“Some of you have seen the factories and shipyards of America, and, while Japan has nothing like them, Japan does have the courage of her people, who are willing to die in their millions to secure their country’s future. America’s vast material superiority will amount to nothing. Even if Germany is defeated by the Allies and we have to face the combined might of the United States, Great Britain, and China, we will be victorious. It doesn’t matter that America’s army now numbers in the millions and its soldiers are not like the drunken louts who were stationed here and were defeated, they are not Japanese.”
As he finished to tepid applause, he saw that most had understood clearly and were looking at him with new respect. He had told them that the Japanese army was inept and guilty of the worst imaginable atrocities. Japan was doomed, and a mighty battle could easily be fought on and for the islands. Simple numbers told them that the United States had a population a third larger than Japan’s. Combine that with Great Britain’s, and add the vast but incompetent legions of China, and an ugly picture of a war of attrition was drawn. Japan might be able to distance herself from China’s hordes but never from an angry and vengeful United States and Great Britain.
Later that evening, Akira and his father met with a select handful of young men in the back of a dry-cleaning business owned by Toyoza Kaga. Guards watched for unwelcome guests while the two kempetei slept away in their beds. The alcohol had been augmented by a mild narcotic, and they would not awaken for anything less than a volcano.
For this group, Akira was even more specific. “Japan has been accused of terrible atrocities in the war with China. Let me tell you that they are all true. I volunteered for Japan’s army because I thought her cause was just and the empire was good. I no longer think that. I saw what happened in Nanking with my own eyes. I saw women and children raped and murdered by the thousands. I saw Chinese men bayoneted to death for no reason other than that they were Chinese. To my shame, I took part in those evil actions. I killed helpless people and raped innocent women.”
He tried to block out his memory of a terrified woman who had submitted to him while her baby whimpered.
“Perhaps,” he said bitterly, “the loss of my leg was in payment for my sins.”
Kentaro Hara was an old friend and peer of Akira’s. “Would it have been saved if Japan’s army had provided decent medical support?”
“Probably,” Akira admitted. “Infection set in after a while. We had to use bandages salvaged from the dead and then washed as best as we could.”
His friends were appalled. “And our troops are really that bad?” Hara asked. “Japan’s army is noted for its discipline. What is happening?”
“Madness,” Akira said, “and incompetence. I did what I did in a moment of rage and fury. We had been fired on from a village, and a friend of mine was killed. In other instances, the replacements from Japan aren’t up to the level of the men they are replacing. The second-and rear-echelon soldiers are little more than half-trained criminals who have been conscripted and abused, and who have no wish to be in China. There have been incidents of soldiers murdering their own officers.”
That brought gasps, and even Toyoza Kaga was surprised.
“What can we do?” Hara asked sadly. “Japan will be defeated and the Americans will be on us in a rage for revenge.”
Akira smiled. “That is why we are here. We must organize and be ready to support the Americans when they invade. They must be made aware that not all Japanese support Tokyo. Not all are old fools or young radicals, like I was. We must be willing to pay for their understanding with our blood.”
“Excellent,” Hara said with an enthusiasm that surprised both Akira and Toyoza, “but how will we let them know we are here, and what should we do? It is rumored that Americans are active on Hawaii. Do we have a means of contacting them?”
Toyoza Kaga spoke for the first time. “I will work on that,” he said innocently and saw the look of comprehension on the others’ faces. When they laughed, he knew that Akira had chosen well, and he was proud of his son.
Lieutenant Goto fully agreed that punishment had to be given out for the deaths of Major Shimura and his guard. The second guard might yet die from his wounds, and his fate, whether he died or not, was part of the planned retribution.
What did surprise Goto was that Admiral Iwabachi had overruled Colonel Omori regarding its severity. Iwabachi wanted blood for the harming of his men and he wanted it in copious amounts, while Omori urged relative restraint. Deaths had to occur, but Omori wanted far fewer than Iwabachi did, and he wanted the native Hawaiian population insulated from the reprisal. It struck Goto as ironic that the admiral was endorsing acts not dissimilar to those that had seen him banished to Hilo.
The new commander of the Hilo garrison was Captain Isamu Kashii, and he held the post by virtue of being more senior in rank than the other captains. In his mid-thirties, Kashii was a firebrand and a fanatic, totally the opposite of the late, unlamented, and cowardly Major Shimura. Kashii wanted to kill Americans, and Goto wanted to help him.
A hundred men and women were chosen from the population. People of Japanese extraction were. excluded from the reprisal, but, regardless of his orders, Hawaiians were not. When Goto had commented that the Hawaiians were likely to be sympathetic to Japan, Kashii had told him it didn’t matter. They were all suspect in his eyes. Kashii could not even begin to comprehend the thought of the assassin being a lone warrior. He was vehement that the murderer had to have had help.
This was more like it, Goto had exulted. Shimura had been a pussy, afraid of his own shadow and more interested in entertaining himself with booze and drugs than in searching out the Americans. Let the blood flow.
