Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  Joe poised his fist above the table.

  “The next two are the Vestal and the Arizona. Both have been hit by—”

  Jackie cut in. “Vestal’s not a state.”

  “The Vestal’s a repair boat, not a battleship,” Joe explained. “Both have been hit by bombs. Bringing up the rear is the Nevada, torpedoed and belching smoke. Minutes after this photo was taken, another bomb knifed through four of the Arizona’s decks. It detonated deep in the forward magazine. The blast blew a fireball more than a thousand feet into the air. That killed close to a thousand men. The explosion was seen and heard for miles. Jap planes, at ten thousand feet—”

  “Don’t bang the table,” Chuck interjected. “Simulate the blast and you’ll have coffee cups flying.” Chuck turned to his daughter. “Khrushchev and his shoe,” he said.

  Too young to catch his meaning, Jackie let the comment pass over her head.

  “Jap planes rode out the shockwave at ten thousand feet,” said Joe. “There was only one survivor forward of the bridge. Fuel gushing out of the hull ignited, and fire spread along Battleship Row. A seaman named Zwarun was locked in the brig on drunk-and-disorderly charges. Poor guy went down with the ship. Two days later, the fires were finally extinguished. All they found of the skipper was his class ring.”

  “Is that the explosion?” Jackie asked, diverting Joe’s attention to the next photograph.

  “Uh-oh,” Chuck said. “Don’t get him started.”

  But it was too late.

  “That photo,” Joe growled, “is one of the most memorable images of the Pacific War. And it’s a fraud. It shows the Shaw, not the Arizona, blowing up. Because it’s the best blast on film from Pearl Harbor, guess what shot gets used?”

  “What’s wrong with that, Red?”

  “Where’s the Nevada?” Joe asked, tapping the photo beside the iconic image of him shooting at the Zero. “It should be there,” he said, fingering the water beneath the raging fireball. “But the heroics of the Nevada have been erased.”

  “Why?” Jackie asked.

  “So the devious War Department could dupe the American public. The only battleship to sail during the attack was the Nevada. Though it had been hit by a fish and was streaming smoke, it cruised past the death and destruction on Battleship Row. As the Nevada slipped between Ford Island and the floating dry dock across the water, in front of Hickam Field—”

  “Where you were?” Jackie cut in.

  “Right,” confirmed Joe. “Anyway, as the Nevada sailed by, three bombs that might have struck it hit the Shaw instead. The Shaw was in the dock for work on its depth-charge gear. Most of the crew were ashore. As it went up in a spectacular explosion, a shutterbug on Ford Island captured the huge fireball you see in this photo. There, in front of the fireworks”—Joe tapped a space that was empty water—“you should be able to see the gun turrets of the battleship.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jackie said. “Why erase the Nevada?”

  “Supposedly, to keep public morale high. From Pearl Harbor on, censorship ruled. You couldn’t find a picture of Americans who died for their flag. This image has been cropped from the original to reduce the smoke and eliminate the damaged Nevada. The War Department thought such photos would stop parents from enlisting their sons. It was only two years later, when the Marines took heavy casualties while storming Tarawa, that the public got to see multiple dead.”

  “Same thing in Iraq,” Chuck said. “Remember the stink that arose when people saw the photos of all those flag-draped coffins in the belly of a plane?”

  “Right,” said Jackie.

  “If you die for your country, you become an embarrassment,” said Joe. “A thousand heroes died on the Arizona, but they got censored. The Shaw made a good photo, so it came to represent the war. And the Nevada got airbrushed out.”

  “Your blood pressure, Red,” warned his son.

  Joe’s face was turning the color of his nickname.

  “I know, I know. Still, it picks my ass. You reach my age, you’re sick of all the lies. Vietnam was a lie from start to finish, and it could have cost me my son. It did cost all those on that wall in Washington. And for what? There are no WMDs in Iraq, even though we flaunted all those phony photos at the UN. More body bags. And for what? Liars in the war rooms aren’t the guys who fight. When push comes to shove, we’re the ones who pay for their lies—in our blood!”

  A haunted look crept into Joe’s eyes.

  “And not just our blood.”

