As usual, the sun was shining. As usual, it wasn’t all that warm even so. It would get up into the low seventies today, and that was it. San Diego had a milder climate than Los Angeles did, even if it was more than a hundred miles down the coast from the bigger city. Mission Bay and the ocean currents and the prevailing winds all had something to do with it. Les didn’t know the wherefores, or worry about them. He just knew it stayed mild almost the whole year around.
He was stripping a BAR that afternoon when Dutch Wenzel came up to him. “So,” Wenzel said, “you a gunny?”
“Fuck, no,” Les answered. “You?”
“Nah.” Wenzel shook his head. “Somebody else is gonna have to whip them boots into shape.”
“That’s what I told Bradford, too.” Les set down the oily rag he was using and wiped his hands on a cleaner one. “We’re the ones who’re gonna have to take those islands away from the Nips. This is what I signed up for, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna miss it.”
“I’m with you.” Wenzel turned and looked southwest. “Matter of fact, I figure I will be with you. You hit the beach, I’ll either be in the same landing craft or the next one over.”
“Gluttons for punishment, that’s us,” Dillon said. The other platoon sergeant laughed, for all the world as if he’d been joking. Dillon went on, “Hell, you haven’t even got shot up. You really want a Purple Heart that bad?”
“Look who’s talking,” Wenzel retorted. “You got it once, and you’re dumb enough to come back for more?”
“Damn straight I am,” Dillon told him. Wenzel nodded in perfect understanding. They were both Marines.
XIII
JANE ARMITAGE WAS beginning to think Oahu would make it. There had been times when she wondered if everybody on the island would starve to death. She’d lost at least twenty pounds herself, and she hadn’t carried any extra weight to begin with. Everybody she knew had lost at least that much—except Major Hirabayashi and the rest of the Jap soldiers in and around Wahiawa. They hadn’t changed a bit. That didn’t surprise her, but it did infuriate her.
She knew better than to let the occupiers see what she thought. Almost everybody in Wahiawa knew better than that. Not being noticed was the best thing you could hope for these days.
A lot of what had been pineapple fields before the invasion were rice paddies now. The Japs seemed convinced the islands could grow enough rice to feed themselves. They talked about two crops a year. Yosh Nakayama didn’t sound too dubious. Jane put more faith in that. What the Big Five had to say . . . What the Big Five had to say, for the first time since before Hawaii belonged to the United States, didn’t matter one damn bit. And if the families who’d run the islands for so long had any brains, they didn’t want the Japs noticing them, either.
As for Jane, she had a new crop of turnips and a new crop of potatoes coming in. Eating what she’d raised with her own hands, with her own sweat, gave her pride of a sort she’d never known before. If only there’d been more.
She’d also discovered that zebra doves were as tasty as they looked. Mynahs, on the other hand, were nothing to write home about. She wouldn’t have eaten them by choice. Roast mynah beat the hell out of going hungry, though. Nobody was fussy any more.
One of the kids who’d been in her class before the war started came by on a scooter. The school had stayed closed since the Japanese occupied Wahiawa, and especially since Mr. Murphy’s untimely demise. Mitsuru Kojima was skinnier than he had been, too, but it didn’t seem to matter so much on a little kid—and he hadn’t been fat to begin with.
“Hello, Mitch,” Jane said. That was what she’d always called him. Most of the Japanese kids in her class had had American names that they used alongside the ones their folks had given them.
He stared at her out of black button eyes. When he said, “My name’s Mitsuru,” he sounded more arrogant than an eight-year-old kid had any business doing. He added something in Japanese. Jane didn’t know exactly what it meant, but she’d heard soldiers say it. One thing she had no doubt of: it wasn’t a compliment.
Away Mitch—Mitsuru—Kojima went. He was just a little kid, but he’d put her in her place. He’d put everything that had been going on in Hawaii before December 7 in its place. He didn’t even know it. All he knew was that he wanted to use his Japanese name, not his American one, and that he was entitled to say rude things to a white woman, even if she had been his teacher.
That was plenty, wasn’t it?
