1942

by Robert Conroy

  It looked like Winters was about to object, but then he thought better of it. His expression said he would get his day in court and was confident he’d be vindicated.

  Spruance adjourned the meeting. As the group left the room, Jamie mentally began to organize his task. He was pondering when he felt a light tug on his sleeve. It was the stenographer. She was shorter than Jamie, thin, maybe an inch over five feet, and in her early twenties. “Hi. Sir, I’m Sue Dunnigan, and Admiral Spruance thought I might be able to help you with the clerical work on your project.”

  “Great,” Jamie said with a grin that surprised him.

  The process of informing California that he’d found Nevermore, also known as Commander Joe Rochefort, was elegant and simple. As directed, at eight in the evening Hawaii time, Jake radioed a single letter of the alphabet. It was A, which meant that Rochefort had been found and was well. Other letters meant different things. B would have meant that Jake and his soldiers were still looking, and C that they hadn’t a clue as to where Nevermore was. Still other letters would have indicated that Rochefort was injured and whether he could travel, while the letter X said he was dead.

  P was the most dreaded signal. It meant that Joe Rochefort was in Japanese hands.

  The one-letter signal was sent three times, at one-minute intervals. Jake wondered what would happen if the soldier entrusted to listening had gone to the can at that exact moment. He would know in just under two days, when he would receive an alphanumeric response that would give him further directions.

  As a precaution, Jake had moved the radio several miles from what they now referred to as their base camp when he transmitted. It was considered extremely unlikely that the Japanese would be able to pick up such a quick message, and even less likely that they would be able to act on it, but no one wanted to take chances. They would, however, wait at the base camp for the return transmission as receiving the message was a passive action. The station in California could be broadcasting to the moon for all the Japanese would know.

  Rochefort and his assistant, Holmes, spent most of their time up at his shack, listening, or doing whatever they did, and this left Jake time to work with his little army. He also interrogated the other sailors as to whether or not they were the only survivors of the sinking of the St. Louis. The cruiser could have had a complement of over a thousand men, and it seemed highly unlikely that only these eight had been spared.

  Jake was able to confirm that the sinking had taken place out of sight of land, and that many hundreds had taken to lifeboats. It could be presumed that others had made land safely, but the sailors told Jake that Rochefort had forbidden them to try to search their fellow crewmen out or make contact with them.

  They also mentioned that they didn’t know Rochefort was even on the St. Louis until he came ashore with them, and that they still didn’t know who the hell he was.

  Good, Jake thought. The fewer who knew, the better.

  Forty-seven hours after sending the message that all was well, they received the response. The first two digits were numeric and represented the number of days in the future when the pickup would be made. The next four digits were the time, and the final two were the location. The value of three was subtracted from each number or letter to give the true message.

  “Jesus, Colonel”-Hawkins laughed-”they sure do make something complicated when given half a chance, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know about you, Sergeant, but I kind of like it that way. The more careful they are, the more likely we are to pull this off.”

  “Ah, sir. When the naval people leave, will you be going with them?”

  Jake had been cleaning his rifle and squinted down the barrel. The question made him think of Alexa and so many others he knew. At least Alexa was likely safe, but the army people were in prison camps. It would be an easy call to say, yeah, he was going with Rochefort, and back to a land of hot coffee, doughnuts, warm beds, and clean uniforms, but somehow it wasn’t all that easy.

  “No, I think I’ll stay here. The navy’ll be back sooner or later, and they’ll need some army help to get untracked.”

  Hawkins grinned. “Thought you were going to do that. We’ve been talking it over, and we’d like to stay with you. Maybe we can really start our own little army, sir.”

  Jake suddenly found it difficult to talk and nodded his thanks. Hawkins and his men were willing to follow him and put their lives in his hands. It was overwhelming and reminded him just what he found good about being in the military. Now all he had to do was make sure their efforts and risks weren’t wasted.

  Toyoza Kaga wasn’t surprised when he was summoned to meet with the already infamous Colonel Omori. As one of the remaining important Japanese whose loyalty might lie with Tokyo, he considered the meeting almost inevitable.

  They met in Omori’s headquarters at Schofield, and the colonel came right to the point. “We are forming a provisional government, and you will be an informal part of it.”

  Kaga bowed. “I’m honored.” He did not miss the fact that he had been ordered to serve and not asked to volunteer.

  Omori waved at a stack of papers. “One of my tasks here is to go over the records held by the American military and the FBI. They make for interesting reading. In some quarters you would be considered undesirable and disreputable, but you are successful and discreet as well as pragmatic. It is also true that you have a son in the service of Japan. You must be very proud of him.”

  “Very much so,” Kaga replied.

  “I believe I can use you as a liaison between myself and the remainder of the Japanese community, who, I am sad to say, have not entirely welcomed us. This, while not completely surprising, is perplexing and disappointing.”

  “Give them time, Colonel. They are terribly confused. Many of them have family on the American mainland, as well as back on the Home Islands, and some even have sons in the American military. Others are waiting and wondering when there will be an official annexation of Hawaii as a province of Japan.”

