Harry Turtledove: The Big Switch

Overhead, a brightly painted Peashooter dueled a Japanese fighter. Americans laughed at the shit the Japs manufactured, but the plane with the meatballs was far faster and more maneuverable than the (admittedly obsolescent) American machine. The Peashooter spun toward the ground, trailing a plume of fire and smoke. No parachute blossomed in the muggy air. Scratch one American flyer, Pete thought.

Then the Japanese fighter’s pilot spotted him and the other Marines and sailors on the Boise ’s deck. He dove on them, machine guns blazing. Pete couldn’t move fast no matter how much he wanted to-and he wanted to one hell of a lot. Bullets spanged off steel. Wounded men screeched. The fighter roared away at not much over stack height.

Something not nearly far enough away blew up with a rending crash. Of course the Japs were coming after the Far East Fleet. Small as it was, they were bound to have carriers offshore. They’d want to make damn sure nobody could go after those precious ships.

They knew how to get what they wanted, too. A bigger explosion followed the first one. An enormous cloud of black smoke toadstooled up into the sky.

“Rifles!” yelled another Marine coming up from below. “I’ve got rifles, so we can shoot back at the lousy yellow bastards!”

Pete gratefully grabbed a Springfield. You could shoot down a plane with a rifle. (You had to be mighty goddamn lucky- mighty goddamn lucky-but you could.) And even if you didn’t shoot anything down, you were trying to. You were in the fight. No-you were in the war. It had taken almost two and a half years, but the United States was finally in the war.

War! The headline on the Philadelphia Inquirer took up most of the space above the fold. Peggy Druce had to turn the newspaper over to learn that Japan had launched attacks on the Philippines and Hawaii, and was also moving into French Indonesia and British Malaya.

It wasn’t that she didn’t already know some of that-she and Herb had been glued to the radio ever since news of what was going on halfway around the world broke here in the States. But the paper had more details than the hasty radio bulletins she’d heard before, many of them delivered by men who sounded as if they could hardly believe the copy they were reading.

She brought the Inquirer in to her husband, who was eating fried eggs and buttered toast and getting down a second cup of coffee heavy with sugar and almost white with cream. She remembered some of the rationed breakfasts she’d had in Europe, and what passed for coffee in Germany. Americans didn’t always understand how lucky they were.

She handed Herb the front page without a pang. She’d glanced at the headlines, and he’d fill her in on anything important she might have missed. He took the Inquirer with a word of thanks. As soon as he had it in front of him, he lit a cigarette. Breathing out smoke, he said, “Lord, what a mess!”

Peggy nodded but didn’t answer. She’d been in the middle of such an exploding mess. Herb, of course, had seen and done even worse things when he went Over There a generation earlier. That wasn’t quite the same, though. The mess then had already exploded by the time he got to it. He knew what he was supposed to do and how to go about it. Things now were up in the air, as they had been when Peggy found herself too close to the German border as Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. Some of those things had been machine-gun bullets and 105mm shells and 500kg bombs. They’d come down, much too close to her head.

“Looks like Manila got caught napping,” Herb remarked, exhaling more smoke. “Hawaii’s not so bad. We were ready for ’em there-but why didn’t we spot ’em while they were on the way, darn it?”

“Maybe they came from a funny direction,” Peggy said.

“Maybe they did-but we ought to be looking every which way at once when there’s liable to be a war on, don’t you think?” Herb opened the Inquirer to get a look at the inside pages. He shook his head. “We were ready in Hawaii, and we still lost a carrier and a battlewagon and some of the fuel store we’ve got there.” He held up a page with a photo for Peggy. She supposed it was smoke from burning fuel oil or whatever the hell. It looked more like a volcano going off.

“What about Manila?” she asked.

“It’s a lot closer to the Japs, and it got hit a lot harder,” Herb answered. “They’ll probably try invading the Philippines if they haven’t already.” He went to another inside page. “MacArthur says, ‘We shall prevail.’ That sounds pretty, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does,” Peggy said. “I wonder how he expects to do it, though.”

“Ha!” Her husband finished the toast and stubbed out his cigarette. “There’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right.”

“What does FDR have to say about it?” Peggy asked, adding, “There wasn’t anything on the front page.”

Herb nodded, acknowledging that she’d looked as she brought in the paper. He settled his bifocals more firmly on his nose as he looked for an answer. He grunted, not much liking what he found. “A White House aide says, ‘Obviously, we are at war. Obviously, we didn’t want to be.’ ”

“Our goldfish could tell us that much, and we haven’t got a goldfish,” Peggy said.

“Yeah, I know.” Herb nodded. Then he let out a different grunt, one that said Now we’re getting somewhere. “The President’s going to address Congress at noon. Emergency session. It’ll go by radio all over the country.”

Peggy wondered how many people would miss church to hear him. It was still Sunday morning here-still very early Sunday morning on the Pacific Coast. It had been Sunday morning for quite a while in Manila, though. Hawaii had got hit at midday Saturday, their time.

When Peggy remarked on that, Herb grunted one more time, now as if to convey Well, what do you expect? “Some of the guys there were still sober, I bet,” he said. “Odds are that’s why they did better.”

“Why does everybody get smashed on Saturday night?” she wondered.

His look told her she could have asked a better question. She thought he’d grunt yet again, but he fooled her: he only rolled his eyes. “You’re in the service, what else is there to do?” he said. Then, slowly and deliberately, he lit another cigarette. His cheeks hollowed as he took a deep drag. When he let it out in twin streams through his nose, he looked like a locomotive venting steam. Peering down at the paper rather than at Peggy, he went on, “If they’ll have me, hon, I’m going to put the uniform on again.”

“Oh, no!” But that was dismay, not surprise. Peggy knew him too well for such a thing to surprise her. She did take her best shot at changing his mind: “You did your bit the last time around-your bit and then some.”

Herb chuckled sourly. “If they have to stick a Springfield in my paws, the USA’s in deep water, all right,” he admitted. “But I know some stuff I didn’t back in 1918. All kinds of things’ll run smoother if somebody like me who knows the ropes is there to keep an eye on ’em.”

She imagined swarms of canny, successful middle-aged men with gimlet eyes and skeptical stares descending on war plants all over the country and telling Army regulars how to do their jobs better. “If you think the regulars will thank you for it, you’re nuts,” she predicted.

She squeezed another chuckle out of him. This one might in fact have been amused. “They may hate us, but they’ll need us.”

Maybe he was right, maybe wrong. Maybe the Army wouldn’t take him back. Peggy hoped it wouldn’t and feared it would. She said, “I don’t remember the last time I wanted a drink so bad first thing in the morning.”

To her amazement, Herb built her a strong one and himself one stronger yet. “What the dickens?” he said. “We don’t go to war every day, thank God. And if we get sleepy later on, so what? It’s Sunday.” Ice cubes clinked as he raised his glass. “Here’s to the USA!”