Days of Infamy doi-1 Page 8

  Shiro Wakuzawa said, “The Americans won’t have any ammunition left for when we come ashore if they keep shooting like this.”

  “Oh, I think they’ll save a bullet or two,” Shimizu said. “Maybe even three.” Some of the first-year soldiers, taking him seriously, gave back solemn nods. Most of them, though, joined the men who’d been in the Army longer and laughed.

  Somebody pointed to the water, right where the waves began breaking. “Are those people? What are they doing? They must be out of their minds!”

  Two nearly naked men rode upright on long boards toward the beach. Bullets must have whipped past them in both directions. They seemed oblivious. They skimmed along on the crest of a wave, side by side. Shimizu stared at them, entranced. He’d never dreamt of such a skill.

  “They must be Americans. Shall I knock them down?” asked a machine gunner at the bow of the barge.

  “No!” Corporal Shimizu was one of the dozen men shouting the same thing at the same time. He added, “They might almost be kami, the way they glide along.”

  “Christians talk about their Lord Jesus walking on water,” Lieutenant Yonehara said. “I never thought I would see it with my own eyes.”

  The two men reached the beach still upright on their boards. Then they did the first merely human thing Shimizu had seen from them: they scooped the boards up under their arms and ran. That was also an eminently sensible thing to do. Machine-gun bullets kicked up sand around their feet. Not all the men on the landing barges must have felt as sporting as the soldiers on this one. But Shimizu didn’t see them fall. Maybe they really were spirits. How could an ordinary man be sure?

  His own barge came ashore, much less gracefully than the surf-riders had. It didn’t quite bury its bow in the sand, but it came close. He staggered. He didn’t know how he stayed on his feet. Somehow, he managed. “Off!” the sailors were screaming. “Get off! We have to go back for more men! Hurry!”

  He scrambled out of the barge and jumped down. His boots scrunched in the sand. Some Americans were still shooting from the plants-almost the jungle-on the far side of the road. Machine-gun and rifle muzzles flashed malevolently. A bullet cracked past Shimizu’s head, so close that he felt, or thought he felt, the wind of its passage.

  He couldn’t run away. There was no away to run to, not at the edge of a hostile beach. He ran forward instead. If he and his comrades didn’t kill those Americans, the Americans would kill them instead. “Come on!” he shouted, and the men in his squad came.

  OSCAR VAN DER KIRK and Charlie Kaapu spent their Sunday morning surf-riding at Waimea Beach and grumbling that the waves weren’t bigger. Every so often, one of them would look up at the planes flying back and forth overhead. At one point, Charlie remarked, “Army and Navy must have a hair up their ass. That’s the biggest goddamn drill I ever saw. Has to cost a fortune.”

  “Yeah,” Oscar said, and thought no more about it. Six-foot waves weren’t so much, not when he’d been hoping for surf three or four times that size, but you could still find all sorts of unpleasant ways to hurt yourself if you didn’t pay attention to what you were doing.

  Finally, his stomach started growling so loud, he couldn’t stand it any more. He and Charlie went into Waimea for something to eat. It wasn’t a big town. There weren’t a lot of choices, especially on a Sunday. As they usually did when they were up there, Oscar and Charlie headed for Okamoto’s siamin stand. For a quarter, you could get a bowl of noodles and broth and sliced pork and vegetables that would hold you for a hell of a long time.

  Old man Okamoto looked faintly apprehensive when they walked in. Oscar wondered why. They hadn’t cadged a meal off him in a year and a half, and they’d paid him back for that one the next time they were here. They ordered their noodles and sat down to wait while the gray-haired little Japanese man ladled them out of the big pot he kept bubbling in back of the counter. He set the bowls on the table along with the short-handled, big-bowled china soup spoons every Japanese and Chinese place in Hawaii seemed to use.

  “Thanks, Pop,” Oscar said, and dug in. He and Charlie both ate like wolverines. He was halfway down the bowl before he noticed old man Okamoto had the radio tuned to KGMB, not to the nasal-sounding Japanese music he usually listened to. KGMB should have been playing music, too, if of a more normal sort. It wasn’t. Instead, an announcer was gabbling into the mike. He sounded as if he’d have kittens right there on the air.

