Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Shimizu told off soldiers to stand watches through the night. One of the benefits of his none too exalted rank was that he got to assign such duties instead of enduring them. He cocooned himself in his blanket and fell asleep. Though he’d been able to eat, exhaustion made the ground seem softer than the mattress on his cot back in the Honolulu barracks.

He wasn’t so happy when he woke up a little before dawn the next morning. He felt stiff and sore. Grunting, he stretched and twisted, trying to work out the kinks. Then he undid his fly and pissed into a rice paddy. Men lined up along the paddy’s muddy edge to do the same.

After more rice for breakfast, the regiment set out again. For the first little while, Shimizu felt like his own grandfather-except that his grandfather had fought in the Sino-Japanese War and always went on about how soft the modern generation was. Then his muscles loosened up and he just felt tired. Tired wasn’t so bad; after yesterday’s march, he’d earned the right to be tired.

“The sea! The sea!” Someone pointed north, toward the Pacific.

“It’s the same sea that washes up against Japan,” Yasuo Furusawa said. He was right, of course. Corporal Shimizu knew that. Like everyone else in the regiment, he’d sailed across every centimeter of it in the Nagata Maru. There hadn’t been any place where he’d had to get out and walk. But it didn’t always feel like the same sea. It was so much warmer, so much bluer, and-except on north-facing beaches in wintertime-so much calmer.

“Remember the waves we rode going up onto the beach?” Shimizu said. “Didn’t that make your bottom pucker up? And it could have been worse. It could have been too nasty to let us land at all. I don’t know what we would have done then.” He had a pretty good idea, though. Ready or not, they would have tried to land. They hadn’t come all that way to sit in the troopships.

“If the Yankees try to land now, the waves won’t throw them around,” Corporal Aiso said. “It’s calm and peaceful during the summer. So it’ll be up to us to shoot them on the beaches if they get that far.”

“If the Navy’s doing its job, they won’t,” Shimizu said.

“If the Navy was doing its job, the Americans wouldn’t have bombed us here,” Aiso said. “If the Navy was doing its job, American subs wouldn’t be shelling us and sinking our ships and spying on us.”

“Well, that’s the Navy,” Shimizu said, and everyone who caught his tone of voice nodded. What can you do about such people? he might have asked. Of course, a sailor would have said, Well, that’s the Army, and sounded exactly the same-half exasperated, half amused. Neither service thought the other had the faintest idea what it was doing.

When the regiment got up to Haleiwa, near the north coast of Oahu, Shimizu expected to turn right and march east. He’d come ashore near Waimea, and the march up from Honolulu had felt a little like running the film of the invasion in reverse. He was taken aback when the column turned left instead. But the beaches past which the soldiers marched were broad and friendly, the country behind them flat and inviting for an invader-flatter and more inviting than where he’d landed. Mountains rose to the south and west, yes, but behind a good stretch of plain now converted to rice paddies.

Fighters with the Rising Sun on flanks and wings rose from an airstrip not far inland. Shimizu smiled to see them as they roared overhead. The handful of planes the Americans managed to put in the air had done damage out of proportion to their numbers till Zeros dealt with them. Unlike the Americans, Japan wouldn’t be caught sleeping. The planes zooming out helped guarantee that.

Grass and ferns had grown over the works the Yankees had dug near the beaches to try to hold back the Japanese Army. The plants and the rain had softened their outlines, as well as those of the bomb craters and shell holes from the Japanese bombardment that had forced the enemy soldiers away from their hastily dug holes.

Lieutenant Horino led his platoon to some of the battered, abandoned American works. “We are going to restore these, men,” he said, by which he meant, You are going to restore these — he wasn’t about to pick up a shovel himself. “We are going to restore these, and meet the enemy on the beach if the Navy screws up and lets him land. If he does, his bones will bleach on the sand. Honto? ”

“ Hai! ” the soldiers shouted, Takeo Shimizu loud among them.

“Not one American will set foot on the grass. Honto? ”

“ Hai! ”

“Then get to work.”

A corporal wasn’t above digging in with an entrenching tool, even if a lieutenant was. As Shimizu cleared trenches and built breastworks, he looked out to sea. The Americans had sited this position well. If not for destruction rained on them by airplanes and warships, they might have held it. We will hold it, Shimizu thought, and added more dirt to the breastwork.

COMMANDER MINORU GENDA stood by the edge of the Wheeler Field runway. Right on schedule, two Mitsubishi G4M bombers flew in from the northwest and landed on the runway. The G4M had proved very useful. It was almost as fast as a fighter, and it had extraordinary range, which meant the Japanese Navy sometimes, as now, ferried important passengers across long stretches of ocean in G4Ms.

But the bomber wasn’t perfect. Everything came with a price. The Mitsubishi plane burned like a torch if it got hit.

No danger here, though; there were no hostile aircraft within fifteen hundred kilometers of Hawaii. The G4Ms taxied to a stop, one behind the other. Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki got out of the first plane: a short man with a face so round, it was almost wider than it was long. From the second G4M descended the officer for whom Ugaki served as chief of staff: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Yamamoto had a firm rule that he and his chief aide should not travel in the same aircraft, lest one disaster overwhelm them both.

Yamamoto looked around as Genda hurried across the tarmac toward him and Ugaki. “So this is Oahu,” said the commander of the Combined Fleet.

“Yes, sir,” Genda said, saluting. “Have you never been here before?”

“I’ve seen Honolulu on my way to and from the United States,” Yamamoto answered. “I never got back into the countryside, though. How about you, Ugaki- san?”

“This is my first time here, sir,” Ugaki said. “Pretty. The weather’s nice, neh?”

“ Hai,” Genda said. “If the weather were all we had to worry about, we wouldn’t have anything to worry about, if you know what I mean.”

Yamamoto smiled. As always, Genda was struck by the sheer physical presence of the man. Yamamoto was short-though not quite so short as either Genda or Ugaki-but energy blazed from him. He said, “Well, we didn’t come here to take on the weather.”

“No, sir,” Genda agreed. “We are honored that you have come to take personal charge of the defenses of Hawaii.” He bowed, thinking, And you and Ugaki both outrank General Yamashita. About time the Navy was in charge of things again.

Shrugging broad shoulders, Yamamoto answered, “The highest-ranking officer should be in charge at the most important point, neh? Nothing is more important for the Empire than holding Hawaii. You were the one who first pointed that out: here we have the great shield behind which the rest of our conquests have proceeded. The Americans are not blind to this. In their hands, Hawaii is a shield no more, but a dagger aimed at our heart.”

Commander Genda bowed. “You are too generous, sir.”

“I don’t think so,” Yamamoto said. “I’ll want to get out to sea as fast as I can. The Yankees are on their way, eh?”