He lined up on Akagi’s stern with extra-fussy care. He always hated to get waved off and have to go around again. Feeling the way he did right now, he hated the idea ten times as much. The landing officer signaled that he was a little high. Obediently, he brought the B5N1’s nose down. No arguments today. Whatever the landing officer wanted, the landing officer would get.
Down came the bomber, straight and true. Fuchida checked once more—yes, he’d lowered his wheels. The landing officer signaled for him to land. He dove for the deck. A carrier landing was always a controlled crash. Most of the time, controlled was the key word. Here, for Fuchida, crash counted for more. The impact made him groan. The world turned gray for a moment. The Nakajima’s tailhook caught an arrester wire. The bomber jerked to a stop. As color returned to things, Fuchida remembered to kill the engine. He was proud of himself for that.
He slid back the canopy and, moving like an old man, got down from the plane. One of the flight crew who’d come to push the bomber out of the landing path looked at him and exclaimed, “Are you all right, Commander?”
“So sorry, but no,” Fuchida answered as his crewmen also left the B5N1.
“Are you wounded?”
“No. Sick. Belly.” Every word took effort.
“Don’t worry, sir. We’ll get you to sick bay,” the man from the flight crew said. And the sailors did, helping him down to the compartment. Usually, it was almost empty; wounded men crowded it now. Had Akagi caught fire, the place would have been a death trap. Damage control must have done a good job.
A doctor in surgical whites eyed Fuchida from over a masuku. “What’s the trouble?” he asked. Fuchida explained his symptoms in a few words. The doctor said, “Ah, so desu. Could be your appendix. Lie down.”
“Where?” Fuchida asked—the beds were all full.
“On the deck.” The doctor sounded impatient. Fuchida obeyed. The doctor peeled him out of his flight suit and jabbed a thumb into his belly between his navel and his right hipbone. “Does that hurt?”
Fuchida didn’t bounce off the steel ceiling, though why he didn’t he couldn’t have said. He didn’t scream, either—another marvel. In lieu of that shriek, he gasped, “Hai.”
“Well, it’s got to come out. Can’t leave it in there—liable to kill you if we do.” The doctor sounded perfectly cheerful. Why not? It wasn’t his appendix. Fuchida lay on the deck till the doctors got another surgical case off one of the operating tables. They helped him onto it. The fellow who’d poked him in the belly stuck an ether cone over his face. The stuff made him think he was being asphyxiated. He feebly tried to fight back. The struggle was the last thing he remembered as blackness swept over him.
THE B. F. IRVINE’S engine started thudding away again for all it was worth. Lester Dillon had served aboard warships. He didn’t think much of freighters. He doubted this one could make better than fifteen knots unless you threw her off a cliff. By the racket and the vibration, she was sure as hell trying now.
He’d gone to the head a couple of times. Otherwise, he’d stayed in the poker game. He would have been a fool to bail out; he was up close to two hundred bucks. You could have a hell of a good time in Honolulu for a couple of hundred bucks.
When he said as much, though, Dutch Wenzel looked up from his cards and asked, “Who says we’re still heading for Hawaii?”
“Well, fuck,” Dillon said. That was a damn good question. He waited till the hand was done. He dropped out early; Dutch ended up taking it with three queens. Then Les stood and stretched. “I’m going up on deck, see what I can find out.”
“I’ll come with you,” Wenzel said, which effectively broke up the poker game. Everybody pocketed his cash. The cards belonged to Dillon. He stuck them in his hip pocket and headed for the narrow steel stairway up to the B. F. Irvine’s deck.
Sailors in tin hats manned hastily mounted antiaircraft guns. Les didn’t laugh out loud, even if he felt like it. The swabbies didn’t look as if they’d ever drawn that duty before. Marines could have done it a hell of a lot better. But Dillon hadn’t come up there to scoff at the sailors.
He glanced at his watch: half past three. He looked at the sun: astern and a little to starboard. He swore in disgust. “We’re heading east,” he said, spitting out the words as if they tasted bad—and they did. “Fucking east, goddammit. We’re running away like sons of bitches.”
