End of the Beginning Read online

  He didn’t hit the boulder, but he frightened it. A sub made a much bigger target, and he would have been carrying a much bigger bomb. If he’d put that bomb so close to a submarine, he was sure he would have hurt it.

  Back to the airstrip he went; there wasn’t a lot of fuel for practice. Groundcrew men guided his plane back to its camouflaged revetment. In spite of the fuel shortage, he told his pilots, “I want all of you to get as much practice as you can. This is important. The better you get when it doesn’t count, the better you’ll do when it does.”

  The pilots nodded, almost in unison. Most of them were veterans of the Pearl Harbor strikes that had opened the war in the Pacific. They knew what meticulous planning and preparation were worth.

  Let me find a submarine, Shindo thought. Let me find one, and I’ll give it a nasty surprise.

  WERE THOSE THE CRATERS of the moon down there? Joe Crosetti knew better, but the bombing range had sure as hell taken a beating. He held the Texan in a dive, watching height peel off the altimeter. When he got down to 2,500 feet, he released the bomb that hung beneath the trainer.

  The Texan wasn’t a dive bomber, any more than it was a fighter. But it could impersonate either. Joe pulled back hard on the stick to bring the plane’s nose up and get it out of the dive. When you were down to half a mile off the ground, you didn’t have much margin for error, even in a plane a lot more sedate than one you would take into combat.

  “Not bad, Mr. Crosetti,” the instructor said—about as much praise as he ever gave. “Take her back to the base and land her.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Joe had to look around to figure out where he was and in which direction Pensacola Naval Air Station lay. That didn’t matter much here—he had plenty of landmarks to guide him back. With only ocean between his plane and a carrier, it might not be so good.

  Some guys seemed to have a compass between their ears. They always knew right where they were and how to get where they were going without fuss, muss, bother, or visible calculation. Joe suspected Orson Sharp was like that. His roomie was a strange bird, but a damn capable one. He wished he could find home as automatically as he reached into his pocket for a half-dollar. But navigation didn’t come easy for him.

  That didn’t mean he couldn’t navigate, only that doing it was hard work. He put the Texan down in a landing he was proud of. If he’d been that neat when he soloed in it . . . But he had more experience now. The more experience he got, the more he realized how much it mattered.

  “I know you want to be a fighter jockey,” the instructor said as they climbed out of the Texan.

  “Yes, sir,” Joe agreed.

  “That’s fine,” the older man told him. “But if you don’t get what you want, you can strike at the enemy in a dive bomber, too. If anything, you can strike harder. Fighters fight other airplanes. Dive bombers fight the ships that carry airplanes.”

  “Yes, sir,” Joe said again. It wasn’t that the other officer was wrong—he wasn’t. But Joe had had his heart set on flying a fighter since before he volunteered for the naval aviation program. Oh, sure, a Dauntless could make a Jap battlewagon or carrier very unhappy—but it was such a lumbering pig in the air next to a Wildcat!

  “Okay.” The instructor sounded wryly amused. No doubt he knew just what Joe was thinking. Fighter pilots got the glory, and glory could look mighty good to a kid getting close to finishing flight school.

  Joe hustled back to his dorm room to work on trig problems he’d have to turn in that afternoon. No, navigation wasn’t easy for him. That just meant he had to sweat it out the hard way.

  The door flew open. In burst Orson Sharp. Joe stared at him. Joe, in fact, dropped his pencil. His roommate looked excited, and Sharp was usually cool as a cucumber. “What’s up?” Joe asked.

  “You haven’t heard?” Sharp demanded.

  “Nope.” Joe shook his head. “If I had, would I be asking you?”

  “No, I guess not.” The kid from Utah nodded to himself. “Word is, we’re going to have one of the pilots off the Yorktown talk to us this afternoon.”

  “Wow!” Joe forgot all about trigonometry. This was bigger news than any navigation problem. The Yorktown lay at the bottom of the Pacific, somewhere north of Hawaii. The Japs had sunk her in the failed U.S. attack against the islands. “Not many of those guys left.”

  Orson Sharp nodded. “I should say not. They had to ditch in the ocean and hope a destroyer would pick them up.” That wasn’t the only reason there weren’t many Yorktown pilots left. Japanese fliers had taken a savage toll on them. Sharp didn’t mention that, and Joe didn’t dwell on it.

