Days of Infamy doi-1 Page 5

  What might have been the voice of God thundered from the island: “Prepare to launch planes!”

  The sailors in blue whipped away the chocks. The lead Wildcat rolled forward, a man in yellow walking backwards just ahead of it, leading it on to a point midway up the flight deck. A little ahead of the island stood another man in a yellow jersey. This one held a checkered flag in his right hand.

  That biblically amplified voice roared again: “Launch planes!”

  As the man with the flag turned his free hand in a grinding motion, the squadron leader gunned his engine. When the note suited the sailor in yellow, he dropped the flag. The plane sped down the deck and zoomed off into the air. The next fighter taxied up to the takeoff line. At the flagman’s orders, the pilot built up the boost on his engine. The flag fell. The Wildcat roared away.

  Then it was Peterson’s turn. The sailors in blue jerseys pulled away the chocks. Up to the line he went, following the man in yellow. The flagman made his grinding motion. Peterson gave his engine the gun. Down went the flag. Peterson whooped with delight. Acceleration shoved him back in his seat as the fighter raced down the Enterprise ’s flight deck.

  As always when he went off the end of the deck, there was that sickening lurch, that moment when he wondered whether he’d go into the sky or into the drink. But the Wildcat climbed after the two planes that had taken off ahead. Peterson whooped again. This was where he was meant to be, what he was meant to do.

  More fighters rose from the carrier. They formed in pairs: leader and wingman. Peterson’s wingman was a j.g. named Marvin Morrison. He had a squeaky tenor voice that broke when he got excited, which happened frequently. It sounded in Peterson’s earphones now: “We’re going to clean the Japs’ clocks for them.”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Peterson agreed. “If they want a war, Marv, we’ll give ’em all the war they want-you bet your ass we will.”

  Similar outraged chatter crackled through the squadron. Along with the outrage was a sense of astonishment: how could the Japanese, with their buck-toothed, bespectacled pilots and their lousy scrap-metal planes, dare to take on the United States of America? The fighter pilots also monitored radio traffic from Pearl Harbor. When one frantic officer relayed rumors that the Japs had German pilots doing some of their flying for them, Peterson nodded to himself. The little yellow men couldn’t have done it all on their own. Say what you would about the Nazis, but they’d shown the world they knew what the hell they were doing when it came to war.

  He saw the thick black smoke rising into the blue tropical sky when he was still a devil of a long way out from Pearl. More and more of it came up every minute, too. “Jesus,” he said softly. With or without help from Hitler’s Aryan supermen, the Japs had done something really terrible here.

  Radio from Pearl Harbor abruptly cut off. He didn’t think it was silence imposed by command. More likely, a bomb had wrecked the transmitter-the signal went away in the middle of a word.

  As Peterson drew closer to Oahu, he saw more smoke rising from the Marine Corps airfield at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. In fact, people in Honolulu used Ewa as a synonym for west, the same as they used Waikiki for east. Till he got close, though, the small smoke from Ewa was lost in the greater conflagration of Pearl Harbor.

  And the closer he got, the worse those fires looked. The tank farms had to be burning, sending untold millions of gallons of fuel oil up in smoke. Peterson swore softly, more in awe than in anger. This was a disaster, nothing else but. Somebody’d been asleep at the switch, or it never could have happened. Heads would roll among the big brass. They’d have to. But that did nobody one damn bit of good now.

  “Bandits!” In Peterson’s earphones, that was more a cry of exultation than a mere word. “Bandits dead ahead!”

  He peered through the bulletproof windscreen. Sure as hell, there they were: shiny silver planes with meatballs on their wings and sides. They were tiny as toys now, but swelled even as he watched. “Come on, Marv!” he called to his wingman. “Time to go hunting!”

  “I’m right with you,” Morrison answered.

  Peterson more than half expected the Japs to run away. Now they’d have to fight, after all, not just kick somebody while he was down. Did they really have the balls for that? But they’d seen the planes from the Enterprise, too, and here they came.

  His thumb tensed on the firing button on top of the stick. Just when he thought he had the first of the enemy fighters in his sights, though, the Jap did a flick roll and zoomed upwards. Christ, but he’s maneuverable, Peterson thought, and then, with a twinge of alarm, He climbs like a son of a bitch, too.

