End of the Beginning Read online

  Lieutenant Foster slid back the canopy. He and Joe climbed out of the Texan. The flying instructor was a lanky six-footer. He towered over Joe, who barely made five-seven. That might have mattered if they were bashing at each other with swords. Who cared how big a pilot was? Joe had heard Southerners say, It’s not the size of the dog in the fight—it’s the size of the fight in the dog. What the Japanese had done since December 7 proved the same thing, but Joe wasn’t inclined to give a bunch of goddamn Japs credit for anything.

  He eyed the Texan with a mixture of exasperation and affection. It was a big step up from the sedate Stearman biplane on which he’d done his primary flight training. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a Yellow Peril buzzed by overhead. The Navy painted all its Stearmans a luminous yellow to warn other pilots that trainees were in the air.

  Yes, the Texan was a long step up from a Yellow Peril. It was a monoplane with a real metal skin, not the doped canvas covering a Stearman. It had a machine gun in the left wing root—the one Joe had used to blast away at the target another plane towed. It had bomb racks, too. It could do a pretty good job of impersonating a warplane.

  But it was only an impersonation. The Texan’s engine put out half the horsepower of a Wildcat’s. Its top speed was only about two-thirds of the Navy fighter’s. That that all made it much more forgiving than the genuine article was only a detail to Joe.

  Groundcrew men came out to detach the plane’s tailhook from the wire and get it out of the way so another cadet could land on the yellow-outlined “carrier deck.” Lieutenant Foster said, “How soon do you think you’ll be ready to solo in a Texan?”

  Joe blinked. He hadn’t expected that question from Foster, especially not after the instructor reamed out his navigation. But it had only one possible answer: “Sir, I’m ready to take a swing at it right this minute if you want me to.”

  Foster had blond hair, a lock of which kept falling down on his forehead, and an aw-shucks smile that probably put the girls in mind of Gary Cooper. It put skinny, swarthy Joe Crosetti in mind of the Nob Hill nobs who looked down their straight noses at dagos like him. But the officer didn’t give him a hard time because of his last name or his looks. Foster said, “I approve of your spirit, Mr. Crosetti. The Navy needs more men who don’t hesitate. But if the flesh doesn’t quite measure up to it, you’re better off waiting, and the country would be better off if you did, too.” Joe must have looked stubborn, or maybe angry, because the flying instructor sighed and went on, “How many memorial services have you attended since you got here?”

  “Uh, a few, sir,” Joe admitted. He’d been to more than a few, and he was sure Wiley Foster knew it. As soon as cadets started getting up into the air, they started finding ways to kill themselves. One midair collision between Yellow Perils had wiped out two cadets and two instructors. Cadets had crashed on the runway. They’d gone into the swamps around Pensacola Naval Air Station. A kid took a Stearman out over the Gulf of Mexico and never came back. No one ever found a trace of him—he was missing and presumed dead. All the same, Joe said, “That wouldn’t happen to me.” He had faith in his own indestructibility.

  Lieutenant Foster clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That’s what they all say. Sometimes it’s the last thing they say.” He eyed Joe. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I can swing it,” Joe said stubbornly.

  Foster looked down at the card on which he’d recorded Joe’s marks for the session. “Maybe you can, by God. Next time you go up, you’ll go up by yourself.”

  “Thank you, sir!” Joe wanted to get all excited. He did get all excited, but he didn’t let most of it show. He was damned if he’d act Italian in front of somebody who looked the way Wiley Foster did.

  He did head back to the barracks at the next thing to a dead run. When he first got to Pensacola, he and his roomie had shared a tent. Some cadets still slept under canvas—no enormous handicap in the steamy Pensacola summertime. But he and Orson Sharp had graduated to better things.

  By the time he got to the two-story brick barracks building, he was drenched in sweat. San Francisco hadn’t come close to getting him ready for Florida heat and humidity. His father was a fisherman; he’d gone out of Fisherman’s Wharf with his old man on weekends and during summers before he landed the job at Scalzi’s garage. Till he got here, though, he’d never understood what a lobster went through when you dropped it in boiling water.

