Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

The artilleryman with the leg wound, by contrast, screamed about God and his mother and shit, all of which amounted to the same thing: he was in pain and didn’t like it. “Hold still, Vic,” Fletch said, kneeling beside him. “I’ll get a bandage on you.” A week earlier, he might have lost his lunch trying. Not any more. He’d had practice. What was that line from Hamlet?Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness, that was it. Old Will had known what he was talking about there, sure as hell.

“Hurts. Hurts like shit,” Vic said.

“Yeah, I know.” Fletch used his bayonet to cut away the khaki cloth of the other man’s uniform-one of the few things a bayonet was actually good for. He could see the artery pulsing inside the wound. It looked intact. If it weren’t, Vic probably would have bled to death.

Fletch dusted the gash with sulfa powder. He couldn’t sew it shut, but fumbled in one of the pouches on his belt and produced three safety pins. They’d help hold it closed, anyhow. He got a bandage over the wound, then stuck Vic’s syringe of morphine into his thigh and pressed down on the plunger.

A couple of minutes later, Vic said, “Ahh. That’s better, sir.” He sounded eerily calm. The drug had interposed a barrier between his torment and him.

“We’ll take him now, sir,” someone behind Fletch said.

He looked up. There were two corpsmen, Red Crosses prominent on their helmets and on armbands. “I wish you guys got here sooner,” he said.

The man who’d spoken gave back a shrug. “It’s not like there’s nothing going on for us, sir.” He looked weary unto death.

His buddy nodded, adding, “Goddamn Japs shoot at us regardless of these.” He tapped the Red Cross emblems. “Bastards don’t give a shit about the Geneva Convention.”

“Tell me about it!” Fletch exclaimed. The memory of the American soldier the Japanese had captured rose in him again. His stomach churned. “You don’t want to let yourselves get caught,” he told the corpsmen.

They nodded in unison. “Yeah, we already know about that,” one of them said. They got Vic onto a stretcher and carried him away. “Come on, buddy-the docs’ll fix you up.”

That left Fletch to figure out how to fight his gun without two more trained men. He had untrained infantrymen jerking shells now. His gun wouldn’t shoot as fast as it had before, but he could still get out two or three rounds a minute. If he had to lay the gun by his lonesome… then he did, that was all.

He muttered to himself. Even from here, the piece could reach all the way to the north shore and into the Pacific. And how was it being used? As a direct-fire gun, banging away at whatever targets he could see. He had no idea where the rest of the 105s in the battery were. The two guns close by belonged to another outfit. They’d been shot up worse than his crew. And that was par for the course. If anything, it was better than par for the course. He’d taken everything the Japs could throw at him, and he was still in the fight. A hell of a lot of people weren’t.

In the sugar fields off to the northeast, a Japanese machine gun started hammering away. The Japs were aggressive with their automatic weapons. They pushed them right up to the front and went after U.S. infantry with them. He didn’t care to think what they would have done with Browning Automatic Rifles. So far, they hadn’t shown any signs of owning weapons like those. He thanked God for small favors.

Aiming the gun at a target by himself was only a little faster than dying of old age. And he hadn’t finished the job before shouts of, “Tank! Tank!” from right in front of him made him give it up.

From everything he’d heard, the U.S. M3 wasn’t anything special compared to what the Germans and the Russians were throwing at each other these days. M3s could usually make the Jap machines say uncle, though. That truth would have pleased Fletch more if any of those U.S. tanks were in the neighborhood. They weren’t. If anything was going to stop this snorting Jap beast from running roughshod over the infantrymen, it was his gun.

“Armor-piercing!” he shouted to the foot soldiers he’d dragooned into his service.

“Which ones are those, sir?” one of them asked.

“Shit,” Fletch said. But he said it under his breath; it wasn’t the infantrymen’s fault that they didn’t know one kind of round from another. “The ones with the black tips. Shake a leg, guys, or that son of a bitch is going to-”

That son of a bitch did start shooting first. Fletch and his makeshift crew threw themselves flat. Fragments of sharp, hot steel snarled overheard. Standing up while you were getting shelled was asking to get torn to pieces. Sometimes you had to, but you never wanted to.

An American machine gun opened up on the tank. For all the good their bullets did, the soldiers at the gun might as well have thrown marshmallows at the Japanese machine. A tank that wasn’t armored against machine-gun fire had no raison d’etre.

“French, yet,” Fletch muttered. But the machine gun did do one thing: it distracted the Japs in the tank from the distant artillery piece to the annoyance right at hand. Fletch didn’t know if that was what the machine gunners had had in mind. He doubted it, as a matter of fact. But it let him get to his feet and yell till his crew did the same. “Come on, you bastards! They’ve given us a chance. They’re human, by God! They can make mistakes, just like us.”

The Japs hadn’t made very many, damn them. By sheer dumb luck, the tank wasn’t very far from the line on which the 105 pointed. Fletch swung the barrel to bear on it. Range was about seven hundred yards. He turned the altitude screw. The muzzle lowered, ever so slightly. “Fire!” he shouted.

The gun roared. Flame shot from the muzzle. The shell kicked up dirt in front of the tank and a little to the left. “Short!” one of the infantrymen shouted-they were starting to learn the ropes.

Now-had the Japs seen the shot? Fletch didn’t think so. They went on banging away at the machine gun. “Armor-piercing again!” he said. “Quick, goddammit!” As the shell went into the breech, he corrected his aim-or hoped he did. The tank wasn’t going very fast, but this gun wasn’t made for hitting any kind of moving target. He’d already seen that. “Fire!”

Boom! The 105 went off again. The foot soldiers who served it flinched. They usually remembered to cover their ears, but they didn’t know opening their mouths helped at least as much when it came to beating an artillery piece’s noise.

But then they started making noise of their own, screaming, “Hit! Hit! Jesus God, that’s a hit!” and, “You nailed that fucker, Lieutenant! Nailed his ass good!”

Fletch didn’t think any tank in the world, U.S., British, German, or Russian, could stand up to a 105mm AP round. This Japanese hunk of tin didn’t have a prayer. He couldn’t have aimed it better if he’d had the most highly trained crew in the world and tried for a week. It struck home right at the join between hull and turret, and blew the turret clean off the tank and a good six feet in the air. Ammo in the turret started cooking off, while the hull erupted in a fireball. The crew never had a chance, not that Fletch wasted much grief on them.

“You see how that Jap tank tipped his hat to our gun?” one of the infantrymen yelled.

Fletch laughed his head off. It was a pretty good line, and all the better because it came from somebody so raw. But that wasn’t the only reason. He felt giddy, almost drunk, with relief. The odds had favored the tank, not him. All he had to protect him from fragments was a flimsy shield. He’d had to be dead accurate to kill before he got killed-and he’d done it.