ask him how he was.

  “I’m not a Jap. I’m an American!” Kenzo had tried protesting the first few times people showered abuse on him. It had got him exactly nowhere, accomplished exactly nothing. It just made people yell at him even more. It had also almost got him into a couple of fistfights.

  One of those wou
ld have happened if a cop hadn’t broken it up. The policeman, a haole, hadn’t wanted his thanks. “I ain’t got much use for you, neither, kid,” he said, “but there’s too much real shit going on to waste time with pissant stuff. Get the hell out of here.” Kenzo got.

  He told Hiroshi about it. He didn’t tell his father. He knew what his old man would have said: that it proved he ought to be saluting the Rising Sun and not the Stars and Stripes. He couldn’t stomach that.

  “I am an American, dammit,” he raged, “even if the haoles can’t see it.”

  “Yeah, I know. Me, too,” Hiroshi said. “But you know what? It’s not just the haoles yelling at us these days. It’s everybody—Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos.” His grin was haggard.

  Kenzo only grunted. Part of that fell under what can you expect? Japan was at war with China, ruled Korea, and now had invaded the Philippines. But it still stung. Just as haoles in Hawaii looked down their noses at everybody else (with the partial exception of the Hawaiians themselves, and they weren’t competition), the Japanese here thought themselves better than Koreans and Filipinos, and probably Chinese, too.

  “You know how bad it is?” Hiroshi said. Kenzo shook his head. His brother said, “Even the Puerto Ricans are yelling, ‘Goddamn Jap!’ these days.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said, unconsciously echoing his father. There weren’t many Puerto Ricans in Hawaii. The ones who were there were seen as thieves and crooks and grifters by everybody else. The story was that the governor of Puerto Rico lo these many years ago, asked for a shipload of laborers, had provided it by emptying the local jails and whorehouses. Kenzo didn’t know if the story was true, but everybody told it.

  Getting out on the Pacific in the Oshima Maru was something of a relief. Kenzo had never imagined he would think something like that. But his father, however loopy the old man’s ideas were, didn’t hate him. The other advantage of going to sea was not being there when the bombs went off. That didn’t help so much, though, because Kenzo still worried about his mother.

  As they pulled out of Kewalo Basin, Hiroshi said, “Father, why not bring Mother on the sampan? That way, we’d all be safe together.”

  “I said this,” Father answered. “She told me she didn’t want to come. What am I supposed to do, drag her?”

  Hiroshi didn’t say anything to that. Kenzo wouldn’t have known what to say to it, either. They just stood there listening to the engine. The sampan had enough fuel to get to Kauai or Maui, but so what? What difference did that make? Even if they got Mother aboard, they’d be nothing but refugees. And, for all Kenzo knew, the Japanese Army was already on the other islands. Even if it wasn’t, it probably would be soon. The U.S. Army hadn’t garrisoned them. They couldn’t put up any kind of a fight.

  Oahu, now, Oahu had put up a hell of a battle. And a whole lot of good it’s done anybody, too, Kenzo thought bitterly. The fighting here couldn’t go on much longer, either. The diesel throbbed under his feet. For how long would his father be able to keep it fueled? How much longer would the food last? What would people do when it started running out?

  Starve, was what occurred to Kenzo. That might be a reason to get off Oahu: the other islands had fewer people, and might have bigger reserves. Or they might not—with fewer people, maybe they’d got less in the way of supplies to begin with. That was probably how things went, all right. They seemed to be going the worst way they could.

  VI

  THE GARDENER WHO spoke for Major Hirabayashi in Wahiawa was named Tsuyoshi Nakayama. Some people called him Yosh. Till this mess started, Jane Armitage hadn’t called him anything. She’d never had anything to do with him. What she and a few other haoles were calling him these days was Quisling. They were careful about where, when, and to whom they said it, though. Let the wrong ears hear and . . . Jane didn’t know what would happen then. She didn’t want to find out, either.

  To give Nakayama his due, he didn’t seem to relish being the occupiers’ mouthpiece. He didn’t shrink from the job, though. What the Japs told him to do and say, he did and said. They’d confiscated guns and food just after they took the town. Radios lasted only a couple of days longer. If Jane had had a little one, she might have tried to hide it. She didn’t have a prayer with the big, bulky shortwave set. When a Japanese soldier carried it away, she felt as if he were stealing the world from her.

  She soon discovered she was lucky she hadn’t tried anything cute. Mr. Murphy, the principal at the elementary school, had had two radios. He’d given the Japanese one and secretly hung on to the other. Not secretly enough—somebody ratted on him.