  Omori looked surprised. “That will happen soon. Haven’t we made it perfectly clear?”

  “Forgive me, Colonel, but most people, myself included, recognize your sincerity but do not believe you are in a position to speak for Tokyo. In short, we are afraid of supporting Japan and then being bargained back to the United States, where we will be subject to American justice that will be extremely harsh.”

  Omori glared at him as he recognized both the truth of what Kaga was saying and the fact that he had said it. Such an argumentative response in Japan would have merited at least a sharp slap across the face. Here it simply pointed out the differences between the Japanese of the Home Islands and the Japanese of Hawaii.

  “Then we will be patient,” Omori finally said and dismissed Kaga.

  As Kaga left, he had his driver pass the crude prison camps where thousands of American soldiers lived almost without shelter. Already they looked gaunt from lack of food and sunburned from exposure. Then, as he drove back to Honolulu, he passed long columns of men, American civilians, who were going to work assignments. Most would work as laborers in grueling circumstances.

  Kaga leaned back in his seat and pondered. The distribution of wealth was in its early stages, but what was going to occur was obvious. All those with white skin were being deprived of their jobs and livelihoods, and put to work as a heavy labor force. The hard work, coupled with short rations, was already taking its toll, and many of the workers in the columns looked like they were scarcely able to shuffle along. Omori didn’t seem to care if civilians under his jurisdiction died, and Kaga wondered if that was part of a plan. He would have to discuss this with some of his closest and most trustworthy friends.

  Closer to the city, life was far less brutal. There, almost every field and vacant spot of land had been turned into a garden, and the crops were starting to come in. Perhaps that, he thought, would alleviate most of the now pervasive hunger problem. Kaga had to admit that the Japanese idea of turnin
g those parts of Oahu that had been sugar or pineapple plantations into rice paddies was potentially a good one. The work was backbreaking, but the Japanese government insisted that younger, stronger American women work at least two days each week in the paddies.

  He passed one such project and ordered his driver to slow down. Close to a hundred American women were knee-deep in brown water. They wore either shorts or skirts with the hems tucked up into their waists, and were hunched over as they did something to the little plants that peeked out of the muddy water. That had been the first problem to be solved-the retention of water. Without any lakes or rivers of consequence, Hawaiian agriculture was dependent on the abundant rainfall and the water that percolated just below the volcanic surface of the land.

  Kaga told the driver to stop. One of the workers looked familiar. It was the woman that Jake Novacek had asked him to look out for, Alexa Sanderson. At least, Kaga thought grimly, she was alive and healthy.

  Alexa straightened up and bent backward to ease the pain in her lower back. A Japanese soldier who was overseeing the group yelled at her, and she went back to work without any comment or change of expression.

  Beside her, Melissa groaned. “God, I hate this,” she whispered.

  The soldiers frowned on too much conversation, although this day’s guard seemed not to care very much. His yelling at Alexa appeared to be more to keep his sergeant happy than out of any degree of nastiness. Alexa thought the Jap soldier looked more like a lost kid than a terrible enemy.

  “I only hope we get to eat some of this,” Melissa added. “I’m really getting worried about Junior.”

  Melissa had left her son with an older woman in the neighborhood while she went out to work. As a woman with a small child, she might have been exempt from the work gangs, but the field workers were also given additional food because of their strenuous tasks. This meant she had more for Jerry Junior.

  Alexa agreed silently. At least the women were being given enough food to get by, while the men were fed less than minimal rations. She’d heard someplace that one of the Japanese strategies was to keep the men so weak that they wouldn’t be able to think of rebelling or sabotage. From the looks on the men’s faces, it was working and after only an extremely brief time.

  “Of course,” Melissa whispered and giggled, “I could always put out for that guard. He seems to be enjoying our legs and what he can see of our boobs when we bend over. I really think he likes his women all sweaty and covered with mud.”

  “I heard he has the clap,” Alexa said sweetly. “But go ahead if you must.”

  She then wondered how many women already were trading sex for favors from the Japs. It was almost inevitable. For a woman, sex might be the only weapon or item of value she had left. Alexa wondered if Melissa would trade sexual favors for food for her son and decided that, under the circumstances, she probably would. Then she wondered whether she would do the same to prevent starvation or physical harm. The thought repelled her, but she could not deny the likelihood. Jake had said survive, and survive at all costs.

  The Japanese strategy seemed to be to strip all semblance of dignity and respect from their civilian prisoners. And that, Alexa realized, was exactly what they were. The Japanese were not an occupying force that permitted the civilian world to function as before. No, they were restructuring the entire economy and social fabric of the islands.

  The thought occurred to her that aching muscles from planting rice might someday be the least of her worries.

  The gentleman from the Portuguese embassy, Rodrigo Salazar, was a little nervous. He was a low-ranking functionary and had never been in the White House, much less met President Roosevelt.

  “Please understand,” Salazar said in correct but halting English, “my country and I are merely the messengers in this unfortunate situation.”

