Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

Every now and then, enemy rounds didn’t come down among the American landing craft but on one or another of them. Then it wasn’t splash- blam! but clang- blam! Les winced every time he heard that, the way he would have winced at hearing a drill in a dentist’s office. And the drill might be for him next, depending on what the dentist had to say. And one of those clang- blam! s might be for him next, too, depending on Lord only knew what.

“Come on, goddammit. Get to the beach, goddammit,” somebody was saying, over and over again. After a bit, Les realized the words were coming out of his own mouth. He wasn’t saying anything everybody else wasn’t thinking.

The LVI’s bottom grated on sand. It rumbled forward anyway. It wasn’t so amphibious as an amtrac, one of the tractors really designed to work on both land and water, but it could get around a bit when out of its proper element. A couple of swabbies undogged the loading gate. It kicked up a splash when it fell open; the LVI hadn’t quite made it to the tide line.

“Out! Out! Out!” Captain Bradford screamed. “Spread out and get off the beach as fast as you can! Move!”

Marines poured from the landing craft. Mortar rounds were bursting on the beach, too, throwing up plumes of golden sand. Machine guns stuttered out death from the undergrowth not nearly far enough away. Japanese tracers were blue-white, not red like their American counterparts. Bullets from those machine guns and enemy rifles kicked up sand spurts, too.

Men went down. Some of them and their buddies shouted, “Doc! Hey, Doc!” for the Navy corpsmen who served the Marines. Others lay where they had fallen. No medic would help a man blown to hamburger by a mortar bomb. Neither would anything else, not till Judgment Day.

Les charged past a Japanese soldier sprawled on the ground all bloody with his long-bayoneted rifle beside him. He thought the man was dead-till a shot rang out behind him. He whirled. The round had come from an American rifle. A Marine said, “The son of a bitch was playing possum. I saw him grab for his piece, and I let him have it.”

“Thanks,” Les said. Had the Jap got a shot off, it would have gone into his back. One of those Japanese blue-white tracers snapped past his head. He threw himself down into a shell hole and fired back, muttering, “Welcome to fucking Hawaii!”

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU THOUGHT HE’D KNOWN EVERYTHING war could do. The bombardment from the U.S. Navy ships gathered off the northern beaches of Oahu showed him he was wrong. Just getting to the beaches had been a nightmare. The air attacks his regiment suffered bled it white before it ever reached its positions. And when it did…

If this wasn’t the end of the world, you could see it from here. Shells roared in on the Japanese positions. They sounded like freight trains rumbling across the sky till they got close, when they began to scream. The guns from the destroyers and cruisers were bad enough. When the battleships opened up, you could see the huge shells coming. The earth shuddered when they hit. Fragments screamed and howled. Blast picked you up, flung you around, and slammed you down like a 250-kilo sumo wrestler on a mean drunk.

As the bombardment went on, men started screaming. Shimizu didn’t blame them. He did some screaming himself, as he had when the bombers came over his barracks. Here and there, soldiers broke and ran away from the beach. Sometimes their own comrades shot them. Sometimes enemy shells took care of it before the Japanese could.

To add insult to injury, dive bombers roared down and dropped bombs on whatever the shells happened to miss. We did this to the Americans. They fought afterwards, Shimizu thought. We have to do the same. But how? He didn’t dare stick his head up out of the hole where he huddled. Looking at the enemy was asking to be destroyed. Just huddling here was asking to be destroyed.

When the shelling and bombing paused, Shimizu was too shaken to respond for a moment, or maybe longer than a moment. More slowly than it should have, duty reasserted itself. “My squad!” he sang out.

“Are you alive?” He supposed he should have put that better, but it was how he felt.

“Here, Corporal!” Shiro Wakuzawa called from a nearby foxhole.

“And me!” Yasuo Furusawa said. A few other men also let Shimizu know they were there. And someone not far away groaned from a wound-a bad one, if the noises he made meant anything.

That was too bad, but Shimizu had bigger worries on his mind. After things stayed quiet for a little while, he did look out toward the Pacific through the leaves and branches camouflaging his position.

“Zakennayo!” he exclaimed.

The sea was full of ships and boats. Warships lay not far offshore. Japanese guns were still shooting, and a few vessels were on fire, but only a few. Shimizu noted the warships, yes, but they didn’t hold his attention for long. Slowly wallowing toward the beaches through the waves-a much milder sea than the Japanese had faced in their winter assault-were landing craft of a variety and profusion he had never imagined. These left the trusty Daihatsu barges on which he and his comrades had come ashore far, far behind.

Some were veritable ships, big enough to hold almost anything. Shimizu didn’t know what they carried, and wasn’t anxious to find out. Others, smaller, pretty plainly brought soldiers to the beach. Even those were an improvement on their Japanese opposite numbers. On a Daihatsu barge, a steel shield protected the man at the wheel and the machine-gun or light-cannon crew. The soldiers the barge carried were vulnerable to enemy fire all the way in.

Not here. These landing boats had real steel sides and front, protecting the men in them. Shimizu stared in honest envy. He wished his own country could have made landing craft like them.

A few Japanese airplanes swooped low to attack the boats. They did some damage, but fearsome American fighters like the ones that had shot up Shimizu’s regiment hacked several of them out of the sky. Shimizu groaned to see a beautiful Zero reduced to nothing but a slick of gasoline burning on the surface of the sea.

“Be ready!” the noncom called to whoever could hear him. “They’re getting close.”

Behind him, somebody with an officer’s authority in his voice shouted, “The enemy must not get off the beach! We will drive him back into the Pacific! Banzai! for the Emperor! May he live ten thousand years!”

“Banzai!” Shimizu joined in the cry. It heartened him. If he thought about the Emperor, that enormous fleet out there and all the accompanying air power didn’t seem-quite-so terrifying.

An artillery shell scored a hit on one of the landing ships. A column of smoke rose from the big vessel, but it managed to reach the beach. The doors at the bow opened. Out rumbled a tank, a snorting monster bigger and fiercer-looking than anything Japan built. On it came, sand flying up from its churning tracks.

The smaller landing boats were coming ashore, too. The men who scrambled out of them wore green uniforms, not the khaki the Americans had used before. Their helmets were also new: domed like the Japanese model rather than British-style steel derbies.

“Forward!” that officer yelled. “We must throw the invaders into the sea! I will lead you!”

Forward was the last direction Takeo Shimizu wanted to go. But I will lead you! was hard to ignore, and the habit of obedience to orders was as strong in him as in any other Japanese soldier. When the officer ran by, katana in hand, Shimizu scrambled out of his foxhole and ran after him.

Mortar bombs and artillery shells burst among the Americans on the beach. Men fell, men flew, men were torn to pieces. Machine-gun and rifle fire ripped into the Yankees, too. Not all of them went down, worse luck. A bullet cracked past Shimizu’s head. He threw himself down behind a boulder. Another bullet spanged off the front of it.