Harry Turtledove: Days of Infamy

In the wardroom, the pilots drank coffee and cursed the Japanese-and also cursed the Pearl Harbor defenders, who’d shot down some of the scouts trying to land in the middle of the attack.

The ships steamed furiously toward Pearl Harbor. They’d been about two hundred miles northwest of Oahu when they got the dreadful news-about seven hours at top speed. And they were making top speed. Bull Halsey was not a man to hang back when he saw a fight right in front of his nose-far from it. He wanted to get in there and start swinging. The only trouble was, he had no more idea than anybody else where to aim his punches.

As the minutes passed and turned into hours, fury and frustration built aboard the Enterprise. The news in the wardroom was fragmentary-people on Oahu were clamping down on radio traffic, too-but what trickled in didn’t sound good. “Jesus!” somebody said after the intercom piped in yet another gloomy report. “Sounds like Battleship Row’s taken a hell of a licking.”

“ That won’t end the world,” Peterson said. “The Navy’s needed to get rid of those wallowing tubs for years.” He spoke like what he was: a carrier fighter pilot. Billy Mitchell had proved battleships obsolete twenty years earlier. Nobody’d paid any attention then. It sounded as if the Japs were driving home the lesson. Would anybody pay attention now?

“You’re a coldhearted bastard, Peterson,” a lieutenant named Edgar Kelley said. “It’s not just ships, you know. It’s God knows how many sailors, too.”

“Yeah? So?” Peterson scowled at the other pilot. “If they didn’t get it now, they sure as hell would when they took their battlewagons west to fight the Japs. Carrier air would take ’em out before the carriers came over the horizon.” He didn’t think of himself as coldhearted. But if you weren’t a realist about the way the world worked, you’d take endless grief in life, sure as hell you would.

Just after noon, a cry not far from despair came over the intercom: “Third wave of attackers striking Pearl!”

That was followed almost immediately by Admiral Halsey’s unmistakable rasp: “Boys, we’ve got to give the land-based air a hand. The Japs have knocked out a lot of it on the ground, and I’ll be double-damned and fried in the Devil’s big iron spider before I let those monkeys have it all their own way when I can give ’em a lick. Go get ’em! I only wish I were up there with you.”

Cheering, the pilots ran for their Wildcats. Peterson’s was third in line. He fired up the engine even before he’d closed the canopy and fastened his safety belts. The fierce roar of the 1,200-horsepower Wright radial engine filled him. His fingernails, his bones, his guts all shook with it. It made him feel not just alive but huge and ferocious- he might have been making that great noise, not his plane.

A red flag hung from the bridge: the signal that the Enterprise was about to launch her airplanes. No men in blue jerseys were left on the deck but the two who stood by to remove the chocks from the squadron leader’s wheels. Sailors in yellow smocks formed a line across the deck.

What might have been the voice of God thundered from the island: “Prepare to launch planes!”

The sailors in blue whipped away the chocks. The lead Wildcat rolled forward, a man in yellow walking backwards just ahead of it, leading it on to a point midway up the flight deck. A little ahead of the island stood another man in a yellow jersey. This one held a checkered flag in his right hand.

That biblically amplified voice roared again: “Launch planes!”

As the man with the flag turned his free hand in a grinding motion, the squadron leader gunned his engine. When the note suited the sailor in yellow, he dropped the flag. The plane sped down the deck and zoomed off into the air. The next fighter taxied up to the takeoff line. At the flagman’s orders, the pilot built up the boost on his engine. The flag fell. The Wildcat roared away.

Then it was Peterson’s turn. The sailors in blue jerseys pulled away the chocks. Up to the line he went, following the man in yellow. The flagman made his grinding motion. Peterson gave his engine the gun. Down went the flag. Peterson whooped with delight. Acceleration shoved him back in his seat as the fighter raced down the Enterprise ’s flight deck.

As always when he went off the end of the deck, there was that sickening lurch, that moment when he wondered whether he’d go into the sky or into the drink. But the Wildcat climbed after the two planes that had taken off ahead. Peterson whooped again. This was where he was meant to be, what he was meant to do.

More fighters rose from the carrier. They formed in pairs: leader and wingman. Peterson’s wingman was a j.g. named Marvin Morrison. He had a squeaky tenor voice that broke when he got excited, which happened frequently. It sounded in Peterson’s earphones now: “We’re going to clean the Japs’ clocks for them.”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Peterson agreed. “If they want a war, Marv, we’ll give ’em all the war they want-you bet your ass we will.”

Similar outraged chatter crackled through the squadron. Along with the outrage was a sense of astonishment: how could the Japanese, with their buck-toothed, bespectacled pilots and their lousy scrap-metal planes, dare to take on the United States of America? The fighter pilots also monitored radio traffic from Pearl Harbor. When one frantic officer relayed rumors that the Japs had German pilots doing some of their flying for them, Peterson nodded to himself. The little yellow men couldn’t have done it all on their own. Say what you would about the Nazis, but they’d shown the world they knew what the hell they were doing when it came to war.

He saw the thick black smoke rising into the blue tropical sky when he was still a devil of a long way out from Pearl. More and more of it came up every minute, too. “Jesus,” he said softly. With or without help from Hitler’s Aryan supermen, the Japs had done something really terrible here.

Radio from Pearl Harbor abruptly cut off. He didn’t think it was silence imposed by command. More likely, a bomb had wrecked the transmitter-the signal went away in the middle of a word.

As Peterson drew closer to Oahu, he saw more smoke rising from the Marine Corps airfield at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. In fact, people in Honolulu used Ewa as a synonym for west, the same as they used Waikiki for east. Till he got close, though, the small smoke from Ewa was lost in the greater conflagration of Pearl Harbor.

And the closer he got, the worse those fires looked. The tank farms had to be burning, sending untold millions of gallons of fuel oil up in smoke. Peterson swore softly, more in awe than in anger. This was a disaster, nothing else but. Somebody’d been asleep at the switch, or it never could have happened. Heads would roll among the big brass. They’d have to. But that did nobody one damn bit of good now.

“Bandits!” In Peterson’s earphones, that was more a cry of exultation than a mere word. “Bandits dead ahead!”

He peered through the bulletproof windscreen. Sure as hell, there they were: shiny silver planes with meatballs on their wings and sides. They were tiny as toys now, but swelled even as he watched. “Come on, Marv!” he called to his wingman. “Time to go hunting!”

“I’m right with you,” Morrison answered.

Peterson more than half expected the Japs to run away. Now they’d have to fight, after all, not just kick somebody while he was down. Did they really have the balls for that? But they’d seen the planes from the Enterprise, too, and here they came.

His thumb tensed on the firing button on top of the stick. Just when he thought he had the first of the enemy fighters in his sights, though, the Jap did a flick roll and zoomed upwards. Christ, but he’s maneuverable, Peterson thought, and then, with a twinge of alarm, He climbs like a son of a bitch, too.