  His finger slid across the newspaper from Pearl Harbor to the photo array on the far side of his present-day headshot.

  “That,” he said, “was the biggest lie of all.”

  Banzai

  Hong Kong

  Christmas Day, 1941

  She refused to let her fear show as she walked the hospital wards, giving what comfort she could to the shot-up and mangled soldiers. As a girl in small-town Alberta, where her dad ran a grain elevator, Viv Barrow had fantasized that she was Florence Nightingale. She saw herself wandering with her candle among all those British heroes who’d been cut down in their prime—or so she had imagined—in that disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War. Yearning to play “the lady with the lamp” to modern-day soldiers, Viv had trained as a nurse at Edmonton’s Catholic hospital. On the day she graduated, she had hopped a train for the long, winding trip through the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver. There, Viv had applied to nurse for the military, and after a brief stint on the hospital boat that sailed to and from the West Coast Native villages, she got the chance to ship out to Hong Kong.

  So here she was, walking the wards in St. Stephen’s College, a two-story boys’ school nestled on a rocky slope near Stanley village. Serving as a makeshift hospital for soldiers who’d been wounded defending the British colony against the Japanese army, the school flew a Red Cross flag on its low-pitched roof.

  “Nurse?”

  “Yes, Corporal?”

  “I can still feel my leg.”

  “That’s common,” Viv assured him, averting her eyes from the stump left when surgeons had amputated the limb just below his pelvis. “We call that phantom pain.”

  “If the Japs come, I’ll protect you.”

  “Shush,” Viv said. “Get some sleep. It’s Christmas Day. And I’ve heard”—she leaned down and whispered in his ear, as if confiding something top secret—“that Dr. Black has a case of whisky in the headmaster’s office. He’ll break it open at noon for a Christmas party.”

  “Save me a dance?” the soldier asked.

  “I promise,” Viv replied.

  Tension had grown throughout the Pacific in 1941, and London had asked if Canada could help reinforce Hong Kong, in the hope that would deter Tokyo from taking hostile action. On November 16, two thousand soldiers with the Royal Rifles of Canada and the Winnipeg Grenadiers had arrived, bringing the defenders to fourteen thousand strong. The ill-equipped and half-trained Canadians assumed they were in for a snooze of garrison duty, but less than eight hours after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, fifty thousand warriors with the Japanese Imperial Army had swept down from China to invade Hong Kong.

  Since then, only fearful news had reached the hospital, and each report was followed by an influx of fresh casualties: shell-shocked men with limbs that had been blown off as the battered battalions fell back to the Gin Drinkers’ Line, a ten-mile rampart of trenches and pillboxes stretching across the rugged hill country of the mainland; gruesome head wounds suffered during the retreat across Victoria Harbour for a do-or-die stand on the island. A week ago, the enemy had waded ashore under cover of darkness, and since then they had been grinding down whatever stood in their way, blasting with their guns and gut-stabbing with their swords and bayonets. Now they had punched through the Wong Nei Chong Gap, in the central highlands, and last night, they had rampaged drunkenly around Stanley village and down this peninsula.

  If Fort Stanley fell, so would Hong Kong.

  Never had Viv
been so relieved to see the break of day. Last night, ominous sounds in the blackness had those trapped in the isolated hospital on edge. They could hear the fighting in Stanley drawing inexorably closer. Now and then, the odd bullet had zipped out of the dark as moaning men, sweating from fever, fidgeted about on their cots. Some cried out from whatever night terrors gripped their minds.

  At one point, Viv had teetered on the verge of a primal scream, so wound up from stress that she feared she might snap. For release, she seized a British captain who had given her the eye and led him into a closet to fuck against the wall. With his pants around his ankles and her skirt hiked up to her waist, the two of them had slammed each other as if dawn would bring the gallows. Even after he exploded in her and Viv bit down on his shoulder to stifle her orgasm, the two had kept on clutching and writhing until both their fear and their passion were exorcised.

  Now, as dawn reddened the windows of the packed main hallway and its adjoining classroom wards, the same British captain was trying to convince Dr. George Black to evacuate St. Stephen’s wounded to the fort.