  That was how Oscar-and Charlie, too-heard about Pearl Harbor. “Jesus,” Charlie said. Then he spooned up some more siamin. Oscar nodded. He went on eating, too. After a couple of minutes, he glanced over to old man Okamoto. No wonder the old guy was nervous! If the Japs had done that down there, he probably counted himself lucky that his neighbors hadn’t come by with pitchforks and tar and feathers.

  Oscar laughed. Like most old-country Japanese, Okamoto had come to Hawaii to work in the fields. He’d been running this place for as long as anybody could remember, though. You had to be crazy to think of him as a danger to the United States. His neighbors must have felt the same way-no sign of tar and feathers.

  “Your KGMB time is eleven-forty-eight,” the man on the radio said, his voice getting shriller every minute. “We have been ordered off the air by the United States Army, so that our signal does not guide Japanese airplanes or parachutists. We will return only to transmit official bulletins and orders. Please stay calm during this period of emergency.”

  This time, Charlie laughed first. Oscar followed suit. The radio signal cut away to sudden, dead silence. How would the horrible news, followed by the station’s disappearance, make anybody stay calm?

  Something else crossed his mind. Japanese parachutists? What would happen if the Japs invaded Oahu? He hoped the Army would trounce them. What else was it here for? But suppose it didn’t. It sounded as if the Japs had landed on things with both feet. Suppose…

  Oscar eyed old man Okamoto again, more thoughtfully this time. If the Japanese Empire’s soldiers came to Oahu, how would the local Japanese respond? He’d heard Army and Navy brass had sleepless nights about questions like that.

  But it was their worry, not his. He and Charlie got to the bottom of their bowls at the same time. “What now?” Charlie asked.

  “I don’t want to go back to Honolulu right away. Everybody’s gotta be going nuts down there,” Oscar answered. “Besides, if the Japs are shooting up Wheeler and Schofield and Kaneohe, God knows if we can even get there from here. We might as well hang around and surf and hope the waves get better. What do you think?”

  Charlie nodded. “Suits me. I was gonna say the same thing, but some haoles, they figure they all the time gotta do stuff, you know what I mean?”

  “If I saw anything I could do, I’d do it,” Oscar said. “You want to join the Army right now?” Charlie shook his head. Oscar shrugged. “Okay. Neither do I. In that case, we might as well do what we’re doing.” He left a dime on the table for old man Okamoto as he and Charlie headed out to his car.

  By the time they got back to the beach, Oscar could see smoke rising in the south up over the mountains. He whistled softly. That was a hell of a lot of smoke. He and Charlie were both shaking their heads when they paddled out into the Pacific. No wonder the fellow on the radio sounded as if he’d just watched his puppy run over by a cement mixer. The Japs must have blown up everything that would blow.

  They rode the waves all afternoon, then went back into Waimea for supper. Okamoto’s seemed to be the only place open, and nobody but them was in it. Along with siamin, Oscar bought a loaf of bread and a couple of Cokes for breakfast the next morning. Getting the old man to understand a loaf of bread wasn’t easy, but he managed.

  He and Charlie slept in the car again that night. Some time after midnight, truck noises and swearing men woke them up. “The Army,” Oscar said, and went back to sleep.

  Army or no Army, it never occurred to him not to go into the water at dawn the next morning. It didn’t occur to the soldiers to try to
stop them till they were already in the ocean and could pretend not to hear. When fighter planes zoomed by overhead right afterwards, Oscar wished he’d listened.

  He didn’t know whether he spotted the incoming barges before the Army men on the beach did or not. He did discover getting stuck in a crossfire was no fun at all. By what would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along, he and Charlie made it back to shore alive. They piled into his Chevy and got the hell out of there.

  III

  JIM PETERSON HADN’T thought the Japanese would hit Hawaii. He would have been glad to have his fellow fliers from the Enterprise tell him what a damn fool he’d been, but he didn’t think many of them were left alive. Nobody was saying much about what had happened to the carrier, either.

