When he said that out loud, the men in his squad laughed. Of course, any joke a noncom made was automatically funny to the men he commanded. Corporals and sergeants had too many ways to avenge themselves on soldiers who didn’t think so—or, more to the point, who acted as if they didn’t think so.
Shimizu remembered the other birds he’d seen when he first came to Oahu: the pigeons and the little blue-faced doves. They’d got thin on the ground in Honolulu, and there weren’t many of them left in the countryside, either. He had no trouble figuring out why: they were good to eat, and food had got scarce. When supplies came regularly from the U.S. mainland, nobody’d bothered the birds. Nowadays, though, they were nothing but meat.
More slowly than they should have, the Japanese soldiers reached the cross road that led west to Schofield Barracks. A gang of American prisoners was repairing it, as the POWs had already done on the north-south road. The prisoners were a sorry-looking lot: skinny and dirty and dressed in the tattered remnants of the uniforms they’d worn before giving up.
“See what happens when you surrender?” Shimizu said, pointing their way. “That’s what you get. That’s what you deserve. Better to die fighting. Better to hug a grenade to your chest and get everything over with at once. Then, at least, you don’t disgrace your family. Honto?”
“Honto!” his squad chorused. No hesitation, no disagreement. Surrender was the ultimate disgrace. How could you hope to go back to your home village after falling into the enemy’s hands? You couldn’t. You’d bring dishonor with you, and all your kin would lose face. Yes, better by far to tap a grenade against your helmet and then hold it tight. Everything would be over in a hurry, and your spirit would go to the Yasukuni Shrine.
After the turnoff for Schofield Barracks came the town of Wahiawa, more of it to the east of the road than to the west. Locals on the street bowed, but didn’t pay much attention to the regiment passing through. By now, they were bound to be used to Japanese soldiers coming and going. They were thin, too, though not so scrawny as the American prisoners. Shimizu thought most of them were skinnier than the civilians in Honolulu. He wondered how much of the fish the sampans caught came this far inland. Not much, unless he missed his guess.
No matter how skinny they were, some of the white women wore scandalously little: nothing but shorts that came more than halfway up their thighs and tops that covered their breasts but not much else. A yellow-haired woman perhaps a few years older than Shimizu walked along the sidewalk with her back very straight, doing her best to pretend the Japanese soldiers in the street didn’t exist.
“They look like whores,” somebody behind Shimizu said.
Soldiers nodded, though he wondered why. No whore in Japan would show herself in public wearing so little; it would shame her. From what he’d seen in the brothels in Honolulu, the same held true here. None of the women in Wahiawa seemed the least bit ashamed.
The women did seem cool and comfortable in the warm weather. Shimizu’s feet were sore. Sweat dampened his uniform. He could smell the men he marched with. They didn’t have the sour, beefy reek a like number of Americans would have, but he knew they were there. He sighed, wishing he were marching with almost-naked women instead of his squadmates. That would sure liven up the day.
Not far beyond Wahiawa, the regiment took a ten-minute break. “Leave your boots on,” Shimizu warned his men. “If you take them off, your feet will swell up and you won’t be able to get them back on again. You wouldn’t like that.” Anyone who couldn’t get his boots back on would have to finish the march barefoot. No, the men wouldn’t like that a bit.
When the sun went down, the regiment was short of Haleiwa and had to camp by the side of the road. The officers muttered and fumed at that, which meant Shimizu and the other noncoms were obliged to mutter and fume, too. He didn’t know about anybody else, but he growled at his squad more for form’s sake than from conviction. If he’d had to march another hundred meters, he was sure he would have fallen over dead.
Cooks who’d brought their field kitchens on horse-drawn carts fixed rice for the men. Some of the soldiers had fallen asleep and couldn’t be shaken awake even to eat. “More for the rest of us,” Senior Private Furusawa said.
“Yes, why not?” Shimizu agreed. “For them, sleep is more important. As for me, I wouldn’t be sorry if the cooks slaughtered the horses and fed them to us, too.” Hashi flashing in the firelight, he emptied his bowl amazingly fast—but he wasn’t the first man done. The soldiers who were hungrier than they were sleepy were hungry.