Jane used the hoe to get rid of a few weeds. No matter how many she murdered, new ones kept popping up. She wasn’t much of a farmer, and never would be, but she’d already discovered how hard it was to keep crops alive and stay ahead of pests.
She looked down at her blue jeans. The fabric over the knees was getting very, very thin. It would split pretty soon. None of her other pairs was in any better shape. Some already had patches on the knees or at the seat. Had these been normal times, she would have needed to buy more. She did need to buy more, but there were none to buy. Make do or do without was the rule these days.
She suspected she would end up using one pair for fabric to keep the others going as long as she could. Then another pair would have to be cannibalized, then another, until finally she’d have one pair left, made of bits and pieces from all the rest.
And what would happen when that pair bit the dust? Jane used a savage slash to decapitate another weed. She might almost have been Major Hirabayashi, cutting off Mr. Murphy’s. . . . Stop that, she told herself fiercely. Just stop it, right this minute. But the thought wouldn’t go away. Neither would the memory of the meaty thunk the sword had made biting into—biting through—the principal’s neck.
Somehow, that memory joined with the way Mitch Kojima didn’t want to be Mitch any more to drive home to her that the Japanese were liable to hold Hawaii for a long time. What would people do as things from the States wore out and broke down? Could Japan supply replacements? On the evidence so far, Japan didn’t give a damn about supplying anything beyond a minimum amount of food—and the Japs grudged even that.
Sudden tears stung Jane’s eyes. She stood there in the middle of her plot, clutching the hoe handle till her knuckles whitened. She didn’t usually let things get to her. She went on from day to day, doing what she had to do to get by in this horribly changed world. Doing that kept her too busy and too tired to worry about anything more.
But she didn’t want to be out here tending turnips and digging weeds and killing bugs when she was thirty-five, or forty-five, or sixty-five, and she was damned if she could see what to do about it. Damned was the word, all right. If this wasn’t hell, it would do till she made the acquaintance of the genuine article.
Two Japanese soldiers strode by. Jane bowed and lowered her eyes to the ground. She didn’t want them noticing she was upset. She didn’t want them noticing her at all. Every once in a while, they would drag somebody into the bushes and do whatever they wanted with her—to her. Several women in Wahiawa went around with dead eyes and started to shiver whenever they saw a Jap.
If they came for her . . . If they came for her, she had to run. She would have liked nothing better than splitting their skulls with the hoe. But bayonets sparkled on their rifles. If she hurt them, they wouldn’t just rape her and they wouldn’t just shoot her dead. They’d kill her slowly, and they’d laugh while they did it. They might kill some other people, too, so nobody got any ideas above her station.
They kept walking. She breathed again. She always felt as if she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs when the Japs were close by. A man worked in the next plot. He also bowed to the soldiers, but he didn’t seem on the edge of panic. As long as he followed the rules they set, he was—probably—safe. No female between ten and sixty could say even that much.
The woman beyond him tensed, the same as Jane had. Having felt the tension in her own bones, Jane recognized it when she saw it. Again, the soldiers went right on past the woman as if she didn’t exist. As soon as she
saw their backs, life returned to the way she stood.
Jane looked to the northeast. She wished a hundred, a thousand, American bombers were roaring toward her. At supper a few days before, somebody had whispered that the British had attacked a German town with a thousand bombers. Maybe somebody had access to a secret radio. Maybe the rumor was just wishful thinking.
Either way, the sky over Wahiawa stayed clear: bare of clouds, bare of bombers, bare of hope. Jane muttered something she’d learned from Fletch, something she never would have said even when she was all alone while she was married to him. Well, circumstances altered cases, by God. These days, she despised him much more for being part of the Army that hadn’t defended Oahu than she ever had for not being much of a husband.
A fly lit on her arm. She smashed it, wiped her hand on her dungarees, and went back to weeding.
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO was not a happy man. Yes, bulldozers had repaired the airstrip at Haleiwa with commendable speed. Yes, more antiaircraft guns poked their camouflaged snouts into the sky around it now. As far as Shindo was concerned, the B-25s never should have got to Oahu in the first place.
