Days of Infamy

by Harry Turtledove

  “Good,” Fuchida said. “We caught the Americans by surprise here. They had better not do the same to us.”

  “They won’t. We won’t let them,” Genda said. “If they want to take these islands back, they’ll have to go through everything we can throw at them—and we can throw a lot.”

  THE BUZZ OF the Stearman’s engine grew thinner as Joe Crosetti eased back on the throttle. The runway swelled beneath and ahead of him. He checked his airspeed and angle of descent. Still a trifle steep . . . He pulled back on the stick, just a little, and the Yellow Peril’s nose rose a bit. Airspeed was okay, but he checked again to make sure his flaps were down. They were. They had been the last three times he checked, too.

  Here came the runway. No time for second thoughts now. He just wanted to do things right. Ninety percent of the trouble in the last twenty feet . . . That wasn’t a second thought; his flight instructor had drilled it into him till it never left his mind.

  Down! The Stearman bounced. Joe’s teeth clicked together. It wasn’t so smooth as he would have liked, but he was down. If he bounced once, he didn’t bounce twice. The little biplane taxied to a stop. Joe let out a long sigh and killed the engine. He unfastened his chute and his safety belt.

  Lieutenant Ralph Goodwin strode across the tarmac to him. “Not bad, Mr. Crosetti,” he said. “Pretty smooth, in fact, up until the very last moment there.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Joe said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “I’ve seen people walk away from plenty worse after their first solo,” Goodwin answered. “How does it feel?”

  Realization of what he’d done washed through Crosetti. “Swell, sir!” He wasn’t the first in his training squadron to solo, but he was ahead of more cadets than he was behind.

  “All right, then,” Goodwin said. “Let’s see you walk away from it.”

  Joe got out of the Yellow Peril. He gave the wing an affectionate pat. “When can I go up again?”

  “Oh, it won’t be long,” the flight instructor said. “But you’ll be moving into a new squadron soon. They may transfer you to another base—they’ll have to check the openings here.”

  As Chapel Hill had before it, Pensacola was starting to feel like home. “I hope they don’t,” Joe said.

  “Wouldn’t hurt you if they did,” Goodwin told him. “You’ve got to be able to fly anywhere, not just at a place you know well. But you’ll take a step up, any which way. You’ve done what you can do on this baby. Time to see how you handle a Texan.”

  “Yeah.” Joe knew he sounded less excited than he should have. He didn’t want to climb into another trainer, even a more advanced one. He wanted to get into a Wildcat and start shooting down Japs.

  Longing must have been naked on his face. Goodwin laughed and clapped him on the back. “Don’t look down your nose at a Texan. The Aussies use the ones they make for ground-attack planes and light bombers—Wirraways, they call ’em. And there’s even talk that they’ll build a version with a cleaner airframe and a bigger engine and use it for a fighter.”

  That struck Joe as a desperation measure. Of course, Australia was in pretty desperate shape these days. With Hawaii lost, the USA had a devil of a time getting supplies over there. And the Japs ruled the skies above the northern part of the country. Everybody wondered when they were going to invade, though it hadn’t happened yet.

  “Come on,” Goodwin said. “Let me buy you a beer. You’ve earned one, by God. Just remember, you’ve got to walk before you can run. Now that you’ve soloed, you’re not taking baby steps any more.”

  “Yes, sir.” Every word of that was true, and Joe knew it. Even so, he ached to be where the action was. He ached for there to be action. “Sir, when are we going to try and take Hawaii back from the Japs?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Goodwin replied. “I’ve got no idea—and if I did, I probably couldn’t tell you anyway. You want to be along for that, don’t you?”

  “You bet I do—more than anything,” Joe said. “That’s why I signed up for this. And after what those bastards did to my uncle and his family—”

  “You still have a chance, I’d say,” Lieutenant Goodwin told him. “Come on—let’s see about that beer.”

  “Okay.” Unlike some of his buddies, Joe didn’t do a whole lot of drinking. For one thing, he was still underage. For another, he didn’t like the taste of the stuff all that much. But this was a ceremonial occasion.