Shimizu told off soldiers to stand watches through the night. One of the benefits of his none too exalted rank was that he got to assign such duties instead of enduring them. He cocooned himself in his blanket and fell asleep. Though he’d been able to eat, exhaustion made the ground seem softer than the mattress on his cot back in the Honolulu barracks.
He wasn’t so happy when he woke up a little before dawn the next morning. He felt stiff and sore. Grunting, he stretched and twisted, trying to work out the kinks. Then he undid his fly and pissed into a rice paddy. Men lined up along the paddy’s muddy edge to do the same.
After more rice for breakfast, the regiment set out again. For the first little while, Shimizu felt like his own grandfather—except that his grandfather had fought in the Sino-Japanese War and always went on about how soft the modern generation was. Then his muscles loosened up and he just felt tired. Tired wasn’t so bad; after yesterday’s march, he’d earned the right to be tired.
“The sea! The sea!” Someone pointed north, toward the Pacific.
“It’s the same sea that washes up against Japan,” Yasuo Furusawa said. He was right, of course. Corporal Shimizu knew that. Like everyone else in the regiment, he’d sailed across every centimeter of it in the Nagata Maru. There hadn’t been any place where he’d had to get out and walk. But it didn’t always feel like the same sea. It was so much warmer, so much bluer, and—except on north-facing beaches in wintertime—so much calmer.
“Remember the waves we rode going up onto the beach?” Shimizu said. “Didn’t that make your bottom pucker up? And it could have been worse. It could have been too nasty to let us land at all. I don’t know what we would have done then.” He had a pretty good idea, though. Ready or not, they would have tried to land. They hadn’t come all that way to sit in the troopships.
“If the Yankees try to land now, the waves won’t throw them around,” Corporal Aiso said. “It’s calm and peaceful during the summer. So it’ll be up to us to shoot them on the beaches if they get that far.”
“If the Navy’s doing its job, they won’t,” Shimizu said.
“If the Navy was doing its job, the Americans wouldn’t have bombed us here,” Aiso said. “If the Navy was doing its job, American subs wouldn’t be shelling us and sinking our ships and spying on us.”
“Well, that’s the Navy,” Shimizu said, and everyone who caught his tone of voice nodded. What can you do about such people? he might have asked. Of course, a sailor would have said, Well, that’s the Army, and sounded exactly the same—half exasperated, half amused. Neither service thought the other had the faintest idea what it was doing.
When the regiment got up to Haleiwa, near the north coast of Oahu, Shimizu expected to turn right and march east. He’d come ashore near Waimea, and the march up from Honolulu had felt a little like running the film of the invasion in reverse. He was taken aback when the column turned left instead. But the beaches past which the soldiers marched were broad and friendly, the country behind them flat and inviting for an invader—flatter and more inviting than where he’d landed. Mountains rose to the south and west, yes, but behind a good stretch of plain now converted to rice paddies.
Fighters with the Rising Sun on flanks and wings rose from an airstrip not far inland. Shimizu smiled to see them as they roared overhead. The handful of planes the Americans managed to put in the air had done damage out of proportion to their numbers till Zeros dealt with them. Unlike
the Americans, Japan wouldn’t be caught sleeping. The planes zooming out helped guarantee that.
Grass and ferns had grown over the works the Yankees had dug near the beaches to try to hold back the Japanese Army. The plants and the rain had softened their outlines, as well as those of the bomb craters and shell holes from the Japanese bombardment that had forced the enemy soldiers away from their hastily dug holes.
Lieutenant Horino led his platoon to some of the battered, abandoned American works. “We are going to restore these, men,” he said, by which he meant, You are going to restore these—he wasn’t about to pick up a shovel himself. “We are going to restore these, and meet the enemy on the beach if the Navy screws up and lets him land. If he does, his bones will bleach on the sand. Honto?”
“Hai!” the soldiers shouted, Takeo Shimizu loud among them.
“Not one American will set foot on the grass. Honto?”
“Hai!”
“Then get to work.”