He drove down to Honolulu to make his feelings known. Parts of the Kamehameha Highway were in excellent shape, set to rights not by bulldozers but by gangs of POWs. Shindo thoroughly approved of that. Since they’d surrendered, how were they better than any other draft animals? Why shouldn’t Japan use them—or use them up—as necessary?
Commander Genda and Commander Fuchida waited for him in Genda’s office. He saluted both of them, then came straight to the point, as was his way: “We should have done a much better job against the Americans. The warning we got was inaccurate, and lulled us into a false sense of security. We would have been better off with no warning at all.”
Had his superiors tried to deny that, he would have been very angry. He would have tried not to show it; a man without self-control would never progress in the Japanese Navy—or anywhere in Japan, come to that. But the feeling would have been there. He probably would have taken it out on his subordinates, as mothers-in-law got their own back for what they’d had to put up with when they were daughters-in-law.
But Mitsuo Fuchida only gave him a wry smile and said, “Hai. Honto.”
“I think we can expect more trouble from the Americans, too, now that we’ve poked them in the snout as they poked us,” Minoru Genda added.
“I believe that. Bombing the mainland was well done.” Shindo didn’t have to disguise his envy as he eyed Fuchida. The commander had all the luck! Not only first over Pearl Harbor but first over San Francisco! Either one of those could make a man’s career. Both? To have both seemed downright unfair.
Fuchida was modest, too. “It was Genda’s idea,” he said.
That didn’t matter so much to Shindo. A lot of the Pearl Harbor plan had also been Genda’s. So what? Fuchida was the one who’d made it real.
With an effort, Shindo brought his thoughts back to the purpose for which he’d come down to Honolulu. “We need more air cover here,” he said. “I don’t just mean land-based. I mean carriers. Akagi by herself isn’t enough. That’s all the more true if you really do expect the Americans to pay us another call. I don’t want them to surprise us again. I want to be the one who goes hunting and finds them first.”
“That may not be as easy as you hope, Lieutenant,” Genda said. “They have something they call radar. We have the name from prisoners we have taken.” He went on to explain what the word meant.
The more Shindo listened, the less happy he got. “That’s terrible!” he exclaimed. “They can see us coming and guide their planes straight to us?”
“It seems so, when everything goes right,” Genda answered.
“They detected us coming in when we attacked Pearl Harbor,” Fuchida added.
“Zakennayo!” Shindo said. “They are idiots, then. Why didn’t they scramble their planes? They could have hurt us badly.”
“For one thing, they were expecting a flight of B-17s along almost the same course. The bombers came in just a little later, and we shot them up on the ground,” Genda answered. He was the man with the facts at his fingertips. He went on, “And, for another, they didn’t really believe we would attack them.”
“In future operations, neither of these factors will hold true.” Commander Fuchida’s voice was dry.
“I should say not.” No matter how phlegmatic Shindo was, he had to fight to keep dismay from his voice. He gathered himself and did his best to think about tactical implications. After a moment, he nodded. “This only makes it more urgent that we reinforce the Akagi. If they have a technical edge, we’ll need the advantage in numbers all the more.”
“Our engineers in Japan were already working on radar,” Genda said. “We’ve flown some of the prisoners to Tokyo so they can give our people more information as that becomes necessary. The principles seem clear. We should be able to deploy sets of our own before long—in fact, we have some trial installations in place now.”
“Will we have working models before the Americans try hitting us again?” Shindo asked. Genda and Fuchida looked at each other. Their elaborately casual shrugs said it was unlikely. Shindo hadn’t expected anything else. He went on, “I’m just a flying officer. Nobody pays any particular attention to me, here or back in Tokyo. But the two of you, you have the ears of important people.” Nobody was more important than Admiral Yamamoto, for instance. “You can persuade them we really need more carriers here.”
The two commanders looked at each other again. They gave Shindo another matched set of slightly overacted shrugs. Once more, he had to fight not to show the anger he felt. Minoru Genda said, “Please believe me, Shindo-san—you aren’t the only one who has seen this problem coming. The carriers had other things to do. But now that Admiral Nagumo’s force has returned to home waters from its sortie into the Indian Ocean . . .”