  He gave his Wildcat full throttle. If the Jap wanted to dogfight, he’d play along. Marvin Morrison stuck to him like a burr, the way a good wingman was supposed to. Several of the Wildcats were shooting now, flames spurting from the four.50-caliber machine guns each one carried. A Japanese fighter fell from the sky trailing smoke and flame. Peterson whooped.

  But the enemy planes were firing, too, and the shells from their wing-mounted cannon bit chunks out of the fighters from the Enterprise when they hit. And they seemed to be able to hit whenever they pleased. Peterson rapidly discovered that dogfighting the Japs was a mistake. It was like trying to pick up water with a fork. Their fighters could turn inside his and out-climb him as if the Wildcat were nailed to the mat.

  This isn’t right, he told himself. What the hell are they doing with hotter planes than we’ve got?

  “I’m hit!” Morrison wailed in his earphones. “I’m going down!” The wingman’s Wildcat spun toward the ground and the sea far, far below. Flames licked back from the engine cowling toward the cockpit.

  “Get out!” Peterson screamed. “Get out while you can!” But he didn’t think Marvin Morrison could.

  And then he had to stop worrying about Marv and try to save his own skin. The Jap he’d been hunting had been hunting him, too. Now the bastard was on his tail. Peterson jinked like a maniac, but he couldn’t shake the enemy or turn the tables on him. Tracers flashed past. Peterson tensed, not that that would do him any good if a shell slammed through his armored seat and into his back.

  Machine-gun bullets stitched across his wing. Two cannon shells hit his engine, one right after the other. It quit. None of his cursing and clawing brought it back to life. All of a sudden, he was flying the world’s most expensive glider.

  He’d told his luckless wingman to get out. Now he had to follow his own advice-if he could. He pushed back the canopy. The slipstream tore at him as he unfastened his harness. Then he was out, and past the tail that could have cut him in half, and falling free… right through the middle of this mad aerial combat. A couple of tracers seemed close enough to touch as he plunged earthward.

  He probably pulled the ripcord sooner than he should have. The jolt of the parachute opening made the world go red for a moment. He tried to steer himself toward land and away from the Pacific. He had a Mae West, but even so… Better the jungle than the sharks.

  Oh, Jesus, here came a Jap fighter, straight for him. Was that the pilot who’d shot him down? One burst from the bastard’s machine guns and he was a dead man. The fighter roared past. The man in the cockpit waved to him as it went by.

  Peterson waved back with a one-finger salute. Fortunately, the enemy flier either didn’t see it or didn’t know what it meant. He flew back into the fight instead of returning to wipe out the insult in blood.

  Like bad-tempered dandelion fluff, Peterson floated down. He spilled air from the chute and swung his weight this way and that, fighting not to go into the drink. And he didn’t. He came down on the fairway of a golf course about a quarter of a mile from the sea.

  Two gray-haired men advanced on him with upraised five-irons. “Surrender!” they shouted.

  In spite of everything, he almost burst out laughing. Here he was, taller than either one of them, fairer than either one of them-and they thought he was a goddamn Jap because he came out of the sky. “Get me to a car and g
et me to an airfield,” he growled. “If they can find a plane for me, I’ve got some more fighting to do.”

  The golfers gaped at him as if he’d started spouting Japanese. If they’d lived here a while, they might even have understood some Japanese. Did they understand English? “I think he’s an American, Sid,” one of them said, as if announcing miracles.

  “You’re right, Bernie,” the other declared after cogitations of his own.

  Peterson felt like murdering them both. Instead, they drove him back towards Ewa. To the east, the flames and smoke of the U.S. Navy’s funeral pyre climbed higher into the air every moment. Soot floated down like black rain.

  IN HIS ZERO, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo watched Pearl Harbor go up in smoke below him. This was the blow Commander Fuchida had wanted to strike: the blow against the harbor’s great tank farms and repair facilities. Even if the invasion of Oahu failed by some accident, the Americans would have a devil of a time getting much use out of their forward base in the Pacific. The channel was plugged, too, with ships sunk trying to steam out and fight. The Japanese task force wouldn’t have to worry about sorties, not for a while.

