Days of Infamy

by Harry Turtledove

  “Jesus Christ!” Wenzel said. “Why the fuck don’t they make up their minds? They send us all the way out here to march in place, for crying out loud?”

  “I know what it could be,” Dillon said.

  “Yeah?” Wenzel and Monahan and the other two men in the game all spoke together.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “The Navy’s got to be up ahead of us somewhere. If they don’t clear the Japs out of this part of the Pacific, we aren’t gonna make it to Oahu to land. If they’ve bumped into ’em . . .”

  After some thought, Dutch Wenzel nodded. “Makes sense,” he allowed. “They wouldn’t want us bumping into carrier air.” He made a horrible face. “That could ruin your whole day, matter of fact.” One more brief pause. “Whose deal is it?”

  LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO prided himself on never getting too excited about anything. Tomorrow morning, battle would come: Japan’s most important fight since the opening blows of the war against the USA. Some people were jumping up and down about that—and making a devil of a racket doing it. Shindo ignored them. He sprawled dozing in a chair in the briefing room. He wore his flying togs. He could be inside his Zero and airborne in a matter of minutes.

  Every so often, the noise around him got too loud to stand, and he’d wake up for a little while. When he did, he thought about what he would have to do. This would be no surprise attack. The Americans knew they’d been spotted. They’d sent up fighters to chase off or shoot down the first H8K that found their fleet. They’d done it, too, though the flying boat had taken out a Wildcat before going into the Pacific. By the time it went down, others were in the neighborhood.

  The Yankees might try to get away under cover of darkness—try to scurry back to the West Coast of the United States. Some of the Japanese pilots thought they would. Saburo Shindo didn’t believe it. Running now would be cowardly. The Americans hadn’t fought very well on Oahu, but they’d fought bravely. They wouldn’t run away.

  If they weren’t running, what would they be doing? Shindo fell asleep again after he asked himself the question and before he answered it. He realized as much only when his eyes came open some time later and he noticed half the people who had been around him were gone, replaced by others. He started chewing on things once more, just as if he hadn’t stopped. What would the Americans do?

  Stay where they were and wait to be attacked? He wouldn’t do anything that foolish. He would storm forward, launch his own search planes as soon as it got light, and strike with everything he had the instant he found the Japanese fleet. If he could see that, wouldn’t the Yankees be able to see it, too? He expected they would.

  They had three carriers. The Japanese also had three, including two of the newest, largest, and fastest in the Navy. The Americans had who knows what for pilots. The Japanese had men who’d smashed everything they came up against from Hawaii to Ceylon. The Americans used Wildcats for fighters. The Japanese used Zeros. Shindo yawned and smiled at the same time. A Wildcat could take more punishment than a Zero. It could, yes—and it needed to. He dozed off one more time, laughing a little as he did.

  When he woke again, it was with someone’s hand on his shoulder. Full alertness returned instantly. “Is it time?” he asked.

  “Not quite yet, sir.” The man standing beside him was one of the wardroom stewards. “We’re serving out a combat meal before the fliers go up.” He held out a bowl full of nigirimeshi—rice balls wrapped in bamboo shoots, with plums at their centers.

  “Arigato.” Shindo took one and bit into it. The stewards had served the same meal before the fliers set off for Pearl Harbor. Another man carried a tray with cups of green tea. Shindo washed down his breakfast with it.

  Akagi’s three elevators were lifting planes from the hangar deck to the flight deck, getting them ready to go into action. Flight-crew men wrestled the bombers and fighters into position one after another. As soon as each elevator went up and came down, another plane went on. Up above, more men from the flight crew would be fueling the planes and making sure their engines and control surfaces and instruments were in good working order. Armorers would be loading bombs and torpedoes, machine-gun bullets and cannon shells. When the time came . . .

  Before it came, though, Shindo gathered up the fighter pilots he would be leading. “Some of you were stuck on Oahu with me when the American bombers raided us,” he said. “They fooled us, and they hit us, and they made us lose face. Now is our chance to get revenge. Are we going to let it slip through our fingers?”

  “Iye!” the fliers answered loudly. Not all of them had been stuck on the island, but every one had been embarrassed. Of course they would say no.

