Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

He took a shot at an Oscar. His tracers went wide. He tried to keep his nose aimed at the Jap fighter, but he couldn’t. It was that much more agile in the air. In a hop and a skip, it was on his tail, those two popguns it carried blazing away. One round hit the Hellcat. Joe glanced anxiously at his gauges as he gave his plane the gun and ran away from the Oscar. No fire. No leaks. No problems. Yeah, a Hellcat could take it. And Hellcats could dish it out, too. That Jap pilot was a pro, but he’d be a dead pro in short order if he tangled with very many of the big, muscular American fighters.

There was the Koolau Range to the east, and the Waianae Range to the west. Japanese antiaircraft guns near the beach started throwing up flak. Joe swerved back and forth, just a little, to keep the gunners from being quite sure where he was going. Dave Andersen stuck with him.

Sure enough, Oahu was little. Only three or four minutes after he saw waves breaking on the beach, he was over the target. Dauntlesses screamed down out of the sky to blast the runways of Wheeler Field. Funny to think how, less than two years earlier, Japanese Vals had done the same damn thing. What goes around comes around, you bastards, Joe thought. Your turn now.

Back in December of ’41, American planes had been parked on the runways wingtip to wingtip. The people in charge then worried about sabotage. They hadn’t figured they’d get sucker-punched. Joe was damned if he knew why not, but they hadn’t.

The Japs, unfortunately, weren’t as dumb or as trusting as the Americans had been. They knew enough to build revetments, and they knew enough to camouflage them, too. But they hadn’t painted a civilian bulldozer in camouflage colors-they’d left it school-bus yellow. Joe couldn’t have found a juicier target in a month of Sundays. His thumb came down on the firing button. Tracers leaped ahead of the Hellcat.

A fireball spouted from the ’dozer. Joe pulled up to make sure he didn’t get caught in it. He swung around for another pass at Wheeler. Shooting up what had been an American facility was fun. All the same, part of him kept imagining he’d get a bill for destroying government property.

This stuff belongs to the Japanese government now. Let them send me a bill. And let them hold their breath till I pay it!

Flak around Wheeler was heavier than it had been by the shore. The Japs knew the Americans would try to come back, and they’d done what they could to get ready. “And it’s not gonna be enough, goddammit!” Joe said.

Muzzle flashes let him spot a gun’s upthrust snout. Shoot at me, will you? Shoot at my buddies? See how you like being on the other end! The gun crew scattered as Joe opened up on them. He roared by before he could see what his bullets did to them. Maybe that was just as well. Those.50-caliber rounds were designed to pierce things like engine blocks and armor plate. What they’d do to flesh and bones hardly bore thinking about.

Several plumes of greasy black smoke fouled the blue sky. Some were from burning Jap planes caught in their revetments. Others, Joe feared, came from downed Hellcats and Dauntlesses. You couldn’t do this for free, however much you wished you could.

As he climbed to make another strafing run, he got a good look at the craters pocking the runways. Even as he watched, another Hellcat shot up a bulldozer. One more cloud of smoke billowed up. Joe slammed his left fist into his thigh. One more ’dozer that wouldn’t make repairs. If the Japs had to fix this mess with picks and shovels, they’d need weeks, not days.

They’d need ’em, but they wouldn’t have ’em. The Marines and the Army were on the way.

“Boys, we have done what we came to do. Let’s go home and gas up and do it some more.” The exultant order kept Joe from heeling his fighter into another dive. He didn’t complain. They had indeed done what they’d come to do.

As he flew out over the north coast, bound for the Bunker Hill, he spotted another well-plastered airstrip down below. Haleiwa, he thought. That’s what the name of that one is. He grinned, there in the cockpit. Yeah, he knew the map, all right.

CARELESS OF-INDEED, OBLIVIOUS TO-his own safety, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo manned a machine gun near the edge of the Haleiwa airstrip. He blazed away at the American dive bombers attacking the strip-and at the fighters attacking anything around it that might make a target.

The machine gun, a Japanese weapon modeled after the French Hotchkiss, used metal strips of ammunition, not the more common belts. The loader was a Japanese groundcrew man who’d protested his unfamiliarity with the process. Shindo’s pistol, aimed at his forehead, proved amazingly persuasive. Whenever the machine gun ran dry, in went another strip of cartridges. Only the groundcrew man’s chattering teeth suggested he might want to be somewhere else.

One of the new American fighters-the same planes that had worked such fearful slaughter on Japan’s beloved Zeros-must have spotted Shindo’s tracers. On it came, straight at him, the machine guns in its wings winking balefully. He fired back, shoving down hard on the triggers till his gun unexpectedly fell silent.

“Give me another strip, you stinking son of a back-passage whore!” Lieutenant Shindo shouted.

The groundcrew man neither obeyed nor answered. Shindo glanced over to him. Bullets from the American plane’s machine guns chewed up the grass and dirt all around the machine gun. One of them had caught the unwilling loader in the face. The unfortunate man no longer had a face. Not much was left of the back of his head, either. His brains and scalp spattered Shindo’s coveralls.

Shoving the dead man aside, Shindo began feeding ammunition into the gun himself. That cut down his rate of fire. He did what he could, though, till the last American planes abandoned Haleiwa and headed out to sea.

Then he ran for the revetment that sheltered his Zero. Two planes nearby were burning, but his survived. He glanced back toward the runway. His mouth twisted. It was as cratered as the surface of the moon. The bulldozer that could have set things right in a hurry burned beside the runway. No one had thought to move it. Not even me, Shindo thought bitterly. And yet a bulldozer was, or should have been, as much a weapon of war as an airplane.

With or without the big, brutal machine, though, they had to get the airstrip ready as fast as they could.

“Prisoners!” he shouted. “Have we got a gang of prisoners anywhere close by?”

TAKEO SHIMIZU HAD RAPIDLY grown to hate the American rifle he carried. It wasn’t just that the Springfield was too long and too heavy for comfort. But he’d got used to all the places where his old Arisaka bumped his back when he carried it along. The Springfield hit none of them. It had its own places, and they drove him crazy-especially the one just above his kidney.

All the soldiers in his squad groused about their Springfields. He let them. If anything, he encouraged them. It gave them something to do as the northbound kilometers went by. People working in the rice paddies that had replaced sugarcane and pineapple fields paused to stare as the Japanese soldiers tramped by. The laborers-Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, whites-had to know what the big bombing attack meant, but no one had the nerve to do anything but stare. An open jeer, here, might have touched off a massacre.

Shimizu’s squad-and the rest of the regiment of which it was a part-were north of Wahiawa when he heard aircraft engines. His head came up like that of a hunting dog taking a scent. So did Senior Private Furusawa’s. “Now,” Shimizu said, “are those our planes or the enemy’s?”

Furusawa nodded. A moment later, he said, “The enemy’s! The roar is deeper than ours!”