The only thing Captain Iwabuchi hadn’t worried about in Honolulu was its civilians. If they starved, if they got shot, if they got blown to pieces—well, so what? And if a fighting man wanted a woman for a little fun before he went back to his foxhole—again, so what?
You knew what kind of screams those were when you heard them. They sounded different from the ones that came from wounded people: they held horror as well as pain. Commander Genda clucked in distress. “This is not a good way to fight a war,” he said.
“Sir, this is what the Army did in Nanking, too,” Furusawa said. “I hadn’t been conscripted yet, but the veterans in my regiment would talk about it sometimes.” Most of them had sounded pleased with themselves, too. He didn’t tell Genda that.
“But American propaganda will have a field day,” the Navy man said. “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is supposed to protect Asia from Western imperialism. Now who will protect Asia from Japanese imperialism?”
He put his life in Furusawa’s hands when he said something like that. If the senior private blabbed to someone like Iwabuchi . . . Well, one more time, so what? Genda would die a little sooner than he might otherwise, and perhaps a little more painfully. Given the perversity of war, though, neither of those was certain. None of the Japanese defenders was likely to get out of this any which way.
The Americans probed with infantry. They got a bloody nose and pulled back. Captain Iwabuchi was jubilant. “They can’t stand up to us!” he shouted. “If they come again, we’ll smash them again!”
Commander Genda sounded less gleeful. “They aren’t done,” he said to Furusawa. “They’re putting a rock in their fist, that’s all.”
“A rock, sir?” The senior private didn’t follow him for a moment.
“You’ll see,” Genda answered.
About fifteen minutes later, Furusawa did. American artillery started pounding the Japanese front-line positions. Furusawa had never imagined so many guns all going off at once. His own forces were not so lavishly provided with cannon. Huddling in a ball to make as small a target as he could, he felt as if the end of the world had come.
When the barrage lifted, the Americans surged forward again. Furusawa was too dazed to shoot for a little while, but Japanese machine guns opened up on the Yankees again. He was amazed he’d lived through the shelling, and even more amazed anyone else had. The automatic-weapons fire drove the Americans back again in front of his foxhole, but they broke through farther north.
“What do we do, sir?” he asked Commander Genda. “If we stay here, they’ll outflank us and cut us off.”
“Hai,” Genda answered. Any Army officer would have ordered a fight to the death where they were. Furusawa was as sure of that as he was of his own name. After a moment’s thought, Genda said, “We fall back. It doesn’t look like we can do much more where we are, does it?”
“Not to me, sir,” Furusawa said in surprise.
To his even greater surprise, Genda smiled at him. “Well, you know more about it than I do.” They fell back, passing the wreckage of a machine-gun nest that hadn’t survived the barrage. Furusawa wondered if the Army would have done better with people like Genda in charge. He feared he’d never know.
XIV
WHY THIS IS HELL, NOR AM I OUT OF IT. KENZO TAKAHASHI REMEMBERED THE line from an English Lit class. It sounded like Shakespeare, but he didn’t think it was. Who, then? He couldn’t remember. Miss Simpson wouldn’t have approved of that at all. If Miss Simpson was still alive, though, she was just as busy trying not to get blown up as Kenzo was.
He and Hiroshi didn’t know where their father was. He’d headed for the Japanese consulate, and he’d never come back. Hiroshi and Kenzo both went looking for him, and neither one had any luck. Kenzo even went to the consulate himself. The guards let him in when he told them whose son he was, but nobody inside would tell him anything. Nobody of very high rank seemed to be there. He wondered where the consul and the chancellor and the other big shots were. Wherever it was, would they have taken Dad with them? Kenzo had trouble believing it.
When the big American push started, shells crashed into the refugee camp where he and his brother and their father had stayed since their apartment—and Kenzo and Hiroshi’s mother—burned in the Japanese attack on Honolulu. Japanese positions were nearby, so Kenzo could see why the Americans struck. Seeing why did nothing to ease the horror.
