Moments later, he heard the Japs yelling as they approached. They sounded mad as hell. They often did, but this was worse than usual. And their progress up the shaft could be noted by cries of pain from the prisoners they passed. That meant they were swinging their damn bamboo swagger sticks at whoever was unlucky enough to get within range.
They hadn’t done that much for a while, not inside the tunnel. What were they so jumpy about? Peterson got a crack across the back that sent him staggering into the rough rock wall. That gave him more scrapes and lumps.
Charlie Kaapu got whacked, too. He took it with a grin, which made the guard hit him again. He kept grinning, and hefted his pick. It wasn’t a threat, or didn’t have to be one, for he slammed the pick into the rock a moment later. But that guard found something else to do pretty damn quick.
As soon as the Jap was out of earshot, Charlie said, “I bet the USA is doing something. These little cocksuckers wouldn’t be so jumpy if we weren’t.”
Is that hope I feel? Jim Peterson wondered. He’d gone without so long, he had trouble recognizing it. He’d had grim determination to survive, but not hope. Hope was different. And yes, this was a dose of that fragile, precious feeling, by God.
Everybody worked harder, not because the guards were beating on people but because hope, in spite of that POW with the authoritative voice, was contagious. Men wanted to believe the Americans were on their way back, and thinking they might be made even dying prisoners stronger . . . for a little while.
When the shift ended, Peterson trudged out of the tunnel with as much spring in his step as a starving man with beriberi could have. He wolfed down his rice and nasty leaves with good appetite. But then, he was always hungry. By the time he ate, he knew the Americans had returned. Men too sick to labor—men who would die soon, in other words—had watched smoke rise in the southwest, from the direction of Honolulu and Pearl Harbor. Some of them had seen the bombers. Peterson couldn’t see anything; it had got dark. He hardly cared. His mind’s eye was in excellent working order.
The guards acted nervous at evening roll call, too. Naturally, they screwed up the count. Just as naturally, they took it out on the POWs. Peterson thought they killed a man when they knocked him down and kicked him, but he wasn’t sure.
Even sleep, normally a man’s most precious asset after food, went by the wayside tonight. Prisoners talked in low, excited voices, falling silent whenever a Jap stalked by. Their longings after an American victory came down to two things: steak and french fries. A few men talked about pussy, but only a few; most were too far gone to worry much about women one way or the other. Fantasies about food were much more immediately gratifying.
“Pussy’s more trouble than it’s worth,” Charlie Kaapu opined. That surprised Peterson; Charlie, of all people here, was in good enough shape to do a woman justice—or maybe even injustice, if he saw the chance.
“It’s trouble I’d like to have,” somebody else said wistfully.
The big, burly—by camp standards, anyhow—hapa-Hawaiian shook his head. “Why you think I ended up in this goddamn place, except for pussy?”
“Tell us the story again, Charlie,” Peterson said. It was better than most of the ones the prisoners told, and he hadn’t heard it so often, either.
Charlie Kaapu looked disgusted with himself. “This Jap major have a blond girlfriend.” He used some of the rhythms of the local pidgin without quite falling into it. Leering, he went on, “Blond girlfriend have good-looking boyfriend.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. But then his face fell. “You go after nooky, you get stupid. I got stupid. I quarrel with the silly bitch, and she squeal on me. They grab me, they ship my ass up here. Ain’t you boys lucky they do that?”
He got jeered, as he must have known he would have. As poor Gordy had said, Peterson wished he’d had that much fun before getting sent to the Kalihi Valley. But the news of the day left him all the more determined to outlast the Japanese.
As he and everyone else in the camp discovered much too early the next morning, the news of the day left the guards all the more determined to make sure none of the prisoners there lived through it.
JOE CROSETTI LISTENED TO THE BRIEFING OFFICER. “All right, gentlemen,” the man said, and paused to swig at his milk. “We’ve given the Japs a left to the jaw and a right to the belly. We’ve sunk their carriers and we’ve walloped the rest of their surface ships and we’ve plastered their airfields on Oahu. They’re on the ropes and they’re wobbly, but they’re still on their feet. Now we go for the KO.”