  Goodwin sat him down at the bar in the officers’ club and bought him a Budweiser. A couple of stools over, two lieutenant commanders were still going on about the alligator hunt of a few days past. A pair of officers had poured down more than might have been good for them and gone out into the swamp not far from the base vowing to come back with an alligator. Some time later, they’d proudly returned with a deceased snapping turtle tied to a broomstick. They’d taken it to market in Pensacola and got eleven cents a pound for it—plus ribbing that wouldn’t quit.

  “Here’s to you, Joe,” Goodwin said, hoisting his own bottle of Bud. “And here’s to giving the Japs what-for.”

  “Thanks.” Joe sipped cautiously. Once, when he was a little kid, his old man had let him take a swig from a bottle of beer. It had tasted nasty then. Am I poisoned? he’d squeaked. His father had laughed like hell. He still wasn’t crazy about the stuff, but it didn’t make him want to get his stomach pumped any more.

  The colored man behind the bar asked, “This here the gentleman’s first solo?”

  “That’s right,” Goodwin told him.

  He slid a dime back across the bar. “On the house.”

  “Thanks.” The flying instructor stuck the little silver coin in his pocket. “See, Mr. Crosetti? You don’t just save the country when you learn to fly. You save me money, too, so you’re really a hero.”

  “Right.” Joe felt silly. Part of him recognized that this was a piece of the celebration, too. The rest was embarrassed all the same. He worked conscientiously at the beer. He supposed one was okay. If he had more than one, he didn’t think he’d be able to see straight for his afternoon classes. He had enough trouble keeping up in navigation the way things were.

  When he went to the mess hall for lunch, Orson Sharp all but waylaid him. “How did it go?” his roomie demanded.

  “I got up,” Joe answered. “I got down. I’m still here. I bounced the landing a little, but I’m still here.”

  “All right!” Sharp grabbed his hand and squeezed it and pumped it up and down. Like everything else about the Mormon, his enthusiasm was perfectly genuine. He’d soloed the week before; his competence was perfectly genuine, too. He seemed delighted to have company, even though Joe was competition for a precious slot on a carrier. “We may be the first room where both guys have soloed.”

  “Yeah?” Joe hadn’t thought about that. “I guess maybe we are. Pretty neat. Maybe we’ll stay together when we switch squadrons, too.”

  “I think we’re stuck with each other,” Sharp said. “We’ll probably make ace the same day.”

  “Yeah!” This time, the word burst from Joe’s throat with savage enthusiasm. And then something else occurred to him. “When you soloed, did your instructor try to buy you a beer?”

  “Sure.” Orson Sharp was anything but self-conscious.

  “What did you do?” Joe asked.

  “I had a glass of apple juice instead,” Sharp answered calmly. “He said it looked like beer from a little ways away, but that isn’t why I did it.”

  “Why did you, then?” Joe inquired, fascinated by the way his roommate did what he thought he ought to do without worrying in the least about anybody else’s opinion. He wondered if he could have matched such self-assurance. He doubted it.

  Sharp looked at him. “I like apple juice.”

  Joe laughed out loud. “You break me up, buddy, I swear to God.”

  “That’s nice.” No, nothing bothered Sharp. “Before too long, we’ll both be breaking up the Japs.”

  “Yea
h!” Joe said again.

  THE LANDING CRAFT bobbed in the waves as it waddled through the Pacific toward the beach. Shells flew overhead. Lester Dillon remembered those freight-train noises only too well from the First World War. Along with the rest of the men in the clumsy landing craft, he bent down a little, as if that would help if one of those shells came down here instead of on the beach. Booms up ahead said the cruisers and destroyers doing the firing were rearranging the landscape pretty drastically.

  Suddenly, the landing craft’s bottom grated on sand. The swabbies who were in charge of the ship as long as it was on the water unhooked the landing ramp at the bow. It thudded down, kicking up quite a splash as it did.

  Captain Bradford was hitting the beach in this landing craft, too. “Come on, y’all!” he yelled, swarming forward. “Let’s go!”

  “Move! Move! Move!” Dillon added, even louder. “The longer you hang around with your thumbs up your asses, the better the chance the Japs have of dropping one on a whole bunch of you.”