  “No,” said Black, the lieutenant-colonel in charge of the wards. “I think it’s safer here.”

  “Safer!” Viv’s lover was incredulous. “How can that be? We’re on the road from the village to Fort Stanley. How long will it be until the Japs come banging on our door?”

  Black was a white-haired, soft-spoken medical man who had worked in the colony for fifty years. His staff consisted of two medical officers, seven British nurses and Viv, four Chinese nurses, and four British orderlies, all of whom cared for about a hundred patients. This morning, the doctor wore his hospital whites with a Red Cross armband.

  “Frankly,” said Black, “I’d sooner be here than with the soldiers at Fort Stanley. Guests at the Repulse Bay Hotel weren’t harmed because there were no able-bodied soldiers on the premises. I’m sure that’s what will happen to us.”

  “Doctor!” Viv exclaimed, shifting from eavesdropping on the men to interrupting them.

  “Yes?” said Black.

  “Look!” Viv pointed her finger to hundreds of dark silhouettes backed by the blood-red sky shimmering beyond the nearest window.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Black said to calm the patients in the central hall. “The Japanese are here. But there’s a Red Cross flag on the roof, and I’ll tell them to leave us alone.”

  Viv watched as Black strode into one of the classrooms and tore a white sheet from a bed. Armed with that flag of surrender, he crossed to the front door and swung it wide to confront the enemy. In heroic British tradition, he barred the threshold with his arm and announced boldly to the point man of the Japanese vanguard, “This is a hospital. You mustn’t come in.”

  A moment later, the back of the doctor’s head blew out in a spray of blood and bone.

  “Banzai!” shouted Genjo Tokuda as he and two hundred Japanese soldiers, bayonets fixed and drunk on liquor looted from a bar, stormed St. Stephen’s College. An old man holding a white sheet opened the door, so Corporal Tokuda, leading the charge, shot him between the eyes. As each soldier rushed into the Red Cross infirmary, he trampled the sheet and bayoneted the doctor.

  Shriek after shriek filled the hall as steel sank into flesh. Fifty-odd patients were run through in their beds, the invaders tearing off bandages to reopen half-healed wounds. When a Chinese nurse tried to protect an invalid, she got skewered too. Before long, those who had swarmed the hospital in helmets, khaki jackets, breeches, and puttees were soaked head to toe in blood. So slippery was the floor that the soldiers struggled to keep their footing as they fanned out to satellite wards to jab their blades into other casualties.

  When a British captain sought to shield a Canadian nurse, Genjo Tokuda gutted him with his bayonet. Eye to eye with the dying man, the Japanese warrior kept him upright on his buckling legs so he could witness the death throes of someone bleeding out like a samurai committing hara-kiri.

  The nurse was Viv.

  The captain was her lover.

  Viv’s memory must have shut down, for the next sound that penetrated her consciousness, after all the screams, was a British voice shouting, “They say that anyone who can get to the front door will be spared.”

  Numb from shock, Viv shuffled toward the rectangle of blinding light. Like animals wading through a flood of blood to Noah’s ark, the patients who had not been slaughtered in their beds strained for the door, some trailing blankets behind them. Viv stooped to help the legless soldier with the phantom pain, dragging the amputee with her the rest of the way.

  At the door, the colony’s conquerors were searching their captives for cash and valuables. Spotting a knife tucked in one man’s belt, they bayoneted him. They even took the prayer book from the padre. Having lost all sense of time, Viv felt as if she were wandering through the landscape of a dream. A nurse’s watch hung upside down on her chest so she could read the time or take a patient’s pulse by looking down at her breast. The soldier who searched her tore it away with such force that he ripped her uniform and exposed her brassiere.

  The soldier sniggered.

  Then Viv was marched away.

  Eight nurses were imprisoned in a stifling room. As morning wore on, the temperature climbed toward 120 degrees. The buzzing of flies was enough to drive the women insane.

  “Are they going to kill us?” asked one nurse, her thumbnail bitten to the quick.

  “We’ll bake to death,” another moaned. “God, this heat! The Black Hole of Calcutta must have been like this.”

