Days of Infamy

by Harry Turtledove

  COMMANDER MINORU GENDA snatched up the jangling telephone in his office. “Moshi-moshi!” he said impatiently. An excited voice gabbled in his ear. Genda’s impatience gave way to astonishment. “But that’s impossible!” he exclaimed. More gabbling assured him that it wasn’t. “How the—?” He broke off. He heard bombs going off in the distance, not at Wheeler Field—that was too far away for the sound to carry—but off to the west. Hickam! he thought in dismay. “So sorry, but I’ve got to go,” he told the officer on the other end of the line, and hung up before the man could squawk any more.

  He rushed downstairs and out onto the sidewalk in front of his office building. The sun was dropping down toward the Pacific. Genda caught glints of light off airplane wings. He knew the silhouette of every plane Japan made. Those weren’t Japanese aircraft.

  They were, they could only be, American. He watched them drone east past the southern edge of Honolulu. He knew every carrier-based U.S. warplane by sight, too. He had to. The planes he saw weren’t any of those, either.

  Other people also realized they belonged to the USA. The whoops and cheers that rang out all over Honolulu told him as much. If he’d had any doubts that Hawaii wasn’t fully reconciled to Japanese occupation, those whoops would have cured them.

  Those weren’t carrier-based aircraft. They were . . . “Zakennayo!” Genda exclaimed. He seldom swore, but here he made an exception. Those were U.S. Army B-25s.

  A million questions boiled in his head. How did they get here? came first and foremost. They didn’t have the range to fly from California. The answer to that one formed almost as fast as the question did. The Americans must have flown them off one of the carriers the picket boat had spotted. Genda bowed slightly toward the U.S. bombers in token of respect. That had taken imagination and nerve.

  But the next question was, How do they aim to recover their planes and their air crews? He couldn’t imagine that the United States would send men off on a suicide mission. He also couldn’t see how the USA planned to get them back. He scratched his head. It was a puzzlement.

  Yet another good question was, What are we doing about this? The Japanese didn’t seem to be doing very much. A few antiaircraft guns started firing. A few puffs of black smoke stained the sky around the B-25s. Genda saw no signs that any of them was hit.

  He also saw no fighters going after them. Had the Yankees blasted all the runways on Oahu? Genda couldn’t believe it. There weren’t nearly enough American bombers to do anything of the sort. More likely, they’d just caught the Japanese with their pants down. Nobody had expected the raiders till tomorrow morning. The Americans had pulled a fast one—the B-25s, with their greater range, could launch far sooner than the usual carrier-based planes would have.

  The Akagi and the Soryu would be rushing north to meet the American carriers . . . which probably wouldn’t be anywhere near so far south as the Japanese thought they were. And Japanese fighters based here on Oahu didn’t seem to be reacting very well at all.

  The Yankees may have done us a favor, Genda thought. This was—this could only be—a raid, a pinprick, an annoyance, a stunt. It wouldn’t and couldn’t settle anything. He imagined U.S. newspapers with headlines like WE STRIKE BACK AT HAWAII! People on the American mainland would cheer—and would have the right to.

  But what would happen if and when the Americans seriously attacked Oahu? Genda didn’t know whether they could. But now he was sure as sure could be that they wanted to. They weren’t going to accept what had happened in the central Pacific as a fait accompli.

  We weren’t ready here, Genda thought. We weren’t ready, and they’ve embarrassed us. They’ve made us lose face. That wouldn’t happen again, though. Genda intended to be one of the men who made sure it wouldn’t happen again. If the Yankees returned, they wouldn’t find Oahu too flustered to fight back. The island would be ready to repel them.

  Meanwhile, still without much harassment from the ground or from the air, the B-25s buzzed off in the direction of Diamond Head. No matter what Genda might plan for the future, today belonged to them. Genda went back up to the office as fast as he’d hurried down to the street. Yes, today belonged to the Americans. He got on the telephone to do his best to ensure that tomorrow wouldn’t.

  CHOW TIME. HORRIBLE glop. Not enough of it—nowhere near enough of it. Fletch Armitage didn’t care. He looked forward to every meal he got in the Kapiolani Park POW camp with greater anticipation than he ever had when he was going to some pretty fancy restaurants back on the mainland.