  And nobody was letting him get back into combat. The only Wildcats on Oahu were the couple that had survived the flight in from the Enterprise. They already had pilots. “Put me in anything, then!” Peterson raged after the golfers whose round he’d interrupted brought him to the Marine Corps Air Station at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. “I don’t care what I’m in, as long as I get another swing at those little yellow bastards!”

  They wouldn’t listen to him. The first thing they did was send him to the dispensary tent, where a harried-looking medic confirmed that yes, he was still breathing, and no, he didn’t have any bullet holes in him. That done, they took him out to the airstrip. It was nothing but wreckage, some still burning.

  “You see?” a Marine Corps captain said. “You aren’t the only one who wants another shot at the Japs-but you’re gonna have to wait in line, just like everybody else.”

  “Jesus!” Peterson said. And it could have been worse. The Enterprise had taken some of the Marine pilots and plants from Ewa to Wake Island just before the Japs came in. Otherwise, they might have got stuck on the ground, too. “What the hell are we going to do?”

  “Beats me,” the captain answered.

  “They kicked us in the nuts, and we weren’t even looking!”

  “Sure seems that way.” The Marine seemed to take a certain morose satisfaction in agreeing with him. “And it’s not just this base, mind you.” He waved to the east. It looked like hell over there-literally. The pall of thick, oily black smoke filled that half of the sky. “Sons of bitches didn’t just hit the fleet. They got the tank farms, too. God only knows how many million gallons of fuel going up in smoke.”

  “Up in smoke is right,” Peterson said. Little by little, the sheer scale of the disaster began penetrating even his stubborn soul. “For God’s sake, if you can’t do anything else, give me a rifle and a helmet and let me shoot at ’em.”

  For the first time, the Marine officer looked at him with something approaching approval, not barely concealed annoyance. “That, now, that may be arranged-if it turns out there’s anybody to shoot at.”

  Peterson stared at him. “If they’ve done this much, you think they won’t follow it up with an invasion? They’d have to be crazy not to.” He was a born zealot; his views swung from one extreme to the other with the greatest of ease.

  Supper was an oddly carefree meal, featuring some of the best lamb chops Peterson had ever eaten. Supper also featured hot and cold running booze. Admiral Halsey sometimes winked at the rules against shipboard alcohol, but Peterson had been mostly dry for a while now. The whiskey and rum and gin and Irish coffee added something to the rumors coming in from around the island. Some of the Marines believed everything, no matter how gloomy. Some refused to believe anything.

  “Only stands to reason,” one of them insisted. “If the Japs plastered us and Pearl Harbor, they couldn’t have had much left over to do anything else.”

  “Bullshit,” said the captain who’d shown Peterson around. “If they did that much down here, they aren’t going to forget about Schofield and Wheeler and Kaneohe. They’ll hit everything.”

  Reports seemed to bear him out. With the radio off the air, though, Peterson found it hard to be sure of anything. He supposed the big wheels here knew what was really going on. He hoped they did, anyhow. They should have-phones were still working, even if the radio had been yanked. But whatever they knew, they weren’t talking. That by itself seemed to say the news wasn’t good.

  Peterson got a cot in a tent that night, and counted himself lucky. When reveille sounded, he thought for a moment he was back aboard the Enterprise. Then memory returned. He was swearing as he bounced to his feet. A Marine climbing out of another cot a few feet away nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, Navy, it’s a bitch, isn’t it?” he said.

  “A bitch and a half,” Peterson answered. “What the hell do we do now?”

  “Might as well have breakfast,” the Marine said practically. “Soon as the brass wants anything from us, I figure they’ll let us know.”

  Breakfast was bacon and eggs and hash browns, not much different from what Peterson would have eaten on the Enterprise — she hadn’t been at sea long enough to switch from fresh to powdered eggs. But the walk to the mess hall reminded him where he was and what had happened. The west was light, but in the east the sun couldn’t penetrate the smoke rising from Pearl Harbor. They hadn’t even slowed down the fires there during the night. How much fuel was burning?

