1942

by Robert Conroy

  “On Saturday, August first,” Yamamoto said, “the Hawaiian Islands will be proclaimed a province of Japan. That is only a week from now, which is not enough time to change matters. When the fleet departs, which will be within a couple of days after that, I will leave you sufficient resources to carry out the following tasks.

  “First, the airfields at Hickam, Ewa, and Barbers must be repaired. Second, the shore batteries and antiaircraft installations must be reconstructed.”

  “Will I receive additional forces to man them?” Iwabachi asked.

  “Of course,” Yamamoto snapped. “Then I want the wrecks removed from the harbor.”

  Iwabachi nodded. “It will take a tremendous effort to remove the carcasses of the sunken battleships. It was not something I attempted to do because, even with the best of resources, it would take an enormous amount of time and effort.”

  This time Yamamoto agreed. “Which is why it is your last priority.” He turned to Omori. “The existence of the American guerrillas on Hawaii is repugnant. What will you do about it?”

  “To be candid, Admiral, there is very little we can do. We know they have a radio and communicate regularly with California, but we have been unable to locate it. We cannot triangulate in such rugged terrain. Right now, we place it in an area of over a hundred square miles, which, given the harshness of the land, means we could march ten feet away from it and not see it. The same holds true with the guerrillas themselves. They can stay out there forever until I get sufficient troops to mount a series of massive sweeps that would wear them down and cut them off from their supply bases.”

  Yamamoto had seen the Philippines and other areas of the Hawaiian Islands. He knew precisely what Omori’s problem was. American guerrillas were still active in the Philippines and even on the relatively small island of Guam. Only time would wear them down.

  “You would need a division,” Yamamoto said. “It must wait. Are they capable of disrupting the annexation proceedings?”

  “They might try something,” Omori said. “But they are only a handful and could do little more than cause an embarrassment. They would also have to transport themselves from Hawaii to Oahu, which I do not consider likely as it would be suicidal.”

  There was no more to be said, and Yamamoto dismissed them. On the deck of the battleship, Omori spent a moment gazing at the splendor of the Japanese navy. He swelled with pride at the force that had humbled the Americans and taken this jewel from them.

  Now all he had to do was ensure that what he’d told the revered admiral was correct. He would contact Goto and make certain that he was doing all that could be done to keep pressure on the American guerrillas. If anything happened, Omori was confident it would be near Hilo, where the Japanese garrison was relatively small, which made it a potentially tempting target. Only a raving idiot would think of attempting anything disruptive with the fleet in the harbor along with a brigade of infantry on troop transports. No, any move by the Americans would be at Hilo.

  So why did he have the nagging feeling of doubt that something was going to go wrong? He would double and redouble his efforts to ensure that the ceremony went off without a hitch. After that, did he really care?

  Alexa watched from behind a tree as Charley Finch headed off in the direction of Hilo. He was alone and carried some rations in a field pack, along with a rifle across his shoulder. He lumbered more than walked, and it was obvious that the sergeant was not in good shape. Too bad, she thought.

  It would take Finch a couple of days to get to either Hilo or the farms he was supposed to visit, and a couple more to come back. If he came back. She wondered if he would actually visit the farms. Perhaps she had misjudged him. After all, there was nothing definitive to hang on him, just the very strong suspicion that there was more to Sergeant Charley Finch than there should be. If he came back and if he had completed his assignment, she would have a lot of her suspicions allayed. But not all of them. She could not get the photograph out of her mind. How had he gotten it?

  Jake walked up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder, massaging it gently. “Are you solving the problem?”

  She felt his strength and drew from it. She pressed backward so that she was leaning against him. It was a very comforting feeling. What she was doing was so far removed from her previous life as a docile navy wife that it was terrifying. “Sure am, Jake.”

  “We just got the word, Alexa. It’s going to be the early morning of August second.”

