Days of Infamy doi-1

by Harry Turtledove

  A pretty woman with yellow hair bowed as the soldiers went by. The light cotton dress she wore covered much less of her than would have been proper back in Japan. Several of Shimizu’s men gave her a thorough inspection. He looked her over himself. If they decided to drag her into a building and enjoy her one after another, who could stop them? Nobody. The fright on her face as she bowed said she knew it, too.

  “Keep going, you lugs,” Shimizu said. “Maybe another time.” A couple of the soldiers sighed, but they obeyed. Honolulu hadn’t been treated as roughly as Chinese towns were when they fell… and Shimizu, a good-natured man, preferred his women willing.

  It was midafternoon when they headed back toward the barracks. Nothing much had happened on patrol, which didn’t break Shimizu’s heart. He approved of routine while he was prowling the streets. Anything that wasn’t routine was too likely to be messy and dangerous.

  Getting back in the company of lots of Japanese soldiers felt good. It meant he didn’t have to look over his shoulder and wonder whether all hell would break loose when he rounded the next corner.

  So he thought, anyway, till a freight-train noise in the air made him throw himself flat. His body recognized that sound before his mind did-and before the incoming shell burst less than a hundred meters away. Most of his men hit the dirt, too. Few who’d met artillery forgot it in a hurry.

  Another shell crashed down by the barracks, and another, and another. Only after the third or fourth burst did Shimizu wonder where they were coming from. Out of the south, by the sound, but what lay south of Honolulu? The Pacific, nothing else.

  “Submarine!” someone shouted, his voice half heard through the crashing impacts and the screams of wounded men.

  Submarine! Shimizu swore. I should have thought of that myself. A sub could sneak close to shore, surface, use its deck gun against whatever it felt like shooting up, and then disappear under the sea again.

  That had hardly crossed Shimizu’s mind before the shelling stopped. He cautiously raised his head, ready to flatten out again in a hurry if more rounds roared in. But the bombardment did seem to be over. He looked around. The men in his own squad were scrambling to their feet. None of them seemed more than scratched.

  Not all the Japanese by the barracks were so lucky. Injured soldiers went on shrieking their pain up to the uncaring tropical sky. And others weren’t men at all any more, but disjointed chunks of meat. Someone’s foot lay only a couple of meters from Shimizu. The body from which the foot had come was nowhere to be seen. Men who hadn’t been hurt started bandaging their comrades and tying off bleeding wounds with tourniquets to try to keep people alive till doctors could see to them.

  The barracks had taken a beating, too. Windows were shattered. Walls had holes in them. The building didn’t seem to be burning. Shimizu wondered why. Dumb luck was the only thing that occurred to him.

  He looked out toward the ocean. He saw no submarine, but it wouldn’t have surfaced for a second longer than it had to. It was bound to be underwater now, crawling away after striking its blow.

  A few minutes later, airplanes started buzzing over the ocean south of Honolulu. One of them dropped a stick of bombs-or would they be depth charges? Even distant explosions set Shimizu’s nerves on edge. He wondered whether that pilot had really seen something or was blowing things up just to be blowing them up. Either way, he’d never know.

  Shiro Wakuzawa came up to him. Sounding surprisingly cheerful, the youngster said, “One good thing, Corporal-san.”

  “What?” Shimizu asked. “What could be good about a mess like this?”

  “Simple, Corporal: it’s not our fault,” Wakuzawa answered. “Whatever they do, they can’t blame this on us poor soldiers. The Navy? Hai. Us? Iye.” He shook his head. “If they can’t blame it on us, they can’t make us wallop each other on account of it.”

  “You hope they can’t, anyway. If they want to bad enough, they can do whatever they please,” Shimizu said. Private Wakuzawa looked alarmed-and had reason to. Shimizu went on, “But I think you’re right. This one’s the Navy’s fault. I’m glad I’m in khaki right now.”

  WHEN GENERAL YAMASHITA summoned Captain Tomeo Kaku to Iolani Palace to confer with him, Captain Hasegawa’s replacement asked-ordered, really-Minoru Genda to accompany him. Genda understood that. He sympathized with it. His superior was brand-new here, and naturally wanted someone along who sympathized with his side of things, to say nothing of someone famous for having facts at his fingertips.