  Marines raced out of the boat. Their boots thudded on the steel ramp. Clutching his rifle, Dillon ran for the beach, too. As soon as he got off the ramp, he went into the water more than halfway up to his knees. It was cold water, too. He swore as he splashed shoreward.

  As soon as he got up onto the beach, he threw himself flat and aimed his Springfield, looking for targets. “Keep moving, men!” Braxton Bradford shouted. “Can’t let ’em pin us down here!”

  Landing craft by the dozen were vomiting Marines onto the beach. All the officers and noncoms were screaming the same kinds of things. As Platoon Sergeant Dillon ran inland, he looked back over his shoulder. The destroyers and cruisers had ceased fire, but they were still out there, ready to drop shells on anybody who gave the leathernecks trouble.

  Dillon caught up with the company commander. “How are we doing, sir?”

  Bradford sprawled behind a bush going brown from lack of rain. “Well,” he drawled, “it’s a hell of a lot easier when they don’t shoot back.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” Dillon agreed. “This doesn’t look a hell of a lot like a Hawaii beach, either. Ocean’s sorta green, sorta gray, not blue like it’s supposed to be.”

  “Damn near froze my feet when I went in, too,” Bradford said. “I remember the first time I went into the Pacific in California. Hell, it was a hot day, and there I was at the goddamn beach, so I charged right on into the water. A minute later, I charged right on out again, too. Damn near—damn near—froze my nuts off.”

  “I believe it,” Dillon said. “Like you say, the weather can get hot, but the ocean never warms up.”

  Bradford looked up to the sky. “Other thing is, we don’t have any of those goddamn Zeros strafing our asses here. If we can’t get air superiority—”

  “Sir, if we can’t get air superiority, we’ll never make it to the beach, let alone off it,” Dillon said.

  “Uh-huh.” The company commander nodded. Dillon had seen more optimistic nods. Hell, he’d felt more optimism himself. Zeros had proved much more effective than anything anybody had dreamt the Japs owned. From Pearl Harbor to Australia to Ceylon, they’d chewed up Wildcats and Buffaloes and Warhawks and Spitfires. Allied planes hadn’t done a whole hell of a lot of chewing back, either.

  “Up to the flyboys,” Dillon said.

  “Yeah.” Captain Bradford nodded again. “They reckon they can do it—and we get to go along for the ride and find out if they’re right.”

  “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right,” Dillon agreed. If the Japs kept control of the air over Hawaii . . . Well, Pearl Harbor had shown what air superiority was worth. And if it hadn’t, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse and the disaster in the Philippines would have. It wasn’t a battleship world, not any more—carriers had more clout.

  The Marines continued their advance inland. Dillon kept shouting to his men to be careful. He kept warning them that it wouldn’t be so easy when the real thing started. He kept reminding them that the Japs would shoot back, and nobody was doing any of that here. And he kept seeing that all his warnings were going in one ear and out the other. More than half the Marines he led hadn’t been born when that machine-gun bullet took a bite out of his leg in 1918. They didn’t know what being under fire was like. Live-fire exercises made them think they did, but those weren’t the real thing. Nobody shot to kill in live-fire exercises. The Japs, on the other hand, would be playing for keeps.

  Dillon wasn’t worried that his Marines would turn tail when they came under fire. He wasn’t even worried that they would freeze up and not shoot back. He had absolute confidence in their courage. He did fear that too many of them would stop bullets because they leaped before they looked, or because they didn’t know what to look for before they leaped. A few hours—sometimes a few minutes—of real combat would teach a lot of those lessons. Sadly, he didn’t know anything else that would. Some of his Marines would get killed before they could learn, and that pained him.

  Unlike a real amphibious assault, this one ended with a bus ride back down to Camp Elliott. Some of the men pointed to Camp Pendleton, where bulldozers and steam shovels and carpenters and masons swarmed. The big new base was going up lickety-split. Les Dillon remained glad he had nothing to do with it. The men on this bus with him—they were the ones who’d go into action first, and that was what he wanted to do himself.

  Some of them were looking out across the Pacific instead of at the construction on land. His own eyes kept sliding west and south, too. A little more than two thousand miles away: that was where he wanted to be.

