Days of Infamy doi-1 Read online

  Jiro Takahashi didn’t say anything. He just eyed the smoke. When the Oshima Maru couldn’t hold another aku, he started the motor and steered the sampan back toward Kewalo Basin. He was not a man to go guessing wildly when he didn’t know. But he wondered whether any accident, no matter how spectacular, could have caused that kind of conflagration. He also wondered what had, what could have, if an accident hadn’t.

  Hiroshi pointed east across the water. “There’s another sampan coming in. Maybe they’ll know what’s going on. Will you steer toward them, Father?”

  Most of the time, Jiro would have gruffly shaken his head and kept on toward Honolulu. The ever-swelling black clouds to the north, though, were too big and too threatening to ignore. Without a word, he swung the Oshima Maru to starboard.

  The other skipper steered his disreputable, blue-painted fishing boat to port. He waved a dirty white cap in the direction of the Oshima Maru and shouted something across the water. Jiro couldn’t make out the words. He cupped a hand behind his ear. The other skipper shouted again. Jiro snorted in disgust. No wonder he couldn’t understand-the other man was speaking English.

  “He says, what’s going on at Pearl Harbor?” Kenzo reported.

  Hiroshi didn’t hide his disappointment. “I was hoping he’d be able to tell us,” he said in Japanese, then switched to English to yell back at the other sampan. The men on board pantomimed annoyance. They’d wanted to find out what was going on from the Takahashis.

  Kenzo called in English toward the other sampan, too. Then he return to Japanese: “We’ll run into more boats when we get closer to the basin.”

  “Hai. Honto,” Jiro said. And it was true. Somehow, though, his younger son contrived to speak Japanese with English intonations. It wasn’t Kenzo’s accent; the teachers at the Japanese school had made sure he spoke better than Jiro, who was a peasant from a long line of peasants. But anyone with an ear to hear had to notice the influence of the other language on he way he put his sentences together. They weren’t exactly wrong, but they were… different. Jiro didn’t know what to do about it. Hiroshi had the same problem, but not so badly.

  Both sampans skimmed north over the waves. Sure enough, other Maru s were also making their way back to Kewalo Basin. (To the Japanese, anything that floated was a Maru.Haoles got a laugh out of their calling sampans ships rather than boats.) On one of them, the crew were all but jumping out of their dungarees.

  Hiroshi pointed to the excited men. “They’ll know.”

  “Yes.” Jiro swung the rudder. The Oshima Maru wasn’t the only sampan making for that one, either. Now Jiro raised his voice. “What is it?” he yelled, and waved northwest, in the direction of Pearl Harbor.

  The four fishermen on the sampan had a radio. News tumbled out of them, some of it in English, some in Japanese. Jiro didn’t get all of it. But he understood enough: the Empire of Japan had attacked the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, and had struck a devastating blow.

  His first reaction was pride. “This is how Admiral Togo hit the Russians in Manchuria when I was young,” he said.

  Hiroshi and Kenzo didn’t say anything for a little while. Then, gently, his older son answered, “But, Father, you weren’t living in Manchuria when they attacked it.”

  “A surprise attack is a dirty way to start a war,” Kenzo added, not gently at all. “That’s how Hitler does things.”

  Jiro blinked. In the Nippon jiji and Jitsugyo no Hawaii and other local Japanese-language papers-the ones he paid attention to-Hitler got pretty good press. The writers worried more about Communists. Wasn’t it the same in English?

  He pointed out what was obvious to him: “This isn’t Hitler. This is Japan.”

  His sons looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to want to say anything. At last, Hiroshi did: “Father, we’re Americans.” Kenzo nodded.

  I’m not! The words leaped into Jiro’s mouth. They were true. Both his sons had to know it. Even so, he didn’t say them. If he had, something would have broken forever between the two boys and him. Sensing that, he kept quiet. Reiko would have understood, but she was of his generation, not his sons’.

  Hiroshi went on speaking carefully: “This attack is going to be bad for all the Japanese in Hawaii-all the Japanese on the mainland, too. The fat cats will think we wanted it. They’ll think we were all for it. And they’ll make us pay.” His brother nodded again, nothing but gloom on his face.