  All the same, Commander Genda could have done without the honor.

  Had the Navy sunk the American submarine, things wouldn’t have been so bad. The enemy would have paid for his daring. But there was no sign that the Yankees had paid even a sen. That one flier had bombed what he thought was a sub. Afterwards, though, there’d been no oil slick and no floating debris. Odds were he’d attacked a figment of his excited imagination.

  Up the stairs to the palace entrance trudged Captain Kaku. He was a stumpy man with bulldog features, less friendly and casual than Hasegawa. One pace to the rear, one pace to the left, Commander Genda followed him. The guards-Army men-at the top of the stairs gave grudging, halfhearted salutes. They weren’t quite insolent enough to be called on it, but their attitude still stung. They might as well have shouted that Navy men deserved no better.

  Kaku affected not to notice. Because he chose to do that, Genda had to match his self-control. It wasn’t easy. Despite his slight stature, Genda was a fiercely proud man.

  “What can we do?” Kaku murmured as they walked into the entry hall. “We deserve to be mocked. First those bombers, and now this!” He let out a long, sad sigh. He’d taken over for Captain Hasegawa only the day before the submarine raid, but plainly saw it as his fault.

  They went up the koa-wood staircase to King Kauakala’s Library. The last time Genda was in the room, he and Mitsuo and Fuchida and a couple of Army officers had asked Princess Abigail Kawananakoa if she wanted to become Queen of Hawaii. As far as Genda knew, plans for reviving the monarchy hadn’t gone any further after she said no. Someone needed to keep working on that. Other potential sovereigns were out there.

  But the monarchy could wait. Now Major General Tomoyuki Yamashita sat behind King Kauakala’s ponderous desk. Yamashita was a ponderous man himself, and only looked more massive looming over that formidable piece of furniture. He had set one chair in front of the desk, intending to leave Captain Kaku out there alone and vulnerable to take whatever he felt like dishing out.

  The general shot Genda a baleful glance. Genda wondered whether Yamashita would order him out or make him stand. By Yamashita’s scowl, he was thinking about one or the other. But he must have decided either would have been too raw. Grudgingly, he pointed to another of the leather-backed chairs against the wall. Genda set it beside the one meant for Captain Kaku. The two Navy officers sat down together.

  “Well?” Yamashita growled. “What do you bunglers have to say for yourselves?”

  “If it weren’t for our ‘bungling,’ sir, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are right now,” Genda said.

  Now Yamashita looked at him as if he were a bug in the rice bowl. “If that submarine had decided to aim for this building, I could have been killed sitting where I am right now.”

  “I am very sorry about that, General,” Captain Kaku said. “Submarines are hard to detect and hard to hunt. That makes them good for nuisance raids like the one the other day. I am glad the boat did not turn its gun this way.”

  Genda wouldn’t have missed General Yamashita. He didn’t think Kaku would have, either. The forms had to be observed, though. Too much truth was destructive of discipline.

  “How do you propose to make sure this sort of outrage doesn’t happen again?” Yamashita demanded. “Aside from the damage it does, look at the propaganda it hands the Americans.”

  “So sorry, General,” Kaku repeated. The Americans had handed Yamashita a stick, and he was using it to beat the Navy.

/>   “We are increasing patrols, sir,” Genda put in. “The new Kawanishi H8K flying boats will help. They have much longer range and greater endurance than the H6Ks they’re replacing. We’re flying them out of the Pearl City base that the Yankees set up for their Pan American Clipper planes.”

  “There are no guarantees, sir,” Kaku added, “but they do have a better chance than anything else we’ve got.”

  “They’re heavily armed, too,” Genda said. “If they spot a sub, they also have a good chance of sinking it.” He paused for some quick mental calculations, then nodded to himself. “They might even be able to reach the U.S. mainland from here. That would pay the Yankees back for what they did to us. If we could drop bombs on San Francisco, say…”

  He’d captured Yamashita’s imagination. He’d hoped he could. “Could they get there and back?” the general asked.

  “It would be right on the edge of their range if they took off from here,” Genda answered. “They could do it more easily if we had a submarine out in the Pacific to refuel them.”