As a result, the hundred doomed men and women had been chosen, some at random and some because they hadn’t shown enthusiasm for the Japanese cause, then interrogated with utmost brutality by Goto and some of Kashii’s men. Many couldn’t walk and had to be helped into the sunlight by those who could, while several were blind. Their eyes had been gouged out. The remainder of the Hilo population had been ordered to witness the punishment, and there was an audible moan by the assembled thousands as the tormented victims were led to the place of death.
Ten thick wooden stakes had been driven into the ground. They rose more than six feet tall and stood in front of a higher wall of sandbags. A Model 92 heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod stood about fifty yards away, while the two-man crew looked grimly at the empty stakes.
Moaning and numb with terror, the first ten were tied to the stakes. Captain Kashii signaled, and the machine gun commenced an insanely loud chattering that drowned out all other sounds. The victims jumped and writhed as the bullets tore into them, sending a spray of blood and flesh into the air. Then everything was still, and the bodies lay limp in their ropes. After a few seconds, some people in the crowd started screaming, but they were ignored. Soldiers untied the victims and dragged their bodies to the wall behind. A couple of them twitched and may still have been alive.
A second ten were brought forward, tied, and machine-gunned. The process was continued until only the last ten remained, and they too were tied to the now badly splintered stakes. The ground before them was so soaked with the blood of the preceding victims that red puddles had formed, and the crowd had ceased screaming or crying out. The mound of dead and dying behind the stakes had become a stack of bloody, raw meat as bullets that missed their targets had smacked into the bodies.
With the last ten in place, Kashii gave another signal, and ten soldiers with bayonets on their rifles took their places, one in front of each victim. Kashii bellowed an order, and the soldiers began their practice. First, they lunged their blades into the meat of their victims’ inner thighs, then the muscle of the upper arms. The last ten shrieked for mercy, but there was none. More thrusts slashed at their buttocks, the backs of their calves, the cheeks of their faces, their eyes, and, finally, slashing, disemboweling thrusts to the victims’ stomachs finished i
t.
Even so, it would take a while for some of them to die. The crowd was dismissed, but soldiers stood guard over the bloody place. Kashii ordered that no bodies be removed for at least twenty-four hours as an example.
The captain strode over to Goto and smiled. There was blood spattered on Kashii’s uniform. “Well, that ought to keep them in line. If it doesn’t, we’ll do it again and again until it does.”
The man loves to kill, Goto thought, and then laughed harshly to himself. And Omori thought I was a problem. At last, he congratulated himself, I am serving under a real leader.
“Some of the people in Hilo will move out, Captain.” Goto’s intelligence operatives told him that several hundred had already departed and more would follow. In a little while, Hilo could be a ghost town.
“Let them,” Kashii said. “There will be no food for them. They’ll come back.”
“Captain, any more clues as to the murderer or his helpers?”
“The killer was an American. One had been seen skulking around the day before, but it was unreported and apparently had happened earlier under the lax administration of my predecessor. But no, I did not get any information regarding specific assistance given to the assassin. Now I don’t need it. A message has been sent. I am confident it will not happen again.”
Goto agreed with Kashii. The Americans would be cowed by what had happened and would not attempt such a murder again. Unless, of course, someone struck at Kashii in revenge for this day. Goto saw how the captain’s actions might have launched a spiral of violence.
Good, he thought. Finally, he felt he was serving under a Japanese warrior.
CHAPTER 17
Lieutenant Brooks was appalled at the Japanese reaction to his killing of Major Shimura. Still, Jake felt compelled to read the young lieutenant the riot act, which he did with a vengeance.
It had taken Brooks several days to return from Hilo through Japanese patrols that were suddenly out in force. Prudently, he had taken a circuitous route back to the main American camp, and it was only then that he found out about what was being called the Massacre of the Innocents.
“I never thought the Japs would do anything like that,” Brooks had said with sincere contrition. He had never dreamed that he would cause anything so awful to occur, and the news had made him physically ill. He had killed an enemy soldier, which was what he had been trained to do.
“You never thought is right,” Jake had snapped. “Look, I’m sorry your brother was killed in the Philippines, damned sorry, but that doesn’t give you the right to go off and start your own private war. If I’d known you were going to shoot that Jap, I’d have stopped you from leaving camp. That Jap you killed was so stupid he was one of our best allies. Now they’ve replaced him with someone who can actually think, and that’s likely to cause still more people to die.”
“It won’t happen again, sir.”
Jake pushed his face right up to Brooks’s. He was taller than the small, wiry Raider. “Damn right it won’t. You take any actions without my orders and I’ll bust your ass right down to buck private. Is that understood?”
“Yessir.”
“And another thing. I have just promoted Hawkins to the temporary rank of captain. Whether or not I have that authority, I don’t care.
I just want it clearly understood that he’s in command and not you if something should happen to me. Understood?” Brooks’s head bobbed up and down. “Good. You’re dismissed.”
Hawkins came over as Brooks departed, his shoulders slumped in dejection. “Everybody makes mistakes, Colonel, but he made a doozy. A hundred dead people because of his actions is a little hard to take. We gotta help him live with that so it doesn’t destroy him.”
