Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

Grumbling, the soldiers followed him outside. Grumbling even more, they scrambled down into the trenches they’d dug in the lawn in front of the stucco building. People who stained their uniforms swore. Sure as sure, they’d get gigged for dirty clothes at roll call tomorrow morning.

When Shimizu heard aircraft engines overhead, he was relieved at first. “Hear how many there are?” he said. “Those must be our bombers coming back from the practice run they were on.”

“I don’t think so, sir, please excuse me,” Senior Private Furusawa said. “This is a deeper noise. Our engines have a higher pitch.”

Shimizu listened a little longer. The noise did seem different. Still… “Sounds like a lot of planes to me, not the ones and twos the Yankees send. They don’t usually come by daylight, either. Are you saying-?”

Before he could finish, antiaircraft guns started banging. The gunners didn’t think the planes overhead were Japanese. And Shimizu heard the flat, harsh crump! crump! crump! of bursting bombs. He heard more of those explosions than he ever had when the Japanese were conquering Hawaii.

He looked up into the sky. His jaw dropped. Those weren’t American seaplanes. He’d grown familiar with their big-bellied lines. Those were bombers, monster bombers, swarms of them. Most flew to the west, in the direction of Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor. But some came right over Honolulu. And the likeliest reason they came right over Honolulu was…

Bombs fell from their bellies. He could see them, tumbling down through the air. And they all seemed to be falling straight toward him. “Duck!” he shouted, and threw himself facedown in the dirt. All of a sudden, he had more important things to worry about than getting dirt on his uniform.

The bombs’ rising whistling scream made him want to scream, too. Then they hit, and he did scream. It didn’t matter. Nobody could hear him through that thunder. The ground shook, as if in an earthquake. He’d been through some bad quakes in Japan. This was worse than any of them. When things rained down on him, he wasn’t sure if he’d be buried alive.

While you were on the receiving end of a bombardment, it seemed to go on forever. At last, after what couldn’t have been more than ten minutes of real time, the bombs stopped falling. At least they did close by-he could still hear explosions off to the west. They were just paying us a social call, Shimizu thought dazedly. They really wanted to visit the airstrip and the harbor.

Like a ground squirrel looking to see if the fox had really gone, he stuck his head out of his hole. The barracks had been shelled before. They’d been leveled this time. Craters were strewn over the ground around the building. So were bodies, and pieces of bodies. Other buildings nearby were smoking ruins.

Yasuo Furusawa came up beside him. The druggist’s son looked around with the same horror on his face as Shimizu felt. “Oh,” Furusawa said softly, and then again, “Oh.” It didn’t seem enough, but what else was there to say?

“Help the wounded!” officers screamed. “Get ready to move! Get ready to fight!” Shimizu didn’t know how he was supposed to do all those things at once. He didn’t know how he was supposed to get ready to fight at all. His rifle was in the barracks, which had started to burn. Looking down the trench, he didn’t see anyone else who had a rifle with him, either.

He could do something for injured men, but not much. He bandaged wounds. He helped get people out of the trenches, and helped lift rubble so others could move them. The doctor who showed up after a few minutes quickly looked overwhelmed.

A fire engine screeched to a stop in front of the barracks. The crew-locals-started playing water on what was left of the building. That wouldn’t do the rifles in there any good. It might keep the ammunition with them from cooking off, though, which would save some casualties.

Private Shiro Wakuzawa pointed west. “Look!” he said.

Shimizu did. Smoke was rising from the direction of the airfield, and from Pearl Harbor just beyond it. The American bombers had indeed hit that area harder than they’d hit Honolulu. A lieutenant started shouting at the firemen: “Don’t worry about this place! Go there! There, do you hear me?” He pointed west, as Wakuzawa had.

The firemen answered him-in English. A couple of them looked Japanese, but nobody admitted to knowing the language. The officer jumped up and down, getting madder and madder. That did him no good at all. He pulled his katana from its sheath. The firemen backed away from him. Almost apoplectic by then, he put it back. He could kill the locals, but he couldn’t get them to understand what he was talking about, and that was what he needed to do.

Other officers started screaming then. “Zakennayo! The rifles!” one of them howled. “How are we supposed to fight the Americans if our rifles are in there?” He pointed at the smoldering, dripping wreckage of the barracks.

Just when all the men with more gold than red on their collar tabs seemed to have lost their heads, a major said, “We have plenty of captured American rifles and ammunition at armories here in Honolulu. We can use them if there aren’t any Arisakas handy. They have better stopping power than our rifles anyway.”

Someone else who’d kept his wits about him added, “Whatever we do, we’d better do it fast. Night is coming, and that will make things harder. Plainly, the Yankees are going to try to invade. We’ll need to be ready to march first thing in the morning.”

That was how Shimizu and his squad found themselves the not too proud possessors of American Springfields. He didn’t much care for his. It was larger and heavier than the Arisaka he was used to: plainly a weapon made for a bigger soldier than the average Japanese.

Yasuo Furusawa worked the bolt on his Springfield a few times. “Smooth-it’s well made,” he said grudgingly.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Shimizu said. “It will kick like a donkey, though.”

“Shigata ga nai, Corporal- san, ” Furusawa said, and Shimizu had to nod.

Not getting supper couldn’t be helped, either. The officers had worried about weapons first and everything else only afterwards. Shimizu was sure the regiment would start marching for its position in the northern part of Oahu as soon as it grew light, too. He wondered if he and his men would get breakfast before they set out.

As it happened, they did: rice cooked somewhere else and brought in by horse-drawn wagon. And then, some of the regiment with Arisakas and others with Springfields, all of the men in dirty, often bloodstained, uniforms, they started marching toward the positions prepared for them before the last attempted enemy invasion.

“We should have trucks,” Senior Private Furusawa grumbled. “We could get there in an hour or two if we had trucks.”

But they didn’t-or rather, they had no fuel for them. That fire engine had been the first motorized vehicle-except for airplanes-Shimizu had seen in operation in weeks. And so… they marched.

To get to the Kamehameha Highway, they had to tramp past Hickam Field. A lot of airplanes remained unharmed in their revetments. The only trouble was, at the moment that did them no good at all. The American bombers had plastered the runways for all they were worth. Snorting bulldozers and swarms of men with picks and shovels-POWs, locals forced into labor gangs, and even Japanese-were doing their best to make the field usable again. Their best wasn’t good enough yet.

Shimizu didn’t like what he saw. How were the Japanese going to attack American ships if their planes couldn’t get off the ground? For a moment, fear made his strides light. Then he remembered the aircraft carriers that had let his country conquer Hawaii in the first place. They would take care of the Yankees.