  “Could you arrange that with Tokyo?” Yamashita asked, suddenly eager.

  Genda and Kaku looked at each other. Neither one smiled. “Possibly,” Kaku said. “It might take some persuading, but possibly. If you would add your voice, Yamashita-san, that would be bound to help.” Genda still didn’t smile, though how he didn’t he couldn’t have said. After what the Americans had done here, Tokyo would leap at the chance to strike back. He was sure of that. Regaining lost face would appeal to the Navy and Army both.

  Major General Yamashita nodded. “You may be sure that I will.”

  Once Captain Kaku and Genda were out on the lawn outside the palace, the new skipper of the Akagi did smile, in relief. “That went better than I hoped it would,” he said. “Thank you very much, Commander.”

  “My pleasure, sir,” Genda answered with a polite bow.

  JIM PETERSON DIDN’T need long after volunteering for an outside work detail to realize he’d made a mistake. He’d thought nothing could be worse than the POW camp by Opana. That only proved he’d been sadly lacking in imagination.

  He and his fellow suckers were set to work repairing a stretch of the Kamehameha Highway. The Japs had graders and bulldozers. If they hadn’t brought their own, they had the ones they’d captured here. They didn’t want to use them. Maybe they were short on fuel. Maybe they just wanted to find a new way to give their prisoners hell. The whys didn’t really matter. The what did.

  The POWs had picks and shovels and hods and mattocks and other hand tools. They broke rock. They carried rock. They flattened chunks of rock till they had a roadway. At first, they’d all been eager to show the Japs what they could do. That hadn’t lasted long. Soon sense prevailed, and they started doing as little as they could get away with.

  That didn’t mean they didn’t work. Oh, no-far from it. The Jap guards were harder on them than the whip-cracking overseers in Gone with the Wind were on the slaves. Peterson had no trouble figuring out why, either. If a slave died, his owner was out a considerable investment. If a POW died here… well, so what? Plenty more where he came from.

  There was more food at the start and end of each day. Nobody could have done hard physical labor on what the Japs fed POWs in camp. Trouble was, there wasn’t enough more food to make up for the labor the men on the work detail did. Every day, Peterson’s ribs seemed to stand out more distinctly.

  And he had to keep an eye on everybody else in his shooting squad. The Jap who’d come up with that scheme had to be a devil who got up and sharpened his horns every morning the way ordinary men shaved. If anybody took off for the tall timber, the whole squad bought the farm. You couldn’t believe the Japs were kidding, either. They’d shoot nine guys because one had run. Hell, they’d laugh while they were doing it, too.

  Peterson particularly worried about a fellow named Walter London. London had been skinny the first time Peterson set eyes on him back in the camp. Unlike most POWs, he hadn’t got any skinnier. He was an operator, a guy who could come up with things like cigarettes or aspirins… for a price, always for a price. He looked out for number one-and there was no number two in his book. That made him dangerous. He wouldn’t care what happened to the rest of the shooting squad, not if he’d disappeared over the horizon before anybody knew he was gone.

  Everybody watched him. Everybody watched everybody else, but everybody especially watched him. He noticed, of course. Only a fool wouldn’t have. Walt London might have been-probably was-a slimy son of a bitch, but he was nobody’s fool. One morning, he asked, “How come I can’t even take a dump by myself without somebody handing me some leaves to wipe my ass?”

  The other members of the shooting squad looked at one another. For a few seconds, nobody seemed to want to take the bull by the horns. Then Peterson did: “That way, we know we’ll have the pleasure of your company after you pull up your pants, Walter.”

  London donned a look of injured innocence. He might have practiced in front of a mirror. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Now Peterson’s voice went cold and flat. “You lie like a wet rag. Anybody with two brain cells to rub together would know what I’m talking about. You may be a bastard, but you’re not a jerk. If you start pretending you are, is it any wonder nobody trusts you?”

  “I’m not gonna bail out on you guys,” London protested.

  “See? You did know what I was talking about after all. How about that?” Peterson’s sarcasm flayed. Walter London turned red. Peterson didn’t care. He drove his point home: “But you’re right. You’re not gonna bail out, because we’re not gonna let you. If you get away, you kill all nine of us. But if you try and get away and we catch you, you don’t need to worry about the Japs. We’ll goddamn well kill you ourselves. Isn’t that right, boys?”

