After three more landings and takeoffs, he got orders to return to the land base. Regretfully, he obeyed. He thought—he hoped—he improved every time. He wanted as much practice as he could get—this was as close as he could come to the real McCoy.
Finding his way across the gray waters of Lake Erie also proved . . . interesting. The Wolverine steamed well out of sight of land. He needed to use some of what he’d learned in navigation before he found New York again. He hoped it was New York, anyway. If he’d fouled up, it might be Pennsylvania or Ontario. Ending up not just in the wrong state but the wrong country would have damaged his career. It probably would have meant he didn’t have one.
But no—he hadn’t screwed the pooch this time. That was the shoreline south of Buffalo, where he belonged. He breathed a sigh of relief. He also tried to suppress the little stab of worry that went through him whenever he did this. Out in the Pacific, he wouldn’t have a shoreline to recognize. If he was going to find the enemy and find his way back to his own carrier again, he’d have to be able to use the navigation they were trying to pound into his head.
Can I? he wondered. He hoped so. He thought so—as long as he had a little while to think while he was doing it. “The Japs may not give you that kind of time, Joe,” he said in the cockpit. “Are you sure you want to go on with this?”
But that had only one possible answer. He nodded. He didn’t need to speak. He’d been doing this for most of a year now. He’d torn his life to pieces to do this. He wasn’t about to back away from it now. And if that meant he had to take a few chances once he got up there . . . He shrugged. Then it did, that was all. His commissioning wasn’t very far away. He didn’t give a damn about becoming an officer for the sake of becoming an officer—though that would have his immigrant parents walking on air.
What he gave a damn about was that becoming an officer, becoming a pilot, would give him the chance to fly off a real carrier and take the war to the Japs. He’d been waiting for that chance ever since Pearl Harbor. It was so close these days, he could taste it. He wanted it bad.
By now, coming down on dry land seemed routine. Instructors had talked to the cadets about stuff like that, warning them against overconfidence. Joe had heard about guys who flew their planes into the ground just out of carelessness. He watched what he was doing, but he had to make himself watch it. That probably wasn’t so good.
No landing officer with wigwag flags here—just him and the F3F and the runway. He landed smoothly enough and taxied to a stop. As he killed the engine, he laughed at himself. Three years earlier, this plane had been on a carrier. If war had broken out then, say over the sinking of the Panay, it would have been in the front line against the Japs. Nowadays . . . Nowadays, it was good enough to train in.
Of course, Japan probably hadn’t had Zeros three years earlier, either. Things happened in a hurry nowadays, and that was that.
Another Grumman biplane came in and taxied up right behind Joe’s. Orson Sharp climbed out of it. “Way to go, roomie,” he said. “You made those circuits and bumps look mighty good.”
“Yeah?” Joe still sometimes had trouble believing his roommate was pulling for him as hard as he seemed to.
But Sharp nodded. “Oh, yeah. We do ’em here, we can do ’em anywhere.” He didn’t ask about his own performance. Part of that was because Joe had been in front of him in the queue and couldn’t have seen him. And the other part was that the Mormon kid, unlike Joe, was confident about everything he did up there. He wasn’t a showoff or anything, but he was good, and he knew it.
Groundcrew men took charge of the fighters. Joe and Sharp walked side by side to the administration building next to the field. By now, Joe was used to having his roommate tower over him. Once you got up in the air, size didn’t matter any more anyway.
When they got inside, instructors separated them. Joe’s raked him over the coals for not following the landing officer’s signals fast enough. The gimlet-eyed men aboard the Wolverine had wasted no time radioing their complaints back to the base. They never did.
Joe took the heat and tried not to show how it stung. Actually, he thought he’d done pretty well. He’d done his damnedest—he knew that. If it wasn’t good enough . . . He’d just have to try to improve. You couldn’t argue. You had no excuses for anything less than perfection. A couple of cadets had complained and alibied when instructors criticized them. Joe didn’t know where they were these days. He did know they weren’t cadets any more.
When his own reaming was done, his instructor barked, “Any questions?”
“Yes, sir,” Joe replied.