Several fliers near Joe said, “Yeah!” A few others growled deep in their throats, a low animal noise he didn’t think they knew they were making. He had to listen to be sure he wasn’t making it himself.
“Our own losses were in the expected range,” the briefing officer continued. “One light carrier sunk, an escort carrier and a fleet carrier damaged. The fleet carrier can still launch planes, and we are still in business.”
More growls rose, and even a couple of whoops. This time, Joe didn’t feel like joining them. The way he looked at it, the Japs had shown just how good they were. Badly outnumbered, mauled going in, they’d still managed to do real damage to the American task force. Well, those dive-bomber and torpedo-plane pilots were out of the game now, most of them for good. The ones whose planes hadn’t got shot down would have had to ditch in the ocean. There couldn’t have been many pickups.
“You’ll know we hit their air bases on Oahu yesterday with B-17s and B-24s,” the briefing officer said. “They made it all the way from the West Coast with their bombs, but they couldn’t hope to get home again. That’s why they headed for Kauai once the raid was done. How we got an airstrip long enough to land bombers built there under the Japs’ noses is a story they’ll write books about after the war. You can bet your life on that.”
Of course, the bombers would still be sitting there at the end of the strip. If the Japs wanted to smash them up, they could. It must have been a one-way mission from the start. Talk about balls-out, Joe thought.
“Our assets on Oahu say we did a good job hitting the enemy bases, but the Japs are attempting to get them into usable shape again,” the briefing officer said. “We don’t want them doing that.” A few grim chuckles accompanied the statement. A wry smile on his own face, the lieutenant commander went on, “Bringing carriers—to say nothing of the troopships behind us—into range of land-based air is liable to be hazardous to everybody’s health.” A few more chuckles, for all the world as if he were joking. “What you boys are going to do is, you’re going to make damn sure that doesn’t happen. Our ship’s bombers are going to hit Wheeler Field again, to keep the Japs from flying off it. You fighter pilots—knock down anything that gets into the air and shoot up as much as you can on the ground. Shoot up enemy planes wherever you spot ’em, and shoot up the earth-moving machinery that lets the Japs make fast repairs. We’ll hit them hard, and we’ll keep hitting them till they can’t hit back any more. Questions?”
“Yes, sir.” A pilot raised his hand. “When do the Marines go in?”
“Day after tomorrow, if everything works the way it’s supposed to,” the briefing officer said. “You can make that happen. You will make it happen. Now go man your planes!”
As Joe hurried up to the flight deck, he fell into stride with Orson Sharp. “Day after tomorrow! We really are gonna take it back from them.”
“Well, sure.” Sharp looked at him. “Did you think we wouldn’t?”
“Of course not!” Joe made himself sound indignant. If he’d had doubts, he didn’t want to admit them even to himself, let alone to his buddy.
Hellcats buzzed overhead as he climbed into his cockpit. The combat air patrol was heavy. They were already in range of land-based air, though none had appeared yet after the naval battle. That too argued the bombers had done a good job of putting the runways on Oahu out of action for the time being.
Joe’s Hellcat was gassed up and brim full of ammo. The plan
e had a few bullet holes that hadn’t been there twenty-four hours earlier, but nothing vital had taken any damage. The engine came to life at once. Joe methodically ran through his checks—they’d drilled that into him before they let him into a Yellow Peril. Everything looked green.
Not quite so many pilots took off as had the day before. Bill Frank, who’d roomed with Joe and Orson Sharp and another guy at ground school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was one of the missing. Nobody’d seen his plane go down, but he hadn’t landed, either. Joe tried not to think about losses. It’s a job, he told himself. You’ve got to do it. Sometimes things happen, that’s all. But they won’t happen to you.
As planes began to leap into the air, Joe thought about what he would be doing. Wheeler Field. The center of the island. Between the mountain ranges. By now, after so much study, he could have drawn the map of Oahu in his sleep. Schofield Barracks and the town on the other side of the highway—Wahiawa—would guide him in if he had trouble finding the place. With the arrogance of youth, he didn’t figure he would. The island wasn’t very big to begin with.
And then he got the checkered flag. The Hellcat sprinted down the flight deck. There was that momentary lurch as it tried to fall into the Pacific. Joe yanked the stick back. The nose went up. The fighter zoomed away to find its fellows. Was any feeling in the world better than this? Well, maybe one.