He and Hiroshi got out unhurt. That would do for a miracle till God decide to dole out a bigger one somewhere else. He’d seen bad things when the Japanese took Honolulu. He hadn’t seen the worst, because the Americans chose to surrender rather than let the worst happen to the civilians in the city. The Japanese didn’t care about civilians. They would fight as long as they had cartridges, and with bayonets after that.
And whether the Americans wanted to bring hell down on the civilians of Honolulu or not, what else were they going to do to get rid of the Japanese soldiers among them? Kenzo and Hiroshi stayed flat on their bellies all through the artillery barrage. They’d learned that much in the earlier round of fighting. It didn’t always help, but it was their best hope.
Shrapnel tore through their tent and the ropes that held it up. It fell down on them, which frightened Kenzo worse than he was already—something he wouldn’t have thought possible. Through the roars and crashes of exploding shells, he heard screams, some abruptly cut off.
When the shelling eased, he struggled free of the heavy canvas. The only words that came out of his mouth were, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”—something his missing father might have said. He could smell blood in the air. There lay a man gutted like an ahi—and there, a few feet away, lay most of his head.
Wounded men and women were worse than dead ones. They writhed and shrieked and moaned and bled and bled and bled. Kenzo bent to use a length of rope torn apart by shell fragments as a tourniquet for a woman who’d lost a big chunk of meat out of her leg below the knee. He hoped it would do her some good.
He was in the middle of that when someone shouted in Japanese: “Come on, give me a hand! Yes, you!” When he looked up, a soldier was leading Hiroshi away. The soldier had a stretcher, and needed Kenzo’s brother to help him carry wounded. No doubt they would deal with soldiers first, civilians later if at all.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said again. He couldn’t stop them from grabbing his brother, not unless he wanted to get killed himself and probably get Hiroshi killed with him. The other trouble was, they were both too likely to get killed anyway. More American shells screamed in, some on the Japanese positions, some on the luckless refugee camp. More screams rose, many of them screams of despair. Kenzo hugged the ground next to the injured woman and hoped none of the fragments would bite him. He had no idea what else to do.
When the barrage eased, he asked the woman, “How are you?” She didn’t answer. He took a look at her. A chunk of shrapnel had clipped off the top of her head. Her brains spilled out onto the dirt. Kenzo threw up. Then he spat again and again, trying to get the horrible taste out of his mouth. And then he staggered to his feet and stumbled away. Any place in the world had to be safer than where he was.
At first, his flight was blind. Before long, though, it had purpose: he headed for Elsie Sundberg’s house. If anything happened to her . . . If anything happened to her, he didn’t think he wanted to go on living. He’d been through a lot just then, and he was only twenty years old.
Getting to her house in eastern Honolulu was a nightmare in itself. He had to pass several checkpoints manned by special naval landing forces, and they would just as soon have shot civilians as looked at them. That was no exaggeration. Bodies lay in the street, blood pooled around them. Some of the women’s skirts and dresses were hiked up. Kenzo bit his lip; the occupiers hadn’t killed them right away.
Had he tried sneaking by, he was sure they would have put a bullet in him. Instead, he came up to each barricade and roadblock openly, calling, “I’m the Fisherman’s son! I’m looking for my f
ather!”
He hated using his father’s collaboration in any way, but it got him by. And one of the men at a sandbagged machine-gun nest said, “Didn’t he get out on the submarine the other night?”
“What submarine?” Kenzo asked—this was the first he’d heard of it.
“There was one,” the landing-forces man said. Kenzo couldn’t very well argue with him, because he didn’t know there hadn’t been one. The fellow went on, “I don’t know whether your old man was on it or not, though. They don’t tell guys like me stuff like that.” He gestured. “Go ahead, buddy. I hope you find him. I always did like listening to him.”
“Thank you,” Kenzo said, wishing he hadn’t heard that quite so often from Japanese military men. He could have done without the compliment. Would his father have got on a submarine—one probably bound for Japan? Muttering unhappily, Kenzo nodded to himself. His father would be able to see the jig was up here. And he must have been afraid of what the Americans would do to him when they came back. He likely had reason, too, even if he was a Japanese citizen. Collaborators would catch it.