  Shindo flew at four thousand meters. The thick, black, greasy smoke had already climbed past him. How high would it go? How far would the pall spread? He couldn’t begin to guess. He also couldn’t see the ground as well as he would have liked, for the smoke obscured it. The very success of the attack was ruining reconnaissance.

  “We were attacked by carrier-based aircraft flying in from the west,” Shindo said into the radio. He knew the carriers wouldn’t answer, but Admiral Nagumo, Commander Genda, and Commander Fuchida urgently needed to hear. “Repeat: attacked by carrier-based aircraft from the west. Approximate bearing 290 degrees from Pearl Harbor. Range unknown, but not likely to be far. Out.”

  His lips curled up at the corners in the disciplined beginnings of a smile. He’d knocked down two Wildcats himself. The pilot of one had managed to get out and get his chute open; he thought he’d killed the other American flier in the cockpit. The enemy was brave-no doubt about that. But Shindo had quickly seen he and his men were better trained. And the Zero could fly rings around the slow, stubby Wildcat.

  Shindo laughed softly. He knew how the Americans looked down their noses at Japan and what she made. Well, the arrogant white men had got themselves a little surprise today.

  Back aboard the task force, they’d be launching a flight of Nakajima B5N2s. They’d held the torpedo bombers out of the third wave just in case American carriers showed up. Now at least one was on the board. Shindo would have bet there was only one, or the enemy would have thrown more fighters at his force.

  The plan called for his planes to plaster Schofield Barracks after they’d finished with Pearl Harbor. But he knew he could fly along the bearing from which the Wildcats had come and have a good chance of finding the carrier that had launched them. The B5N2s would be coming from much farther away. They wouldn’t know where along that bearing the carrier might lie, so they’d have to waste time searching.

  Shindo made up his mind. He pulled half a dozen Zeros and ten Aichi D3A1 dive bombers out of the Schofield Barracks attack and ordered them off to the west with him. If that carrier was there, he wanted to be in at the kill. Taking it out might be the most important thing the Japanese Navy did.

  There was Ewa down below. Planes still burned on the runways, where they’d been lined up almost wingtip-to-wingtip: a perfect target. The Americans had a couple of antiaircraft guns up and working. They fired at Shindo’s detachment, but the shell bursts didn’t come close.

  On he flew, out over the Pacific. It was so much bluer and more beautiful than it had been around Japan. The air above Oahu had smelled sweet and spicy before battle began. This was a wonderful place. It would make a fine addition to the Japanese Empire. But to make sure it did, where was that carrier?

  If I’m on a wild-goose chase… Alone in the cockpit, Shindo shrugged. If he was, he was. He had to take the chance.

  There was Kauai, off to the northwest of Oahu. The Garden Island, its nickname was. He’d run into that in an intelligence briefing. It was supposed to be even lovelier than Oahu. Shindo wondered if that were possible.

  Then all thoughts of Kauai, all thoughts of beauty, vanished from his head. There south of the island were ships, their white wakes very visible as they steamed towards Oahu at full speed. Shindo’s heart thuttered with excitement. Now-was the U.S. carrier with them? Yes, that had to be it, there at the heart of the flotilla. The escorting ships-were those battleships, or only cruisers?

  He couldn’t tell. He didn’t care, or not much. The carrier counted for more than all the others put together. He radioed its position to his own fleet and to the torpedo bombers that already had to be on the way.

  Then he spoke to the pilots he led: “The carrier is your first priority. Attack it at all costs. Only after it is destroyed will you worry about any other ships. Banzai for the Emperor!”

  Answering Banzai! s dinned in his earphones. The American ships swelled as he drew closer to them. Flame and smoke burst from the guns of the forward vessels. They’d spotted him, then. Black puffs of smoke dotted the sky ahead. They hadn’t quite found the range. But they would. They would.

  “Enemy fighters ahead!” a Zero pilot yelled.

