Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

The sailors in yellow formed a line across the flight deck. “Prepare to launch planes!” came the command from the island. Joe heard it both over the loudspeakers and through his earphones. The last two men in blue took the chocks away from the lead plane. A man in yellow walked backwards, making come-hither motions with his hands. The Hellcat followed, also at a walking pace.

Just in front of the island stood a man with a checkered flag in his right hand. He made grinding motions with his left. The lead plane’s engine sped up. Another roar came from the loudspeakers: “Launch planes!” The man with the flag made more grinding motions. The lead plane’s motor raced. The checkered flag went down. The F6F raced along the flight deck, dipped as it shot off the bow, then gained altitude again and shot up to take its place in what would soon be the greatest assemblage of naval airpower the world had ever known.

Plane after plane took off. After what seemed forever but was only a few minutes, Joe’s turn came. He followed the beckoning sailor in yellow to the center of the deck, revved his engine higher and higher at the flagman’s signal, and whooped when the checkered flag dropped. Now!

Acceleration slammed him back in his seat as the Hellcat darted forward. That sickening lurch when it went off the deck… He hauled back on the stick and gave the plane all the throttle she had. Up she went. Hell, she might have been doing the Indian Rope Trick, the way she climbed. Nothing he’d trained in even came close.

But an F6F wasn’t a widowmaker, the way some hot planes were. She played tough, but she played fair. And the higher Joe got, the more of the U.S. fleet he could see spread out below him. With any luck at all, they’d give the Japs the biggest kick in the ass the world had ever known.

Along with Bunker Hill, Essex and three more brand-new fleet carriers steamed toward Hawaii. So did the repaired Hornet. So did Ranger. She wasn’t an ideal combat carrier, but she could carry planes to make this big fist even bigger. And so did five light carriers, which could keep up with their bigger sisters no matter what, and close to a dozen escort carriers, which couldn’t. The baby flattops would get left behind in a fast-moving action, but among them they brought almost as many planes into action as the Essex -class ships.

Joe spotted his element leader and took his place below and to the right of the other Hellcat. He’d wanted to lead an element-Orson Sharp led one. But wingman was what they’d given him, and he knew he had to squash that gnawing jealousy. He’d been good enough to get here, goddammit. If he did his job well, he might be leading an element pretty damn quick.

Dive bombers and torpedo planes went into formation with the fighters. The torpedo planes were new Grumman Avengers, not the lumbering Douglas Devastators that couldn’t get out of their own way and had failed so miserably the year before.

“All hands! All hands! Listen up, everybody!” Excitement crackled in Joe’s earphones. On the short-range, plane-to-plane circuit, the officer went on, “We’ve got a bearing on the Japs-a cruiser’s recon plane found the bastards. I got the word just before I launched. Range about 160, maybe 170, course 200. That’ll get us close enough to find ’em on our own, anyway. Let’s go hunting!”

The fierce shouts that filled Joe’s head made him want to snatch off the earphones. But he didn’t. He added to the din. Like a swarm of bees-a big swarm of bees-the U.S. aircraft buzzed south.

MITSUO FUCHIDA’S B5N2 FELT DIFFERENT WITH A TORPEDO from the way a B5N1 had with bombs slung beneath. The long, heavy torpedo made the aircraft a bit slower, a bit clumsier. He shrugged. He would do what needed doing anyway.

Patches of white, fluffy cloud sailed past every now and again. For the most part, though, the sky was clear and the sea below calm. As the Yankees had the year before, they’d picked better weather to attack Hawaii than Japan had at the end of 1941. Fuchida shrugged again. The United States could pick and choose. As far as he could see, Japan hadn’t had a choice. Roosevelt had cut off metal shipments, frozen assets, and, most important, stopped the flow of oil, all to dislodge Japan from her rightful empire in China. If she’d bowed to U.S. extortion, she would have been America’s puppet forever after. Better to fight, to seize the chance to be one of the great powers in the world.

He peered ahead, hoping to catch sight of the American ships. That was foolish, as a glance at his watch told him. He and his comrades hadn’t flown nearly long enough to put the enemy in sight.

He clicked his tongue between his teeth. He didn’t have so many comrades as he would have liked. Only about 120 planes were winging their way north-a third as many as had flown against Hawaii at the start of the war in the Pacific. He wished Zuikaku hadn’t been hit. That had to be bad luck… didn’t it? Her planes would have made this sortie half again as strong.

“Airplanes ahead!” The words in his earphones were quietly spoken, but they might as well have been screamed. Now he would see what the Americans had come up with this time.

When he found the enemy air armada, he thought for a moment he was seeing spots before his eyes. That many planes? He bowed in the cockpit, not to the oncoming Yankees but to Admiral Yamamoto. The commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet had said before the war started that Japan would have six months or a year to do as she pleased in the Pacific, but things would get much harder after that. Conquering Hawaii had stretched Japan’s hegemony out to a year and a half and even a little more, but Yamamoto, as usual, seemed to know what he was talking about.

As more Japanese fliers saw the Americans, questions dinned in Fuchida’s earphones. He commanded the Emperor’s aircraft, as he had at Pearl Harbor and in the first fight in the North Pacific. Most of the increasingly alarmed queries boiled down to, Do we attack the enemy’s planes, or do we go on to strike at his ships?

To Fuchida, that had only one possible answer. “We go for the American carriers,” he declared over the all-planes circuit. “Without carrier decks to land on, airplanes here are useless. If we sink the enemy’s carriers, he cannot possibly invade Hawaii. Press on!”

The Americans should have been thinking along the same lines: so it seemed to him, anyway. But, taking advantage of their numbers, they sent some of their fighters against the Japanese strike force. Even before Fuchida called orders, some of the Zeros shot ahead to defend the precious torpedo planes and dive bombers.

They’re coming very fast, Fuchida thought. The Americans had been flying higher than the Japanese. Part of that speed came from losing altitude-but only part. Alarm tingled through him. The enemy had something new. Wildcats couldn’t have performed like this. Neither could Zeros.

Fuchida’s B5N2 had a pair of forward-firing machine guns, plus another pair in the rear cockpit controlled by the radioman. “Be ready, Mizuki,” Fuchida called through the intercom.

“What else am I going to be, sir?” the first flying petty officer replied. They’d been together a long time. Mizuki could get away with backtalk that would have sent a lot of ratings to the brig.

Fuchida didn’t answer. Some of the enemy fighters ahead, he saw, were Wildcats, but they weren’t the ones attacking the Japanese. The Americans knew Wildcats couldn’t equal Zeros. They thought these new machines could.

And they might have been right. A Zero tumbled toward the Pacific, trailing smoke. Another simply exploded in midair. That pilot, at least, probably never knew what hit him. Fuchida waited to see enemy fighters going down, too. He finally spotted one, but only after several Japanese planes were lost.