Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

“First thing you need to remember is, the Japs aren’t a joke. Forgetting that is the fastest way I know to get yourselves killed. All the jokes we made up till last year about them being little bucktoothed guys with funny glasses flying planes made out of tinfoil and scrap iron-all that stuff’s a bunch of hooey. They’re lousy back-stabbing so-and-sos, yeah, but they’re awful good at what they do. They flew rings around us out there.”

He paused, a look of intense recollection on his face. Joe wondered exactly what his mind’s eye was seeing. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem pleasant. Hadley’s left arm twitched a little. Maybe that meant something, maybe it didn’t. The injured pilot was the only one who knew for sure.

After a silence that lasted a few seconds too long for comfort, Hadley went on, “The Japs are no joke, and their planes are no joke, either. You’ve probably heard a thing or two about what the Zero can do.” He paused again, this time waiting for nods. When he got them, he resumed: “Well, everything you’ve heard is true. That’s one hell of an airplane. It’s faster than a Wildcat, it climbs better, and it can turn inside you like you wouldn’t believe-and a Wildcat’s pretty maneuverable all by itself. If you try and dogfight a Zero, you are fitting yourself for a coffin. Don’t do it. You won’t do it more than once.”

Again, he seemed to look at something only he could see. This time, he explained what it was: “They told me the same thing I’m telling you. I didn’t want to listen. I figured no Jap in the world had my number. Shows what I know.”

He gathered himself. “Don’t dogfight them,” he repeated. “If you’re taking notes, write that down. If you’re not taking notes, write it down anyway.” He tried the aw-shucks grin again. It came out strained.

“You’ve got two edges, and only two. A Wildcat can outdive a Zero. You can make a firing run from above and behind. Or, if you’re in a lot of trouble, you can dive out of there, and most of the time you’ll get away.”

Joe waited to hear what the other edge was. While he waited, he underlined what he’d written about not dogfighting. But Hadley seemed to have dried up. Lieutenant Commander Jones had to prompt him:

“Lieutenant…?”

“Huh?” Jack Hadley came back to himself from wherever he’d gone. “Oh. Sorry, sir. I was thinking about… battle damage, you might say. Yeah. Battle damage.” Was he talking about what had happened to himself, to his airplane, or to the whole fleet the USA sent against Hawaii?

Did it matter?

Hadley gathered himself again: “There’s one other thing you can do to at least help keep those monkeys off you. A pilot named Jimmy Thach thought it up, and the Thach Weave does some good, anyway.” He briefly described the system, explaining how a threatened plane’s sharp turn away from the enemy would alert the other pair in a four-plane element to turn towards it and give them a good shot. “This isn’t perfect, not even close,” he finished. “It takes really tight teamwork and a lot of practice to work well. But it does give us some kind of chance against a superior airplane, and we hardly had any before.”

He took questions then. Several people, Joe among them, asked about the Thach Weave. Hadley painfully levered himself to his feet and drew diagrams on the blackboard. They helped; Joe hadn’t been able to visualize the tactic well from words alone. The circles and arrows helped him see what needed doing. Whether he could do it, and do it in coordination with other pilots-well, that might be a different question. But he was practicing formation flying, too, so he figured he’d get the hang of it.

Then Orson Sharp said, “Sir, would you tell us about your ditching?”

Before Hadley said anything, he sat down again. Again, his bad leg stuck out in front of him. He reached out and touched that stiff knee. “I’d already got this by then. Damn bullet came in from the side. The armor in the seat is good; the stuff in the cockpit’s not so hot. Tell you the truth, that damn Jap filled the plane full of holes. My engine was starting to cook. Thank God those radials are air-cooled, though. A liquid-cooled engine would’ve lost its coolant and frozen up on me long before, and I’d’ve gone into the drink too far from home.

“As it was, I nursed her back toward where our ships were at. I was hoping we still had a working carrier, but no such luck. Every time the flames got going in the cockpit, I’d use the extinguisher to put’em out-mostly.” He looked down at his burned arm. Joe couldn’t tell if he knew he was doing it.

“I put her in the water as slow and smooth as I could,” Hadley said. “Then I pushed back the cockpit-that still worked great, in spite of all the damage I’d taken-dragged myself out, and managed to inflate my life raft. A destroyer picked me up-and here I am.”

He gave them that farmboy grin one more time. He made it sound easy. How much fear and pain hid behind the smiling facade? Enough so that even somebody like Joe Crosetti, who’d never seen combat, could tell they were there. But, since Jack Hadley pretended they weren’t, everybody else had to do the same thing.

Could I do that? Joe wondered. He hoped so, but he was honest enough to admit to himself that he had no idea.

JANE ARMITAGE STOOD in line to get what the community kitchen in Wahiawa dished out for supper. As usual, what plopped onto her plate would have been the butt of a Catskills comic’s joke. The food here is lousy-and such small portions. She got a boiled potato bigger than a ping-pong ball but smaller than a tennis ball, some greens that might have been turnip tops or might have been weeds, and, unusually, a chunk of fish a little larger than a book of matches.

By the way the fish smelled, it hadn’t been caught yesterday-or the day before, either. Jane didn’t complain. Wahiawa was as near in the middle of Oahu as made no difference. It wasn’t very far from the Pacific-nothing on the island was-but fish of any sort seldom got away from the coast. Too many hungry mouths, especially in Honolulu.

Other people were as glad to see the treat as she was. “Isn’t that something?” was what she heard most often. She sat down at one of the tables scattered around the elementary-school playground and dug in.

The fish had an undertaste of ammonia that went with the way it smelled. If she’d got it in a restaurant before the occupation, she would have angrily sent it back. Now she ate every crumb, all of the nondescript and rather nasty greens, and every bit of potato. She didn’t lick the plate when she was through, but some people around her did.

Haoles mostly sat together. So did local Japanese. So did Chinese. So did Filipinos. So did Wahiawa’s handful of Koreans-as far away from the local Japanese as they could. Not all the local Japs collaborated with Major Hirabayashi and the occupiers-far from it-but enough did that people from other groups were leery about having too much to do with them.

Jane sat and listened to the chatter around her-in English and otherwise. Blaming the local Japanese for all the troubles in Wahiawa wasn’t fair. Some of them really did see Japan as their country, more than they saw the USA that way. How could you blame them, when a lot of haoles had gone out of their way to make it plain they didn’t think Japs were as good as they were?

And besides, the local Japanese weren’t the only collaborators. Sitting one table away from Jane was Smiling Sammy Little, who’d sold jalopies to servicemen from Schofield Barracks before the invasion. He hadn’t quite been a loan shark, but his interest rates were as high as the law allowed, and a lot of his cars were lemons. He was still smiling these days. With next to no gas on the island, he didn’t sell cars any more. But the Japs were glad to buy what he had for them.