  Cadets weren’t in the habit of ditching classes anyhow, but the hall where the pilot would speak was packed tighter than a cable car with a tourist convention in town. The navigation instructor, whose class the pilot was taking, was a dour lieutenant commander named Otis Jones. He’d pulled every string he knew how to pull to get sea duty, but he was still here. That no doubt helped make him dour. All the same, Joe was convinced he’d been born with a lemon in his mouth.

  Now he said, “Gentlemen, it is my privilege to present to you Lieutenant Jack Hadley, formerly of the USS Yorktown, soon to return to one of the carriers now building. Lieutenant Hadley!”

  Hadley came out and saluted Jones. The cadets gave the fighter pilot a standing ovation. He eyed them with an aw-shucks grin. He wasn’t much older than they were; some of them might have been older than he was.

  “Thanks, guys,” he said. Like his clean-cut blond good looks, his flat vowels said he came from somewhere in the Midwest. Being around cadets from all over the country had made Joe way better at placing accents than he’d ever needed to be back in San Francisco. Hadley went on, “Why don’t all of you sit down again? And if you don’t mind too much, I’m gonna do the same thing.”

  No matter what Lieutenant Commander Jones said, Hadley wasn’t going back to sea right away. He walked with a pronounced limp and carried a cane. A nasty burn scar showed below his left shirt cuff; Joe wondered how far up his arm it went, and what other wounds his summer whites concealed. When Jones brought him a chair, he sank into it rather stiffly, and sat with his left leg, the bad one, out straight in front of him.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said to Jones, who nodded brusquely and sat down himself at a front-row desk he’d saved with a homemade RESERVED sign. Jack Hadley looked out at the crowded room again. “You’ve got to remember, gentlemen: I don’t have a whole lot of experience against the Japs myself. But what I’ve got is more than most Americans have, so here’s how it looks to me.

  “First thing you need to remember is, the Japs aren’t a joke. Forgetting that is the fastest way I know to get yourselves killed. All the jokes we made up till last year about them being little bucktoothed guys with funny glasses flying planes made out of tinfoil and scrap iron—all that stuff’s a bunch of hooey. They’re lousy back-stabbing so-and-sos, yeah, but they’re awful good at what they do. They flew rings around us out there.”

  He paused, a look of intense recollection on his face. Joe wondered exactly what his mind’s eye was seeing. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem pleasant. Hadley’s left arm twitched a little. Maybe that meant something, maybe it didn’t. The injured pilot was the only one who knew for sure.

  After a silence that lasted a few seconds too long for comfort, Hadley went on, “The Japs are no joke, and their planes are no joke, either. You’ve probably heard a thing or two about what the Zero can do.” He paused again, this time waiting for nods. When he got them, he resumed: “Well, everything you’ve heard is true. That’s one hell of an airplane. It’s faster than a Wildcat, it climbs better, and it can turn inside you like you wouldn’t believe—and a Wildcat’s pretty maneuverable all by itself. If you try and dogfight a Zero, you are fitting yourself for a coffin. Don’t do it. You won’t do it more than once.”

  Again, he seemed to look at something only he could see. This time, he explained what it was: “They told me the same thing I’
m telling you. I didn’t want to listen. I figured no Jap in the world had my number. Shows what I know.”

  He gathered himself. “Don’t dogfight them,” he repeated. “If you’re taking notes, write that down. If you’re not taking notes, write it down anyway.” He tried the aw-shucks grin again. It came out strained. “You’ve got two edges, and only two. A Wildcat can outdive a Zero. You can make a firing run from above and behind. Or, if you’re in a lot of trouble, you can dive out of there, and most of the time you’ll get away.”

  Joe waited to hear what the other edge was. While he waited, he underlined what he’d written about not dogfighting. But Hadley seemed to have dried up. Lieutenant Commander Jones had to prompt him: “Lieutenant . . . ?”

  “Huh?” Jack Hadley came back to himself from wherever he’d gone. “Oh. Sorry, sir. I was thinking about . . . battle damage, you might say. Yeah. Battle damage.” Was he talking about what had happened to himself, to his airplane, or to the whole fleet the USA sent against Hawaii?