He kept an eye peeled for ships down below. Not quite all the escorts from the Jap task force were accounted for. He figured the U.S. battlewagons and cruisers and destroyers could handle whatever was left, but why take chances? He didn’t spot any major warships. They’d either gone back to the bottom or scooted back to Oahu. He did see several fishing boats. At first, he just accepted that—he was, after all, a fisherman’s son. But then he remembered the Japs used those boats as pickets. They would have radios aboard. The attack from the U.S. fleet wouldn’t be a surprise. If the enemy could put planes in the air, he would.
He could. And he did. Joe had just spotted Oahu, green in the distance, when a warning dinned in his earphones: “Bandits! Bandits at ten o’ clock!”
Some distance back of the lead planes, Joe peered southeast till he spotted the Japanese planes. Their pilots were sly. They’d swung around toward the sun so they could come out of it and be harder to spot. Joe wished his Hellcat carried radar. Then the enemy wouldn’t be able to play tricks like that. Well, they hadn’t worked this time.
He glanced over at his wingman. He led an element now, instead of following in one. Survival of the fittest—or luckiest—worked in the air just the way it had in his biology textbook. The other pilot, a big blond guy from South Dakota named Dave Andersen, waved in the cockpit to show he was paying attention. Joe waved back.
Here came the Japs. Some of the fighters were Zeros. Maybe they’d made it back to Oahu after their carriers went down. Maybe they’d been based there—the Japs sure did that with their Navy planes in the South Pacific. Others were shorter, trimmer, with a smaller cockpit canopy. Silhouette recognition paid off. Those were Jap Army fighters—Oscars, in U.S. code.
Oscars were slower than Zeros. They didn’t carry cannon, either, only two rifle-caliber machine guns. But they were supposed to be even more nimble and maneuverable than the Navy fighters. Having watched pilots in Zeros pull off some mind-boggling loops and turns and spins, Joe was from Missouri on that; he wouldn’t believe it till he saw it for himself.
Which he did, in short order. Hellcats could outclimb and outdive Oscars with ease. But an enemy pilot who knew what he was doing could damn near fly his plane back around under itself. Hellcats flew like flycatchers. Oscars dodged like butterflies.
They couldn’t hit much harder than butterflies, though. Canvas-and-wire biplanes in the last war had had just as much firepower. And Hellcats were built to take it. Oscars weren’t. They were several hundred pounds lighter even than Zeros, and correspondingly flimsier. All that maneuverability came at a price. If an Oscar got in the way of a burst from a Hellcat’s six .50-caliber guns, as often as not it would break up in midair.
That couldn’t have been good for morale, but the Japs who flew the Army fighters had guts. They bored in on the Dauntlesses the Hellcats escorted. So did their Navy buddies in Zeros. They got a few, too, but they paid, and paid high. The Hellcats badly outnumbered them. Joe wondered how many Oscars and Zeros—and Jap bombers, too—were stuck on the ground because they couldn’t take off. Lots, he hoped.
He took a shot at an Oscar. His tracers went wide. He tried to keep his nose aimed at the Jap fighter, but he couldn’t. It was that much more agile in the air. In a hop and a skip, it was on his tail, those two popguns it carried blazing away. One round hit the Hellcat. Joe glanced anxiously at his gauges as he gave his plane the gun and ran away from the Oscar. No fire. No leaks. No problems. Yeah, a Hellcat could take it. And Hellcats could dish it out, too. That Jap pilot was a pro, but he’d be a dead pro in short order if he tangled with very many of the big, muscular American fighters.
There was the Koolau Range to the east, and the Waianae Range to the west. Japanese antiaircraft guns near the beach started throwing up flak. Joe swerved back and forth, just a little, to keep the gunners from being quite sure where he was going. Dave Andersen stuck with him.
Sure enough, Oahu was little. Only three or four minutes after he saw waves breaking on the beach, he was over the target. Dauntlesses screamed down out of the sky to blast the runways of Wheeler Field. Funny to think how, less than two years earlier, Japanese Vals had done the same damn thing. What goes around comes around, you bastards, Joe thought. Your turn now.