A petty officer hurrying by paused. He might have been thinking about chewing Dillon out. But either a look at the platoon sergeant’s stripes or a look at the other Marine with him changed the rating’s mind. All he said was, “You ain’t got the word?”
“Down there?” Dillon jerked a thumb toward the passageway from which he’d just emerged. “Shit, no, Navy. They don’t even give us the time of day down there. What is the skinny?”
“Two carriers sunk—two of ours, I mean—and the third one smashed to hell and gone. God only knows how many pilots lost.” The petty officer spoke with the somber relish contemplating a really large disaster can bring. He went on, “We hurt the Japs some—don’t know just how much. It doesn’t look like they’re chasing us. Why the hell should they, when we ain’t got any air support left? Sure as hell can’t go on without it. So we’re heading back to port, fast as we can go.”
“Oughta be zigzagging, then,” said Dillon, remembering his trip Over There as a young man. “Otherwise, we’re liable to make some Jap sub driver’s day.”
The Navy man pointed to the bridge. “You wanna go talk to the skipper? He’s just dying to hear from you, I bet.”
“We’re all liable to be dying,” Dillon said. But he took not one step in the direction the petty officer had indicated. Would a Navy officer listen to a jar-head sergeant? Fat chance. Anyhow, all the troopships should have been zigzagging, not just the B. F. Irvine.
He took another look down the deck. Along with the men at the antiaircraft guns, the ship did have sailors at the rail, some with binoculars, looking for periscopes. That was better than nothing. How much better? Time would tell.
Behind him, Dutch Wenzel started swearing with a sudden impassioned fury. “What’s eating you?” Les asked.
“If I’d known we were gonna get our butts kicked here, I would’ve let ’em make me a gunny,” Wenzel answered. “We won’t be coming back this way for a while—better believe we won’t. When we do, we’ll have some of the new fish with us, too. I could’ve got that new rocker and still had a chance to hit Hawaii.”
“Oh,” Dillon said. “Yeah. Hadn’t even thought of that.” He too contemplated rank gone glimmering. “Too late to worry about it now, and it ain’t the biggest worry we’ve got right now, either. Maybe we’ll get another crack at it once we make it back to base.” If we make it back to base, he added to himself.
Vince Monahan came up on deck. “Let’s pick up the game again. You guys have got a chunk of my money, and I aim to get it back again.”
Les said, “Just don’t shoot at the Japs with aim like that.” They went below, reclaimed their spot—no mere privates had presumed to occupy it—and got down to business. Dillon took out the cards. “My deal this time, I think.”
JOE CROSETTI AND Orson Sharp listened to the bad news coming out of the radio in their room. “The Saratoga and the Yorktown are definitely known to be lost,” Lowell Thomas said in mournful, even sepulchral, tones. “The Hornet has suffered severe damage at the hands of the Japanese, while two cruisers and a destroyer were also hit by Jap aircraft. Our own gallant fliers inflicted heavy blows on the enemy fleet. They struck at least two and maybe three Jap carriers, as well as several other enemy warships.”
That was all good, but nowhere near good enough. The American carriers should have knocked out their Japanese rivals, then gone on to gain dominance over whatever land-based planes the Japs had in Hawaii. The plan must have looked good when the American fleet set out from the West Coast. Unfortunately, the Japs had had plans of their own.
Thomas continued, “Admiral Chester W
. Nimitz, who commanded the American task force, has issued the following statement: ‘Our movement toward the Hawaiian Islands has failed to gain a satisfactory position, and I have withdrawn our ships. My decision to attack at this time and in this way was based on the best information available. The Navy and the air did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.’ ”
A singing commercial extolling the virtues of shaving cream came on. Orson Sharp said, “Well, you can’t stand up and take the heat any better than that.”
“Yeah,” Joe said glumly. “I only wish he didn’t have to. What the hell went wrong?” He often felt funny about cussing around his roommate, because Sharp so scrupulously didn’t. He couldn’t help himself today. “God damn it, we were supposed to whip them.”