  He’d just got a second cup of coffee when air-raid sirens began to howl. He sprang up and followed the Marines as they ran for shelter. Most of them made for a nearly finished swimming pool not far away. “First time I ever jumped into one of these when it was dry,” he said.

  He got a laugh. Minutes later, though, bombs started whistling down. Being on the receiving end and unable to hit back was anything but funny. A few antiaircraft guns banged away, but the enemy airplanes were high in the sky. Peterson didn’t think any of them got hit. No U.S. planes rose to challenge them. No U.S. planes at Ewa could.

  “This isn’t how it was yesterday morning,” said one of the Marines in the pool. “Then they came in with fighters, right over the rooftops. We shot back with Springfields,45s, anything we could get our hands on. Didn’t do a hell of a lot of good, not as far as I could see.”

  The bombers didn’t linger very long. After ten or fifteen minutes, they droned away. The Marines and Peterson emerged from their makeshift shelter. A bomb had knocked over the old Navy airship mooring mast the Marines used for a control tower. Another had hit the enlisted men’s barracks, which the Zeros had shot up the day before. One end had fallen down, and what was still standing was on fire. And that second cup of coffee never got finished, because the mess hall had taken a direct hit.

  Bombs had hit the asphalt X of the runways, too. If Ewa had had any flyable planes, they wouldn’t have been able to get off the ground till the craters were repaired. “Son of a bitch!” Peterson said, looking around at the devastation. “Son of a bitch!”

  “That’s about the size of it,” agreed the captain who’d taken charge of him the day before. He hadn’t been in the pool, and Peterson hadn’t seen him at breakfast, either. By his drawn features, he hadn’t had any sack time the night before. He went on, “You were talking about drawing a helmet and a rifle and making like a soldier. Were you serious about that?”

  “Hell, yes,” Peterson answered without hesitation. But then he thought to ask, “How come?”

  “About what you’d expect,” the Marine officer answered. “The Japs are on the island.”

  LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO didn’t much care for flying combat air patrol above the Japanese task force. As far as he was concerned, that was a job for the float planes from the battleships and cruisers that had accompanied the aircraft carriers to Hawaii. But Admiral Nagumo had ordered differently, and so Shindo buzzed along with his engine throttled back to be as miserly with fuel as he could.

  He would rather have been strafing the American soldiers on Oahu and finishing the job of knocking out the U.S. aircraft on the island. But he was not the sort of man to protest orders. When Commander Genda told him to take charge of the patrol, he’d just nodded and saluted and said, �
�Aye aye, sir.”

  In a way, he could see the need. They’d sunk one carrier. But they thought three or even four had been based at Pearl Harbor. If planes from any of those showed up at the wrong moment… well, life could get more interesting than Shindo really wanted. He preferred things to go according to plan.

  His eyes darted now right, now left, now center. He kept flicking them here and there. If anything was in the sky to see, he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss it. Stare straight ahead all the time, and even important things wouldn’t register.

  He’d been flying for a couple of hours, and almost dismissed the float plane off to the west as one of his countrymen. But the lines weren’t quite right. Neither was the color-Japan seldom painted her aircraft that oceanic blue.

  “That’s an American plane!” The words crackled in his earphones. One of the other pilots had spotted it too, then. “It’s seen us. I’ll shoot it down!”

  “No!” Shindo said sharply. “No one is to shoot at that airplane until I do. The rest of you, continue on your normal patrol.”

  Had another man given orders like that, the fliers under him would have thought him out for glory, out to run up his own score. With Lieutenant Shindo, that was unimaginable. He gunned his Zero toward the American plane.

  The enemy pilot took awhile to spot him. No doubt the Americans were paying more attention to the ships spread out ahead of them. That was their duty, after all. Not until just before Shindo fired a machine-gun burst at him did they realize they had company. Only after the burst did the pilot turn toward the west and try to escape. The radioman, who also had charge of the rear-facing machine gun, shot back at the Zero.

  Shindo pulled back out of range, as if afraid. Then he made a couple of feckless lunges at the float plane. He fired each time, but his bursts went wide. “What are you doing, Lieutenant?” one of the other fliers demanded. “For heaven’s sake, finish him. Do you want him to get away?”