  By early 1942, Portugal was one of a diminishing number of neutral nations left among the major powers. In Europe, the others were Switzerland, Spain, Ireland, and Sweden. To a large extent, their neutrality was a fiction. Portugal was unofficially with the Allies, while the other nations were more or less in the Axis camp. Some of this was geographic pragmatism. Switzerland and Sweden bordered Axis powers, while the Spanish government had been supported by Hitler in their civil war and had a long land border with Nazi-dominated France.

  Ireland, of course, hated anything British and was only now coming to grips with the fact that the United States, the land where so many of her sons and daughters had emigrated, was allied with Great Britain, whom she despised.

  Portugal, facing westward on the Atlantic, and thoroughly distrusting neighboring Spain, leaned toward the United States. Portugal also had diplomatic ties with Tokyo, which made her useful for the unofficial exchange of messages.

  In the New World, most of the nations of Latin America were in the Allied camp, while the larger nations of South America-Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru-still straddled the fence.

  “This is amazing,” Roosevelt said as he handed the message to his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. “First they conquer Hawaii and now the Japs expect us to provide food for the Hawaiians.”

  “It confronts a hard reality,” Hull said. “The islands do not grow enough food to support their population, and the only way to prevent starvation is to permit ships to bring food. Japan does not have surplus food, so that leaves us. We may have instituted rationing and be feeding other nations, but we will always have food for our own people.”

  “The Japanese say it will only be for a short while,” Salazar said. “They are converting the islands into a self-sustaining agricultural economy, and this process should be completed within a few months.

  In the meantime, they require a convoy of food each month to feed Americans in Hawaii.”

  “And none of this good food will reach their army, will it?” Hull asked sarcastically and then apologized when he saw the discomfort on Salazar’s face. “Of course it will, and please forgive me. I did forget that you are the messenger and not the message.”

  Salazar grinned. “At least you will not have me beheaded.”

  “Not immediately,” Roosevelt said. “How many ships do we need each month?”

  Salazar checked his notes. “It depends on the size of the vessel. Between twenty-five and fifty. You do understand that the Japanese will not permit American flagged ships to enter Hawaiian waters, do you not? They understand that declarations of war on them by some of the South and Latin American countries are without substance and will accept ships flying those flags.”

  “Ducky,” Hull said with uncharacteristic candor.

  “We accept,” Roosevelt said. “I will not permit Americans to starve if there is any way I can prevent it.”

  After a moment’s polite conversation, Salazar departed.

  “I wish to see King and Marshall,” Roosevelt said. “Perhaps there’s something useful they can make of this.”

  Hull demurred. “The Japs’ll be watching the convoy like hawks. I’m sure they are familiar with the legend of the Trojan horse.”

  Roosevelt started to make a pair of martinis. “What we do and how we do it are the military’s problem. I do think, however, that they could be looking so hard for a Trojan horse that they might miss something more obvious, such as submarines landing men and supplies.”

  The thought pleased him, and he began to chuckle.

  CHAPTER 12

  Staff Sergeant Charley Finch was just about the only American who was delighted by the Japanese attack on December 7. Charley was a supply sergeant who had access to the vast warehouses that housed the army’s store of supplies.

  At thirty-eight, short and overweight, Charley had been preparing for his retirement from the army by padding his nest. He had sold substantial amounts of material and army equipment to international dealers at a tenth of its worth. Even with this fragment of value, he saw thousands of dollars coming in, which he cabled to an account at the Bank of America in San Francisco. It was, he though
t, foolproof.

  At least it was until he got greedy and sold stuff to some local people who got stupid and then got caught, at which point he began to sweat bullets. The local crooks’ possession of military goods had brought in the FBI and, if it hadn’t been for the Japanese attack, would have seen him arrested when they traced it back. As it was, he’d been tipped off, and, while the bombs were fortuitously falling, he’d set fire to a couple of warehouses, figuring that “bomb damage” would account for any shortages.

  He’d been right, and the FBI forgot about trivial matters like missing equipment and went chasing more important targets.

  What he hadn’t counted on was being thrown into a POW camp. The conditions were brutal, the food was totally inadequate, and the guards were sadists who took great delight in beating prisoners to bloody pulps for the most trivial of reasons. They thought it was fun for one guard to direct a prisoner to perform one task while another would come along a few seconds later and change the order. Then the first guard would brutally beat the hapless prisoner for not carrying out the original assignment. If the prisoner tried to protest or did anything other than stand and take it, the beating got even more severe. Already, several prisoners had been beaten to death. Everyone knew it was a sadistic game the guards played, but there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  So far, Charley had not been caught in it, but he figured his luck had run out when a pair of guards called him by name and dragged him out of the camp, so terrified that he could barely stand up. It’d happened to a lot of soldiers; not all of them had returned, and many of those who did come back had been beaten pretty badly.

  Charley was dumped in the back of a truck and forced to lie on his face while he was driven a short ways. He knew where he was going- the kempetei headquarters.

  He sat for several hours on a hard stool while he sweated and worried. Finally, two new guards grabbed him and dragged him into an office where he confronted a Japanese officer. His knees weakened and he almost fell as he recognized the officer. It was Colonel Omori, the head of the kempetei and a man whom others described as Satan himself. Beside him stood Satan’s helper, Lieutenant Goto.