Kenzo talked his way past another couple of Japanese strongpoints. The special naval landing forces and the soldiers they had with them seemed determined to hold on to Honolulu as long as they were still breathing and still had ammo. God help the city, Kenzo thought, not that God seemed to have paid much attention to Honolulu since December 7, 1941.
The fresh shell crater in the Sundbergs’ front lawn made Kenzo gulp. One of the windows had only a few shards of glass in it. There was a fist-sized hole in the front door. Nobody answered when he knocked. He started to panic, but then quelled the alarm thudding through him. They’d built a hidey-hole under the house.
He tried the door. It swung open. He carefully closed it behind him, wanting things to look as normal as they could. Then he went to the closet that held the entrance to the foxhole. Sure enough, the rug over the trap door was askew.
If Elsie and her family were down there, they had to be panicking, hearing footsteps over their heads. Kenzo squatted down and rapped out shave and a haircut—five cents on the trap door. He didn’t think any Japanese soldier would do that. When he tried to lift the trap, though, he found it was latched from below. That was smart.
He rapped again, calling, “You okay, Elsie?” Could she hear him through the floor? He called again, a little louder.
Something slid underneath him—the latch. He got off the trap door so it could go up. It did, about an inch. Elsie’s voice floated out of the opening: “That you, Ken?”
“Yeah,” he said, almost giddy with relief. “You okay?”
“We are now,” she answered. “You gave us quite a turn there.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I figured I would, but it was too late by then.”
“How about you?” Elsie asked.
“The Americans shelled the camp,” he said bleakly. “There are machine-gun nests not far away, so they’ll probably do it some more. Hank and I are okay so far. The Japanese dragooned him into being a stretcher-bearer, but he was all right last I saw him.”
“What about your father?” Elsie knew where his worries lived, all right.
“I think he’s on his way to Japan right now,” Kenzo replied. “And if he is, that may be the best thing for all of us.”
Elsie’s mother spoke up: “If they’re shelling the camp, you won’t have anywhere to stay. Come down here with us.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Damn straight we’re sure.” That gruff male voice belonged to Mr. Sundberg, whom he hadn’t met so often. “We owe you plenty, Ken. Maybe we can pay back a little. Come on—make it snappy.”
Kenzo lifted the trap door high enough to get through it, then closed it over his own head. It was dark and gloomy under the house, and smelled of damp dirt. There’d been more digging since he last saw the shelter. Elsie squeezed his hand. “We just went down here yesterday,” she said. “We’ve got water. We’ve got some food. We can last till it’s over—I hope.”
“And we’ve got a honey bucket over there in the corner, at the end of that trench.” Mr. Sundberg chuckled hoarsely. “All the comforts of home.”
Kenzo’s nose had already noted the honey bucket. It was better than nothing. The whole setup was a lot better than staying out in the open. “Thanks,” he said. That didn’t go far enough. He tried again: “Thanks for looking at me and not seeing a Jap.”
Elsie squeezed his hand again. Her mother said, “We’ll sort that all out later. Let’s see if we can live through this first.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard such good advice.
REPLACEMENTS CAME UP TO FILL THE RANKS of Captain Braxton Bradford’s company. Les Dillon looked at the new men joining his platoon with something less than delight. They were plainly just off the boat. They must have landed in the north, hopped on a truck to get down here—and now they’d go into the meat grinder. They were clean. They were clean-shaven. Their uniforms weren’t filthy, and weren’t out at the knees and elbows. The way the veterans looked and smelled and acted seemed to dismay them. They might have been in the company of so many wolves.
“Any of you guys ever seen combat before?” Les knew the answer would be no even before the new fish shook their heads. He sighed. Sheer ignorance was going to get a lot of them shot in the next few days. He couldn’t tell them that straight out. What he said instead was, “Try and stick close to somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing. Shoot first and ask questions later. The Japs have had time to get ready for us, and they don’t give up. We’ve got to make the damn bastards pay for what they’ve done to Hotel Street.”
“Hotel Street, Sergeant?” a replacement asked.
