Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Jiro exclaimed once more. His sons stared in horror. The other sampan lay dead in the water.

Jiro brought the Oshima Maru up alongside it. Two of the fishermen aboard were gruesomely dead, one almost cut in half by bullets, the other with his head blown open. One of the others was clutching a wounded leg. “They thought we were invading!” he moaned. The fourth fisherman, by some miracle, hadn’t been hit, but stood there in shock, a dreadful amazement frozen on his face.

“Come on,” Jiro told his boys, trying to ignore the stink of the blood that was everywhere on the shattered sampan. “We’ve got to do what we can for them.”

“What if that plane comes back?” Kenzo quavered.

Jiro shrugged fatalistically. “What if it does? It shows you what the haoles think of how American you are, neh? ”

Neither Kenzo nor Hiroshi had anything to say to that. Gulping, they scrambled onto the other sampan.

“COME ON! COME on!” Lieutenant Yonehara shouted. “Move! Move! Move! You can’t waste a minute! You can’t even waste a second!”

A great stream of Japanese soldiers emerged from the hold of the Nagata Maru. Once upon a time, during his brief schooling, Corporal Takeo Shimizu had heard something about the circulation of the blood. There were little things inside the blood that swirled through the body over and over again.

Corpuscles! That was the name. He wouldn’t have bet he could put his finger on it, not after all these years. He felt like a corpuscle himself, one out of so very many. Corpuscles, though, weren’t weighted down with helmets and bayoneted rifles and packs that would sink them like stones if they couldn’t make the journey from the transport to the landing barges coming alongside.

It was black night, too, which didn’t make things any easier. The Nagata Maru had charged forward all through the day and after darkness came down. The ship and the other transports unloading their cargoes of soldiers and equipment were supposed to be near the north coast of Oahu. Shimizu hoped their captains and navigators knew what they were doing. If they didn’t…

Someone stepped on his foot. That gave him something more urgent than captains and navigators to worry about. “Watch it,” he growled.

“So sorry,” a soldier said insincerely.

“So sorry, Corporal,” Shimizu snapped. The soldier, whoever he was, let out a startled gasp. It was still too dark to recognize faces, and Shimizu hadn’t been able to tell whose voice that was, either.

The Nagata Maru rolled and pitched in the Pacific swells, rising and falling six or eight feet at a time. Behind Shimizu, somebody noisily lost the supper he’d had the evening before. The sharp stink made the corporal want to puke, too. Again, though, he had other things to worry about. The swells wouldn’t make boarding the barges any easier.

His platoon commander didn’t seem worried. “This isn’t bad, men,” Lieutenant Yonehara called. “We could board in seas twice this high!”

“Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try it,” said a soldier protected from insubordination by darkness. Another soldier stepped in the new puddle of vomit and cursed monotonously.

Yonehara’s platoon did keep advancing toward the rail, so Corporal Shimizu supposed other men from the regiment were going down the side of the ship and onto the barges. It was either that or they were all going over the side and drowning. They could have done that back in Japanese waters, if it was what the High Command had in mind. They wouldn’t have needed to come all this way.

“Wait!” a sailor called. The tossing didn’t seem to bother him a bit. “Another barge is coming alongside. That’s the one you’ll go into.”

Corporal Shimizu wondered how he could tell. It was as dark as the inside of a pig. Something hard and cold caught him just above the belly button-the rail. Automatically, his hands reached out to take hold of it. His right hand closed on iron, his left on rope: part of the netting down which he’d scramble when the word came.

He stood there, hoping the pressure behind him wouldn’t send him over the side before he was supposed to go. Without warning, the sailor slapped him on the back. “Down you go,” the fellow said. “Hurry! Don’t hold things up.”

“ Hai,” Shimizu said. He swung over the rail, hanging on for dear life while his boot found the net. If he’d been a monkey, able to grasp with feet as well as hands, everything would have been simple. As things were, he clambered down slowly and carefully.

“Hard work!” said a soldier scrambling down beside him. Corporal Shimizu nodded. This time, that was true literally as well as metaphorically.

The Daihatsu landing craft bobbed in the Pacific beside the Nagata Maru. It was about fifty feet long, with a beam of ten or twelve feet. Its hull was made of steel, supported by heavy wooden braces. It had twin keels riveted on to the hull. Except for the two machine guns at the bow and the steel shield protecting the wheel, it could have been a fishing boat going after sardines on the Inner Sea.

Getting down into the barge from the transport was tricky. Shimizu clung to the net. He didn’t want to get squashed between the two vessels. If he did, they’d scrape him off the steel.

“Come on!” a man on the barge called encouragingly. “Lean out. I’ll grab your boots and keep you safe.”

Leaning out, taking his feet out of the net, was the last thing Shimizu had in mind. Glumly, he realized he had no choice. With the burden he was bearing, how long could he hang on with arms and hands alone? How soon would he go into the water? “Hurry up!” he called to the fellow in the barge.

“I’ve got you,” the man answered, and so he did. “Let go. You’ll come in.”

Reluctantly, Shimizu obeyed. He was falling… into the barge. He laughed in relief as he straightened up. “ Arigato,” he said.

“ Do itashimashite.” The other man waved away his thanks. “Don’t pay back-pay forward. Help your friends coming down.”

That was good advice, and Corporal Shimizu took it. No one got crushed between the Nagata Maru and the landing barge. There were a couple of close calls, passed off with laughs and bows and exclamations of, “Hard work!”

The whole company squeezed onto the barge. Shimizu wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. Lieutenant Yonehara seemed pleased. “All according to plan,” he said. “We should start for Oahu any minute now.”

“I thought we were going to Hawaii,” a soldier said.

“Oahu is one of the islands of Hawaii,” the platoon leader explained. “It’s the one with the good harbor, and the one where the Americans have all their soldiers. Once we take it away from them, all the Hawaiian Islands are ours.”

It all sounded very easy when Lieutenant Yonehara put it like that. Shimizu let out a soft sigh of relief. He wanted it to be easy. People said the planes from the carriers had done a good job of hitting the harbor and the rest of the island’s defenses. Shimizu had been in the Army long enough not to trust what people said. This time, though, he hoped rumor told the truth.

The diesel engine at the stern of the landing barge took on a deeper note. The barge pulled away from the Nagata Maru. Another took its place. The motion was fierce-up hill and down dale, much worse than it had been in the freighter. Shimizu’s stomach lurched. I won’t be sick, he told himself sternly. A few soldiers did puke up whatever was in their bellies.

Twilight began turning the eastern sky pale as the barge-one of a whole flotilla of invasion craft-lumbered toward the shore. Most of the other landing craft carried soldiers, as Shimizu’s did. Some had howitzers or light tanks aboard. Shimizu hoped they were well chained down. If they shifted, they could capsize their barges and take them to the bottom.