  With the backbone of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the bottom of the sea, Japan had launched a multi-pronged attack on Southeast Asia, hurling its might against the Philippines, Midway, Thailand, Wake, Guam, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, Burma, and here. The sooner the Rising Sun flapped over Hong Kong, the sooner these soldiers would be off to seize other riches. So the task was to force the last stronghold at the tip of this peninsula—Fort Stanley—to surrender.

  The men who had made it to St. Stephen’s door were locked away in a windowless storeroom on the second floor. About sixty prisoners of war were packed into a ten-by-twenty-foot space—so many that they had to take turns at sitting and lying down. As the heat of the noontime sun hammered the roof, the Japanese began selecting captives for the torture room.

  The gibbering from the first pair to feel the dismembering edge of the sword electrified the air within St. Stephen’s. The butcher’s bill recorded four chopped-off ears before the men were finally slaughtered. Genjo Tokuda was with the squad that transported the doomed. To push the sweating prisoners back from the door long enough for his cohorts to haul out the next two, he fired a couple of quick shots into the huddle of POWs.

  The youngest of the captives was shaking with fear.

  The defiant soldier next to him appeared to be a vet from the First World War. Tokuda knew just enough English to catch what the old hand said to the youth: “Look, kid, we’re gonna die today. But the one thing we’re gonna do is die like Royal Rifles. So don’t let these fuckers scare you.”

  “Him,” said Tokuda in Japanese, so his comrades dragged away the old vet as one of the second pair. He too died pleading for mercy after they stabbed out his eyes.

  Then it was back to the cell.

  “Canada,” Tokuda said, pointing at the young soldier who had quaked with such fear.

  “Yeah,” choked the Rifle, trying his hardest to muster his courage. “To hell with you. Go ahead. Kill me, you bastard!”

  Tokuda struck him with the flat of his sword.

  “Canada ... Cowboy!”

  The Rifle frowned. “Sure ...” Hesitation. “Cowboy,” he said. His puzzled face seemed to ask, What’s going on here?

  Tokuda stepped back and twirled his free hand above his head like a cowboy whirling a lariat. “Yip-yip-yip,” he mimicked.

  Another slap of the sword, this time to the side of the boy’s head.

  Tokuda drew an imaginary pistol with his empty hand.
“Cowboy ... You.”

  With blood running down his gashed cheek, the Canadian pantomimed a quick-draw back.

  The Japanese laughed.

  And they left him alive in the room.

  Wails and cries filled St. Stephen’s as the butchery went on. Worse yet were the interludes of silence, for they meant that Tokuda and his squad were on their way back to the second-floor cell for more POWs to dismember. Every time that door swung open, Tokuda slapped his hip with his hand and then aimed a finger at the Rifle. And every time, the youth drew in return.

  Finally, there was enough hacked-apart flesh in the torture room to serve the conquerors’ plan. Four more Royal Rifles were led off to what they assumed would be their deaths, but instead they were forced to watch while Japanese swords cut the tongue out of one man from the previous pair and chopped off the other man’s ears. After, the commander’s interpreter told the four reprieved soldiers, “Go to Fort Stanley and tell your leaders what you have seen. Hong Kong must surrender, or all will be killed like this!”

  Writhing and crying, with soldiers gripping her arms and legs, one of the Chinese nurses was carried out of the stifling room. Where she went, Viv could only guess, but quickly female screams began to echo through the hospital.

  Soon, the Japanese were back for another nurse. From the smell of whisky on their breath and the bottle gripped in one’s hand, Viv knew the soldiers had cracked open the case of liquor that Dr. Black had been saving for the Yuletide party. What a savage Christmas! she thought as another Chinese nurse went into hysterics.

  The sight of the struggling woman being dragged from the room flooded Viv’s brain with images of the Japanese army’s 1937 Rape of Nanking. If what they said was true, more than three hundred thousand people in China’s capital city were beheaded, burned, bayoneted, buried alive, and disemboweled. Eighty thousand women and girls were raped by the invaders. But the one image Viv couldn’t shake from her mind, no matter how hard she tried, was that of a pregnant woman who was sliced open after death so her rapists could present the fetus to their commander on the end of a bayonet.