“I think we sold them short again,” Sharp said. “We didn’t figure they’d have the nerve to attack Hawaii at all, and then they did. And they licked us there and in the Philippines and down in the South Seas, but they had numbers and surprise on their side. We’d lick ’em if we ever got ’em even-Steven.”
“Well, sure,” Joe said. But it hadn’t turned out to be well, sure. The American carrier force and the Japanese had met on equal terms, and the Japs had come out on top. That wasn’t just shocking. It was mortifying.
Patiently, Sharp said, “Looks to me like we sent a boy to do a man’s job. We wanted to do something fast, pay the Japs back for what they did to us. And we tried it, and it didn’t work. We’ll try again—we have to try again. I just hope we do it right next time instead of fast.”
Joe eyed his roomie. “When the next war comes, you want Thomas or H. V. Kaltenborn or whoever’s in back of the microphone to go, ‘Admiral Sharp has issued the following statement,’ don’t you?”
“Not if it’s a statement explaining why what we tried didn’t work,” Sharp replied.
He didn’t make a big fuss about things. He hardly ever did. But he had his eye on one of the top prizes, sure as the devil. Joe owned no ambition higher than roaring off the deck of a carrier and mowing down Zeros one after another. The way Sharp thought about the bigger picture and how things fit together made him want to do the same.
Lowell Thomas returned. He talked about big German advances in southern Russia, and about the Afrika Korps’ push to Alamein. The next stop after that was Alexandria and the Nile. “The upcoming Fourth of July holiday,” he went on, “promises to be the most anxious for this great nation since that of 1863, when Meade’s army met Robert E. Lee’s at a little Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg.”
“Gettysburg,” Joe echoed. To all but a dying handful of graybeards, it was only a name from a history book. None of his family had been on this side of the Atlantic when men in blue and men in gray tried to kill one another with muzzle-loading muskets and cannon. The weapons, by modern standards, were laughable. The fury with which the soldiers on both sides had wielded them was anything but.
“We’ll do what we need to do,” Sharp said. “If it takes a little longer than we figured at first—then it does, that’s all. When the Federals marched down to Bull Run, they thought they’d win in a hurry, too. It didn’t work like that, but they didn’t lose, either, not in the end.”
“You’ve got a good way of looking at things, you know?” Joe said.
His roomie shrugged. “Hey, I wish we’d done it the easy way, believe me. If we have to do it the hard way, then we do, that’s all.”
Joe eyed him. “Anybody ever tell you you’re too sensible for your own good?”
“Besides you, you mean?” Sharp asked. Laughing, Joe nodded. The other cadet said, “Oh, I’ve heard it a few times. But my guess is, the people who say it aren’t sensible enough.”
He sounded dead serious. That only made Joe laugh harder. He said, “God help the Japs when we turn you loose on them.”
Now Orson Sharp was the one who laughed. And Joe had been joking. But, while he’d been joking, he probably hadn’t been kidding. How many pilots had the Navy lost in the failed attack on Hawaii? Too damn many—Joe was sure of that. A lot of what had been the first team wasn’t there any more. If the United States tried again—no, when the United States tried again, for he too was sure the country would—a lot of the guys who flew off the flattops would be rookies like him.
Yeah, he thought. Just like me.
FOR THE FIRST time in Kenzo Takahashi’s life, the Fourth of July wasn’t a holiday. It was a little slower than usual, because it was a Saturday. But no firecrackers spit and snarled. No fireworks displays were scheduled for the evening. No admirals and generals made pompous, boring speeches about the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Instead, both the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin ran banner headlines: GREAT JAPANESE VICTORY! and JAPAN SAVES HAWAII!, respectively. Both got more paper than the occupying authorities normally doled out to them. The Japanese wanted them to make a big fuss about this. Japanese-language newspapers shouted even louder.
Kenzo wanted to believe all the shouts were a pack of lies. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t just that no American planes appeared over Oahu and no American fighting men splashed ashore. Word always got around when the Japanese were telling tall tales. Kenzo wasn’t sure how. He supposed some people still had shortwave sets and listened to news from the mainland, even if they took their lives in their hands when they did it.