  Did it matter?

  Hadley gathered himself again: “There’s one other thing you can do to at least help keep those monkeys off you. A pilot named Jimmy Thach thought it up, and the Thach Weave does some good, anyway.” He briefly described the system, explaining how a threatened plane’s sharp turn away from the enemy would alert the other pair in a four-plane element to turn towards it and give them a good shot. “This isn’t perfect, not even close,” he finished. “It takes really tight teamwork and a lot of practice to work well. But it does give us some kind of chance against a superior airplane, and we hardly had any before.”

  He took questions then. Several people, Joe among them, asked about the Thach Weave. Hadley painfully levered himself to his feet and drew diagrams on the blackboard. They helped; Joe hadn’t been able to visualize the tactic well from words alone. The circles and arrows helped him see what needed doing. Whether he could do it, and do it in coordination with other pilots—well, that might be a different question. But he was practicing formation flying, too, so he figured he’d get the hang of it.

  Then Orson Sharp said, “Sir, would you tell us about your ditching?”

  Before Hadley said anything, he sat down again. Again, his bad leg stuck out in front of him. He reached out and touched that stiff knee. “I’d already got this by then. Damn bullet came in from the side. The armor in the seat is good; the stuff in the cockpit’s not so hot. Tell you the truth, that damn Jap filled the plane full of holes. My engine was starting to cook. Thank God those radials are air-cooled, though. A liquid-cooled engine would’ve lost its coolant and frozen up on me long before, and I’d’ve gone into the drink too far from home.

  “As it was, I nursed her back toward where our ships were at. I was hoping we still had a working carrier, but no such luck. Every time the flames got going in the cockpit, I’d use the extinguisher to put ’em out—mostly.” He looked down at his burned arm. Joe couldn’t tell if he knew he was doing it.

  “I put her in the water as slow and smooth as I could,” Hadley said. “Then I pushed back the cockpit—that still worked great, in spite of all the damage I’d taken—dragged myself out, and managed to inflate my life raft. A destroyer picked me up—and here I am.”

  He gave them that farmboy grin one more time. He made it sound easy. How much fear and pain hid behind the smiling façade? Enough so that even somebody like Joe Crosetti, who’d never seen combat, could tell they were there. But, since Jack Hadley pretended they weren’t, everybody else had to do the same thing.

  Could I do that? Joe wondered. He hoped so, but he was honest enough to admit to himself that he had no idea.

  JANE ARMITAGE STOOD in line to get what the community kitchen in Wahiawa dished out for supper. As usual, what plopped onto her plate would have been the butt of a Catskills comic’s joke. The food here is lousy—and such small portions. She got a boiled potato bigger than a ping-pong ball but smaller than a tennis ball, some greens that might have been turnip tops or might have been weeds, and, unusually, a chunk of fish a little larger than a book of matches.

  By the way the fish smelled, it hadn’t been caught yesterday—or the day before, either. Jane didn’t complain. Wahiawa was as near in the middle of Oahu as made no difference. It wasn’t very far from the Pacific—nothing on the island was—but fish of any sort seldom got away from the coast. Too many hungry mouths, especially in Honolulu.

  Other people were as glad to see the treat as she was. “Isn’t that something?” was what she heard most often. She sat down at one of the tables scattered around the elementary-school playground and dug in.

  The fish had an undertaste of ammonia that went with the way it smelled. If she’d got it in a restaurant before the occupation, she would have angrily sent it back. Now she ate every crumb, all of the nondescript and rather nasty greens, and every bit of potato. She didn’t lick the plate when she was through, but some people around her did.

  Haoles mostly sat together. So did local Japanese. So did Chinese. So did Filipinos. So did Wahiawa’s handful of Koreans—as far away from the local Japanese as they could. Not all the local Japs collaborated with Major Hirabayashi and the occupiers—far from it—but enough did that people from other groups were leery about having too much to do with them.

  Jane sat and listened to the chatter around her—in English and otherwise. Blaming the local Japanese for all the troubles in Wahiawa wasn’t fair. Some of them really did see Japan as their country, more than they saw the USA that way. How could you blame them, when a lot of haoles had gone out of their way to make it plain they didn’t think Japs were as good as they were?