  In a low voice, he asked Captain Bradford, “We really gonna ship out soon, sir? Is that the McCoy, or is it just the usual bullshit?”

  “Well, you never can tell for sure,” Bradford answered, just as quietly, “but I’d sure as hell be ready to sling a duffel over my shoulder and haul ass in a hurry if I was you.”

  “Right.” Excitement flared through Dillon. He sometimes wondered why. He did know what combat was like—and he wanted to go back to it? But, crazy or not, he did. “I’ll have the men ready, too,” he promised.

  “Reckoned you would,” the company commander said, and not another word after those three. Dillon was proud.

  He let his Marines know what was what without making a big fuss about it. He didn’t want them too excited, in case the rumor turned out to be just a rumor after all. The next day, Dutch Wenzel tipped him a wink. The other platoon sergeant thought it would happen, too, then.

  And it did happen. Four days later, they were ordered onto buses again, this time to the port of San Diego. They climbed aboard the B. F. Irvine, a converted freighter. By everything Dillon could see, the conversion was hasty and incomplete. The accommodations he and his men got were better than the railroad cars he’d used in France. Of course, those had been marked 36 MEN OR 8 HORSES. These weren’t a hell of a lot better, either.

  Seeing the narrow, gloomy, airless space in which he’d make the journey to Hawaii, a Marine said, “I ought to complain to the Red Cross.”

  “Fuck that,” his buddy answered. “They’re treating us like dogs, so complain to the goddamn SPCA.”

  They had their first abandon-ship drill a little more than an hour after leaving port. Part of Les approved; they were doing what they needed to do in case of disaster. The rest of him worried. Did they have so little confidence that they could evade Japanese subs? If they did, how much trouble was the invasion fleet liable to be in?

  He shrugged, down there in the bowels of the troopship. He couldn’t do anything about it, one way or the other.

  CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU felt every gram in the pack on his back. He and his men had spent too long in Honolulu, and hadn’t done enough while they were there. Now they were marching again, and he could feel that they hadn’t done it for too long. He could also feel that it was summertime. Oahu didn’t get cold in the winter or hot in the summer, but it was warmer now than it had been when he fought h
is way south across the island. As the sweat streamed down his face, he felt every degree, too.

  “Come on, keep it up!” he called to his men. “You’ve got soft! You’ve got fat! You’ve got lazy!” He’d got soft and fat and lazy himself, but he wasn’t about to admit it to the soldiers in his squad. He would march till he fell over dead before he showed weakness. Noncoms had to act that way. If they didn’t, if they let their men get the edge on them, they couldn’t hope to do their job.

  The very landscape had changed since he last came this way. It wasn’t that he was heading north instead of south, either. What had been fields full of sugarcane and pineapple were now rice paddies. That gave the countryside a much more familiar feel. The men who had grown the other crops were now hard at work to feed the island. Some of them looked up from the fields as the regiment marched by. Others just kept on with what they were doing.

  “I wonder if they’d rather be doing this or the work they had before,” Senior Private Furusawa said. He’d always had an inquiring turn of mind.

  “They’d rather eat,” Shimizu said. “You can’t live on that other stuff, even if it’s nice once in a while. Rice, now . . .” He didn’t go on, or need to. To him, to all of them, rice was food. Everything else added variety.

  All the blown bridges on the north-south highway had been repaired. All the damage from mines and shells had been fixed, too. Cars and trucks and tanks could travel without any trouble. So could soldiers.

  Shiro Wakuzawa asked, “Are the Americans really going to attack us? Didn’t we teach them enough of a lesson when we took Hawaii away from them?”

  “Who knows for sure?” Shimizu answered. “That’s not for us to worry about. If they try to land on Oahu, what we’ve got to worry about is throwing them back. We can do it—if we’re in the right place when they try to land. If we’re there and they don’t have the nerve to try anything, that’s all right. But if we aren’t and they do, then we’ve got a problem.”

  Mynah birds scolded the Japanese soldiers as the men marched north. Corporal Shimizu did his best to ignore them. They were noisy and pushy and had no manners. They might as well be Americans, he thought.