End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

  The sea was full of ships and boats. Warships lay not far offshore. Japanese guns were still shooting, and a few vessels were on fire, but only a few. Shimizu noted the warships, yes, but they didn’t hold his attention for long. Slowly wallowing toward the beaches through the waves—a much milder sea than the Japanese had faced in their winter assault—were landing craft of a variety and profusion he had never imagined. These left the trusty Daihatsu barges on which he and his comrades had come ashore far, far behind.

  Some were veritable ships, big enough to hold almost anything. Shimizu didn’t know what they carried, and wasn’t anxious to find out. Others, smaller, pretty plainly brought soldiers to the beach. Even those were an improvement on their Japanese opposite numbers. On a Daihatsu barge, a steel shield protected the man at the wheel and the machine-gun or light-cannon crew. The soldiers the barge carried were vulnerable to enemy fire all the way in.

  Not here. These landing boats had real steel sides and front, protecting the men in them. Shimizu stared in honest envy. He wished his own country could have made landing craft like them.

  A few Japanese airplanes swooped low to attack the boats. They did some damage, but fearsome American fighters like the ones that had shot up Shimizu’s regiment hacked several of them out of the sky. Shimizu groaned to see a beautiful Zero reduced to nothing but a slick of gasoline burning on the surface of the sea.

  “Be ready!” the noncom called to whoever could hear him. “They’re getting close.”

  Behind him, somebody with an officer’s authority in his voice shouted, “The enemy must not get off the beach! We will drive him back into the Pacific! Banzai! for the Emperor! May he live ten thousand years!”

  “Banzai!” Shimizu joined in the cry. It heartened him. If he thought about the Emperor, that enormous fleet out there and all the accompanying air power didn’t seem—quite—so terrifying.

  An artillery shell scored a hit on one of the landing ships. A column of smoke rose from the big vessel, but it managed to reach the beach. The doors at the bow opened. Out rumbled a tank, a snorting monster bigger and fiercer-looking than anything Japan built. On it came, sand flying up from its churning tracks.

  The smaller landing boats were coming ashore, too. The men who scrambled out of them wore green uniforms, not the khaki the Americans had used before. Their helmets were also new: domed like the Japanese model rather than British-style steel derbies.

  “Forward!” that officer yelled. “We must throw the invaders into the sea! I will lead you!”

  Forward was the last direction Takeo Shimizu wanted to go. But I will lead you! was hard to ignore, and the habit of obedience to orders was as strong in him as in any other Japanese soldier. When the officer ran by, katana in hand, Shimizu scrambled out of his foxhole and ran after him.

  Mortar bombs and artillery shells burst among the Americans on the beach. Men fell, men flew, men were torn to pieces. Machine-gun and rifle fire ripped into the Yankees, too. Not all of them went down, worse luck. A bullet cracked past Shimizu’s head. He threw himself down behind a boulder. Another bullet spanged off the front of it.

  He had to make himself get up and run on. Combat got no easier because he’d been away from it for a while. If anything, it felt harder. The fear came back faster. It felt worse than it had when the Japanese invaded Hawaii, much worse than it had when he fought in China.

  A mortar bomb hissed down not nearly far enough away. That wasn’t a Japanese round; Shimizu remembered the sound of the burst from the last time he’d fought Americans. One of his comrades started screaming. Fragments must have done their bloody work. American machine guns started stitching the air with death, too. Those big men in the unfamiliar uniforms wouldn’t be easy to throw back.

  Shimizu looked around him. You always wanted to see that you weren’t going forward all alone. Some of his men were still with him. Good. Other Japanese farther away were advancing, too. Yes, very good.

  The officer was looking around, too, when a burst from a Yankee machine gun caught him in the chest. The katana flew from his hand. The blade flashed in the sun as it fell to the ground. The officer twisted, staggered, and fell. He kept thrashing on the ground, but he was a dead man. At least two, maybe three, rounds had torn out through his back. As always, exit wounds were ever so much larger and bloodier than the holes bullets made going in. If one of those rounds hadn’t found his heart, he would still bleed to death in short order.

  Was anybody else of higher rank still up and fighting? Shimizu didn’t see anyone. That wasn’t a good sign, but he didn’t have time to brood about it. “Come on!” he shouted. “We can do it!” Could they? They had to try.