  And besides, the local Japanese weren’t the only collaborators. Sitting one table away from Jane was Smiling Sammy Little, who’d sold jalopies to servicemen from Schofield Barracks before the invasion. He hadn’t quite been a loan shark, but his interest rates were as high as the law allowed, and a lot of his cars were lemons. He was still smiling these days. With next to no gas on the island, he didn’t sell cars any more. But the Japs were glad to buy what he had for them.

  Jane hated him much more than she did someone like Yosh Nakayama. Smiling Sammy didn’t remember or care that he was supposed to be an American. If the Russians or the Ethiopians or the Argentines had invaded Hawaii, he would have sucked up to them, too.

  “. . . Egypt . . .” “ . . . outside of Alexandria . . .” “ . . . Montgomery . . .” Jane got tantalizing bits of conversation from the table on the other side of her. She tried to listen without paying obvious attention. Somebody over there either had an outlawed radio or knew someone else who had one. News that wasn’t Japanese propaganda did circulate in spite of everything the occupiers could do to stop it.

  She swore under her breath. They were talking in low voices, and she couldn’t hear as much as she wanted. What was going on outside of Alexandria? Had the Germans broken through at last? Or had Montgomery somehow held them? She couldn’t make it out.

  She looked back toward the pans and kettles where the cooks had fixed the evening slop. She hoped for dessert, even though she knew what it would be. If this nightmare ever ended, she’d taken a savage oath never to touch rice pudding again for the rest of her life. Hawaii still had sugar, and it had some rice. Boil them together till they were something close to glue, and there was a treat that counted as one only because there were no others.

  Jane looked down at her arms. Every time she did, she thought she was a little skinnier than before. How long could that go on before nothing was left of her, or of anyone else? Not forever, and she knew it too well. And so she didn’t despise even the sweetish library paste that went by the name of rice pudding. Calories were calories, wherever they came from.

  But the cooks gave no sign of having any dessert at all to dish out today. She swore again, not quite so softly. She was so tired of being hungry all the time. And she was just so tired. . . .

  Had it been less than a year ago that she’d walked into a restaurant and
ordered a T-bone too big to finish? She hadn’t thought anything of it. She hadn’t even asked for a bag to take home the leftovers. Christ, what a fool I was! Had she eaten beef since the Japs occupied Wahiawa? She didn’t think so.

  She carried her plate and silverware to the dishwashers. Everyone took turns at that. One of the women was saying something to another one when she walked over to them. They both clammed up before she could hear what it was. They started again when she walked off and got too far away to make out what they were saying.

  Her stomach knotted, and for once it wasn’t the wretched food. Were they gossiping about her? About somebody she knew, somebody they knew she knew? About whatever was happening outside of Alexandria?

  Whatever it was, she’d never know. They didn’t trust her enough to let her in on it. Before the war, she’d talked with her third-graders about the difference between freedom and dictatorship. She’d talked about it, yeah, but she hadn’t understood it. The difference lay in what people said to one another, and in what they didn’t say when other people might hear. It lay in trust.

  And trust, in Wahiawa, was as dead as comfortable American rule over Hawaii. If the United States came back, if the Stars and Stripes once again flew over the school and the post office and Schofield Barracks, would that trust return? How could it, once it was so badly broken?

  But if it didn’t, would the islands ever really be free again?

  FLETCH ARMITAGE WAS SICK OF DIGGING. He would have been sick of digging even if he weren’t doing it on starvation rations. He looked like a skeleton with callused hands. The Japs didn’t care. If he got too weak to dig, they wouldn’t put him in the infirmary till his strength came back. They’d just knock him over the head, the way you would with a dog that got hit by a car. Then they’d give his shovel to somebody else, and use that poor, miserable bastard up, too.

  And why not? As far as they were concerned, prisoners were fair game. They had tens of thousands of them. If they worked POWs to death, they wouldn’t have to worry nearly so much about plots and escape attempts. Skeletons with callused hands didn’t have the energy or the strength to try anything drastic. All the energy they had was focused on staying alive, and they had to put all their strength into the work. If they didn’t, the Japanese noncoms who lorded it over them made them pay.