  Alexa thought quickly. What the devil day was today? It was so easy to lose track out in the wild. Ah yes, August second was a week away. Perfect.

  “Are you worried?” she asked.

  “Damn right I am. I still don’t know everything that’s going on, and that’s the best way. But I do know that if our part of this fails, we could be running for our lives from thousands of angry Japs. We’ll have proven that we’re a lot more dangerous than they thought, and they won’t stand still for that. We’ll have a devil of a time hiding or getting away from here.”

  She shrugged. It was easy to be fatalistic. “If that’s the case, Jake, then we run. And if we can’t run, then we die. Like I said before, I’m not going to go back as a prisoner.”

  “Me neither,” he said gently as he hugged her and nuzzled the back of her neck. Soft hairs grew there, and he thought they were fascinating.

  “We all have to die sometime, don’t we?”

  “Yeah,” he answered with a harsh laugh. “I just don’t want it to be right away. I’d kind of hoped to spend more time with you. Like maybe thirty years or so.”

  Alexa took his hand and led him away. Several other people were about and trying not to look at them. When they were alone in the shadows, she turned and kissed him. “Then let’s spend what time we have together. I know a marvelous place in the bushes where we can make love. I find you very attractive now that you no longer smell like fish.”

  Jake hesitated. “There’s a helluva lot to do between now and next Sunday.”

  “An hour?” she teased. “You can’t spend an hour making love to the woman you love?”

  Jake laughed and felt himself growing warm. “An hour I can spend.”

  Admiral Nimitz had himself driven out to the isolated ocean cove where the five giant seaplanes bobbed at anchor. First there had been eight, and then six, and now another had fallen to mechanical problems.

  Nimitz thought it was incredible that such massive and ungainly things could ever get airborne. However, once they did reach the skies, they became long-winged and as graceful as one of the great birds that flew the oceans.

  “Colonel, you are either the bravest man I’ve ever known or the craziest.”

  “Probably a little of both, sir.”

  “You realize what we’re doing, don’t you?”

  Doolittle’s orders were to be over Pearl Harbor at just before dawn on the morning of Sunday, August 2, 1942. Exactly how he would do that without proper navigating equipment and in the face of possibly contrary winds was his problem. He had five massive flying boats all reconfigured to carry bombs. They could make it to Hawaii and, just maybe, all the way back. There was no other plane on the face of the earth that could do that.

  It was presumed that some planes would be lost in the raid, and that the remaining planes would be damaged, perhaps severely. The cripples were to fly as far as possible toward the United States and then land in the ocean. Ships would try to find them and pluck them to safety. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was something.

  Doolittle’s men were willing to put themselves at risk, but not to commit suicide. There had to be at least the ghost of a chance of survival. Of course, no one wanted to be captured by the Japanese. A fast death would be the best that could happen in that case.

  “Yes, sir, I understand fully, and so will my men,” Doolittle said. “We’re going to do unto the Japs as they did unto us. We’re going to hit them just before first light, when their slanty little eyes are fast asleep. I do have a
question, though.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “My five planes aren’t all that’s involved in this, are we?”

  Nimitz smiled. “If I recall, you were more than willing to take a flight of B-25s over Tokyo without any assistance, weren’t you?”

  Doolittle winced and grinned. “Sorry, Admiral. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “Colonel, let’s just say that you shouldn’t be surprised at anything that happens. Like I told you so long ago, people say you’re the right man for this mission because you are so flexible in your thinking. That’s why you’ve been given carte blanche regarding the choice of targets.”

  There was, however, a priority to the targets. First, he was to attack any carriers in the harbor. Second, he was to hit the fuel storage depots. Battleships were a very low priority. Not only were his bombs too small to do much damage to them but the huge battlewagons just weren’t all that important anymore.

  The great unspoken fear was that Doolittle’s planes would make it through Japanese defenses only to find that the carriers were no longer in the harbor. It wouldn’t take them long at all to sortie into the open ocean once the alarm was sounded.