  “When have things been good for the Japanese in Hawaii?” Jiro asked. “When have the big shots not made us pay? And things would have been even worse if the Japanese government hadn’t complained and made the planters live up to their contracts. All that was before you were born, so you don’t remember. But it happened.”

  “Don’t you see, Father? That doesn’t matter now,” Kenzo said. “We’re at war with Japan.”

  We’re at war with Japan. The words stabbed Jiro like a dagger. They put him and his sons on opposite sides of a chasm. What he hadn’t said, Kenzo had. He wasn’t at war with Japan. Japan was his country. It always had been, even if he hadn’t lived there since he was young. The haoles who ran Hawaii had made it very plain that they didn’t believe he was an American, or that he could turn into one.

  His sons might think themselves Americans. The haoles who ran the islands didn’t think they were. There weren’t enough jobs for Japanese who had the education to fill them. They couldn’t move up in society. They couldn’t join the Army, either. No Japanese were allowed in the Twenty-fourth or Twenty-fifth Divisions, though every other group in Hawaii had members there. Kenzo and Hiroshi had to know that. But they didn’t want to think about it.

  And Jiro didn’t want to think about what the attack on Pearl Harbor might mean, or about what might happen in its aftermath. Because he didn’t, he steered the Oshima Maru back toward Kewalo Basin without another word. The time for a real quarrel might come later. He didn’t want it now, out on the open sea.

  The other sampans hurried north along with his. The one with the radio was a bigger boat, with a bigger engine. Minute by minute, it pulled away. That proved its undoing. A buzz in the sky swelled into a roar. A dark green fighter with unmistakable U.S. stars on wings and fuselage swooped down on the lead sampan. Machine guns roared. The fighter streaked away.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Jiro exclaimed once more. His sons stared in horror. The other sampan lay dead in the water.

  Jiro brought the Oshima Maru up alongside it. Two of the fishermen aboard were gruesomely dead, one almost cut in half by bullets, the other with his head blown open. One of the others was clutching a wounded leg. “They thought we were invading!” he moaned. The fourth fisherman, by some miracle, hadn’t been hit, but stood there in shock, a dreadful amazement frozen on his face.

  “Come on,” Jiro told his boys, trying to ignore the stink of the blood that was everywhere on the shattered sampan. “We’ve got to do what we can for them.”

  “What if that plane comes back?” Kenzo quavered.

  Jiro shrugged fatalistically. “What if it does? It shows you what the haoles think of how American you are, neh? ”

  Neither Kenzo nor Hiroshi had anything to say to that. Gulping, they scrambled onto the other sampan.

  “COME ON! COME on!” Lieutenant Yonehara shouted. “Move! Move! Move! You can’t waste a minute! You can’t even waste a second!”

  A great stream of Japanese soldiers emerged from the hold of the Nagata Maru. Once upon a time, during his brief schooling, Corporal Takeo Shimizu had heard something about the circulation of the blood. There were little things inside the blood that swirled through the body over and over again.

  Corpuscles! That was the name. He wouldn’t have bet he could put his finger on it, not after all these years. He felt like a corpuscle himself, one out of so very many. Corpuscles, though, weren’t weighted down with helmets and bayoneted rifles and packs that would sink them like stones if they couldn’t make the journey from the transport to the landing barges coming alongside. />
  It was black night, too, which didn’t make things any easier. The Nagata Maru had charged forward all through the day and after darkness came down. The ship and the other transports unloading their cargoes of soldiers and equipment were supposed to be near the north coast of Oahu. Shimizu hoped their captains and navigators knew what they were doing. If they didn’t…

  Someone stepped on his foot. That gave him something more urgent than captains and navigators to worry about. “Watch it,” he growled.

  “So sorry,” a soldier said insincerely.

  “So sorry, Corporal,” Shimizu snapped. The soldier, whoever he was, let out a startled gasp. It was still too dark to recognize faces, and Shimizu hadn’t been able to tell whose voice that was, either.

  The Nagata Maru rolled and pitched in the Pacific swells, rising and falling six or eight feet at a time. Behind Shimizu, somebody noisily lost the supper he’d had the evening before. The sharp stink made the corporal want to puke, too. Again, though, he had other things to worry about. The swells wouldn’t make boarding the barges any easier.