  He didn’t need to be Albert Einstein to figure out why. These days, he had an insider’s understanding of relativity. When you were already well fed, even the finest supper could be only so nice. And when you were hungry, any food at all, even food you would have turned your nose up at when times were better, couldn’t be anything less than wonderful.

  In those days, more good food had been just a surfeit. Fletch had wondered when he would start to get a potbelly. Here and now, every grain of rice kept him breathing for another—how long? A minute? Five minutes? Who could say? But he would rather have had a T-bone with all the trimmings than Jane wearing nothing but a smile.

  He wondered how she was. Had she stayed in Wahiawa or fled in front of the oncoming Japanese? Fletch had no way to know, of course. He had no way to know which would have been better, either. The Japs had gleefully strafed refugees, and in the end there’d been no way to stay in front of them. Had there been, he wouldn’t have been standing in line in a POW camp.

  A fly landed on his arm. He slapped at it. It buzzed away. Then his ear caught another buzz, this one up in the sky. He wasn’t the only one who heard it, either. Somebody pointed west, toward downtown Honolulu. Somebody else said, “What the hell are those?”

  Since the planes were coming out of the sun, what they were wasn’t obvious for a little while. But then somebody else said, “Fuck me if they ain’t B-25s!”

  As soon as the soldier said it, Fletch knew he was right. Those sleek lines and twin tail booms couldn’t have belonged to any other aircraft. Fletch wished Hawaii would have had a few squadrons of them instead of the lumbering Douglas B-18s that weren’t fast enough to run or well enough armored to fight. Then he wondered what difference it would have made. The Japs would have shot up the B-25s on the ground, too.

  And then—and only then—Fletch wondered what the hell B-25s were doing flying over Japanese-occupied Oahu. He wasn’t the only one slow on the uptake—far from it. The cheering in the camp had hardly started before he was yelling his head off. Everybody was yelling a few seconds later, yelling and shaking hands and pounding buddies on the back.

  Not more than ten seconds later, the machine guns on the guard towers around the camp cut loose. The prisoners inside hit the dirt with the unanimity of conditioned reflex. Only after Fletch lay flat did he poke his head up for a split second to see what the hell was going on. The Japs in the towers weren’t shooting at their captives. They were blazing away at the bombers.

  “Dumb assholes,” said a sergeant lying next to Fletch. “Those planes are too high up for small arms to hit.”

  “Let ’em waste ammo,” Fletch said. “At least it’s not coming in on us.” The sergeant nodded.

  The B-25s flew on by. East of Diamond Head, they swung up toward the north. That was when Fletch started trying to figure out not only what they were doing but how they’d got here. They couldn’t have taken off from San Francisco. They wouldn’t have made it to Oahu in the first place, let alone had a prayer of getting back. Could the big, hulking brutes have flown off a carrier? He wasn’t sure; he was no Navy man. But he would have bet the farm the stork hadn’t brought them.

  Quite a few of the POWs were Navy men. Some of them swore up and down that no Army bombers could have got airborne off a carrier’s short flight deck. They couldn’t come close to explaining how else the bombers had arrived over Oahu, though. As that sank in, their protests faded.

  The cheering didn’t last long. A
captain—Army variety, not Navy—said, “You wait and see—the Japs’ll make us pay for yelling for our own goddamn side.”

  “Of course they will. They’ve lost face,” another officer said.

  Fletch found that horribly likely. What could be more embarrassing than enemy bombers showing up over an island you thought you owned? Surprise, guys, Fletch thought. The Japs cared more about prestige than Americans did, too.

  Slowly, the chow line started snaking forward again. Here and there, men had dropped mess kits when they dove for cover as the guard-tower machine guns opened up. They squabbled over which one was whose and over who’d been a clumsy idiot and stepped on one: all serious business because it centered on food.

  No juicy T-bone for Fletch or anybody else at the Kapiolani camp—just rice and leaves that might have been vegetables or might have been weeds, and not enough of either. He hated it and he wanted more, both at the same time. But however unsatisfactory a supper it made, he felt better afterwards than before. For a little while, his body was only yelling at him that it was hungry. It wasn’t screaming, the way it usually did.