  Heat and humidity or not, he took the stairs two at a time. He ran down the hall and threw the door open. Orson Sharp sat in a chair by his bunk, studying navigation. The cadet from Salt Lake City was big and fair and even-tempered. He didn’t swear and he didn’t drink coffee, let alone beer. Sharp was the first Mormon Joe had ever met. Joe sometimes thought he was too good to be true, though he never would have said so.

  “How did it go?” Sharp asked, looking up from his book.

  Joe’s enormous grin probably said everything he needed to say, but he spelled it out just the same: “Lieutenant Foster’s going to let me solo next time I go up! I can’t wait!”

  His roomie’s pleasure seemed entirely unalloyed. “That’s terrific! I know you were hoping, but I don’t think you expected it quite so soon.”

  “Nope. He liked my firing run at the target. I think that’s what clinched it.” Slower than he should have, Joe remembered Sharp had flown this morning, too. “How about you?”

  “My instructor let me take it up by myself today.” Sharp shrugged in wry self-deprecation. “I lived.”

  Joe fought down a stab of jealousy. His roommate had soloed in a Stearman a week before he had, too. Sharp did everything well and didn’t fuss about anything. He was so unassuming, you almost had to act the same way around him. Joe walked over and stuck out his hand. “Way to go! Congratulations!”

  “Thanks, buddy.” Orson Sharp’s hand was almost half again as big as his. When the cadets played football, Sharp was a lineman. Joe played end or defensive back. He was quick, but he wasn’t big. “We’re getting there,” Sharp added.

  “Yeah!” Joe said. “We’ve still got instrument flying to do, on the Link trainers on the ground and then up in the air, and I suppose they’ll give us some flight time on F3Fs, too.” The Navy’s last biplane fighter had stayed in front-line service till less than two months before Pearl Harbor. Joe tried to imagine F3Fs mixing it up with Zeros. Perhaps mercifully, the picture didn’t want to form. Now the F3F was a last-step trainer. Joe added two more words: “And then . . .”

  “And then we see where they assign us,” Sharp said. “Did you put down VC on all three lines on your preference questionnaire way back when?”

  “Carrier duty? You bet your . . . You bet I did.” Around his roomie, Joe didn’t swear very much, either. “You?”

  “Oh, sure,” Sharp answered. “If they don’t give me that, I don’t care what I get. Everything else is a booby prize.”

  “I’m with you.” Joe didn’t give a damn about patrol planes or flying boats (no, that wasn’t true—he hated Jap flying boats, because one had dropped a bomb on the house where his uncle and aunts and cousins lived, but he didn’t give a damn about piloting an American flying boat) or anything but carrier-based air, preferably fighters.

  “I hope we do end up together,” Orson Sharp said seriously. “We’ve made a pretty good team so far.”

  “Uh-huh.” Joe nodded. “I better get some more of that navigation under my belt, too, or else I’m not going anywhere.” He pulled his own book out of the metal footlocker by his bed and sat down in a chair. He knew his roomie would give him a hand where he had trouble. He’d helped Sharp through some of the mysteries of engine maintenance. They did make a pretty good team. Look out, Hirohito, Joe thought, and dove into the book.

  LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO RARELY GOT EXCITED about anything. Some people said the Navy pilot was a cold fish. He didn’t see it like that. To his way of thinking, most people got excited over nothing.

  He stood on the A
kagi’s flight deck and looked around Pearl Harbor. The view here wasn’t what it had been before Japan and the United States went to war. Then the American ships in the harbor were tied up alongside piers or rested easily at anchor. Now they were nothing but twisted, blackened, rusting metal. Some of them still leaked oil into the water. Shindo could see several of those rainbow patches. The mineral stink of the fuel oil fouled the tropical breeze.

  The third wave of Japanese planes over Oahu had sunk two American destroyers in the channel leading out from Pearl Harbor to the Pacific, trapping the rest of the U.S. Pacific Fleet inside the harbor and letting the Japanese pound it to pieces at their leisure. Shindo nodded to himself. The Americans would have tried to sortie against the Japanese strike force. They probably wouldn’t have had much luck, not without carrier support, but just as well they hadn’t got the chance.

  Japanese naval engineers had got the destroyers out of the channel only a few weeks before the failed American invasion. Shindo was glad they had. Now Akagi had somewhere local to make repairs without worrying about American submarines: the antitorpedo net was back in place at the mouth of the channel.