  The second fear was that his planes would waste their bombs on empty storage tanks. Intelligence sources said that only half the depot’s tanks were full, but they didn’t say which half.

  There were twelve men on each of the five planes: a pilot, copilot, navigator, radioman, bombardier, and gunners to fire the machine guns that had been installed as defenses against the Zeros that were sure to swarm them. It had been hoped that the guns would provide a disconcerting sting and help the seaplanes get through.

  Doolittle thought they were a waste of time and men. He had sixty men with which to take on the Jap navy and the defenses of Pearl Harbor.

  Why the hell, he thought wryly, hadn’t he stuck with something simple? Like bombing Tokyo.

  CHAPTER 21

  Lieutenant Ernie Magruder paced the distance from the cliff to where the planes would commence their runoffs. In a few days he would launch eleven Grumman Wildcats against the might of Japan. The Wildcat was a good, solid plane, although obsolescent and due to be replaced by a newer Grumman model. The newer plane was not going to be risked in an operation as chancy as this. There was too much possibility of it falling into Japanese hands.

  The Wildcat carried six machine guns but only two one-hundred-pound bombs. It had a range of just over seven hundred miles, which meant they would not have all that much time over Pearl during the raid. In and out, drop and run, shoot and scoot were his instructions. Even so, there probably wouldn’t be enough fuel to take them back to the Big Island if they had to do much fighting or high-speed maneuvering, so they were to land on abandoned strips on Molokai. From there, they were to run like hell and hide. Ironically, these now-abandoned fields were the ones that had first been used by the Japanese earlier in the year. Locals had helped repair them after the Japanese left.

  The Wildcat was considered overmatched by the Zero, which was faster and more maneuverable. But Magruder knew that his plane could still cause a great deal of damage to the Zero, which had a wonderful propensity to blow up when hit, while his tough little plane could absorb punishment and get away.

  His job wasn’t to take on the Zeros. His task was the carriers, if any, and the fuel. He had been told that his appearance over Pearl would be a complete surprise to the Japanese. Magruder sincerely hoped so. It was the Japs who had a death wish, not Ernie Magruder of Montgomery, Alabama.

  Of course, that presumed he and his trusty planes got airborne in the first place.

  “What’s the problem?” asked Captain Gustafson. “You take off from a little ship in the middle of an ocean, don’t you? So what’s wrong with jumping off a cliff?”

  Magruder laughed nervously and conceded that the jut-jawed captain had a point. Launching from Hawaii was planned to be simplicity itself. Three abreast, planes were to taxi as fast as they could downhill toward the cliff, then launch themselves into space. According to Gustafson’s calculations, the planes would drop but a few feet before becoming stable flying machines. Magruder had his doubts and could visualize himself plummeting a thousand feet into the ocean. “Captain, I just want you to know that, if this doesn’t work, my last words will be ‘You fucked up, sir!’ “

  Gustafson laughed hugely. “What’s the saying? If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have enlisted? Well, son, you’ve enlisted and here you are. Now, if you know a better way of getting your planes in the air without building an airfield that the Japs would spot, you tell me.”

  Magruder didn’t. “Now that I think of it, getting in the air might just be the least of my problems,” he said. “I have to find Pearl Harbor at dawn and without attracting attention, blow up the place, and then get safely out of there. Jumping off a cliff is a piece of cake in comparison.”

  Gustafson nodded sympathetically. Magruder was only half his age and had his whole life before him. In the short while they’d been together, he’d begun to think of Magruder as the son he and his wife never had.

  Gustafson was an immigrant from Sweden who’d arrived as a teenager. Before coming, he’d been told that the United States was a land of soft and spineless people who would never fight and couldn’t bear to be uncomfortable. Novacek, Magruder, and so many others had shown that assessment to be a lie. He put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “You can do it, Ernest.”

  Magruder laughed. Nobody called him Ernest. “Thanks, Pop.”

