Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

The naval officer looked at him in surprise. Furusawa wondered if he was in trouble. Then he laughed at himself. Of course he was in trouble. Before long, all the Japanese soldiers and men from the special naval landing forces would be dead. How could he land in trouble any worse than that?

After a moment, Genda started laughing, too. “Well, Furusawa- san, you’ve got the right way of looking at things-no doubt about it. All we can do here is all we can do. Once we’ve done it…” He licked his lips. “Once we’ve done it, they’ll start defending the Empire a little closer to the home islands, that’s all.”

Furusawa sent him an admiring glance. Defending the Empire closer to home sounded much better than dying to the last man here. They both meant the same thing, but how you looked at it did count.

A mortar bomb crashed down not far away. Furusawa and Genda both huddled in the trench. You couldn’t hear a mortar bomb coming. It announced itself by blowing up. Huddling in a trench wouldn’t do you any good if the damn thing came down on top of you, either.

More mortars opened up on the Japanese positions in front of Iolani Palace. So did regular U.S. artillery pieces. You could hear those shells coming in. The louder the scream in the air, the closer to you they were. Some were very close, close enough to throw dirt on Furusawa.

“They’re coming! They’re coming!” someone shouted.

Furusawa popped up when he heard that. He might get killed if he did, but the American Marines would surely kill him if he waited in the hole. He squeezed off a couple of rounds from his Springfield. The U.S. barrage hadn’t knocked out all the Japanese strongpoints. Machine guns spat death at the big men in green uniforms. Some fell. Some ducked into doorways or dove behind piles of wreckage. Some drew back.

“We still have teeth,” Furusawa said proudly, even if he had no idea whether he’d hit any Americans.

“Hai.” Commander Genda jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. Smoke rose from the palace. A couple of shells had hit it. “In the end, they won’t care whether they destroy it. A pity-it’s a nice building. I hope… the people inside are all right.”

He didn’t talk about any one person in particular. Senior Private Furusawa had a pretty good idea which person in the palace mattered most to him, though. When Furusawa came to Hawaii from Japan, he’d never expected to meet a queen. There hadn’t been any queen here then. He couldn’t fault Genda’s taste. Queen Cynthia was a striking woman, even if her coppery hair and green eyes made her seem more like some kami than a proper human being.

An American with one of their automatic rifles started squeezing off short bursts to make the defenders keep their heads down. A bullet snapped past Furusawa’s ear. He ducked. So did Commander Genda. Furusawa sighed. His superior’s romance probably wouldn’t have ended well anyhow. It surely wouldn’t now.

LES DILLON’S FIRST GLIMPSE of Iolani Palace was almost his last glimpse of anything. As he ran up Hotel Street-not the good part, worse luck-and turned right on Richards, a burst of enemy machine-gun fire cut down the Marine next to him. The man, a replacement whose name Les had never learned, probably died before he finished crumpling to the pavement. Three slugs in the chest would do that to you. Les knew he could have caught the burst as easily as the other guy. Dumb luck, one way or the other.

He dove headlong into a doorway. Letting the Japs have another good shot at him would be stupid. Not everything that happened in combat was luck, not even close. If you gave the enemy a target when you didn’t have to, you almost deserved to get nailed.

The Japs kept shooting as if they thought somebody would outlaw ammunition in an hour and a half. To Les, the long bursts they fired from their machine guns showed poor training. If you fired off a whole strip of bullets, or a magazine’s worth from a light machine gun, of course most of them would go high. The muzzle couldn’t help pulling up. Three, four, five rounds at a crack was the right way to do it.

With all those bullets in the air, though, some had to hit something. The poor damned replacement had proved that the hard way. Calls for corpsmen rang out again and again. Les admired the Navy men who accompanied the Marines more than he could say. Combat wasn’t their proper trade, but they went anywhere he and his buddies did. And they put themselves in harm’s way every time they rescued a man under enemy fire. When corpsmen got liberty along with Marines, they had a hard time buying themselves drinks.

Mortars and artillery pounded the Japanese in front of Iolani Palace. Les wouldn’t have wanted to be a Jap, pinned down by superior firepower and with no place to go. But he’d already seen the slant-eyed monkeys had no quit in them. Maybe that barrage knocked out some of their strongpoints, but the ones that survived kept right on shooting.

Dauntlesses roared down out of the sky to bomb the Japs. The ground shook under Les. Blast slugged him like a Sugar Ray Robinson right-and he wasn’t even the target. No, he wouldn’t have wanted to trade places with the Emperor’s samurai.

Marines started dashing across Richards toward the palace grounds. Even after the dive bombers came in, the Japs had plenty of machine guns waiting for them. And snipers in the buildings on this side of the street took a toll, too.

A lieutenant from another company dove into the doorway with Les. “We’re going to have to clear this whole block,” he said.

“What? You and me?” Lieutenant or no lieutenant, Les was ready to tell him to piss up a rope if he said yes to that. Combat was one thing, and bad enough all by itself. Suicide when suicide wouldn’t do you or your side any good was something else again. As far as Les was concerned, the Japs were welcome to that.

But the officer, who’d probably been born about the time when Les started going over the top in France, shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “I’ve got some men following me. If they don’t get chopped up too bad, they’ll be along.”

“Okay, sir. That’s business,” Les said. The junior officer wasn’t asking his men to do anything he wouldn’t do himself, and he’d got here ahead of them. Les asked, “How are they fixed for grenades?”

“Lots,” the lieutenant said, which was the right answer. While waiting for the rest of the Marines to get there, Les kicked in the door. If Japs had lurked right behind it, he would have been dead long since. He went inside, his heart pounding. Then he had company, lots of company. It helped-some.

Clearing that block across the street from the palace grounds was as nasty a job as he’d ever been part of. The Japs, as usual, wouldn’t retreat and wouldn’t surrender. They had grenades, too. He would hear them banging the damn things on a helmet or against a wall to start their fuses. That would be the signal to duck into an office or back around a corner when you could, then to move forward again once the enemy grenades went off.

It might as well have been trench warfare. Along with the grenades, it came down to hand-to-hand more than once. Some Hawaiians fought alongside the Japs. Instead of being small and tough, they were big and tough, and no more inclined to surrender than Hirohito’s boys.

“Just my luck,” Les panted after the Marines finished a knot of them. He had blood on his bayonet and blood on his boots. The stink of it filled the air. “Some of these Hawaiian fuckers quit as soon as they got the chance-but none of the ones I ever ran into.”

“Maybe they don’t like you, Sarge,” a Marine said.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Les said. The other leatherneck had put a bayonet into the kidneys of the Hawaiian he’d been fighting, so he couldn’t complain about undue familiarity. “Got a butt on you? I’m out.”