A corporal wasn’t above digging in with an entrenching tool, even if a lieutenant was. As Shimizu cleared trenches and built breastworks, he looked out to sea. The Americans had sited this position well. If not for destruction rained on them by airplanes and warships, they might have held it. We will hold it, Shimizu thought, and added more dirt to the breastwork.
COMMANDER MINORU GENDA stood by the edge of the Wheeler Field runway. Right on schedule, two Mitsubishi G4M bombers flew in from the northwest and landed on the runway. The G4M had proved very useful. It was almost as fast as a fighter, and it had extraordinary range, which meant the Japanese Navy sometimes, as now, ferried important passengers across long stretches of ocean in G4Ms.
But the bomber wasn’t perfect. Everything came with a price. The Mitsubishi plane burned like a torch if it got hit.
No danger here, though; there were no hostile aircraft within fifteen hundred kilometers of Hawaii. The G4Ms taxied to a stop, one behind the other. Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki got out of the first plane: a short man with a face so round, it was almost wider than it was long. From the second G4M descended the officer for whom Ugaki served as chief of staff: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Yamamoto had a firm rule that he and his chief aide should not travel in the same aircraft, lest one disaster overwhelm them both.
Yamamoto looked around as Genda hurried across the tarmac toward him and Ugaki. “So this is Oahu,” said the commander of the Combined Fleet.
“Yes, sir,” Genda said, saluting. “Have you never been here before?”
“I’ve seen Honolulu on my way to and from the United States,” Yamamoto answered. “I never got back into the countryside, though. How about you, Ugaki-san?”
“This is my first time here, sir,” Ugaki said. “Pretty. The weather’s nice, neh?”
“Hai,” Genda said. “If the weather were all we had to worry about, we wouldn’t have anything to worry about, if you know what I mean.”
Yamamoto smiled. As always, Genda was struck by the sheer physical presence of the man. Yamamoto was short—though not quite so short as either Genda or Ugaki—but energy blazed from him. He said, “Well, we didn’t come here to take on the weather.”
“No, sir,” Genda agreed. “We are honored that you have come to take personal charge of the defenses of Hawaii.” He bowed, thinking, And you and Ugaki both outrank General Yamashita. About time the Navy was in charge of things again.
Shrugging broad shoulders, Yamamoto answered, “The highest-ranking officer should be in charge at the most important point, neh? Nothing is more important for the Empire than holding Hawaii. You were the one who first pointed that out: here we have the great shield behind which the rest of our conquests have proceeded. The Americans are not blind to this. In their hands, Hawaii is a shield no more, but a dagger aimed at our heart.”
Commander Genda bowed. “You are too generous, sir.”
“I don’t think so,” Yamamoto said. “I’ll want to get out to sea as fast as I can. The Yankees are on their way, eh?”
“So it seems, sir,” Genda replied. “They appear to have slipped by our submarines at night, but flying boats report that large numbers of Navy ships and transports are no longer in West Coast harbors.”
“Why haven’t the famous flying boats found the enemy fleet at sea, then?” Vice Admiral Ugaki asked irritably.
“My guess is, the Americans are trying something sneaky,” Yamamoto said before Genda could reply. “They’ll come down on us out of the north, or maybe even from the northwest, instead of making a straight run from their Pacific coast. And the straight route is the one the flying boats and the subs will be patrolling most. What do you think, Genda-san?”
“That’s how it looks to me, too, sir,” Genda said. “They’ll assemble somewhere up in the north, hope they can defeat our carrier force, and try to land if they do.”
“Good enough,” Yamamoto said. “Well, the sooner we get out to Akagi and go after them, the better off we’ll be. We have better planes and better pilots, and I aim to take advantage of it.”
“Yes, sir,” Genda said, and then, “You’ll want to spend the night here on Oahu, won’t you, and fly out in the morning? You’ve been traveling for a long time.”
By the look on Vice Admiral Ugaki’s face, he would have liked nothing better. But Yamamoto shook his head. “I’ll rest when I get there,” he said. “I want to make sure I’m in place when the fighting starts. If I wait, it may start without me. You do have aircraft here that can land on a carrier?” His bulldog expression said somebody—probably Genda—would catch it if he had to wait while planes came back to Oahu from the Akagi.