  “Good,” Shindo told them. “Very good. They want a lesson. It’s up to us to give them one. By the time we’re through with them, they won’t want to come anywhere near Hawaii for the next hundred years. Let’s give the Emperor a Banzai! and then go out there and serve him.”

  “Banzai!” the fighter pilots shouted. They hurried up to the flight deck.

  Shindo climbed into his Zero. Morning twilight stained the eastern sky with gray. Somewhere out there, the enemy waited. As Shindo went through his checks, he was pretty sure he knew where. Any which way, he would get a signal from the bombers, whose radios were more fully hooked into the reconnaissance network.

  Planes began roaring off the flight deck. He fired up his engine. It roared to smooth, powerful life. His turn came soon. The air officer swung his green lantern in a circle. Shindo’s Zero sped along, dipped as it went off the end of the deck, and soared into the sky.

  XV

  IN HIS NAKAJIMA B5N1, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida listened to the reports coming in from the flying boats and from the float planes the fleet had launched to search for the American carriers and their surrounding vessels. He didn’t think he would have long to wait; the Japanese knew about where the enemy would be.

  And he proved right. He hadn’t been airborne long before a float-plane pilot found the foe. “Range approximately 150 kilometers,” the pilot shouted. “Bearing is 045.” He paused, then shouted again: “They are launching planes! Repeat—they are launching planes!”

  We’re up first, Fuchida thought. Good. Ignoring the growing ache in his belly, he spoke to his radioman: “Relay the position to our aircraft.”

  “Hai, Commander-san,” First Flying Petty Officer Tokunobu Mizuki said. He took care of that with his usual unflustered competence.

  Fuchida worried that the Americans would intercept the float plane’s signal and learn where the fleet was. He shrugged. With their electronics, they would see from which direction the Japanese strike was coming and trace it back anyhow. Maybe we should have thrown them a curve, thought Fuchida, a baseball fan. Probably too late to worry about it now.

  “Shindo here, Commander.” The fighter pilot’s voice, calm as usual, sounded in Fuchida’s earphones.

  “Go ahead,” Fuchida said.

  “Question, sir,” Saburo Shindo said. “If we spot the American airplanes on their way to our fleet, do we peel off and attack them, or do we continue with you?”

  “Come with us,” Fuchida answered without hesitation. “We’ll need your help to keep the Wildcats off us, and the Zeros up over our ships will tend to the Americans.”

  “All right, sir. That’s the way we’ll do it, then. Out.” Lieutenant Shindo broke the connection. Fuchida smiled to himself. Shindo, no doubt, would be telling the fighter pilots of the decision. Just as surely, he wouldn’t raise his voice while he did it. With his machinelike competence, Shindo might have come out of the Mitsubishi aircraft plant himself.

  Somewhere not too far away—and drawing closer by several kilometers every minute—an American officer was likely listening to the same question from one of his subordinates. How would he answer it? How would his answer change the building battle? We’ll see, Fuchida thought.

  As when planes from the Japanese carriers attacked the Enterprise and then the Lexington—and as when aircraft from the Lexingt
on delivered their alarming counterstroke—the two fleets here would not draw close enough to see each other and turn their guns on each other. This war was overturning centuries of naval tradition.

  Sudden excited gabble filled Fuchida’s earphones. Dryly, Petty Officer Mizuki said, “Some of our men have spotted the Americans’ airplanes, sir.”

  “Really?” Fuchida matched dry for dry. “I never would have guessed.” Mizuki chuckled.

  A moment later, Fuchida saw the Americans himself. They were flying a little lower than the Japanese, and noticeably slower: their torpedo planes were lumbering pigs, obsolete when compared to the sleek Nakajima B5N2s in Fuchida’s strike force. American torpedoes weren’t all they might have been, either. Several duds had proved a hit from them wasn’t necessarily fatal, or even damaging.

  Would the Wildcats climb up and try to strike the Japanese? Fuchida hoped so. They were slower than Zeros in everything but an emergency dive, and gaining altitude would cost them still more speed. Shindo and the rest of the Japanese fighter pilots had to be licking their chops.