He kept hoping he would hear that Japan was inventing a battle that hadn’t happened or exaggerating about one that hadn’t gone so well. He kept hoping, but nobody said anything like that. It looked as if those gloating headlines were nothing but the truth.
His father had no doubts. Jiro Takahashi rubbed it in. “You see?” he said as he and Kenzo and Hiroshi lined up for their rice that evening. “You see? This is what happens when the United States fights Japan. Twice now, big battles—and who won? Who won, eh? Japan won, that’s who!”
“Banzai,” Kenzo said sourly.
That only made his old man mad. He’d known it would, which was why he did it. “You should always say that with respect! With spirit!” Jiro growled. “You don’t joke around with it!”
Kenzo hadn’t been joking. Before he could say so, Hiroshi stuck an elbow in his ribs. He gave his brother an Et tu, Brute? look. But Hiroshi only shook his head, ever so slightly. And Kenzo realized his brother was right. If he sounded too American, somebody in earshot was liable to report him to the occupying authorities. His father wouldn’t—they might disagree, they might quarrel, but he knew his old man would never betray him. Some stranger who might get some cash or some extra food, though . . .
“Yeah,” Kenzo said in English. “Thanks.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hiroshi told him.
“What are you two going on about?” their father asked. Neither one of them answered. He sniffed. “You’re so proud of your English. How much good does English do you now?”
They didn’t answer that sally, either. The line snaked forward. Kenzo held out his bowl for rice and vegetables. Some people had to live on this and nothing else. Kenzo would have been happy out on the Pacific now, not just for the sake of food but because he and his father didn’t fight so much when they had bait and hooks and ahi and aku and lines and sails to talk about. Everything came back to politics on dry land . . . and everything that had to do with politics was going his old man’s way.
Once he got fed, he took the bowl off by himself to eat in peace. He even waved Hiroshi away when his brother started to follow him. Hiroshi just shrugged and found somewhere else to go. To Kenzo’s relief, his father didn’t come after him.
A lot of the trees that had been proud parts of the botanical garden were long since gone to firewood. Shrubs and bushes and ferns persisted. Why not? They weren’t worth pulling up and burning. He sat down on the grass close by a jungly clump and started eating. With automatic ease, he scooped up rice with his hashi and brought it to his mouth.
He start
ed to laugh, not that it was funny. He told anybody who’d listen that he was an American. No matter what he told people, what was he doing? Sitting on the ground and eating rice with chopsticks. Circumstances seemed to be conspiring to turn him into a Jap no matter what he wanted.
He told himself Elsie Sundberg wouldn’t think so. No matter what he told himself, he had a hard time believing it. After what had happened out in the Pacific, she’d probably figure him for a Jap now, no matter what he’d told her. And if she didn’t, her folks would.
At just short of twenty, gloom came easily. Getting rid of it was harder. Kenzo washed his bowl after he finished eating. The chopsticks were cheap bamboo. Even here, even now, they weren’t in short supply. He threw them in a corrugated-metal trash can.
Then he looked west, toward Pearl Harbor. No, no fireworks tonight. The U.S. Navy was gone from these parts. Everything else that had to do with the United States seemed gone, too. So where was there a place for a person of Japanese blood who thought he had the right to be an American?
Anywhere at all?
MINORU GENDA COUGHED behind his masuku. Admiral Yamamoto looked around Akagi’s wardroom with affectionate amusement. “Is this an after-action conference or a sick-bay gathering?” he asked.
“Sorry, sir,” Genda said. If not for the conference, he would have been back in sick bay. Commander Fuchida sprawled across three chairs at the doctor’s orders. He was a long way from being over his appendectomy. Captain Ichibei Yokokawa of Zuikaku had a bandaged left shoulder. A ricocheting bullet from a Wildcat had wounded him. He was lucky it had lost most of its momentum before striking; a .50-caliber round could kill from shock without penetrating anything vital. Of course, if he were really lucky he wouldn’t have been wounded at all.
Days of Infamy Page 54