But Genda pointed to a pair of Aichi dive bombers. “They are at your service, sir.”
“Good.” There was never anything halfway about Yamamoto. If he was unhappy, he was very unhappy. If he wasn’t, everything was rosy. He walked over to the edge of the runway, undid his fly, and eased himself on the grass. When he came back, he was smiling. “That’s a lot better than trying to piss in a tin can while an airplane’s bouncing all over the sky. Go on, Ugaki-san, while you’ve got the chance. You won’t make a mess here.”
“I didn’t make a mess,” Ugaki said with dignity, but he walked off the runway and turned his back, too.
Admiral Yamamoto threw back his head and laughed. Now that he saw he’d got what he wanted, he was in a good mood. He cocked his head to one side and studied Genda. “Are you feeling well, Commander? You look a little peaked.”
Genda bit down on his lower lip in embarrassment. He hadn’t realized it showed. “I’m . . . all right, sir.” He gave himself the lie, for he started coughing and wheezing and had trouble stopping. “I’ve had a little trouble with my lungs lately; nothing too bad, though.”
“You ought to see a physician,” Yamamoto said.
“I intend to, sir—after we beat the Americans.”
“All right, as long as you’re well enough to help us fight them. You won’t do the Empire any good if you’re flat on your back.”
“Yes, sir. I understand that. I’ll get through the fight.” Genda knew he was trying to convince himself as well as Admiral Yamamoto. There’d been a couple of times when he almost did go to the doctor in spite of the action looming ahead. But whatever was troubling his chest had eased back, and here he was.
Here came the officer in charge of Wheeler Field: a lieutenant colonel. He bowed to Yamamoto and Ugaki in turn. “Honored to have you here, sir,” he told the commander of the Combined Fleet. “I trust you’ll do me the honor of dining with me tonight?”
“I’m afraid not,” Yamamoto said, and the Army officer’s face fell. Yamamoto did take the time to make sure the man understood it was nothing personal: “My chief of staff and I are going straight out to our flagship, as soon as you can put pilots into those Aichis. The Americans won’t wait.”
In the face of such formidable devotion to duty, the lieutenant colonel said the only thing he could: “Yes, sir.”
Genda knew a certain amount of
relief. At least Yamamoto didn’t propose flying out to the Akagi himself. He had his wings, yes, but Genda didn’t think he’d ever made a landing on the deck of a flattop. Yamamoto caught his eye and raised one eyebrow slightly. Genda gave back an almost imperceptible nod. Yamamoto said, “And make sure you have a plane for Commander Genda as well. His assistance is bound to prove invaluable.”
“I’ll take care of it, sir,” the Army man promised. His eyes raked Genda. Who the devil are you? he might have asked. Genda didn’t enlighten him.
Inside half an hour, Admiral Yamamoto and Vice Admiral Ugaki were winging their way north. A little later, the lieutenant colonel scraped up another Aichi D3A1 and a pilot to ferry Genda out to the Akagi. He still didn’t know who Genda was or what he’d done to deserve singling out by name by the most famous officer in all the Japanese armed forces. That suited Genda—who cared for results much more than for renown—just fine.
The flight didn’t suit him so well. The longer it went on, the less happy his chest got. He tried willing the congestion away, as he had before, but didn’t have much luck. He huddled in the dive bomber’s rear seat, doing his best not to move. When the plane came down in the controlled crash that was a carrier landing, he had to bite back a groan.
Getting out of the Aichi after the pilot opened the canopy took all his strength. He dragged himself down to the flight deck and stood there swaying. Captain Kaku, who’d come out of the island onto the deck to greet him, took one look at him and snapped, “Go to the dispensary.”
“I’m all right, sir,” Genda protested feebly.
“Go to the dispensary. That’s an order, Commander.” Kaku’s voice had not a gram of give in it. Genda gave back a miserable salute and obeyed.
A doctor with round-lensed spectacles like Prime Minister Tojo’s listened to his heart and lungs with a stethoscope. “I’m very sorry, Commander, but you have pneumonia,” he announced. “It’s a good thing you came to see me. You need a spell of bed rest.”
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