  Even though he ran forward in a crouch, a bullet caught him in the side. At first, he felt only the impact. His legs didn’t want to carry him any more. He held on to his rifle as he sprawled on the ground. The pain hit then. His mouth filled with blood when he howled. He tried not to thrash like a dog hit by a truck. If he lay still, maybe he could take out one more enemy soldier.

  An American in that new green uniform eyed him. Shimizu looked back, his own eyes mere slits. The American brought up his rifle to make sure of him. Shimizu tried to shoot first, but found he lacked the strength to raise the heavy Springfield. He saw the muzzle flash. Then darkness crashed down.

  SABURO SHINDO SHOT DOWN HIS SECOND AMERICAN FIGHTER in the space of a few minutes. It was luck as much as anything else: he put a cannon shell through the enemy’s canopy, and probably through the pilot, too. The plane, out of control, spiraled down to the Pacific.

  Much good it does me, Shindo thought. Smash one ant, and the rest would still steal the picnic. The Yankees were ashore. It was the Army’s fight now. The Navy had done everything it could—and failed. Shindo hated failure. He knew that none of what had happened was his fault. That didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, or that what sprang from it wouldn’t be bad.

  American landing craft littered the beaches like children’s toys at the edge of a bathtub. Those ingenious boats, the great fleet of warships offshore, and the stifling enemy air umbrella overhead spoke of an industrial power and of a determination far greater than he’d imagined. He’d scorned the Americans in 1941. He didn’t enjoy that luxury any more.

  Tracers zipped past his Zero. He couldn’t outdive or outclimb the U.S. fighter on his tail. He could outturn it, and he did, throwing his aircraft hard to the right. The American tried to stay with him, but couldn’t. Only a Japanese Army Hayabusa could turn with a Zero, but a Hayabusa couldn’t stay up with one if it did.

  And Shindo and his Zero couldn’t stay up with the American. He fired a burst at the enemy fighter, but it did no harm. Then the other plane sped away from his as if he were wearing heavy boots. He’d seen that before, too. It infuriated and humiliated him. None of what he felt showed on his face or in his demeanor. It seldom did.

  An antiaircraft shell from one of the ships below burst too close for comfort. It didn’t harm the Zero, but staggered it, as if it had rolled into a pothole in the air. He swung through some quick turns and speed changes to throw off the gunners, all the while wondering what to do next.

  He couldn’t harm the enemy carriers, not now. Strafing the other warships wouldn’t do a thing to their big guns. He couldn’t do much to the landing craft, either, and what he could do wouldn’t matter; the Americans were on the beaches. I have to hit them there, then, he decided.

  He came in low, machine guns hammering. His bullets sent something up in flames. Enemy soldiers scrambled for cover and flopped down when they found it. Not all of them ran. Some stood their ground and blazed away at him with small arms. They’d done the same thing during the first day of the Japanese attack on Hawaii. Anyone who thought the Americans weren’t brave was a fool. They were soft, and they let themselves be captured so their enemies could make sport of them, but in action they showed plenty of courage.

  Machine guns also opened up on Shindo. They put enough lead in the air to be nuisances
, or worse than nuisances. A bullet clanged home, somewhere behind the cockpit. Shindo eyed his instruments. No damage showed. His controls still worked. He climbed, spun back, and made another run along the beach.

  More fire answered him this time. The Americans were ready to the point of being trigger-happy. They missed him, though, missed him again and again. He watched his own bullets chew up sand, and hoped they chewed up men as well.

  After one more pass along the beach, he saw he was low on gas. Time to go back and refuel. He’d got out of Haleiwa by bouncing along the grass near the damaged airstrip: if he could take off from a rolling, pitching carrier deck, he could also manage that. But he pulled up instead of trying to land where he’d got airborne. The U.S. naval bombardment had cratered the fields near the runway. He would surely flip his Zero if he tried to put it down.

  If he couldn’t land there, though, where could he? The next closest runway was at Wheeler Field, near the center of the island. He knew the Americans had worked Wheeler over, too, but they would have done that from the air alone. Some of the bigger naval guns might have reached it, but surely they would be concentrating on targets closer to shore. Shindo would have, were he mounting an invasion. He had to assume the Americans would do the same.