The instructor’s eyebrows rose. More often than not—much more often than not—that was the wrong answer. But the instructor couldn’t presume ahead of time. “Go ahead,” he said, his voice chilly as the weather.
“Sir, we’ve lost a lot of carriers in the Pacific,” Joe said. “My question is, when do we start getting replacements?”
“Ah.” The instructor relaxed. Joe had found a question he could safely ask: it wasn’t one about his own performance. Something approaching warmth entered the older man’s voice as he replied, “Well, Mr. Crosetti, you have to understand I don’t know a whole lot more than you do here—not officially, anyway.”
“Yes, sir,” Joe said eagerly. “I do follow that. But you’re hooked into the grapevine, and I’m just a dumb cadet. I don’t get the time of day, let alone the juicy stuff.”
The instructor’s face crinkled into a wide smile. Joe hadn’t been sure it had room for that much amusement, but it did. The officer said, “We’re not talking weeks, but we’re not talking years, either.” He caught himself. “I take it back. From what I hear, the first one is only weeks away. But we’re looking at next summer before we have enough hulls in the water to go back and take another shot at the Japs.”
“Next summer.” Joe weighed that. Normally, seen with the impatience of youth, it would have seemed a million miles away. But when he looked ahead at everything he still had to do to win a place on one of those carriers . . . “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.”
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO HAD ALWAYS SLEPT LIGHTLY. Lately, he’d been dozing and catnapping more than really sleeping. He didn’t like that at all. Air raids came every few nights now, and he expected them even on nights when they didn’t come. Worry kept him awake when sirens didn’t.
Tonight, though, the alarm was real. “Zakennayo!” he snarled as he ran for a shelter trench. “What good is it to have this fancy electronic warning if we can’t shoot down the enemy airplane once we spot it?”
As if to mock him, a couple of antiaircraft guns near the Haleiwa airstrip started barking. Wasting ammunition, he thought scornfully: they had about as much chance of hitting that stinking flying boat as he did if he stood up and threw rocks at it.
Through the guns’ racket, he caught the steady purr of the floatplane’s engines. The Americans made good motors; by comparison, a lot of Japanese aircraft sounded like flying washing machines.
Crump! Crump! Bombs fell, not too far away. Yankee raiders hadn’t hit Haleiwa for a few nights. This was the least of the airstrips on Oahu, as it had been when the Americans held Hawaii. Maybe they thought they would catch us napping. Maybe they were right, too.
A few more explosions, these more distant. Shindo wanted to hop in his Zero and go after the enemy seaplane. But night fighting was a risky business only now beginning to get specialists even in Europe, where there’d been more of it than anywhere else.
If he took off here, he’d be flying blind. He wouldn’t have radar technicians who could guide him to his target, the way English and German night-fighter pilots did. He wouldn’t have a swarm of targets to go after, either: just one seaplane on a nuisance raid. And he’d have a devil of a time getting down again, too, with all the fields on Oahu blacked out at night.
No, he had to stay where he was and do a slow burn. That, no doubt, was what the Americans had in mind. They knew how to get what they wa
nted, damn them.
More bombs fell, somewhere far off in the distance. Schofield Barracks? Wheeler Field? Even Honolulu? But for those distant explosions, the night was eerily silent, as most Oahu nights were. Sound could carry a long, long way.
The all-clear sounded. Shindo went back to his tent. He was too angry and too disgusted to sleep. He thought he might have had a chance to doze off—but before he could, he thought about what the Army officers stationed in Haleiwa would say. He could hear them laughing behind their hands as they asked why the Navy couldn’t keep the Yankees away from Hawaii.
He’d heard those questions before. He knew what the answer was: the Pacific was too big to let anybody keep an eye on every square kilometer of it. The Americans had found that out in the biggest possible way almost a year earlier. Now they were impressing the same lesson on the Japanese.
Shindo shrugged. The Americans could be nuisances. They were nuisances. But they weren’t going to catch Japan napping with a major attack on Hawaii. That wouldn’t and couldn’t happen. By now, the Japanese had picket boats out facing the Panama Canal as well as the U.S. mainland. If the Americans wanted another crack at these islands, they would have to take it against defenders who were alert and ready.
