Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Probably not much,” Joe said. “If I don’t end up a Navy flier, the draft’ll get me pretty soon.”

“I said a little longer.” Dominic Scalzi was a precise man, a good thing for a mechanic to be. He jerked a thumb at the little washroom off to one side of the work area. “Go on and change into your coveralls. Long as you’re here, I’m gonna get some work outa you. See if you can clean the gunk outa Mr. Jablonski’s carburetor, will you? He’s been pissing and moaning about it for weeks.”

“I’ll try,” Joe said. “You want to know what I think, I think the carb on a ’38 Plymouth is a piece of crap.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think. I just want you to clean out the son of a bitch.” Scalzi’s uniform was an almost Navy blue, but all it had on it was Dom machine-embroidered over the left breast pocket. Joe’s was just like it except for the name.

He grabbed a hasty cigarette of his own while he changed out of his jacket and slacks and into the scratchy denim coveralls. Before he came out, he flushed the butt down the toilet. He figured on soaking the carburetor in gasoline before he got to work on it. Gasoline and cigarettes didn’t mix.

Once he’d soaked everything with the gasoline, he went after the valves and springs and made sure no deposits could interfere with their functioning. Then he reassembled the carb. His hands knew what to do, almost without conscious thought on his part. He had the carburetor back on the engine before he really noticed what he was up to.

The key was in the ignition. He started up the Plymouth, listened, and nodded to himself. The car sounded a hell of a lot better than it had when old man Jablonski brought it in. He waved to his boss. Scalzi came over, wiping his greasy hands on a rag. He listened, too, and gave Joe a thumbs-up. Joe grinned. It was turning into a pretty damn good day.

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU liked the way things were going nowadays much better than he had a week earlier. The attack over the western mountains had made the Americans fall back for their very lives. They still hadn’t pieced together a line to match the one they’d held in front of Schofield Barracks and Wahiawa. With a little luck, they wouldn’t be able to.

They hadn’t quit, though. A Yankee machine gun up ahead spat death across a pineapple field. Shimizu crouched in a foxhole. Sooner or later, a grenade or mortar bomb would take care of the machine-gun crew. Then he’d advance again. Or, if one of his officers gave the order, he’d advance sooner than that. And if the machine gun blew out his brains or chopped his legs out from under him… in that case, like it or not, one of the chowderheads in his squad would get a star on each of his red-and-gold collar tabs.

Meanwhile… Meanwhile, Shimizu lit a cigarette from a pack he’d taken off a dead American. The tobacco was amazingly smooth and mild. Any way you look at it, the Americans live better than we do, he thought. He made twenty yen-about four dollars and sixty cents-a month. He wondered what an American corporal got paid. More than that, or he missed his guess.

Cautiously, he stuck his head up for a look around. He saw where the machine gun was: in a sandbagged position behind a creek. Whoever’d sited it had known what he was doing. If there were no mortars handy, he didn’t see how anyone could knock it out. The gunners would shoot a man with grenades before he got close enough to fling them.

He ducked down in a hurry. He wasn’t going to order anybody forward to throw his life away. Lieutenant Yonehara had done that, and what had it got him? Nothing but a grieving family back home.

Of course, Colonel Fujikawa or some other officer could order the men to advance, and they would have to go. What would happen to them afterwards? That was in the hands of karma. So Shimizu told himself, anyway.

“This way! Forward! It’s clear over here!” The shout came in Japanese, from ahead and to the right. It wasn’t just Japanese, either. It was Hiroshima dialect-from Shimizu’s own part of the country-and old-fashioned Hiroshima dialect at that. It sounded like somebody who’d never been off a farm in the back of beyond till the Army grabbed him. Shimizu would have thought only old grannies talked like that nowadays.

But if there was a way forward… He sprang out of his hole, shouting, “Come on, men! Let’s drive the Yankees back again!”

He wasn’t the only one who’d emerged. Quite a few soldiers had heard that shout. They all jumped up and started running ahead and to the right. And the American machine gun and nearby riflemen remorselessly chopped them down. Shimizu had learned better than to stay on his feet very long under fire like that. He threw himself flat and, still on his belly, started scraping himself a new hole in the ground.

Amid the screams of the wounded, somebody yelled, “ Zakennayo! ”-a pungent, all-purpose obscenity-and then went on, “Must be one of those Hawaii Japanese!”

Shimizu dug harder. He muttered, “ Zakennayo! ” too. They’d told him before he set out that there were more people of Japanese blood in Hawaii than any other group. From what he’d seen, that was likely true. Most of them had roots around Hiroshima, too. That was why the Fifth Division, which drew its manpower from that region, was on Oahu now. And they’d told him the Hawaii Japanese would be delighted to see these islands come under the Rising Sun.

That… wasn’t so obvious. Some of the older men and women seemed glad enough to see the Japanese. A lot of the younger ones, the ones born here, seemed anything but. This fellow had just got several soldiers shot. If we get our hands on him … Shimizu thought longingly.

He cursed again as he threw dirt in front of himself. The Americans and the damned Hawaii Japanese had suckered him. He squeezed the entrenching tool till his knuckles whitened. Of course the bastard sounded as if he came from the dark side of the moon. Most of the Japanese here had old-fashioned accents. They or their ancestors had been peasants to begin with, and the language here hadn’t changed with time as it had in Japan.

He’d just got the foxhole half as good as the one he’d left behind when mortar bombs did start whistling down around the American machine gun. Those bursts sounded sweet to him-but not sweet enough to make him stick his head up out of that foxhole. If he did, the Yankees were liable to blow it off for him.

“You got ’em. It’s safe. Come on!” The alluring Japanese voice came from ahead of him. This time, he sat tight. What could they do to that fellow if they caught him? He’d be even more fun to play with than an ordinary captive.

Soldiers were yelling, “Down! Stay down! It’s a trick!” But Shimizu heard feet running through the field. He also heard the machine gun stutter to life. Curses and screams followed. So did the thuds of bodies crashing to the ground. Shimizu added his own curses to the din. Now he was swearing at his own men at least as hard as at the Americans. If that voice had fooled them once-well, they weren’t expecting it. But if it fooled them twice…

“Stay down, baka yaro! ” he yelled. Dumb assholes they were, almost dumb enough to deserve getting shot.

More mortar bombs fell around the machine-gun nest. “You can’t hit a damn thing!” that lying Japanese voice jeered. Maybe, on the principle that everything it said was full of crap, the mortars really had put the American machine gun out of action. Maybe-but Corporal Shimizu didn’t stick his head up to find out.

He didn’t hear any signs that the men around him were trying to advance, either. He breathed a sigh of relief. Some of them could learn after all. The ones who couldn’t had paid the price for their stupidity.