  Shindo laughed unpleasantly. The Yankees hadn’t bothered with torpedo netting for individual ships last December. They hadn’t figured anyone could rig torpedoes to run in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. Japan taught them otherwise. The devastation here proved that.

  Devastation held sway on land, too. Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, had been palm trees and ferns where it wasn’t U.S. Navy installations. Now it was rubble with greenery poking through; hardly anything held greenery in check for long here. The Americans had fought house to house in Pearl City, north of the harbor. The town where Navy personnel and the civilians who worked for them lived was as battered as the island.

  And the land to the east was worse. The Americans had stored their fuel there, and Japanese bombs sent the oil and gas up in smoke. Shindo vividly remembered the smoke: the funeral pyre of U.S. ambitions in the Pacific. The great black greasy plume had stayed in place for weeks, till the fires finally burned themselves out. Nothing grew there. Shindo wondered whether anything ever would. Ford Island and Pearl City had seen war. The tank farms had seen hell.

  Near those fuel tanks had stood the U.S. Navy repair facilities. The Yankees wrecked those themselves when they realized they weren’t going to be able to hold Oahu. Japanese engineers were full of professional admiration for the job their American counterparts did. It made operating Pearl Harbor as a base for the Japanese Navy much harder—much harder, but not impossible.

  As if to underscore that, Akagi’s flight deck vibrated under Shindo’s feet. Metallic clatters and bangs came from below. A dive bomber had got one home on the carrier during the fight north of the Hawaiian Islands. The bomb penetrated the flight deck near the bow and exploded in the hangar. Luckily, just about all the ship’s planes were in the air, defending Akagi or attacking the enemy’s carriers. Otherwise, things would have been even worse.

  Damage-control parties had got steel plates over the hole in the flight deck so the carrier could launch aircraft. That was the essential, the indispensable, repair. Everything else had waited. The crew was attending to the rest now, as best they could here in Hawaiian waters.

  Zuikaku, much more badly damaged than Akagi, had had to limp back to Japan for repairs. That left her sister ship, Shokaku, the only undamaged Japanese carrier in the Eastern Pacific. Shindo muttered to himself. Shokaku’s fliers and sailors had less experience than Akagi’s. In a crisis . . .

  No less a personage than Admiral Yamamoto thought a crisis unlikely any time soon. The Americans had hurt the Japanese carrier force. Japan had crushed the Americans. Two of the three U.S. carriers that had sailed from the American mainland lay on the bottom of the Pacific now. The third, hurt worse than either Akagi or Zuikaku, had barely staggered back to the West Coast. Whatever invasion fleet followed behind the carriers and their escorts had also run for home.

  We smashed them, Shindo thought complacently. If they come back here again, we’ll smash them again, that’s all.

  A tall, horse-faced officer came up onto the flight deck from below. Seeing Shindo, he waved and walked toward him. Shindo waved back, then saluted as the other man drew closer. “How are you feeling, Fuchida-san?” he asked.

  “Better day by day, thanks,” Commander Mitsuo Fuchida answered. He’d come down with appendicitis during the fight with the Americans. He’d completed his attack run, brought his bomber back to Akagi, gone straight to sick bay, and parted with the inflamed organ.

  “Glad to hear it,” Shindo said. He’d led Akagi’s fighters during the last wave of the attack on Oahu and in the recent battle against the Yankees north of Hawaii. Fuchida had been in overall command in the first wave and also, illness or no, in the fight where he’d come down sick.

  “It’s over. I got through it. They patched me up,” Fuchida said as more clanging and banging came from the hangar deck. Fuchida smiled. “Akagi can say the same thing.”

  “I wish it weren’t taking so long,” Shindo grumbled. A thoroughly businesslike man, he didn’t notice Fuchida’s joke till it was too late to respond. Keeping his mind on business, he looked north and east. “I wonder what the Americans are doing with that beat-up flattop of theirs.”

  “She’s under repair up in Seattle,” Fuchida answered.

  “Ah, so desu? I hadn’t heard that,” Shindo said.