  Here and there, prisoners whistled or hummed “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America” and other patriotic songs. Nobody sang the words out loud. That would have been asking for trouble. Some of the guards knew English, and some of the local Japanese had thrown in with the occupiers. Even the tunes were dangerous. Fletch admired the POWs who showed what they were feeling without wanting to irritate the occupiers. He didn’t doubt that everybody felt the same way. Why stick your neck out to show it?

  And one flight of bombers couldn’t be anything more than a nuisance to the Japs. They might remind Hawaii—and Tokyo—that the USA was still in the fight, but they weren’t about to bundle the Empire of Japan back across the Pacific. Too bad, Fletch thought, eyeing the barbed wire surrounding him. Too goddamn bad.

  LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO wasn’t usually a man to show what he felt. Right now, though, he was furious, and making only the barest effort to hide it. The officers set over him had talked about an American attack at first light tomorrow morning. He’d been ready to meet that. He’d had his fellow fighter pilots at Haleiwa ready to meet it, too.

  They hadn’t been ready for the single U.S. bomber that swooped low over the airstrip here now as afternoon passed into evening, dropped a stick of bombs, and roared off to the south. Had there been three bombers instead of one, they could have wrecked the whole field. Bombs from the one were bad enough. No Zeros could take off till those holes got filled in.

  “Isogi!” Shindo shouted at the bulldozer operator. The Army noncom tipped his hat to show that he was hurrying. Blue, stinking diesel smoke belched from the bulldozer’s exhaust pipe. The lowered blade shoved dirt into one of the last holes in the ground. The big, snorting machine tamped the dirt down flat with the blade and with its caterpillar treads.

  Pick-and-shovel men would have taken a couple of days to repair the damage. Shindo knew that. Here, the sun still stood in the sky, though it sank toward the western horizon with each passing minute. And each passing minute meant one minute fewer in which he could hope to gain revenge.

  As if moving in slow motion, the bulldozer cleared the runway. “Let’s go!” Shindo shouted to his men. They ran for their fighters. As soon as Shindo slammed his canopy shut, a groundcrew man spun his prop. The Zero’s engine roared to life. Obeying another groundcrew man’s signals, Shindo taxied out of the revetment that had saved the plane from damage and out to the runway.

  He gave the Zero the gun. It bounced a couple of times as it ran over the hasty repairs the bulldozer had made, but he had no trouble getting into the air. He grudged the time he had to wait for his comrades to join him. As soon as they’d all taken off, they streaked away to the northeast after the now-vanished American bombers.

  Where? Shindo didn’t know, not exactly. He was going on dead reckoning and gut instinct and the sketchy reports he’d got from other parts of Oahu. Any of those might have been wrong. All of them might have been wrong, and he knew it only too well. If they were . . . If they were, he’d see nothing but sky and ocean till he ran low on fuel or ran out of light.

  He admired the Yankees’ nerve. They’d got everybody on Oahu jumping like fleas on a hot plate. Including me, he thought sourly. He still hadn’t figured out how they intended to get picked up. He couldn’t believe they’d be able to land on a carrier, even if they’d left from one. Would they ditch in the ocean and trust to luck? That seemed to stretch trust further than it ought to go.

  “There, Lieutenant!” An excited voice in his earphones made him stop puzzling over it. “Isn’t that them, about ten o’clock low?”

  “Hai.” Shindo, by contrast, sounded perfectly calm. He estimated the American bombers’ course and radioed it back to Oahu. It might help the Japanese carriers and their planes find the ships that had launched the B-25s. That done, he said, “Now we make them pay.”

  It wouldn’t be easy. They had scant daylight left. And the bombers had seen them, too. The B-25s dove for the deck. They had a very fair turn of speed. They weren’t as fast or as maneuverable as the Zeros (nothing was as maneuverable as a Zero except the Japanese Army’s Hayabusa fighter, which was much more lightly armed), but they didn’t dawdle.

  They also showed they had teeth. The machine gunners in their dorsal turrets blazed away at Shindo and his comrades. And those were heavy machine guns. A Zero must have got in the way of a few rounds, for it tumbled into the Pacific trailing smoke and flame. One reason Zeros were so fast and maneuverable was that they were lightly built. When they got hit, they paid the price.