But even that knowledge didn’t soothe Shindo enough to let him sleep. He fumed about tonight’s raid and tossed and turned till morning painted the eastern horizon golden. Then he went to the mess and got rice with bits of salt fish in it and a cup of tea. Like tobacco, tea was a precious import. Even Japanese military personnel below officer’s rank had trouble getting their hands on any.
Some of them had taken to coffee instead. That was locally grown, though not in large amounts. Shindo thought it was nasty. But it packed the same jolt as tea, or even more, so it had its uses.
A telephone call came in from Honolulu just after Shindo finished that early breakfast. Since he was expecting it, he sounded properly subordinate to Commander Fuchida. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We will make a sweep to the north. . . . Oh, yes, sir. If we spot anything, we’ll do our best to shoot it down or sink it.”
“Good,” Fuchida said. “It would be excellent if we could show that we are making the Americans pay.”
“I understand, sir.” What Shindo understood was that Fuchida’s superiors were breathing down his neck. But Shindo, like any fighter pilot, did want to be up in the air going after the enemy.
He told the armorers to load a 250kg bomb on the rack he’d had installed under his Zero’s belly. If he met a submarine, he wanted to be able to punish it. The bomb wouldn’t handicap him against the lumbering American flying boats he was likely to meet in these waters. It would have against Wildcats, but he didn’t expect to run into Wildcats. Wildcats meant carriers close by, and there were no American carriers close by.
Away he went, up into the sky. Certain officers—not Fuchida, to his credit—complained about how much gas searches used up. They didn’t think enough about the cost of not searching.
As Shindo flew in a widening spiral over the Pacific, he breathed in oxygenated air with the taste of rubber. That taste and flying would always be linked in his mind. For some men, it was the smell of gasoline; for others, the throbbing roar of the engine. Not to Shindo. For him, that taste said it all.
He wanted to spot the enemy. He wanted to kill the enemy. If he saw a flying boat, he wanted to shoot it down. If he saw a submarine, he wanted to sink it. He’d flown too many searches where nothing turned up.
The thought had hardly crossed his mind when he spied motion in the air out of the corner of his eye. He started to swing his Zero in that direction, then stopped, laughing and swearing at the same time. That wasn’t an enemy flying boat—that was another Japanese fighter plane, on a search spiral of its own. No one except the Americans would have been happy with him had he gone after it and shot it down.
That the other pilot might have shot him down instead never crossed his mind. He respected the ability of every man he faced. Not taking your opponent lightly was the best way to live to a ripe old age. But, without false modesty, Shindo expected to win every aerial combat he entered. So did any good fighter pilot. Without that touch of arrogance, you couldn’t do your job well.
He felt like a peregrine falcon on the prowl for pigeons. But there were no pigeons. He kept one eye on the fuel gauge. If he had to go home hungry—again—he wouldn’t be a happy man.
There! What was that, four kilometers below, down on the surface of the Pacific? It wasn’t a pigeon, but it might be a duck. It was somebody’s submarine, sliding along on the surface as if it didn’t have a care in the world.
Somebody’s, yes—but whose? Japan had subs in these waters, too, to go after American warships if the Yankees tried to invade Hawaii again. But if the submarine was American . . . Saburo Shindo didn’t want clodhoppers from the Army looking down their noses at his service. Sinking an American sub would be a good way to shut them up for a while.
He put himself between the sun and the boat and went down lower for a closer look. Anyone in the conning tower would have to look up into that glare, and would have a hard time spotting him. Attacking out of the sun worked against other airplanes. It ought to be just as good against a submarine.
If he attacked . . . Shooting down his own side’s plane would be bad. Bombing his own side’s sub would be disastrously worse. But he knew the lines of Japanese submarines very well. He had to. This one looked different. In these waters, anything not Japanese had to be American.