  But the Wildcats pressed on to the south, not leaving the attack aircraft they were assigned to shepherd. Fuchida nodded to himself. He would have made the same choice. He had made the same choice for his side. He ordered Mizuki to radio word of the sighting back to the fleet.

  “Aye aye, sir,” the radioman answered. “I would have done it without orders in a minute if you hadn’t spoken up.” From a lot of ratings, that would have been a shocking breach of discipline. Mizuki and Fuchida had been together for a long time. The petty officer knew what needed doing in his small sphere as well as Fuchida did in the larger one.

  Each strike force slightly adjusted its course based on the direction in which the other had been flying. If the Americans had thrown a curve . . . Fuchida refused to worry about it. He already had the approximate bearing from the Japanese reconnaissance aircraft.

  He had the bearing. He knew how far he’d come. Where were the Americans, then? All he saw was the vast blue expanse of the Pacific. He didn’t want the men he led spotting the fleet ahead of him. He was their leader. Didn’t that mean he ought to be first at everything?

  No matter what he wanted, he wasn’t quite first. But he spied the enemy warships just after the first radio calls rang out. Like the Japanese, the Americans used cruisers and destroyers to surround the all-important carriers. The smaller vessels started throwing up antiaircraft fire. Puffs of black smoke marred the smooth blue of the sky.

  A couple of shells burst not far from Fuchida’s bomber. Blast made the Nakajima shake and jerk in the air. A chunk of shrapnel clattered off a wingtip. It seemed to do no harm. The B5N1 kept flying.

  “Torpedo planes, dive bombers—work together,” Fuchida called. “Don’t let the enemy fighters concentrate on one group. Fighters, protect the attack planes. Banzai! for the Emperor.”

  Answering “Banzai!”s filled all strike-force frequencies. Here came the Wildcats that had been orbiting above the American fleet. Muzzle flashes showed they’d started shooting. The four heavy machine guns they carried were not to be despised. If they hit, they hit hard.

  As if to prove as much, a burning Zero spun toward the Pacific far below. A Wildcat followed. It was out of control, the pilot surely dead, but it didn’t show nearly so many flames as the Zero. Wildcats could take more damage than their Japanese counterparts. They could—and they needed to, for the Japanese had an easier time hitting than they did.

  “Level bombers, line up behind your guide aircraft,” Fuchida called out over the radio. The tactic had worked extremely well above Pearl Harbor. The level bombers scored a surprising number of hits there. Back in December, though, their targets lay at anchor in a crowded harbor. Now they were twisting and dodging all over the sea. Hits wouldn’t come easy. We can only do our best, Fuchida thought.

  Down below, antiaircraft fire caught an Aichi dive bomber as it was about to heel over and swoop on a carrier. Instead of diving, the Aichi fell out of the sky, rolling over and over and breaking up before it hit the water. Two more brave men gone. Two more spirits in Yasukuni Shrine.

  Fuchida switched places with the second plane in his group of five. First Flying Petty Officer Akira Watanabe was the best pilot in the Japanese Navy, and his bombardier, First Flying Petty Officer Yanosuke Aso, was also the best. They needed to pass right over the center of the enemy fleet. As always, hitting carriers came first.

  “Be ready!” Watanbe called to the pilots behind him. His plane bounced upward as the bombardier released the load. Fuchida’s B5N1 also lurched in the air as its bombs fell free. More bombs tumbled down from the planes that followed him. Suddenly, the aircraft was lighter, more maneuverable. And it needed to be. Mizuki, who handled the rear-facing machine gun as well as the radio, opened up on something—presumably a Wildcat—behind the bomber.

  Now that Fuchida didn’t have to fly slow and straight for the bombardier’s sake, he threw his Nakajima into aerobatics as violent as its engine and frame could stand. The rest of the planes in his group were doing the same thing—all but one. That one, flames shooting from the wing root and the engine cowling, plummeted down toward the sea.

  Petty Officer Mizuki let out a wordless shout. Fuchida corkscrewed away to the left. Planes usually broke to the right, to take advantage of the torque from their props. He hoped his maneuver would catch the Yankee on his tail by surprise. And it did—the Wildcat shot past him, close enough for him to see the American’s startled face. If only he had a forward-facing machine gun . . . But he didn’t, and the Wildcat got away.