Les rolled his eyes. The kid didn’t even know. Wearily, Dillon said, “Best damn place in the world to get drunk and get laid. That give you the picture?” The young Marine nodded. He looked eager—gung-ho, people were calling it these days. Gung-ho was great if it kept you going forward. If you didn’t pay enough attention to where you were going, though . . .
“Y’all listen up, hear me?” That was Captain Bradford. A Southern drawl often seemed to be the Marine Corps’ second language. The company commander went on, “We are gonna go on through those houses and apartments in front of us, and we aren’t gonna stop till we get to the rubble past ’em where the Japs bombed Honolulu a year and a half ago. We’ll set up a perimeter on the edge of that zone and wait for the artillery and armor to soften up the way ahead. Questions, men?”
Nobody said anything. Les figured the new guys would keep going if they got half a chance. Marines were like that, grabbing as much as they could as fast as they could. The Army was more methodical. Dogfaces said the Marine way caused more casualties. Les thought there might be more at first, but not in the long run.
“You new men, keep your eyes open, hear?” Bradford added. “Damn Japs are better at camouflage than y’all ever reckoned anybody could be. Fuckers’ll hide in a mailbox or under a doormat. Everybody watches out, everybody helps everybody else. Right?”
“Right, sir!” the Marines chorused. Les caught Dutch Wenzel’s eye. The other platoon sergeant gave back a fractional nod. The replacements wouldn’t know what to look for. Some of them would get educated in a hurry. Others—probably more—wouldn’t stay in one piece long enough to have the chance.
Some of those houses and apartments and little shops up ahead were as innocent as they looked. Some held Jap riflemen or machine-gun positions. Japanese mortar crews would be waiting in the alleys and on the roofs. Les knew the Marines could clear them out. What the cost would be . . . That was the question.
A couple of bullets snapped past. Les was on the deck before he knew he’d thrown himself flat. It was just harassing fire, but it was from an Arisaka. He didn’t believe in taking chances. Some of the new guys gave funny looks to him and the other Marines who’d flattened out. He didn’t care. His mama hadn’t raised him to take chances he didn’t have to.
Machine guns, mortars, and some 105s opened up on the buildings ahead. Hellcats strafed them. By the time the barrage let up, they were smoking wreckage. Les wondered how anybody could tell them from the rubble farther east. He shrugged. He’d worry about that later, if at all.
“Boy, those Jap bastards must be dead meat now,” a recruit said happily.
Les laughed, not that it was funny. “Yeah, and then you wake up,” he said. “They’re waiting for us. You see one you think is dead, put a bullet in him. He’s liable to be playing possum, waiting to shoot you in the back.”
The replacement looked disbelieving. Les had neither time nor inclination to knock sense into his empty head. Captain Bradford yelled, “Forward!” and forward he went.
As usual, he ran hunched over, making himself the smallest possible target. He dodged like a halfback faking past tacklers. And the first piece of cover he saw—goddamn if it wasn’t a bathtub, blown from Lord knows where—he dove behind.
Sure as hell, the shelling and strafing hadn’t killed all the Japs. It hadn’t even made enough of them keep their heads down. Arisakas and Springfields and Nambu machine guns opened up. Knee mortars started dropping their nasty little bombs among the Americans. So did bigger mortars farther back. Les hated mortars not only because the bombs could fall right into foxholes but also, and especially, because you couldn’t hear them coming. One second, nothing. The next, your buddy was hamburger—or maybe you were.
Wounded men started screaming for medics. The Navy corpsmen who went in with Marines didn’t wear Red Cross smocks and armbands or Red Crosses on their helmets. The Japs used them for target practice when they did. The medics carried carbines—sometimes rifles—too. In France in 1918, the Germans mostly played by the rules. As far as Les could see, there were no rules here. This was a very nasty war.
He snapped off a shot or two, then ran forward again. Several Marines were shooting at a ground-floor window from which machine-gun fire was coming. Les Dillon put a couple of rounds in there, too, to give the Japs inside something to think about. Two Marines crawled close enough to chuck grenades through the window. The machine gun promptly squeezed off a defiant burst. More grenades flew in. This time, the enemy gun stayed quiet.
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