Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Supper was an oddly carefree meal, featuring some of the best lamb chops Peterson had ever eaten. Supper also featured hot and cold running booze. Admiral Halsey sometimes winked at the rules against shipboard alcohol, but Peterson had been mostly dry for a while now. The whiskey and rum and gin and Irish coffee added something to the rumors coming in from around the island. Some of the Marines believed everything, no matter how gloomy. Some refused to believe anything.

“Only stands to reason,” one of them insisted. “If the Japs plastered us and Pearl Harbor, they couldn’t have had much left over to do anything else.”

“Bullshit,” said the captain who’d shown Peterson around. “If they did that much down here, they aren’t going to forget about Schofield and Wheeler and Kaneohe. They’ll hit everything.”

Reports seemed to bear him out. With the radio off the air, though, Peterson found it hard to be sure of anything. He supposed the big wheels here knew what was really going on. He hoped they did, anyhow. They should have-phones were still working, even if the radio had been yanked. But whatever they knew, they weren’t talking. That by itself seemed to say the news wasn’t good.

Peterson got a cot in a tent that night, and counted himself lucky. When reveille sounded, he thought for a moment he was back aboard the Enterprise. Then memory returned. He was swearing as he bounced to his feet. A Marine climbing out of another cot a few feet away nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, Navy, it’s a bitch, isn’t it?” he said.

“A bitch and a half,” Peterson answered. “What the hell do we do now?”

“Might as well have breakfast,” the Marine said practically. “Soon as the brass wants anything from us, I figure they’ll let us know.”

Breakfast was bacon and eggs and hash browns, not much different from what Peterson would have eaten on the Enterprise — she hadn’t been at sea long enough to switch from fresh to powdered eggs. But the walk to the mess hall reminded him where he was and what had happened. The west was light, but in the east the sun couldn’t penetrate the smoke rising from Pearl Harbor. They hadn’t even slowed down the fires there during the night. How much fuel was burning?

He’d just got a second cup of coffee when air-raid sirens began to howl. He sprang up and followed the Marines as they ran for shelter. Most of them made for a nearly finished swimming pool not far away. “First time I ever jumped into one of these when it was dry,” he said.

He got a laugh. Minutes later, though, bombs started whistling down. Being on the receiving end and unable to hit back was anything but funny. A few antiaircraft guns banged away, but the enemy airplanes were high in the sky. Peterson didn’t think any of them got hit. No U.S. planes rose to challenge them. No U.S. planes at Ewa could.

“This isn’t how it was yesterday morning,” said one of the Marines in the pool. “Then they came in with fighters, right over the rooftops. We shot back with Springfields,45s, anything we could get our hands on. Didn’t do a hell of a lot of good, not as far as I could see.”

The bombers didn’t linger very long. After ten or fifteen minutes, they droned away. The Marines and Peterson emerged from their makeshift shelter. A bomb had knocked over the old Navy airship mooring mast the Marines used for a control tower. Another had hit the enlisted men’s barracks, which the Zeros had shot up the day before. One end had fallen down, and what was still standing was on fire. And that second cup of coffee never got finished, because the mess hall had taken a direct hit.

Bombs had hit the asphalt X of the runways, too. If Ewa had had any flyable planes, they wouldn’t have been able to get off the ground till the craters were repaired. “Son of a bitch!” Peterson said, looking around at the devastation. “ Son of a bitch!”

“That’s about the size of it,” agreed the captain who’d taken charge of him the day before. He hadn’t been in the pool, and Peterson hadn’t seen him at breakfast, either. By his drawn features, he hadn’t had any sack time the night before. He went on, “You were talking about drawing a helmet and a rifle and making like a soldier. Were you serious about that?”

“Hell, yes,” Peterson answered without hesitation. But then he thought to ask, “How come?”

“About what you’d expect,” the Marine officer answered. “The Japs are on the island.”

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO didn’t much care for flying combat air patrol above the Japanese task force. As far as he was concerned, that was a job for the float planes from the battleships and cruisers that had accompanied the aircraft carriers to Hawaii. But Admiral Nagumo had ordered differently, and so Shindo buzzed along with his engine throttled back to be as miserly with fuel as he could.

He would rather have been strafing the American soldiers on Oahu and finishing the job of knocking out the U.S. aircraft on the island. But he was not the sort of man to protest orders. When Commander Genda told him to take charge of the patrol, he’d just nodded and saluted and said, “Aye aye, sir.”

In a way, he could see the need. They’d sunk one carrier. But they thought three or even four had been based at Pearl Harbor. If planes from any of those showed up at the wrong moment… well, life could get more interesting than Shindo really wanted. He preferred things to go according to plan.

His eyes darted now right, now left, now center. He kept flicking them here and there. If anything was in the sky to see, he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss it. Stare straight ahead all the time, and even important things wouldn’t register.

He’d been flying for a couple of hours, and almost dismissed the float plane off to the west as one of his countrymen. But the lines weren’t quite right. Neither was the color-Japan seldom painted her aircraft that oceanic blue.

“That’s an American plane!” The words crackled in his earphones. One of the other pilots had spotted it too, then. “It’s seen us. I’ll shoot it down!”

“No!” Shindo said sharply. “No one is to shoot at that airplane until I do. The rest of you, continue on your normal patrol.”

Had another man given orders like that, the fliers under him would have thought him out for glory, out to run up his own score. With Lieutenant Shindo, that was unimaginable. He gunned his Zero toward the American plane.

The enemy pilot took awhile to spot him. No doubt the Americans were paying more attention to the ships spread out ahead of them. That was their duty, after all. Not until just before Shindo fired a machine-gun burst at him did they realize they had company. Only after the burst did the pilot turn toward the west and try to escape. The radioman, who also had charge of the rear-facing machine gun, shot back at the Zero.

Shindo pulled back out of range, as if afraid. Then he made a couple of feckless lunges at the float plane. He fired each time, but his bursts went wide. “What are you doing, Lieutenant?” one of the other fliers demanded. “For heaven’s sake, finish him. Do you want him to get away?”

“No,” Shindo said, and said no more for a little while. Then he radioed the carriers: “Enemy aircraft’s bearing is 280. I say again, 280. Along that bearing, we will find American ships, and we may also find planes on the way to attack us.”

He got no acknowledgment. He’d expected none. Even if the enemy had spotted them, the carriers needed to maintain radio silence, especially if a U.S. carrier had launched against them.

Now that he had the bearing, he could end the little farce he’d been playing out. He felt proud he’d been the one to get it here as well as from the Wildcats near Pearl Harbor the day before. He climbed and then dove. The enemy gunner couldn’t fire at him without shooting off his own tail. Shindo put several cannon shells into the float plane’s belly. This held no sport. It was simply killing: a part of war. The American plane tilted in the air. Smoke poured from it. The pilot fought for control-fought and lost. Down toward the water he fell. He and his gunner had both been brave and skillful. Flying a scout plane against the best carrier-based fighter in the world, that hadn’t helped them a bit.