  Wheeler was only a couple of minutes away. He realized at once that the runways would not serve. They’d been pounded hard, and the bulldozers that might have fixed them in a hurry had been pounded even harder. He saw several burnt-out hulks. One of them had been flipped onto its back, no mean feat with a machine so massive.

  Bombs had fallen on the grass around Wheeler Field, but it wasn’t—Shindo was betting his life it wasn’t—an impossible landing surface. He came in as slow as he could, just above stalling speed. Down went his landing gear. He brought the fighter’s nose up and the tail down, as if he were out to snag an arrester cable on a carrier deck.

  He bounced to a stop. It wasn’t a landing to be proud of, but he got down. For the moment, nothing else mattered. He undogged the canopy, pushed it back, and stood up in the cockpit. Groundcrew men ran toward him. “What do you need?” they shouted.

  “Everything,” Shindo answered. “Gas. Oil. Ammunition. A place to piss.”

  One of the men pointed back into the bushes. “Do it there. The Yankees won’t spot you that way. And do it fast, before their planes come over again, see you, and shoot you up.”

  They weren’t just talking about him, of course. The Americans were much more likely to spy his Zero. As Shindo went into the bushes and undid his flying suit so he could ease himself, he heard the buzz of engines overhead. But that was the familiar buzz of his own country’s airplanes; the Zero and the Hayabusa used the same powerplant. Keeping a few planes in the air to protect what was left of Wheeler Field struck him as a good idea, though he pitied the Army pilots in their Peregrine Falcons. The fearsome new American fighters would chew them up and spit them out. Higher speed and the wing cannon gave Zeros at least some kind of chance against the enemy.

  When he came out of the undergrowth, he didn’t see any armorers working on those wing cannon. “What’s the matter?” he demanded.

  A man reloading one of his machine guns said, “So sorry, Pilot-san, but this has been an Army field for a while. Because Hayabusas don’t carry cannon, I don’t think we’ve got any 20mm ammunition.”

  “Zakennayo!” Shindo exclaimed. He thought hard. “Wait a minute. You fly Donryus out of here, neh?”

  The Ki-49—its name meant Dragon Swallower—was the Army’s counterpart to the Navy’s G4M bomber. It was faster, but had a much shorter range. Like the G4M, it mounted a 20mm cannon for defensive armament.

  “I’m an idiot!” the armorer exclaimed. He clapped a hand to his forehead, then bowed. “Please excuse me, sir. We store ammunition for bombers separately from what fighters use.”

  “I don’t care if you stow it up your back passage,” Shindo said. “Just get me some, and hurry about it.”

  The armorer screamed at his colleagues. One of them dashed away. He came back fast enough to satisfy even the unhappy Shindo. No enemy airplanes had shown up, which was all to the good. Shindo wondered if he’d be able to take off again without nosing down into a hole in the ground. The run was bumpy, but he got airborne.

  He would take off and land on highways if he had to. All he wanted to do was hit the Americans as hard as he could for as long as he could. But how would he get refueled if he had to land on a highway? How would the armorers reload his guns? He shrugged. For now, he had fuel and ammunition—and plenty of Americans to hit. He roared back toward the landing beaches.

  JIRO TAKAHASHI STARED AT THE SCRIPT in front of him in dismay. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He looked up to Osami Murata in even greater dismay. “So sorry, Murata-san, but I can’t say this!”

  “Why not?” the radio correspondent from Tokyo asked calmly. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Jiro echoed. He hoped Murata was joking, but feared he wasn’t. “It isn’t true, that’s what! How can you say—how can you have me say—all the Japanese in Hawaii support the Emperor against the USA?” Not all the Japanese in his own family supported the Emperor against the USA, as he knew too painfully well. He kept quiet about that. Instead, he said, “Captain Iwabuchi has put up signs all over Honolulu that anyone who causes trouble will be shot. He’s put them up in English and Korean and Tagalog and Chinese and Japanese. He wouldn’t do that if he thought all the Japanese here were loyal.”

