Harry Turtledove: Days of Infamy

“Yeah,” Kenzo said in English. “Thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hiroshi told him.

“What are you two going on about?” their father asked. Neither one of them answered. He sniffed. “You’re so proud of your English. How much good does English do you now?”

They didn’t answer that sally, either. The line snaked forward. Kenzo held out his bowl for rice and vegetables. Some people had to live on this and nothing else. Kenzo would have been happy out on the Pacific now, not just for the sake of food but because he and his father didn’t fight so much when they had bait and hooks and ahi and aku and lines and sails to talk about. Everything came back to politics on dry land… and everything that had to do with politics was going his old man’s way.

Once he got fed, he took the bowl off by himself to eat in peace. He even waved Hiroshi away when his brother started to follow him. Hiroshi just shrugged and found somewhere else to go. To Kenzo’s relief, his father didn’t come after him.

A lot of the trees that had been proud parts of the botanical garden were long since gone to firewood. Shrubs and bushes and ferns persisted. Why not? They weren’t worth pulling up and burning. He sat down on the grass close by a jungly clump and started eating. With automatic ease, he scooped up rice with his hashi and brought it to his mouth.

He started to laugh, not that it was funny. He told anybody who’d listen that he was an American. No matter what he told people, what was he doing? Sitting on the ground and eating rice with chopsticks. Circumstances seemed to be conspiring to turn him into a Jap no matter what he wanted.

He told himself Elsie Sundberg wouldn’t think so. No matter what he told himself, he had a hard time believing it. After what had happened out in the Pacific, she’d probably figure him for a Jap now, no matter what he’d told her. And if she didn’t, her folks would.

At just short of twenty, gloom came easily. Getting rid of it was harder. Kenzo washed his bowl after he finished eating. The chopsticks were cheap bamboo. Even here, even now, they weren’t in short supply. He threw them in a corrugated-metal trash can.

Then he looked west, toward Pearl Harbor. No, no fireworks tonight. The U.S. Navy was gone from these parts. Everything else that had to do with the United States seemed gone, too. So where was there a place for a person of Japanese blood who thought he had the right to be an American?

Anywhere at all?

MINORU GENDA COUGHED behind his masuku. Admiral Yamamoto looked around Akagi ’s wardroom with affectionate amusement. “Is this an after-action conference or a sick-bay gathering?” he asked.

“Sorry, sir,” Genda said. If not for the conference, he would have been back in sick bay. Commander Fuchida sprawled across three chairs at the doctor’s orders. He was a long way from being over his appendectomy. Captain Ichibei Yokokawa of Zuikaku had a bandaged left shoulder. A ricocheting bullet from a Wildcat had wounded him. He was lucky it had lost most of its momentum before striking; a.50-caliber round could kill from shock without penetrating anything vital. Of course, if he were really lucky he wouldn’t have been wounded at all.

“We did what we set out to do when we sought this battle,” Yamamoto said. “The Americans will not come forward. They will not invade Hawaii. The islands will remain our bastion, not theirs.”

“Well done!” Captain Tomeo Kaku said. “And I say, ‘Well done!’ to the crews of Shokaku and Zuikaku in particular. However fine the ships are, they are new, and their crews do not have so much experience working as a team as Akagi ’s does. But no one will say they are not veterans now.”

“ Arigato,” said Captain Jojima Takatsugu of Shokaku. Captain Yokokawa started to nod his thanks, then grimaced and thought better of it. Eyeing that thick pad of bandages on his shoulder, Genda couldn’t blame him.

“We are not finished, though,” Yamamoto said sternly. “This is a victory, but not one that will end the war. The Americans paid a high price, but they will be back when they feel strong enough. We have to see what we paid, what we can do to make good our losses, and how best to face the Yankees when they return-for they will.”

“Are you sure, sir?” Captain Kaku asked. “How many times must we crush them before they know we are their masters?”

“How many times?” Yamamoto shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know that what we’ve done so far isn’t enough. We have awakened a sleeping giant, and we have yet to see everything he can do.”

“What is our best course, then, sir?” Genda asked.

“To make these islands strong. To make the fleet that protects them strong,” Yamamoto replied. “American arms factories and shipyards are just now getting up to full war production. What we have seen is not a patch on what we will see. Fuchida- san! ”

“Yes, sir!” Fuchida still sounded fuzzy-from painkillers, Genda suspected-but Yamamoto’s voice could and would galvanize anybody.

“What were our aircraft losses?” asked the commander of the Combined Fleet.

“Just over a hundred planes, Admiral.” Fuzzy or not, Fuchida had the numbers he needed at his fingertips. Anyone who came to a meeting with Yamamoto unprepared deserved whatever happened to him.

The admiral grunted. “Could have been worse, I suppose. But these were highly trained men, some of the best we had. How soon can we replace them, and how good will the replacements be?”

“As for numbers, sir, we can replace them as soon as the new pilots and radiomen and bombardiers arrive from Japan,” Fuchida replied. “Quality… Quality is harder to gauge. Nothing but experience can make a man a veteran. The fliers from Shokaku and Zuikaku know this now.”

“ Hai,” Yamamoto said noncommittally. He rounded on Captain Yokokawa. “How long before Zuikaku is back in service?”

“Sir, she’ll have to return to Japan for repairs,” Yokokawa answered. “There’s no help for it. We’re lucky we kept her afloat after the pounding she took. The Americans pressed their attacks with all their strength.”

Another grunt from Yamamoto. He hadn’t been aboard Zuikaku or seen for himself how she was fought. All he could know was that she’d taken much more damage than either of the other Japanese carriers. He said, “A pity the Americans did such a good job of wrecking the navy yard here before they surrendered.”

“They were thorough,” Genda agreed.

“Have the engineers looked at what we’d need to do to get the yard operational?”

Genda’s specialty was air operations. But he was also the man with the answers; Yamamoto’s wasn’t the only head to turn his way. He said, “Sir, I’m told it’s not practical, since we would have to bring all our fuel from Japan. You might want to talk with the engineers, though, to see if things have changed since the last time I checked with them.”

“I’ll do that,” Yamamoto said. “Having to take a ship back more than five thousand kilometers to get it repaired is inefficient, to say the least.”

“The Americans had no trouble maintaining a yard here,” Captain Takatsugu said. “What they can do, we should be able to do, too.”

Just for a moment, Admiral Yamamoto looked angry. Genda knew what to watch for, and when to look. The eyebrows that came together, the lips that thinned… The expression vanished almost as fast as it appeared, but Yamamoto did not care for officers who failed to think things through before they spoke. “The Americans are only a little more than half as far from Hawaii as we are. And they have more fuel than they know what to do with. They had no trouble shipping some of it here. We, on the other hand…”