Jake agreed. “I’ll ease up on him tomorrow. You’re right, I don’t want to destroy him as an officer or as a person. Let him spend a night thinking about it, though. Now, let’s talk about our new member. Who the hell is Charley Finch, and why does he make me uncomfortable?”
Hawkins chuckled. “For one thing, if he’s been on the lam for a couple of months, like he says, he looks too well fed and plump to me.”
“Right. Did you know him before the war?”
“I knew of him, but I never really met him. I saw him a few times at the NCO club and knew he was in supply, but we never hung around.”
“What was his reputation?”
“A low-level crook and overall shady character, which may explain why he is so plump and juicy. He’s one of those guys who could hustle his way out of anything, so he may have been doing exactly what he said he was, being fed and cared for by locals and by stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down.”
Finch had arrived the day before. He claimed that he’d escaped from a Japanese work gang a couple of months earlier, and that his fellow prisoners had all been shipped to Japan. He said he’d been hidden by sympathetic Hawaiians on Oahu who’d helped him make his way to Maui, where he’d stayed with an old Hawaiian woman who’d cared for him and kept him hidden. Then, as Finch explained it, she died and he made his way to Hawaii all by himself in a small boat he’d swiped.
“It’s a great story,” Jake said, “and there’s nothing that can be verified. His fellow prisoners are gone, the old lady’s dead, the boat’s stolen, and he’s already said he can’t quite recall the people on Oahu who helped him because he was so sick at the time. He may not be a yachtsman, but he just could be good enough to take a small boat from Maui to Hawaii. It’s less than thirty miles from one island to the other, and I don’t think he’d ever even be out of sight of land on a sunny day.”
Hawkins grinned. “I take it you don’t trust him.”
“Hawk, the old army was a small club, and the garrison on Oahu was an even smaller chapter of that club. Everyone knew everybody else, and, yeah, I knew about good ol’ Sergeant Charley Finch. Hell, everybody did. You’re right, he was a minor crook and a total shit. Keep this under your rusty helmet, Hawk, but he was under investigation by the FBI.”
Hawkins whistled. “Why?”
“Stealing army stores and selling them. I got involved in my intelligence capacity because the FBI thought he was selling weapons to gangsters and other people who didn’t like the United States.”
“Jesus, now what?”
“Well, we gotta remember that he was never arrested, never indicted, never tried, and never found guilty. Who knows, he may be innocent of anything major.”
Jake thought of the supplies he’d “liberated” before the surrender. Did they make him different from Finch? “At any rate, he’s the type of person who actually could show up fat and healthy when everyone else is starving, and that doesn’t necessarily make him a crook. In fact, it might make him the kind of cunning son of a bitch who could help us.”
“Okay, Colonel Jake, then what does it really make him?”
“Someone we watch very carefully, Hawk. Either he’s telling the truth, or he’s doing things I don’t even want to think about.”
Hawkins took a deep breath as he realized what Jake was implying. “The killing on Lanai? Those seven guys who got caught by the Japs? You think he had something to do with that?”
“It’s almost too awful to contemplate, isn’t it? I can’t believe a fellow American would have anything to do with it, but I can’t get the possibility out of my mind. Nobody has any proof, and you can’t send somebody to jail on my hunches. On the other hand, if Sergeant Finch is such a damned great hustler, he may be an invaluable asset to us. We’re gonna use him, Hawk, but”-Jake grinned tightly-”we’re going to watch him like a hawk.”
The giant flying boat wasn’t particularly difficult to get or keep airborne, although keeping it on the straight and narrow in a stiff desert wind was a challenge, even for a skilled pilot like Colonel Jimmy Doolittle.
Below him were a series of rectangles painted in white on the flat and barren ground east of San Diego. They were approximately one thousand feet by one hundred feet and were intended to simulate a ve
ry large ship, and a ship that was anchored. Doolittle and Nimitz had concluded that anyone could hit a tank farm full of large and combustible oil storage tanks. It would take real skill to hit a carrier if, by chance, one was in Pearl Harbor at the time of the strike.
The priorities were ironically like those given the Japanese on December 7. First were the carriers. In their absence, the oil storage tanks. Nowhere on the list were battleships. Even if there were battlewagons in Pearl, they were to be ignored in favor of the carriers and the oil storage facilities. My, Doolittle thought, how the mighty have fallen. His personal opinion was that battleships were particularly dramatic dinosaurs that could do damage only if they were permitted to get within range. The purpose of a plane was to keep them out of range and to sink them.
After numerous attempts, Doolittle and the other pilots had come to the conclusion that the Boeing Model 314 flying boat was a lousy bomber, and that hitting any target was extremely difficult.
Of course, if they’d been able to use one of the new, secret Norden bombsights, it might have been different. High command, however, had nixed that idea. Too much chance of the bombsights falling into enemy hands, they’d said, which pretty much told him what they thought of his chances for survival.
This conclusion was further reinforced when Doolittle was informed that he would be promoted to brigadier general on his return, and not before. He understood fully. Enough generals had been killed or captured in this war. They did not need another one for the Japanese press to trumpet as a triumph. Colonels, even bird colonels, were a dime a dozen.
The massive plane came in over the target at five hundred feet. Five other planes flew at the same height over other, similar rectangles.
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