Back in December of ’41, American planes had been parked on the runways wingtip to wingtip. The people in charge then worried about sabotage. They hadn’t figured they’d get sucker-punched. Joe was damned if he knew why not, but they hadn’t.
The Japs, unfortunately, weren’t as dumb or as trusting as the Americans had been. They knew enough to build revetments, and they knew enough to camouflage them, too. But they hadn’t painted a civilian bulldozer in camouflage colors—they’d left it school-bus yellow. Joe couldn’t have found a juicier target in a month of Sundays. His thumb came down on the firing button. Tracers leaped ahead of the Hellcat.
A fireball spouted from the ’dozer. Joe pulled up to make sure he didn’t get caught in it. He swung around for another pass at Wheeler. Shooting up what had been an American facility was fun. All the same, part of him kept imagining he’d get a bill for destroying government property.
This stuff belongs to the Japanese government now. Let them send me a bill. And let them hold their breath till I pay it!
Flak around Wheeler was heavier than it had been by the shore. The Japs knew the Americans would try to come back, and they’d done what they could to get ready. “And it’s not gonna be enough, goddammit!” Joe said.
Muzzle flashes let him spot a gun’s upthrust snout. Shoot at me, will you? Shoot at my buddies? See how you like being on the other end! The gun crew scattered as Joe opened up on them. He roared by before he could see what his bullets did to them. Maybe that was just as well. Those .50-caliber rounds were designed to pierce things like engine blocks and armor plate. What they’d do to flesh and bones hardly bore thinking about.
Several plumes of greasy black smoke fouled the blue sky. Some were from burning Jap planes caught in their revetments. Others, Joe feared, came from downed Hellcats and Dauntlesses. You couldn’t do this for free, however much you wished you could.
As he climbed to make another strafing run, he got a good look at the craters pocking the runways. Even as he watched, another Hellcat shot up a bulldozer. One more cloud of smoke billowed up. Joe slammed his left fist into his thigh. One more ’dozer that wouldn’t make repairs. If the Japs had to fix this mess with picks and shovels, they’d need weeks, not days.
They’d need ’em, but they wouldn’t have ’em. The Marines and the Army were on the way.
“Boys, we have done what we came to
do. Let’s go home and gas up and do it some more.” The exultant order kept Joe from heeling his fighter into another dive. He didn’t complain. They had indeed done what they’d come to do.
As he flew out over the north coast, bound for the Bunker Hill, he spotted another well-plastered airstrip down below. Haleiwa, he thought. That’s what the name of that one is. He grinned, there in the cockpit. Yeah, he knew the map, all right.
CARELESS OF—INDEED, OBLIVIOUS TO—his own safety, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo manned a machine gun near the edge of the Haleiwa airstrip. He blazed away at the American dive bombers attacking the strip—and at the fighters attacking anything around it that might make a target.
The machine gun, a Japanese weapon modeled after the French Hotchkiss, used metal strips of ammunition, not the more common belts. The loader was a Japanese groundcrew man who’d protested his unfamiliarity with the process. Shindo’s pistol, aimed at his forehead, proved amazingly persuasive. Whenever the machine gun ran dry, in went another strip of cartridges. Only the groundcrew man’s chattering teeth suggested he might want to be somewhere else.
One of the new American fighters—the same planes that had worked such fearful slaughter on Japan’s beloved Zeros—must have spotted Shindo’s tracers. On it came, straight at him, the machine guns in its wings winking balefully. He fired back, shoving down hard on the triggers till his gun unexpectedly fell silent.
“Give me another strip, you stinking son of a back-passage whore!” Lieutenant Shindo shouted.
The groundcrew man neither obeyed nor answered. Shindo glanced over to him. Bullets from the American plane’s machine guns chewed up the grass and dirt all around the machine gun. One of them had caught the unwilling loader in the face. The unfortunate man no longer had a face. Not much was left of the back of his head, either. His brains and scalp spattered Shindo’s coveralls.
Shoving the dead man aside, Shindo began feeding ammunition into the gun himself. That cut down his rate of fire. He did what he could, though, till the last American planes abandoned Haleiwa and headed out to sea.
End of the Beginning Page 31