  Now—what had the bombs done?

  LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO was not a happy man. His Zero was still a better plane than the Wildcats he faced, but the Yankees had come up with something new, something that made them harder to shoot down. They flew in groups of four, two pairs of two separated by the radius of a tight turn. Whenever he drew a bead on one plane, the enemy pilots in the more distant pair would turn sharply toward him. That move warned the man he’d targeted to turn away sharply, spoiling his aim. And if he pursued too far trying to get it back, he came right into the line of fire of the more distant pair.

  The first time the Americans tried that weave on him, he almost shot himself down walking right into it. He thought they’d got lucky then. When they did it twice more in quick succession, he realized it wasn’t luck. They’d worked out a tactic to take advantage of the Wildcat’s powerful guns and give it a chance to survive against the otherwise superior Zero.

  “Be careful!” he shouted to the pilots he led, and warned them what to look for. He hoped they would listen. In the heat of battle, who could tell?

  Not all the Japanese had the chance to listen. Several Zeros had already gone down. The Americans’ weave, no doubt, had done to them what it almost did to Shindo.

  But Wildcats were also falling out of the sky. And the ones that mixed it up with Shindo’s Zeros weren’t attacking the Aichis and Nakajimas that accompanied them. Those were the ship-killers, the planes that had to get through at any cost.

  Bombs burst around the American carriers. Shindo saw no hits, but even near misses would cause damage from casing fragments and from the effects of blast on enemy hulls. A Nakajima B5N2 raced towards a carrier. Its torpedo splashed into the sea. A heartbeat later, the torpedo bomber turned into a fireball. The torpedo was away, though.

  The carrier started to slew to starboard. Too late, too slow. The torpedo struck home just aft of amidships. Nothing wrong with Japanese ordnance—Shindo watched the explosion. The enemy ship staggered like a prizefighter who’d just taken a right to the chin.

  “Banzai!” Shindo yelled, there in the cockpit. “Banzai!”

  He lost sight of the carrier for a little while after that. He was dealing with a Wildcat that had somehow got separated from its comrades. The pilot tried to dogfight him instead of diving away from trouble. The Yankee discovered what a lot of his countrymen had before him: that didn’t work. A Z
ero could turn inside a Wildcat. A Zero could, and Shindo did. He shot up the American plane till at last it nosed down and crashed into the ocean.

  By then, the Americans on the carrier had got her moving again, even if not at top speed. Saburo Shindo gave American engineers and damage-control parties reluctant respect. They knew their business. Here, knowing it didn’t help. An Aichi dive bomber swooped down out of the sky, releasing its bomb at what seemed just above the height of the bridge. As the Aichi screamed away, its prop and fixed landing gear almost skimming the waves, the bomb hit dead center.

  Where the ship had staggered before, she shuddered now. She lost power and lay there dead in the water as flames leaped up from her. That, of course, was an invitation to the Japanese pilots. Another torpedo and what Shindo thought was a bomb from a level bomber slammed home. The carrier began to list heavily to port.

  One down, Shindo thought. Two to go.

  WHEN MINORU GENDA heard American planes were on the way, he climbed out of the sick-bay cot where he’d been lying. Weak as he was, it felt like a long climb, too. He found a box of gauze masks like the ones the pharmacist’s mates wore, and fastened the ties around his ears. Masuku was the Japanese name, borrowed from the English.

  “Here, what are you doing? You shouldn’t be up and about! Kinjiru!” One of those pharmacist’s mates caught him in the act of leaving. “Get back where you belong, right this minute!” He was just a rating, but thought his station gave him the right to boss officers around.

  He was usually right, too. Not here. Not now. Slowly but firmly, Genda shook his head. “No. We’re going into battle. They need me up there.” He had to stop and cough halfway through that, but he spoke with great determination.

  “In your pajamas?” the pharmacist’s mate said.

  Genda looked down at himself. Then he spied his uniform jacket hanging on a hook welded to the sick-bay door. He threw it on over the thin cotton pajamas. “This will do. Now get out of my way.”