  He got nods from the rest of the shooting squad. He wore only the corporal’s stripes he’d earned not long before the American defense on Oahu collapsed. But he still talked like an officer. He knew how to lead. The others responded to that, even if they didn’t quite know what they were responding to.

  Hate blazed from Walter London’s eyes. Peterson looked back at him with nothing at all in his own. London wilted-under the hate lay fear. “Honest to God, I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

  Push him too hard now, Peterson judged, and he might bolt for the sake of getting everybody else shot. With a broad, insincere smile of his own, Peterson said, “Okay. Sure thing.”

  Later, one of the other men in the shooting squad, a PFC named Gordy Braddon, sidled up to him and said, “That asshole still wants to cut out on us.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Peterson said. “We’ll watch him. If he does try and disappear, we’ll nab him, too. I’m not about to let a punk like that put me in my grave.”

  Braddon had tawny hair, a long-jawed face, and an accent that said he came from Kentucky or Tennessee. His chuckle sounded distinctly cadaverous. “You bet you won’t, on account of the Japs won’t bother throwin’ you in one if they shoot you ’cause London goes south.”

  “All the more reason not to let him, then,” Peterson said. Braddon chuckled again and slipped away.

  Nights were bad. The rest of the shooting squad had to keep watch on Walter London. That meant giving up part of their own sleep when they were desperately weary. London proved how shrewd he was. If he’d kept complaining and kicking up a fuss, the other men would have been sure they were doing the right thing. He didn’t. He didn’t say boo, in fact. He just slept like a baby himself. He might have been saying, If you want to waste your time, fine. Go ahead. I don’t intend to waste mine. That was a damned effective way to take revenge.

  Fighting to keep his own eyes open, watching the other POWs snoring away in the middle of the night, Peterson hated him right back. If London were square, he wouldn’t have needed to waste his time like this. Yeah, and if ifs and buts were candied nuts, we’d all have a hell of a Christmas.

  He felt t
he exhaustion less in the nighttime than he did the next day. One morning when he was particularly frazzled, Braddon handed him three or four small, greenish fruits-they couldn’t have been much above the size of his thumbnail-and said, “Here. Chew on these.”

  Peterson did. They were bitter enough to make his face pucker up. “What the hell are they?” he asked, wondering if the other man was playing a nasty practical joke on him.

  “Coffee beans,” Braddon answered. “Stuff grows wild here.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Peterson let the juice run down his throat. Sure as hell, his heart started beating faster and his eyes opened up. Admiringly, he asked, “How the devil did you recognize ’em?”

  “My ma kept tryin’ to grow ’em in Memphis,” Braddon said. “Didn’t work. Winters are mild, but they aren’t that mild. Every time we got a hard frost, it’d kill ’em off. But she kept after it, Ma did. Hell, for all I know, she’s still tryin’.”

  “Damn,” Peterson said reverently. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had coffee. Not too long after December 7-he was sure of that. Since he’d gone so long without, the stuff kicked him hard now, almost like Benzedrine. He felt like a new man, and the new man felt ready to go out there and bust his ass. It wouldn’t last-he was sure of that-but he’d make the most of it while it was there.

  FLYING ABOARD ONE of the three Kawanishi H8Ks that droned east and north through the darkness awed Commander Mitsuo Fuchida. Part of his excitement was over the mission. The Americans had dared to strike at Hawaii from the air. Now Japan would pay the same kind of visit to the U.S. mainland.

  Some good kami must have taken hold of Minoru Genda’s tongue when he proposed the raid to General Yamashita. It was the perfect way to pay the Yankees back for their insolence. As soon as Fuchida heard about it, he knew he had to come along. And here he was, heading straight for North America.

  The rest of the awe was devoted to the plane in whose copilot’s seat he flew. The H8K was, quite simply, the best flying boat in the world, and nothing else came close. The airplane was about three-quarters the size of one of the China Clippers that had traveled from the U.S. West Coast to Hong Kong and Macao, but it was half again as fast as they were. It cruised at better than 320 kilometers an hour, and could get up over 460 at top speed.