  “I just found out a few hours ago myself,” Fuchida said. “One of our H8Ks spotted her. They’re amazing aircraft.” Enthusiasm filled his face. And the big flying boats were remarkable planes. Flying out of what had been the Pearl City Pan Am Clipper base, they could reach the West Coast of the USA for reconnaissance work or even to drop bombs. Fuchida had flown on one in a three-plane raid on San Francisco. That, no doubt, accounted for a good part of his enthusiasm.

  It also made Shindo jealous as could be. Fuchida was very able. Nobody would have quarreled with that; Shindo certainly didn’t. Because he was so able, he sometimes got to do things he wasn’t strictly entitled to do. Sitting in the copilot’s seat of an H8K was one of those, sure enough.

  None of what Shindo thought showed on his face. That was true most of the time, but he made a special point of it now. The two of them served together, but they weren’t close friends the way Fuchida and Minoru Genda were. And Fuchida had two grades on Shindo. Letting a superior see what you thought of him was never a good idea.

  All Shindo asked, then, was, “What else are the Yankees doing in Seattle?”

  “Working around the clock, seems like,” Fuchida answered. “It’s that way whenever we get a look at one of their ports. They haven’t given up.”

  “If they want another go at us, they can have it,” Shindo said. “We’ll give them the same kind of lesson we did six weeks ago.” He paused, eyeing Fuchida. Now the other naval aviator’s face was the sort of polite blank mask behind which anything could have hidden. Shindo decided to press a little to see what was there: “We’re just about back up to strength here with aircraft and pilots.”

  “In numbers, yes,” Fuchida said. “Do you think the replacements fly as well as the men we lost? Are the bombardiers as accurate?”

  So that was it. Shindo said, “They’ll get better as they get more flying time. I was thinking the same thing not long ago about Shokaku’s crew.”

  “I hope so.” Fuchida still sounded worried. “We don’t have the fuel to give them all the practice I wish they could get.”

  Saburo Shindo grunted. That, unfortunately, was true. Blowing up the tank farms had hurt Japan as well as the USA—though the Americans surely would have fired them to deny them to the invaders. As things were, the Japanese in Hawaii didn’t have the fuel to do all the patrolling by air or water Shindo would have liked to see. They’d spent gasoline and fuel oil like a drunken sailor to get through the last battle. Now they had to bring in more, a ship at a time. It wasn’t a good way to do busi
ness, not when the merchant ships were short of fuel, too—and not when American subs would be hunting them.

  “How soon will we be able to start using the oil we’ve taken in the Dutch East Indies?” Shindo asked.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t got the slightest idea,” Fuchida answered. “Maybe Commander Genda would know, but I don’t.”

  “If it’s not pretty soon, why did we go to war?” Shindo grumbled.

  “Because if we hadn’t gone to war, we wouldn’t have any oil coming in at all,” Fuchida said. “And you can’t very well worry about using or rationing what you don’t have.”

  However much Shindo would have liked to argue with him, he didn’t see how he could.

  JIM PETERSON STOOD IN THE CHOW line with his mess kit and spoon. The rice and vegetables the Japs doled out to American POWs in labor gangs weren’t enough to keep body and soul together. That didn’t mean he wasn’t hungry and didn’t want the meager supper. Oh, no! For a little while after he ate it, he’d feel . . . not quite so bad.

  He’d seen what happened when people got too weary to give a damn about food. The Japs didn’t let them rest. They worked them just as hard as anybody else, and beat them if they couldn’t keep up. And if the POWs died under such treatment—well, tough luck. Japan hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention. As far as her soldiers were concerned, surrender was the ultimate disgrace. Having surrendered, the American soldiers and sailors on Oahu were essentially fair game.

  Plop! The man four in front of Peterson got his miserable supper. Plop! The man three in front. Plop! Two in front. Plop! The guy right ahead of Peterson. And then, plop!—he got his. For ten or fifteen seconds, the world was a glorious place. He had food! He hurried off to eat it, cradling the mess tin to his chest like a miser with a sack of gold.

  A lump of gluey rice and anonymous greens about the size of a softball—that was what he was getting all excited about. He knew it. It shamed him. It made him disgusted at himself. But he couldn’t help it. That was how much his body craved even the scanty nourishment the Japs gave him.