“Ah, so desu!” Shindo breathed. The Japanese strike force had sunk a British carrier and smashed up ports and shipping along the east coast of India and in Ceylon. That would help Japan tighten its grip on Burma and perhaps clear the way for an invasion of India. Shindo gave back a shrug of his own. The western fringe of the Japanese Empire wasn’t his special worry. The eastern edge was. “How many carriers will we get?” he asked eagerly.
“Two,” Genda answered.
Shindo had hoped for three, but feared the answer would be only one. “Not bad,” he said.
“Tell him the rest,” Fuchida put in.
Genda did: “They’re Shokaku and Zuikaku.”
Those were the biggest, best, and newest carriers the Imperial Navy boasted. Shindo wanted to jump up and down and whoop, but showing delight would have been as uncalled-for, as American, as showing anger. “Well,” he said, “That is good news.”
“Hai,” Fuchida said. “If the Yankees want to make a big fight of it, let them. We’ll deal with whatever carriers they send the same way as we dealt with the ones we caught off Hawaii when the Pacific War started.”
“Oh, yes. Oh, my, yes. I can’t wait to start flying off a carrier deck again,” Shindo said. “After you’ve got used to doing them at sea, takeoffs and landings from an ordinary airstrip just aren’t the same.” He made as if to yawn. Fuchida, also a carrier pilot of great experience, laughed out loud at that. Shindo went on, “And, as we said, the Americans won’t take us by surprise again.”
“We will make very sure of that,” Commander Genda said. “Along with the picket boats, now we’ll have the new H8Ks flying long-range patrols to the north and east.”
“They’re really remarkable machines.” Having flown in one, Fuchida could hardly contain his enthusiasm. “Wonderful endurance, good protection, lots of guns, and they aren’t even all that slow. Lieutenant Muto said he wasn’t afraid of taking on American fighters, not even a little bit.”
“No, eh?” Shindo let it go at that. Pilots were supposed to be happy about the planes they flew. All the same, he thought this Muto, w
hom he didn’t know, not just an optimist but a fool. No matter how fast a flying boat was, it couldn’t outrun or outmaneuver a fighter. The fighter could pick an attack angle where most of the victim’s guns didn’t bear, and then. . . . Shindo’s thumb twitched, as if on the firing button. American warplanes didn’t measure up to Zeros, but they were plenty to deal with the likes of an H8K. He hoped Muto didn’t discover the truth of that the hard way.
Still . . . Shokaku and Zuikaku coming to join the Akagi! He went back to Haleiwa a happy man.
OSCAR VAN DER KIRK met Charlie Kaapu on the beach at Waikiki. They both had their sailboards and everything else they needed for a fishing run. Oscar was proud of himself for his invention. Not for the first time, he thought he might have made a mint off it in ordinary days. The trouble with that was, in ordinary days he wouldn’t have thought of it. Amazing how hunger concentrated the mind.
And he’d found a real niche no one else was exploiting. The fishing was pretty good out in that area beyond the beach but closer than sampans usually came. He hoped it would stay that way now that more and more people were putting sails on their surfboards.
He didn’t begrudge Charlie his sailboard. The two of them had been through too much together for that. The hapa-Hawaiian grinned at him, saying, “Here comes the smart haole.”
“Where?” Oscar looked back over his own shoulder. Charlie thought that was funnier than Oscar did himself. He made a hell of a good audience. The two of them walked down to the Pacific. As usual now, the men fishing at the edge of the surf made way for them.
As they paddled out past the breakers, Charlie said, “You really that smart?”
“What do you mean?” Oscar asked, though he had a good idea.
Sure enough, his buddy said, “You so smart, why you take up with that blond wahine from the mainland again?”
That had several possible answers, from the crudely anatomical to None of your business. Oscar chose a mild middle ground: “Susie’s not so bad. A lot of people would’ve flipped, getting stuck in all this. Heck, a lot of people did flip. Susie’s come through pretty well.”
Days of Infamy Page 45