  Through Yosh Nakayama, Major Hirabayashi called the people of Wahiawa into the streets. Mr. Murphy, hands tied behind his back, stood in front of Hirabayashi. The officer spoke in Japanese. Nakayama translated: “This man disobeyed an order of the Imperial Japanese Army. The punishment for disobeying an order is death. He will receive the punishment. Watch, and think about him so this does not happen to you.”

  Two soldiers forced Mr. Murphy down to his knees. The principal looked astonished, as if he couldn’t believe this was happening to him. He didn’t seem afraid, which also argued that he didn’t believe it. Surely the Japs would call it off once they’d taught him his lesson.

  Major Hirabayashi drew his sword. Jane had seen it there on his hip before. She hadn’t thought about it; it seemed about as useful in modern war as a buggy whip. Now, all at once, she noticed that the major had lovingly kept it sharp. The blade was slightly curved. The edge glittered in the sun.

  Hirabayashi raised the sword above his head. With a sudden, wordless shout, he swung it in a gleaming arc of death. It bit into—bit through—Mr. Murphy’s neck. The principal’s head leaped from his shoulders. Blood fountained, amazingly red. Some of it splashed the soldiers who’d held the American. Mr. Murphy’s body convulsed. The spasms went on for a couple of minutes. His head lay in the street. It blinked once before the features slackened into death’s blankness.

  Somehow, that blink sickened Jane worse than all the gore and the flopping. Had he known what had happened to him, even if just for a few seconds?

  Some people in the crowd—women and men both—screamed. Several threw up. Some made the sign of the cross. A hulking six-footer who ran a hardware store keeled over in a faint. His wife, who barely came up to his chin, kept him from smashing his face on the asphalt.

  Hirabayashi wiped his bloody blade on Mr. Murphy’s trousers, then slid it back into the scabbard. He shouted something angry-sounding in Japanese. “You will obey,” Yosh Nakayama translated. “If you do not obey, you will be sorry. Do you understand?” No one said anything. Hirabayashi shouted again, even louder. Nakayama said, “He wants to know if you understand.”

  A ragged chorus of yeses rose from the crowd. Some of the people who’d crossed themselves did it again. Major Hirabayashi grunted again and turned his back. Nakayama gestured to the locals: it was over.

  Singly and in small groups, they straggled back to their homes. Jane was alone—and had never felt more alone in her life. She’d seen Mr. Murphy every day since getting her teaching job here. He wasn’t the most exciting human being ever born—what principal was?—but he was solid, competent, plenty likable if you didn’t happen to be a fourth-grader in trouble.

  Now he was dead. For a radio, he was dead.

  Hardly anyone talked about the—murder? execution?—as the crowd drained away. Part of that, no doubt, was shock. And part of it probably had to do with fear over who might be listening. Somebody you’d lived across the street from for the last twenty years might sell you down the river to the Japs. How could you know, till too late? Why would you take the chance?

  People in Russia and Nazi Germany and the countries Hitler had overrun had to make calculations like that. Americans? Even a month earlier, Jane never would have believed it. But if you didn’t make those calculations, or if you got them wrong . . . you might be the next Mr. Murphy.

  And it wasn’t just the loca
l Japanese you had to look out for. Jane had seen more than one haole sucking up to the occupiers. Some people had to be on the ins with whoever was in charge. If it was the usual authorities, fine. If it was a bunch of bastards with guns—and with swords; oh, yes, with swords—well, that was fine, too. There was one more thing Jane wouldn’t have believed till she saw it with her own eyes.

  She locked the door behind her when she got to the apartment. She hadn’t been in the habit of doing that till the Japs came. It wouldn’t help her a hell of a lot now, either. The rational part of her mind knew that. She locked the door anyway, because she wasn’t feeling any too rational these days.

  She wished she could fix herself a good stiff drink. But Fletch had taken most of the booze when he left (she’d been glad to see it go, too—then), and the rest had been confiscated along with the food. She was stuck with her own thoughts, no matter how much she hated them. The thunk of the sword as it slammed into Mr. Murphy’s neck . . . That last blink after he was—after he had to be—dead . . .

  “Oh, Jesus,” she moaned: as close to a prayer as had passed her lips in years.

  The worst of it was, she’d have to go out again for supper. The communal meals had started off bad, and were getting worse as stocks of this and that began to run out. She was damned if she knew what they would do in a few months.

  “Damned is right,” Jane muttered. And damnation might not wait for months. It might be only weeks away. She wondered how much food other people had given up, and how much the Japs had taken from groceries. How long would it last? How long could it last? “We’ll find out.”

  She also wondered whether the occupiers gave a damn. Wouldn’t they be just as happy if everybody on Oahu except maybe their few special friends starved to death? Then they wouldn’t have to worry about keeping an eye on them any more.