  His platoon commander didn’t seem worried. “This isn’t bad, men,” Lieutenant Yonehara called. “We could board in seas twice this high!”

  “Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try it,” said a soldier protected from insubordination by darkness. Another soldier stepped in the new puddle of vomit and cursed monotonously.

  Yonehara’s platoon did keep advancing toward the rail, so Corporal Shimizu supposed other men from the regiment were going down the side of the ship and onto the barges. It was either that or they were all going over the side and drowning. They could have done that back in Japanese waters, if it was what the High Command had in mind. They wouldn’t have needed to come all this way.

  “Wait!” a sailor called. The tossing didn’t seem to bother him a bit. “Another barge is coming alongside. That’s the one you’ll go into.”

  Corporal Shimizu wondered how he could tell. It was as dark as the inside of a pig. Something hard and cold caught him just above the belly button-the rail. Automatically, his hands reached out to take hold of it. His right hand closed on iron, his left on rope: part of the netting down which he’d scramble when the word came.

  He stood there, hoping the pressure behind him wouldn’t send him over the side before he was supposed to go. Without warning, the sailor slapped him on the back. “Down you go,” the fellow said. “Hurry! Don’t hold things up.”

  “Hai,” Shimizu said. He swung over the rail, hanging on for dear life while his boot found the net. If he’d been a monkey, able to grasp with feet as well as hands, everything would have been simple. As things were, he clambered down slowly and carefully.

  “Hard work!” said a soldier scrambling down beside him. Corporal Shimizu nodded. This time, that was true literally as well as metaphorically.

  The Daihatsu landing craft bobbed in the Pacific beside the Nagata Maru. It was about fifty feet long, with a beam of ten or twelve feet. Its hull was made of steel, supported by heavy wooden braces. It had twin keels riveted on to the hull. Except for the two machine guns at the bow and the steel shield protecting the wheel, it could have been a fishing boat going after sardines on the Inner Sea.

  Getting down into the barge from the transport was tricky. Shimizu clung to the net. He didn’t want to get squashed between the two vessels. If he did, they’d scrape him off the steel.

  “Come on!” a man on the barge called encouragingly. “Lean out. I’ll grab your boots and keep you safe.”

  Leaning out, taking his feet out of the net, was the last thing Shimizu had in mind. Glumly, he realized he had no choice. With the burden he was bearing, how long could he hang on with arms and hands alone? How soon would he go into the water? “Hurry up!” he called to the fellow in the barge.

  “I’ve got you,” the man answered, and so he did. “Let go. You’ll come in.”

  Reluctantly, Shimizu obeyed. He was falling… into the barge. He laughed in relief as he straightened up. “Arigato,” he said.

  “Do itashimashite.” The other man waved away his thanks. “Don’t pay back-pay forward. Help your friends coming down.”

  That was good advice, and Corporal Shimizu took it. No one got crushed between the Nagata Maru and the landing barge. There were a couple of close calls, passed off with laughs and bows and exclamations of, “Hard work!”

  The whole company squeezed onto the barge. Shimizu wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. Lieutenant Yonehara seemed pleased. “All according to plan,” he said. “We should start for Oahu any minute now.”

  “I thought we were going to Hawaii,” a soldier said.

  “Oahu is one of the islands of Hawaii,” the platoon leader explained. “It’s the one with the good harbor, and the one where the Americans have all their soldiers. Once we take it away from them, all the Hawaiian Islands are ours.”

  It all sounded very easy when Lieutenant Yonehara put it like that. Shimizu let out a soft sigh of relief. He wanted it to be easy. People said the planes from the carriers had done a good job of hitting the harbor and the rest of the island’s defenses. Shimizu had been in the Army long enough not to trust what people said. This time, though, he hoped rumor told the truth.

  The diesel engine at the stern of the landing barge took on a deeper note. The barge pulled away from the Nagata Maru. Another took its place. The motion was fierce-up hill and down dale, much worse than it had been in the freighter. Shimizu’s stomach lurched. I won’t be sick, he told himself sternly. A few soldiers did puke up whatever was in their bellies.

