Harry Turtledove: End of the Beginning

All Shindo asked, then, was, “What else are the Yankees doing in Seattle?”

“Working around the clock, seems like,” Fuchida answered. “It’s that way whenever we get a look at one of their ports. They haven’t given up.”

“If they want another go at us, they can have it,” Shindo said. “We’ll give them the same kind of lesson we did six weeks ago.” He paused, eyeing Fuchida. Now the other naval aviator’s face was the sort of polite blank mask behind which anything could have hidden. Shindo decided to press a little to see what was there: “We’re just about back up to strength here with aircraft and pilots.”

“In numbers, yes,” Fuchida said. “Do you think the replacements fly as well as the men we lost? Are the bombardiers as accurate?”

So that was it. Shindo said, “They’ll get better as they get more flying time. I was thinking the same thing not long ago about Shokaku ’s crew.”

“I hope so.” Fuchida still sounded worried. “We don’t have the fuel to give them all the practice I wish they could get.”

Saburo Shindo grunted. That, unfortunately, was true. Blowing up the tank farms had hurt Japan as well as the USA-though the Americans surely would have fired them to deny them to the invaders. As things were, the Japanese in Hawaii didn’t have the fuel to do all the patrolling by air or water Shindo would have liked to see. They’d spent gasoline and fuel oil like a drunken sailor to get through the last battle. Now they had to bring in more, a ship at a time. It wasn’t a good way to do business, not when the merchant ships were short of fuel, too-and not when American subs would be hunting them.

“How soon will we be able to start using the oil we’ve taken in the Dutch East Indies?” Shindo asked.

“I’m afraid I haven’t got the slightest idea,” Fuchida answered. “Maybe Commander Genda would know, but I don’t.”

“If it’s not pretty soon, why did we go to war?” Shindo grumbled.

“Because if we hadn’t gone to war, we wouldn’t have any oil coming in at all,” Fuchida said. “And you can’t very well worry about using or rationing what you don’t have.”

However much Shindo would have liked to argue with him, he didn’t see how he could.

JIM PETERSON STOOD IN THE CHOW line with his mess kit and spoon. The rice and vegetables the Japs doled out to American POWs in labor gangs weren’t enough to keep body and soul together. That didn’t mean he wasn’t hungry and didn’t want the meager supper. Oh, no! For a little while after he ate it, he’d feel… not quite so bad.

He’d seen what happened when people got too weary to give a damn about food. The Japs didn’t let them rest. They worked them just as hard as anybody else, and beat them if they couldn’t keep up. And if the POWs died under such treatment-well, tough luck. Japan hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention. As far as her soldiers were concerned, surrender was the ultimate disgrace. Having surrendered, the American soldiers and sailors on Oahu were essentially fair game.

Plop! The man four in front of Peterson got his miserable supper. Plop! The man three in front. Plop! Two in front. Plop! The guy right ahead of Peterson. And then, plop! — he got his. For ten or fifteen seconds, the world was a glorious place. He had food! He hurried off to eat it, cradling the mess tin to his chest like a miser with a sack of gold.

A lump of gluey rice and anonymous greens about the size of a softball-that was what he was getting all excited about. He knew it. It shamed him. It made him disgusted at himself. But he couldn’t help it. That was how much his body craved even the scanty nourishment the Japs gave him.

For this I went to Annapolis? he thought bitterly as he shoveled glop into his face as fast as he could.

He’d been a Navy lieutenant on the Enterprise, coming back to Pearl Harbor after delivering fighter planes to Wake Island. He’d roared off the carrier’s deck to do what he could against the Japanese-and promptly got shot down. He’d thought his Wildcat was pretty hot stuff till he ran into his first Zero. It was also the last one he’d faced in the air. One was plenty. One had sure been plenty for him.

He managed to bail out, and came down on a golf course near Ewa, the Marines’ airfield west of Pearl Harbor. He’d done his damnedest to get back in the air. His damnedest turned out to be no damn good. Lots of pilots-Marines, Army and Navy men-were in line ahead of him. All they needed were planes. The Japs did a hell of a job blowing those to smithereens on the ground. Japanese mastery of the air in the invasion was absolute.

Since Peterson couldn’t fight the Japs in the air, he’d fought them on the ground as a common soldier. He’d even been promoted to corporal before the collapse; he still had the stripes on the sleeve of his ragged shirt. Nobody would use him as an officer on the ground, which was only fair, because he hadn’t been trained for that. He would have got people killed trying to command a company.

Nobody in his shooting squad knew he’d been an officer. No sooner had he thought of the squad than he thought of Walter London. Up came his head, like a bird dog’s. Where was London? There, sitting on a boulder, eating rice like everybody else. Peterson relaxed-fractionally. London was the weak link in the squad, the guy most likely to disappear if he saw half a chance-and if the other guys didn’t stop him.

That was what shooting squads were all about. The Jap who’d come up with the idea must have got a bonus from the Devil. If one man escaped, all the others got it in the neck. That violated all the rules of war, of course, but the Japs didn’t care. Anybody who’d seen them in action had no doubts that they would get rid of nine because the tenth vamoosed.

The sun sank behind the Waianae Range, Oahu’s western mountains. The labor gang was widening the road that led to Kolekole Pass from Schofield Barracks. Why the road needed widening, Peterson couldn’t see. He’d been stationed in the Kolekole Pass for a while during the fighting. Not many people wanted to get there, and he couldn’t imagine that many people ever would.

But it gave the POWs something to do. It gave the Japs an excuse to work them-to work them to death, very often. Peterson laughed, not that it was funny. Working the prisoners to death was probably no small part of what the Japanese had in mind.

He finished the last grain of rice in the mess kit. He always did. Everybody always did. He remembered when he’d left food on his plate in the Enterprise ’s wardroom. No more. No more. He got to his feet. He topped six feet by a couple of inches, and had been a fine, rangy figure of a man. Now he was starting to look more like a collection of pipe cleaners in rags. He’d lost somewhere close to fifty pounds, and more weight came off him every day. He didn’t see how, but it did.

Peterson made a point of walking right past Walter London and scowling at him. Most POWs were scrawny wretches. London was skinny, but he wasn’t scrawny. He was a wheeler-dealer, a man who could come up with cigarettes or soap or aspirin-for a price, always for a price. The price was commonly food.

A stream ran down from the mountains, close by the side of the road. POWs rinsed their mess tins and spoons in it, getting them as clean as they could. Dysentery wasn’t bad here, but some men suffered from it-and more, weakened by hard labor, exhaustion, and starvation, came down with it all the time. You did what you could to stay clean and to keep your stuff clean. What you could do often wasn’t enough.

There were no huts. There were no beds. There weren’t even any blankets. In Hawaii, that mattered much less than it would have a lot of other places. Peterson found some grass and lay down. Other men were already lying close by. If they felt cold in the middle of the night, they would roll together and use one another to keep warm.