Shindo didn’t dither. Dithering was in his nature even less than in most fighter pilots’. As soon as he was sure that boat belonged to the enemy, he dove on it. He’d never trained as a bomber pilot. His Zero didn’t have dive brakes on the wings, the way Aichi dive bombers did; the design team that made the fighter hadn’t figured it would need those big slotted flaps. He couldn’t dive as steeply as an Aichi pilot could, either; his plane wasn’t built to handle the stress of pulling out of a dive like that. He did the best he could with what he had.
The submarine swelled enormously. Shindo saw someone on the conning tower—and then, all at once, he didn’t. The boat started to slide beneath the waves. They’d spotted him! But acceleration wasn’t the only thing pulling his lips back from his teeth in a predatory grin. Too late! They were much too late!
He worked the bomb-release button. That was as much a makeshift as the rack under the Zero’s belly; it wasn’t an original part of the instrument panel. It did what it was supposed to do, though. The bomb dropped free. Shindo pulled back on the stick, wrestling the Zero’s nose up before it went into the Pacific, too. The fighter’s airframe groaned. No, it wasn’t made for this kind of work.
But the nose did lift. Shindo swung the Zero into a tight turn so he could see what he’d done. When he did, he pounded a leather-gloved hand down on his thigh. The bomb had hit maybe ten meters aft of the conning tower. Men were swarming out of the sub, which was trailing smoke and sinking fast.
Shindo went around for another pass. By then, the American sailors had got into several inflatable life rafts. His thumb found the firing button on top of the stick. The Zero’s machine guns chattered. Back when the fight for Hawaii was new, Shindo had let an American pilot he’d shot down parachute safely to earth. Thinking back on it, he had no idea why he’d been so soft. He shrugged, there inside the cockpit. He tried not to make the same mistake twice.
A couple of sailors in the rafts fired pistols at his plane. Had he been down there, he would have done the same thing. But he was up here instead, and so he shot up the rafts till they sank, till blood turned the Pacific red. This was why he’d come out here. If an American flying boat rescued those sailors, they would make more trouble for Japan. And if they managed to reach Oahu or another island, anti-Japanese locals, of whom there were too many, were likely to take them in. Nobody would have to worry about either of those unfortunate developments now.
Quietly pleased with himself, Shindo flew back towards Oahu.<
br />
A LONG COLUMN OF BOOTS marched through the mud in a driving rainstorm of the sort southern California Chambers of Commerce pretended this part of the country didn’t get. Lester Dillon had spent enough time at Camp Elliott to know better. The youngsters who wanted to be Marines looked thoroughly miserable.
Dillon was miserable, too, but he didn’t show it. As far as they were concerned, he was immune to vagaries like weather. If rain hit him and ran down the back of his neck, if his boots squelched in the mud—well, so what? He was a platoon sergeant. At the moment, he was a platoon sergeant who craved coffee with brandy in it, but these puppies didn’t need to know that.
“I can’t hear you!” he shouted, pitching his voice to carry even through the downpour.
The boots had been singing a marching song. Understandably, the downpour dampened their zeal. Dillon understood that, all right, but he wasn’t about to put up with it. They weren’t supposed to let anything dampen their zeal. That was part of what being a Marine was all about. If rain could do it, coming under fire would be infinitely worse. Coming under fire was infinitely worse, but they had to act as if it weren’t. They roared out the song through the rain:
Little bird with a yellow bill
Sat outside my window sill.
Coaxed him down with a crust of bread,
And then I smashed his fuckin’ head!
“I still can’t hear you!” Dillon shouted, but not so angrily: they were loud enough to wake the dead now.
And they were getting tougher. When they started training, this tramp through the rain and muck would have prostrated them. Now they took it in stride. Few physical challenges fazed them any more. That too was part of what made them what they ought to be. But it was the easy part. A lot of them—farm boys and factory workers—had been in good shape before they started training. But being in good shape, while necessary to make a Marine, wasn’t enough.
Would they stick together? Would they think of their buddies, their unit, as more important than themselves? Would they throw away their lives to save their buddies if they had to, knowing those buddies would do the same for them? Would they go forward where staying safe required hanging back?
End of the Beginning Page 16