  Shindo chose a B-25. He gave it a burst from his own machine guns. Those were just rifle-caliber weapons. He made hits. He was sure of that. But the bomber kept flying as if nothing had happened to it. Sturdy construction and armor plate might make a plane slow and sluggish, but they too had their advantages.

  Another Zero cometed into the sea. Shindo swore. Who was supposed to be shooting down whom? He brought another bomber into his sights. This time, he opened up with his twin 20mm cannon. A couple of hits from them would knock anything out of the sky. Getting the hits was the problem. They fired none too fast and carried only a limited store of ammunition.

  Get in close, he thought. That was the fighter pilot’s number-one rule. Get in close enough and you couldn’t miss. Shooting at long range was the most common and worst mistake novices and bad pilots made. Once the enemy filled your windshield, you didn’t scare him when you opened up. You killed him.

  The Americans knew that as well as Shindo did. Tracers streaked past his Zero. But they had to aim guns in turrets, which wasn’t easy. He pointed his fighter’s nose at the B-25 and started shooting. Chunks flew from the bomber. For a long, dreadful moment, he thought it would keep going all the same. But it heeled over and smashed down into the ocean. Even then, though, it left only an oil slick, not a floating patch of fire like a Zero. Another place the Yankees added weight was in self-sealing fuel tanks that really worked.

  Three more B-25s—and another Zero—went into the Pacific before Shindo broke off the attack. If he and his comrades were going to get back to Oahu with any light in the sky, they had to turn south now. The bombers kept on heading northeast, as if they intended to fly to California. They couldn’t get there, though. Shindo wondered again what they did intend to do.

  As he made for Oahu, he also wondered if he’d pursued too long. And then he saw that the groundcrew at Haleiwa had lit up the airstrip with parked cars and trucks and a searchlight that had stood in front of a movie theater. His landing was a long way from elegant, but he made it.

  A groundcrew man with a flashlight guided him to a revetment. He killed the motor, leaped out of his Zero, and ran for the radio in the headquarters tent. He wanted to find out whether carrier-based aircraft could catch the enemy’s ships.

  Other pilots came to listen with him. A couple of hours lat
er, they got a nasty jolt. Instead of the Japanese finding the American carriers, a U.S. sub found the Soryu. The Yankees must have hoped the Japanese would charge after them, hoped and had submarines lying in wait. Now Shindo listened anxiously, fearing the carrier would sink. Not till after midnight was it plain the ship would survive. Two torpedoes had struck her, but only one exploded. Had they both . . . But they hadn’t, and the Soryu limped back toward safer waters.

  With her came the Akagi. There would be no pursuit of the U.S. raiders after all. However they intended to recover their planes and crews, they could go ahead and do it.

  XI

  DOOLITTLE RAIDS HAWAII! THE NEWSPAPER HEADLINES SCREAMED. TAKES JAPS BY SURPRISE! Only when you got to the fourth paragraph of the story did you discover that six of his sixteen B-25s had been shot down. The rest of what was in the paper was a paean to the heroism of the crews that had been rescued after they ditched in the Pacific—and, in slightly smaller measure, to the heroism of the destroyer crews that had done the rescuing.

  Joe Crosetti understood that. Like every cadet at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, he wished he’d been along with Jimmy Doolittle and his intrepid flyboys. He was sick-jealous of the fliers, as a matter of fact. How horribly unfair that they’d got to go and he hadn’t! Just because they’d been flying for years while he was only now beginning to get up in the air . . .

  That they’d lost more than one plane in three and about one man in two (for several crewmen had been shot even on B-25s that kept flying to the ditching point) fazed him not at all. It hadn’t fazed them either. They were all volunteers. The papers made that very plain. He couldn’t imagine anybody in the country who wouldn’t have stepped up to the plate there.

  He burbled about the attack standing on the runway next to the Boeing Stearman he’d soon be taking up. Like all Navy trainers, the tough little biplane was painted bright yellow so nobody could mistake it for anything but what it was. People not training in Stearmans called them Yellow Perils, not altogether in jest. They were dangerous to their pilots and dangerous to those around them.