Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

The bombardier laughed. “Fat lot of good those have done them.”

In a strictly military sense, he was right. But the Japanese were monitoring radio stories from the mainland about the “Heroes of Hawaii.” The Americans here might be doomed to failure. They still made good propaganda, and helped distract the people of the USA from the advances General Homma’s army was making in the Philippines and the rapid push down the Malayan peninsula toward Singapore against the British.

Things are going our way, Fuchida thought. We have to keep moving fast. If we let up, if we let our enemies catch their balance, we could be in trouble. But so far, everything is fine.

Other bombers were pounding the docks and the area just inland from them. Unopposed bombers could do dreadful things to cities. The Germans had shown as much over Rotterdam and Belgrade. Now Japan, having swept away American air power in Hawaii and the Philippines, was teaching the same lesson to Honolulu and Manila.

Fuchida wondered if the rumors he’d heard could be true. Had the Americans in the Philippines really let their planes get caught on the ground? The Japanese hadn’t hit them from Formosa till a day after fighting opened here in Hawaii. People said General MacArthur was supposed to be a good commander. If he’d been caught with his pants down like that, though… A Japanese officer would have slit his belly to atone for the disgrace. The Americans seemed to lack the idea of seeking an honorable death.

They lacked all sorts of notions of honor. And yet no one could fault the courage with which they’d fought here in Hawaii. The contrast left Fuchida puzzled. How could courage come into being without honor?

The other thing that puzzled him was how so much courage sprang from so much wealth. The homes, the swarms of motorcars, the vast numbers of telephones and radios… All of it made a Japanese stare in astonished disbelief. The meat and vegetables in the shops had been a surprise, too, but they were starting to run low. Put everything together and it was amazing the Yankees weren’t too soft to fight. Somehow, though, they weren’t.

Fuchida swung the B5N1 back to the north for the short hop back to Haleiwa. All hops here were short, which saved fuel. Not all of what the bomber was burning had come off the Akagi. Quite a bit was taken from captured filling stations. The Americans, with all the petroleum in the world at their fingertips, hadn’t thought to destroy much of what was in that stock to keep the Japanese from using it.

More antiaircraft shells burst around the bomber as Fuchida flew over the front. The Americans were falling back into the high ground that covered Honolulu from the north. They might be hard to root out of there. Fuchida shrugged in the privacy of the cockpit. The Army had done a good job so far-better than he’d expected. It should be up to this, too.

“Wish we had some more bombs on board, sir, so we could drop some on these fellows’ heads,” the bombardier said.

“We have people paying attention to them, I promise,” Fuchida said dryly.

“I know that, sir,” the bombardier answered. “But I want to do it myself.”

“Every man in his place,” Fuchida said. But the bombardier showed fine martial spirit. Of course the Japanese had it. They were a warrior race, schooled in the ways of bushido. It was the Americans who should have been without it. But they made warriors, too. Fuchida shrugged again. However strange that was, it was the truth.

He landed at that first captured airstrip by Haleiwa. Elsewhere in the north, combat engineers were making new runways with captured earth-moving equipment. Ordinary American builders had more bulldozers and other heavy machinery than Japanese military engineers-another example of American prodigality, or maybe just of American wealth.

“How did it go, sir?” a groundcrew man asked as Fuchida climbed out of the bomber.

“According to plan,” he answered, and laughed-he sounded like Lieutenant Shindo. But it was true. “Just according to plan.”

“LOUSY JAP!” KENZO TAKAHASHI heard that shout every time he stuck his nose outside. “Lousy stinking Jap!”

It had been bad before. It was worse now that the Japanese were bombing Honolulu. That brought the war home to people for whom, even after Pearl Harbor, it hadn’t seemed quite real. Hard to deny reality when you were out on the street because your house, and maybe your wife or your son, too, had been blown to smithereens.

The only good thing about being out on the street in Honolulu in January was that you wouldn’t freeze, the way you might somewhere on the mainland. If you had a sweater, that was plenty. Even if you didn’t, you’d get by. But if you were on the street and you saw a young man with golden-brown skin, high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and coarse black hair, you weren’t going to wish him the top of the morning and ask him how he was.

“I’m not a Jap. I’m an American!” Kenzo had tried protesting the first few times people showered abuse on him. It had got him exactly nowhere, accomplished exactly nothing. It just made people yell at him even more. It had also almost got him into a couple of fistfights.

One of those would have happened if a cop hadn’t broken it up. The policeman, a haole, hadn’t wanted his thanks. “I ain’t got much use for you, neither, kid,” he said, “but there’s too much real shit going on to waste time with pissant stuff. Get the hell out of here.” Kenzo got.

He told Hiroshi about it. He didn’t tell his father. He knew what his old man would have said: that it proved he ought to be saluting the Rising Sun and not the Stars and Stripes. He couldn’t stomach that.

“I am an American, dammit,” he raged, “even if the haoles can’t see it.”

“Yeah, I know. Me, too,” Hiroshi said. “But you know what? It’s not just the haoles yelling at us these days. It’s everybody-Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos.” His grin was haggard.

Kenzo only grunted. Part of that fell under what can you expect? Japan was at war with China, ruled Korea, and now had invaded the Philippines. But it still stung. Just as haoles in Hawaii looked down their noses at everybody else (with the partial exception of the Hawaiians themselves, and they weren’t competition), the Japanese here thought themselves better than Koreans and Filipinos, and probably Chinese, too.

“You know how bad it is?” Hiroshi said. Kenzo shook his head. His brother said, “Even the Puerto Ricans are yelling, ‘Goddamn Jap!’ these days.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said, unconsciously echoing his father. There weren’t many Puerto Ricans in Hawaii. The ones who were there were seen as thieves and crooks and grifters by everybody else. The story was that the governor of Puerto Rico lo these many years ago, asked for a shipload of laborers, had provided it by emptying the local jails and whorehouses. Kenzo didn’t know if the story was true, but everybody told it.

Getting out on the Pacific in the Oshima Maru was something of a relief. Kenzo had never imagined he would think something like that. But his father, however loopy the old man’s ideas were, didn’t hate him. The other advantage of going to sea was not being there when the bombs went off. That didn’t help so much, though, because Kenzo still worried about his mother.

As they pulled out of Kewalo Basin, Hiroshi said, “Father, why not bring Mother on the sampan? That way, we’d all be safe together.”

“I said this,” Father answered. “She told me she didn’t want to come. What am I supposed to do, drag her?”

Hiroshi didn’t say anything to that. Kenzo wouldn’t have known what to say to it, either. They just stood there listening to the engine. The sampan had enough fuel to get to Kauai or Maui, but so what? What difference did that make? Even if they got Mother aboard, they’d be nothing but refugees. And, for all Kenzo knew, the Japanese Army was already on the other islands. Even if it wasn’t, it probably would be soon. The U.S. Army hadn’t garrisoned them. They couldn’t put up any kind of a fight.