Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

He got on a Jap’s tail and thumbed the firing button. The Zero caught fire. It went straight down into the ocean. Yelling like a red Indian, he went after another one. This Jap must have spotted him at the last second, because the fellow did a flick roll and squirted away like a wet watermelon seed shot out between your fingers. One second he was there; the next, gone.

“Son of a bitch!” Joe said: frustration mixed with reluctant respect. The Zero really was as maneuverable as people said. Joe sure wouldn’t have tried that getaway in a Hellcat, but it worked like a charm. Still, in evading him, the Jap had to break off his attack on the Avengers, so Joe figured he’d done his job.

And his altimeter was unwinding like a son of a bitch. He leveled off at under two thousand feet, then pulled the stick back and climbed. If he’d had any Japs on his tail, he would have left them behind as if they’d nailed their shoes to the floor.

As he gained altitude, he got a look at the Japanese ships not far ahead. He’d spent more than a year studying silhouettes and photos and models from every angle under the sun-and he still had a devil of a time telling destroyers from cruisers, cruisers from battleships. Even the carrier was hard to spot, and he was damned if he knew for sure which one she was.

But that wasn’t his headache, not really. He needed to run out of planes before he worried about ships. He looked around for more Zeros to shoot up.

FUCHIDA HAD KNOWN IT WOULD BE BAD. The American air armada and the ferocious attack it got off against the Japanese strike force had warned him of that. But nothing in his blackest nightmares had warned him it would be as bad as this.

American ships stretched as far as the eye could see, as far and farther. Fuchida knew-few men knew better-the resources the Japanese Empire had available. Raw fear almost made his hand shake on the torpedo plane’s stick. How were those slender resources going to stand against… this?

A warrior’s iron steadied him. Japan had beaten the Americans before. One well-trained man who despised death was worth half a dozen of the ordinary kind. So his country’s doctrine insisted, and so it had seemed up till now.

If, however, the enemy opposed you with a dozen ordinary men…

He shook his head. He would not think like that. The Japanese strike force had plenty, even now, to blunt the force of this attack. He believed that. He had to believe it. The alternative was feeling that rising panic again.

“Commander- san ?” The voice on the intercom belonged to his bombardier.

“Hai?” Fuchida did his best to suppress what was going on inside him, but he could still hear the tension even in that one-word response.

“Sir, I was just thinking-it’s a shame we can’t carry two torpedoes,” the rating said.

Fuchida broke up, right there in the cockpit. He didn’t think he’d ever done that before. Laughter washed away the last of the fear. “Domo arigato, Imura- san, ” he said. “I needed that. We’ll just have to do what we can with what we’ve got.”

From the rear cockpit, Mizuki the radioman said, “That’s what the man with the little dick said when he went to bed with the geisha.”

Both Fuchida and Imura snorted. Fuchida’s confidence, having returned, now soared. How could his country lose when it had men who cracked silly jokes in the face of death?

The Americans seemed intent on showing him exactly how Japan could lose. The destroyers and cruisers protecting the U.S. carriers-and were those battleships out ahead of them, too? — threw up a curtain of flak the likes of which he’d never seen before. That didn’t worry him so much, though. The antiaircraft fire would knock down a few planes, but only a few. You went ahead and did your job and didn’t worry about it. If you and an enemy shell happened to wind up in the same place at the same time, that was hard luck, and you couldn’t do a thing about it.

But the Yankees, despite having dispatched such an enormous strike force against Akagi and Shokaku, also kept a formidable combat air patrol above their own fleet. Wildcats and the new fighters-whose name Fuchida did not know-tore into the attacking Japanese planes.

Mizuki’s rear-facing machine guns chattered. “Scared the baka yaro off!” the radioman said triumphantly. And he must have, for no machine-gun bullets tore into the torpedo plane. Fuchida allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief. He hadn’t even seen the enemy plane Mizuki fired at.

Two burning Zeros plummeted into the Pacific. Part of the problem was that the new American fighters looked a lot like bigger versions of the Wildcats with which they mingled. They were plainly descended from the planes with which Fuchida and the Japanese were familiar. But any careless Zero pilot who tried to take them on as if they were Wildcats discovered he’d made a mistake-usually his last one. Zeros could outfly the older American fighters, but not these, not these.

A piece of shrapnel clanged against Fuchida’s wing. He glanced to the left. He didn’t see fire. That deserved-and got-another sigh of relief from him. Then the curtain of antiaircraft fire eased. He’d brought his Nakajima past the enemy’s screening ships. A carrier loomed ahead.

It threw out its own flak, of course. Tracers stabbed toward him. He ignored them. A torpedo run had to be straight. “Ready?” he called to the bombardier.

“Ready, sir,” Imura answered. “A hair to the right, sir, if you please. I think she’ll try to dodge to port when we launch.”

Fuchida made the adjustment. The torpedo splashed into the sea. The Nakajima suddenly grew lighter, faster, and more maneuverable. Now Fuchida wished he were only a spectator, and a man who had to get out of there alive if he could. But, as the officer in overall command of the Japanese air strike, he had to linger and do what he could to direct his countrymen against the enemy. And lingering, in this neighborhood, was asking not to grow old.

“Diving against a Yankee carrier. May the Emperor live ten thousand years!” The radio call made Fuchida look around to see if he could find the attacking Aichi. But the Americans were spread out over so much ocean, he couldn’t spot it. It might have been a good many kilometers away. He didn’t see any sudden great plume of smoke rising from a stricken ship, either. Too bad, he thought.

THE PILOT IN THIS WILDCAT flew his plane as aggressively as if it were one of the new American fighters. Saburo Shindo didn’t mind that at all. Aggressiveness was a great virtue in a fighter pilot-when he had the aircraft that could make the most of it. This fellow didn’t, not against a Zero. Shindo got on his tail and stayed there, pumping bullets into the enemy plane till at last it caught fire and went down.

Shooting down enemy fighters was the reason he’d accompanied the Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes against the Americans. Doing his job should have given him more satisfaction, especially since he was good at it. Today, he felt like a man snatching up whatever he could as he escaped a burning house. He might hang on to a few trinkets, a few toys, but the house would still be gone forever.

Two American fighters knocked down a Nakajima just as it started its run against an enemy ship. Shindo was too far away to help or to draw off the American planes. He could only watch helplessly.

That summed up how he felt about too much of this fight. The Japanese strike force from Akagi and Shokaku that had done such splendid work around Hawaii was getting hacked to bits before his eyes. One after another, planes tumbled into the sea. Where would more highly trained, highly experienced pilots and aircrew come from after these men were gone? He had no idea.