  “Captain Iwabuchi has to fight.” Murata was patience personified. “That’s not your job. Your job is to persuade people to support the Emperor and Japan. You’ve been good at it, Takahashi-san. Now you have to keep on doing it. We need you more than ever, in fact.”

  “Do you?” Jiro tried to keep the worry out of his voice. He probably ended up sounding like a machine. He knew why they needed him more than ever. The Americans were ashore on the north coast of Oahu. They hadn’t come very far yet, but they plainly ruled the air here. Japan had used that edge to win after her invasion. Couldn’t the United States do the same? He feared it could.

  “Yes, we do.” Beneath his calm, beneath his good nature, Murata showed steel. “Are you sure you’re a loyal Japanese citizen yourself, Takahashi-san?”

  “I should hope I am!” Jiro said.

  “Well, I should hope you are, too,” the radio man said. “But if you are, you’re going to have to prove it.” He tapped the script with an elegantly manicured fingernail. “With this!”

  “Jesus Christ! Give me something I can read without wanting to go out and cut my throat afterwards!” Jiro said. “Hawaii isn’t better off under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere than it was before. Not all Japanese here love the Emperor. I wish they did, but they don’t. I don’t know what the Koreans are doing, but I don’t think they’re ‘flocking to volunteer along with their Japanese co-imperials.’ ” Koreans didn’t like being part of the Japanese Empire. The Koreans in Hawaii had made no secret of being glad they weren’t part of the Empire any more—except now they were again.

  Murata waved Jiro’s complaints aside as if they came from a little boy. “We all have to do what we can, Takahashi-san,” he said. “We’re fighting a war. It’s come here again. We didn’t want that to happen, but it did. We have to use every weapon we can get our hands on. Building morale, here and in the home islands, is one of the weapons we need. You’re scheduled to go on the air in a few minutes. Are you going to read what you’re supposed to read, or not? Reading it will help the Empire. If that doesn’t matter to you . . .”

  He didn’t say what would happen then. By not saying, he let pictures form in Jiro’s mind. Jiro didn’t like any of those pictures. They started with bad things happening to him and went on to bad things happening to his sons and friends. None of those bad things would be hard to arrange, not at all. He played the last trump in his hand: “I’m going to complain to Chancellor Morimura.” If he reminded Murata who his friends were
, maybe the man would back off.

  Instead, Murata laughed uproariously. “Go ahead, Takahashi-san. Go right ahead. Who do you think wrote that script, anyway?”

  “Not Chancellor Morimura?” Jiro said in something not far from horror.

  With more than a little malicious glee, the broadcaster from Tokyo nodded. “The very same. Now, Takahashi-san, enough of this nonsense. Get on with it, and no more backtalk.”

  Miserably, Jiro obeyed. He wondered how he could get through the program, but he’d done enough of them that he had no trouble reading the words set out before him. He thought his performance left something to be desired, but the engineer in the room next to the studio gave him a thumbs-up through the window that let the man see in.

  When it was over, sweat drenched Jiro. He stumbled out of the studio. Murata waited in the hallway, all solicitude now that he’d got what he wanted. “Very good!” he said. “You see? That wasn’t so hard.”

  “Whatever you say,” Jiro answered dully.

  “Yes, whatever I say.” Murata had that elegant accent. He wore a fancy suit. And he had all the arrogance the Japanese conquerors had brought with them from the home islands.

  Jiro had admired that arrogance when it was aimed at the local haoles. When it was pointed at him and fired like a gun . . . It felt different then. Amazing how different it felt. “Please excuse me, Murata-san. I’m going home.”

  “So long,” Murata said, as if he and Jiro were still on friendly terms. As if we were ever on friendly terms, Jiro thought. Murata had used him, the way a man would use any tool that came in handy. I was too dumb to see it. I see it now, though. He didn’t intend to say anything about it. If he did, Hiroshi and Kenzo would only laugh at him. Hearing I told you so from his sons was the last thing he wanted.

  The thick, nasty, greasy smell of burning fuel oil filled the air. He’d got used to that after the Japanese bombed the Pearl Harbor tank farms. Then, once the tanks finally burned dry, the stink went away. Now it was back. It wasn’t so strong this time, probably because Japan didn’t stow nearly so much fuel here as the USA had. But the Americans had hit what there was.