  “Now,” Gustafson said, “let’s see if that still we rigged up is working all right. We have a couple of days to prepare for your mission, and I think we could all use a drink.”

  After what seemed an eternity, Jamie Priest had finally gotten a letter from WAVE-in-training Suzy Dunnigan. She said that she was doing well in the classroom portion of her training, and that the physical part was a breeze. Recalling her taut and lean body as they swam, ran, and made love, he had no doubt that she could march or hike circles around her peers.

  Her only negative was that she had just come down with the flu and was puking her guts out. She said it was the navy’s fault for sending her from sunny California to Chicago. Jamie laughed at the joke. It was July, and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center was probably hotter than San Diego, so maybe it wasn’t the flu. Maybe it was something she’d eaten, like navy food, for instance.

  Every day he had his security clearance brought him new discoveries and revelations. He now understood that Great Britain had been fully informed of the navy’s masquerade off Iceland. Thanks to some clever carpentry, the smaller vessels had been made over to look like their bigger brethren. Viewing from a distance, the German sub had been fooled and Berlin had passed the erroneous information on to the Japanese.

  The British had intercepted both the message from U-123 and the subsequent signal from Berlin to Tokyo. They had forwarded the information to Admiral King in Washington, where it had been relayed to both Nimitz in San Diego and Spruance in the Pacific. Jamie wondered if King’s noted antipathy toward Britain had moderated. He doubted it.

  You see what you expect to see, had been the plan. It had grown from that long-ago offhand comment by Jamie. The U-123’s was not the only sighting of the phantom fleet. A Spanish warship had been permitted to get close enough to see and then been abruptly ordered out of the area. The Spanish were ostensibly neutral but leaned heavily toward the Axis. The second confirmation must have really dazzled the Japs, he thought.

  Another consequence of Jamie’s new status was the realization that Jake Novacek led the guerrillas on Hawaii and that Alexa Sanderson was there as well. Every time he thought of it he had to stifle a grin. He could see Novacek as a guerrilla, but Alexa? What the hell had happened to the quiet girl who had been the wife of his friend? Alexa Sanderson was almost a socialite, not a soldier. But then, he thought solemnly, circumstances force changes. Sometimes you have to adapt or die.

  When Nim
itz found out that he knew Novacek, Jamie was called into the admiral’s office. “Commander, do you realize that you are among a handful of people who have any idea who this fellow is?”

  Jamie didn’t. “Sir, I’m very surprised.”

  Nimitz gestured him to a chair. “Novacek is responsible for at least two aspects of Operation Wasp. Joe Rochefort worked with him for a short while and thinks highly of him, and the only other recommendation I’ve gotten is from a General Joe Collins, who sent a favorable report on Novacek to General Marshall. Some think Rochefort’s a little crazy, and I have no idea who this Collins person is, although I accept Marshall’s opinion of both him and his reference. Novacek might not be one of Marshall’s Boys, but Collins certainly is, and, if Novacek pulls this off, he might well be one too.”

  Jamie stifled a grin. Even on a good day, Rochefort was at least unique, and crazy might not be that far off the mark. However, Rochefort was crazy like a fox. As to Jake becoming one of General Marshall’s favorites, Jamie found himself strangely pleased for someone he hadn’t known at all before December 7.

  “Sir, I was very impressed with what little I saw of him,” he said and then explained that he really knew Alexa Sanderson far better. “All I can say is I think that we’re in good hands with Jake Novacek, and I’m very glad that Mrs. Sanderson is as well.”

  Nimitz had only a dim recollection of once meeting Tim Sanderson, and none of his widow, although he recalled the name as a result of queries from some congressman. Admirals often had a hard time recalling junior officers with whom they had no contact, and Nimitz was no exception, even though he epitomized courtesy and consideration.

  “It’s a strange world, Commander,” he said, “and it’s about to get even stranger in a couple of days, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”