  Shindo swore, but only mildly. Of course the American carrier would have a combat air patrol overhead. Zeros orbited the Japanese task force, too-just in case. “Our job is to keep those fighters off our dive bombers,” he radioed to his comrades. “We are expendable. They are not. Let’s go.” He didn’t shout Banzai! again. He was not a showy man.

  The Zero’s engine roared as he brought it up to full combat power. He and his fellow fighter pilots left the D3N1s behind as if they were nailed to the sky. There were the Wildcats, boring in on them. He’d already seen the American Navy fliers had courage and to spare.

  What they didn’t have was enough in the way of airplanes under them. The Zeros slashed into the enemy planes. One Wildcat after another tumbled toward the Pacific. A Zero fell, too, and then another. The Japanese fighters were lighter and faster and more maneuverable than the Americans, but the Wildcats could take more punishment and keep flying.

  There-Shindo turned quicker and harder than any Wildcat could hope to do. His thumb came down on the firing button. The twin 20mm cannon in his wings roared. A tracer round scored a line of what Japanese pilots called ice candy across the sky. Shells blew holes in the Wildcat just behind the cockpit. No plane could survive punishment like that. Spinning wildly, flames pouring from it, the American fighter went down.

  Where were the dive bombers? In the fight to keep the Wildcats off them, Shindo had lost track. Then the glint of sun off a cockpit let him spy them. They’d gone into their attack run, stooping on the frantically zigzagging carrier like so many falcons.

  In these cerulean seas, the American Navy’s camouflage scheme-dark gray below and light gray above-left something to be desired. It was better suited to gloomier climes farther north. Even from his height, Shindo could make out the planes on the flight deck. Whether the carrier was going to fly them to Oahu or launch a strike against his task force, he didn’t know. Too late now, either way.

  Antiaircraft fire snarled up at the diving Aichis. One of them was hit, caught fire, and spiraled into the Pacific. Its bomb went off when it struck, sending up a white geyser of water. But the rest of the dive bombers pressed on fearlessly. They released their bombs one after another and pulled up and away.

  “Banzai! ” Shindo shouted when the first bombs exploded. But they were near misses, one astern, the other to port. The carrier kept dodging, staggering across the sea like a drunk. It did not save her, though. The next three bombs were hits: one near the stern, one on the island, and one not far from the bow. The bursts of flame and great clouds of black smoke showed him the difference between what he’d thought a hit looked like and the real thing.

  The hit near the stern, a
mong the airplanes loaded with fuel and torpedoes and bombs, was the one that devastated the carrier. Secondary explosions followed almost at once as the munitions, bathed in fire, went off on their own. Engines damaged, the stricken ship slowed to a crawl. Brave men crewed her, though. The antiaircraft guns that hadn’t been knocked out kept firing at the Japanese planes.

  Seeing their comrades’ success, the last three dive bombers pulled up without dropping their bombs. “What are you doing?” Shindo called to them.

  “Sir, the carrier is dead in the water,” one of those pilots replied. “We request permission to attack a battleship instead.”

  “I think they’re cruisers,” Shindo said. “But even if they are battleships, the carrier is the primary target.” He looked down at it. The Aichi pilot was right; it could not move at all. Still, the Americans were supposed to be very clever, very skillful, at damage control. Shindo made up his mind. “Two of you will strike the carrier again. The third may use his bomb against a cruiser. Do you understand me? All three of you-speak up!”

  “Aye aye, sir!” they chorused.

  “Obey, then.” Shindo radioed the rest of the D3A1s: “Go back to the ships. If you pass the torpedo bombers coming this way, give them a course.”

  The three bomb-laden Aichis climbed back up into the sky, then dove once more. As Shindo had commanded, two of them attacked the carrier. One missed even though the target lay dead in the water. The other bomb, though, struck square amidships. Shindo thought afterwards that that one might have been enough to sink her all by itself. She began to list to starboard. The list quickly grew. Whatever men remained aboard her could do nothing to stop it.

  Shindo was so intent on watching her that the fire and smoke suddenly spurting from a cruiser’s-or was it a battleship’s? — superstructure took him by surprise. “Banzai! ” an excited young pilot shouted in his earphones. “That is a very solid hit!”