Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

But the bomb had also knocked his gun over on its side. The 105 weighed almost two and a half tons on its carriage. That hadn’t been enough to keep it upright. One wheel still spun lazily. Fletch wanted to kick the piece. He couldn’t fire it. He couldn’t move it.

“I can’t do shit,” he said, and heard himself as if from very far away.

Then he remembered the De Soto had been carrying ammunition. He yelped, sprang back into the hole in the ground, and flattened himself out again. Sure as hell, the shells started cooking off one after another as the flames got to them. That probably made for a spectacular fireworks display, but you wouldn’t have wanted to watch from too close. Fletch, hugging the ground as shell fragments screeched past overhead, was much too close.

When the booming stopped, he cautiously looked up from the hole. He might have been a groundhog, curious about his shadow. What he was curious about was the De Soto, and whether any pieces of it bigger than a bobby pin were left. As far as he could tell, the answer was no.

Ten minutes later, the men from the gun crew came back, each of them rolling along a wheel with tire and inner tube on it. They stared at the overturned gun and at what was left of the car that had drawn it. “Fuck, Lieutenant,” Clancy said, “why didn’t you tell us to bring back a whole automobile?”

“Please accept my apologies, gentlemen,” Fletch said with what he thought was commendable dignity. “If you can get one, please do. Some rope would be nice, too. Maybe we can get the gun back on its wheels.” He thought he would need to do that pretty damn quick if he was going to do it at all. It wasn’t just that he wanted to keep shooting at the Japs, though he did. But it looked as if the Army was going to retreat again, and he wanted to hang on to the gun if he possibly could. He’d brought it this far, after all.

What went through his head was, Yeah, and a hell of a lot of good it’s done me. What had he accomplished with the 105? Oh, he’d blown up a tank. And he’d probably killed or maimed a bunch of Japanese soldiers he’d never seen. But so what? If he’d done anything really worth bragging about, would the U.S. Army have been down here on the outskirts of Honolulu? If everybody’d done something really worth bragging about…

If that had happened, some scout plane would have spotted the Japanese carriers and the invasion force before they plastered Oahu. The carriers would have been attacked and driven off or sunk. If the landing force had managed to hit the beach, it would have been slaughtered right there. As soon as the Japs wrecked the fleet and, worse, wrecked the local U.S. air power, that was the ballgame right there.

Clancy and Dave and Arnie didn’t worry about such things-or if they did, they didn’t show it. “We’ll find you a ride, Lieutenant,” Dave said. “Ain’t nothin’ to get all hot and bothered about.” He nudged his pals. “Come on, guys. Let’s get it done.” Off they went, with as much swagger as if they were still fighting at Waimea.

Fletch wearily shook his head. He wished he could keep his pecker up like that. Japanese artillery started pounding the positions in front of him. The Jap guns were poorly sited; he could see their muzzle flashes. If he’d had anything to shoot back with, he would have made them sorry. But all he could do right now was watch. Few of their shells came back far enough to get close to him. None came close enough to make him dive for cover. He would have for some of them when the war got started. Misses that would have terrified him then he took for granted now.

What he didn’t take for granted were men straggling away from the line the Japs were shelling. They looked as if they’d had themselves a bellyful of war and didn’t want any more. “Get back to your positions!” he shouted at them. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Some of them just kept walking. They weren’t running, but they weren’t going to fight any more, either. One man said, “It don’t make no fuckin’ difference now. Shit, we’re licked.” Two or three others nodded.

“Get back to your positions,” Fletch snapped. “That’s an order, goddammit.”

They ignored him. He didn’t know what to do. If he picked up his rifle and tried giving that order again… Quite a few of them had rifles, too. They might not want to use them against the Japs any more, but he didn’t think they’d be shy about turning them on him.

What was an army when soldiers stopped obeying officers? It wasn’t an army any more, that was for damn sure. It was just a mob. That had happened to the Russians and the Germans at the end of the last war. Now Fletch saw it here.

The soldiers trudged past him. More followed in their wake. The Americans had done everything they could here. Now some of them-a lot of them-were deciding they couldn’t do any more, and might as well save their own skins.

Was anybody still at the front? Would the Japs be along in another ten minutes? Fletch didn’t want to meet them by himself. Unlike a lot of his countrymen, though, he didn’t want to run away from them, either. He stood irresolute, peering north and west.

A shiny maroon Ford convertible drove up against the tide of retreating men. Clancy waved to Fletch. “Ain’t this some snazzy hot rod?” he yelled from behind the wheel.

“It’ll do,” Fletch said, grateful his merry men hadn’t got the hell out of there in that snazzy hot rod. “You have rope?”

Dave and Arnie hopped out of the Ford. Dave displayed a coil. He and Fletch fixed it to the gun, while Arnie tied the other end to the car’s front bumper. Fletch waved to Clancy, who put it in reverse. The rope came taut. The tires spun, kicking up dust. Fletch figured either nothing would happen or the dead weight would pull the Ford’s bumper off. But when the 105 stirred a little, hope also stirred in him.

He rushed to the gun and started pushing with all his might. “Come on, goddammit!” he yelled to Arnie and Dave. They joined him, grunting and straining. “We can do it!” Maybe we can do it. “Put your backs into it!”

“Give us a hand, you lazy bastards,” Arnie growled at three retreating soldiers. For a wonder, they did. For an even bigger wonder, the gun thumped over into its wheels.

Sweat ran down Fletch’s face. He’d pulled something in the small of his back. He didn’t give a damn. “That’s the way,” he panted. “Let’s get her hitched up and…” He stopped. After that, what else could he do but retreat, too?

THIS IS THE way the world ends, Jim Peterson thought. T. S. Eliot hadn’t known a thing about it. When the British surrendered to the American colonists at Yorktown, their band had played “The World Turned Upside Down.” Peterson’s world was turning upside down under his feet. The little yellow men from Tokyo were walloping the tar out of their American foes. That wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. But it was real, real as the stink that rose from him because he hadn’t bathed in he couldn’t remember how long.

Pearl City lay just north of Pearl Harbor. It housed sailors who’d been stationed there and civilians who’d worked there. It had been a pleasant little town. Now it was on the front line. Palm trees and Norfolk Island pines lay in the streets, uprooted by bombs and shells. What had been nice little homes were now smoldering, bullet-pocked rubble. As far as fighting went, rubble wasn’t so bad. It gave better cover than it would have before it got smashed.

“Hey, Peterson,” said the sergeant who’d given him his stripes. The man’s name was Bill McKinley, and he answered to Prez.

Peterson just grunted. They crouched in a wrecked kitchen, peering out through the glassless window toward the north. A hole in the roof about the size of a cow let in sun and rain-sometimes both at once.