  Twilight began turning the eastern sky pale as the barge-one of a whole flotilla of invasion craft-lumbered toward the shore. Most of the other landing craft carried soldiers, as Shimizu’s did. Some had howitzers or light tanks aboard. Shimizu hoped they were well chained down. If they shifted, they could capsize their barges and take them to the bottom.

  Other men worried about other things. “If American planes come overhead right now, we’re sitting ducks,” a sergeant said. Nobody could contradict him, for he wasn’t wrong. What pilot could want a better target than wallowing invasion barges?

  “Will the Americans be waiting for us on the beach?” Shiro Wakuzawa asked.

  That was another good question. Shimizu didn’t know how to answer it. It was a day now since the carrier task force had started pounding Oahu. Would the Americans think it was just a hit-and-run raid, or would they expect an invasion to follow the attack from the air? Shimizu would have, but he didn’t know how Americans thought.

  Lieutenant Yonehara found his own way to deal with the question: “Whether they are on the beach or not doesn’t matter, Private. If they are, we’ll beat them there. If they aren’t, we’ll move inland and beat them wherever we find them. Plain enough?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Wakuzawa would goof off whenever he got the chance, but he wasn’t foolhardy enough to show an officer disrespect. A man who did that soon regretted the day he was born.

  The sky grew ever lighter. Soldiers pointed ahead and exclaimed, “Land!”

  “Well, what did you expect when we got into the barges?” Shimizu demanded. “That they’d dump us in the middle of the sea?” The men laughed. Some of them probably hadn’t thought much about getting into the barges one way or the other. A lot of soldiers were like that: they took things as they happened, and didn’t worry about them till they happened.

  “It’s so warm, and the air smells so good,” Private Wakuzawa said. “The weather sure is better than it was when we left the Kurils.”

  “Hai! ” Several soldiers agreed with him. Maybe Siberia had worse weather than the Kurils did, but maybe not, too. After all, most of the weather those northern islands got blew straight down from Siberia.

  The machine guns at the landing barge’s bow began banging away. Shimizu followed the lines of tracers rising up into the brightening sky and saw his worst nightmare-everybody’s worst nightmare-real
ized. Three American fighter planes were swooping down on the fleet of barges. Their guns started winking. Bullets kicked up spurts of water. Screams from other barges said not all the bullets were splashing into the Pacific.

  But then the American planes suddenly broke off the attack. They darted away. Zeros swooped down on them like falcons after doves. Takeo Shimizu let out a wordless cry of joy and relief. An American fighter caught fire and cartwheeled into the sea. Another went down a moment later. Shimizu didn’t see what happened to the third, but it didn’t come back. Nothing else really mattered.

  “If I ever meet those Zero pilots, I’ll buy them all the sake they can drink,” Private Wakuzawa exclaimed. “I thought we were in trouble.”

  “The Navy will not let us down,” Lieutenant Yonehara said. He might have said much more than that; Wakuzawa had shown not just a lack of confidence but a lack of martial spirit. But the platoon leader dropped it there. Maybe he’d had a moment of alarm, too. Shimizu knew he had, even if he’d kept quiet about it.

  He peered south. The sun came up over the horizon, spilling ruddy light across the golden beaches dead ahead, the palm trees just behind them, and the jungle-clad mountains a little farther inland. The sight was one of the most beautiful Shimizu had ever seen. It all seemed so peaceful. It wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  Waves broke on the beach. They looked like pretty good-sized waves to Shimizu. Could the barge get through them without flipping over? He hoped so. He’d find out any minute now.

  A few machine guns on the shore started shooting at the invasion barges. The barges shot back. Something bigger and heavier threw shells at the Japanese-those were big splashes rising from the sea. Zeros dove at the beach. Dive bombers appeared overhead. They swooped down, too. The shelling suddenly stopped.

  Some of the machine guns kept firing. Two bullets ricocheted off the shield that protected the sailor at the wheel. A soldier howled when another one, instead of ricocheting, struck home. Shimizu had fought in China. He’d seen plenty of gunfire worse than this. It was just something a soldier went through on the imperial way. To the new men, it must have seemed very heavy and frightening.