Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

They were falling back anyhow. No doubt that said they had no real chance. Fletch scowled. He didn’t want to think about that. He said, “We’d better move back toward Honolulu. Things are still holding together there, or they were the last I heard.”

“We’d better move back somewhere, that’s for damn sure,” Clancy said.

The other two enlisted men nodded. Arnie said, “If we don’t, the Japs are liable to cut us off.”

He stopped right there. He didn’t need to say another word. If advancing Japanese soldiers cut them off, they were liable to capture them. Nobody in his right mind cared to chance that.

“Come on,” Fletch said harshly. “Let’s get going.”

Off they went, retreating to the south and east. They weren’t the only ones-far from it. Singly and in small groups like theirs, other soldiers tramped along the side of the road or out in the middle of it. Clouds drifted overhead. A spatter of rain fell, though the sun never disappeared. The landscape was one of almost unearthly beauty: jungle-clad hills to the north, palm trees and blossoming hibiscus close at hand, mynahs and bluish-faced zebra doves pecking for whatever they could find, the sapphire sea visible to the south.

Where beauty failed, it failed because of man rather than nature. Ahead, Honolulu lay mired in smoke after the latest Japanese bombing attack. If Fletch turned his head to look west, he could see more ruin in Pearl Harbor. He didn’t. He was too stubborn.

But when he looked around, he saw the ugliness in his comrades and himself. They were scrawny and filthy and unshaven. They smelled bad. At least half of them had minor wounds. They all had the hangdog air of beaten men.

That was one more thing Fletch had no idea how to cure. He was sure he had that same hangdog air himself. Oahu was going to fall. It would fall sooner, not later, too. And what would the Japs do with all the soldiers they captured then? What would they do to them? Whatever they want to, Fletch thought, and shuddered.

Somewhere not far away, an officer was shouting frantically, trying to get men to form a defensive line. “Come on, you sorry bastards!” he howled. “We’ve still got a chance as long as we don’t quit!”

Fletch gathered up his erstwhile gun team by eye. “Let’s go,” he said.

They didn’t argue with him. They showed no great enthusiasm, but they went along. Maybe they were also wondering what would happen if and when they had to lay down their arms. That one gnawed at Fletch.

Because it gnawed at him, he shoved it to the back of his mind. He found the loud officer-a captain-behind a bougainvillea hedge. “What do you need, sir?” he asked.

“Fucking everything!” the captain exclaimed. Then he amplified that. Pointing north toward the hills overlooking Honolulu, he said, “We’ve got to stop the advancing enemy.”

“But, sir-” Fletch pointed west, the direction from which he’d come. “The Japs are over there.”

“I know that, goddammit,” the captain said impatiently. “But they’re sneaking down through the hills, too, to get on our flank and rear.”

Fletch didn’t know why he was surprised. If the Japs could get men over the Waianae Range, these lower, less rugged hills would prove no great challenge to them. But he couldn’t help asking, “Why didn’t we have men up there to stop them?”

“In that jungle? Who would have figured they could get through it?” the captain said, proving some people had trouble learning even from experience. It wasn’t the captain’s fault alone, of course. His superiors had to have the same attitude. Ostriches eventually pulled their heads out of the sand and ran, didn’t they? That only proved they were one up on the top brass in the Hawaiian Department.

“Uh, sir?” Fletch gestured for the captain to step aside with him for a moment. The other officer did. In a low voice, Fletch said, “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but if they’re coming at us from the north and from the west, we are really and truly screwed.”

The captain nodded. “Yes, I realize that. And so, Lieutenant? Have you heard an order to surrender?”

“No, sir,” Fletch said.

“Neither have I. That being so, we had better keep fighting, don’t you think?” As if to underscore the captain’s words, mortar bombs started whistling down not nearly far enough away. The captain and Fletch both threw themselves flat on the ground before the first one burst. Jagged fragments of steel hissed and whistled through the air. A soldier cried out, sounding startled and hurt at the same time. The captain started shouting again without raising his head more than a couple of inches: “Stay ready, men! They may try to follow this up with foot soldiers!”

“Christ!” Fletch said. “Are they down this far already?”

Before the captain could answer, Japanese rifle fire did it for him. The Arisaka rifle the Japs used sounded less robust than the Springfield. It was only.256 caliber, and didn’t have quite the stopping power of the bigger, heavier American round. The Arisaka had proved plenty good enough, though.

Men began slipping away from the captain’s makeshift line. He cursed them with weary hopelessness. Fletch understood that. It was exactly the way he felt himself.

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU hadn’t known what to expect from Honolulu. It sprawled ahead of him now, hard by the Pacific. The buildings were large and solid, in the Western style. All the same, it couldn’t have held much more than half as many people as Hiroshima, the Japanese city closest to his farm.

Here and there, in little stubborn knots, the Americans still fought hard. But now that resistance began to feel like the last spasms of some dying thing. The Japanese could bypass the men who did keep battling, because in a lot of places there weren’t any. That let them surround the pockets of diehards and dispose of them at their leisure.

When Shimizu sent young Shiro Wakuzawa out to scrounge supplies for the squad as the sun sank in the west, the first-year soldier went off with a sigh. His squadmates murmured, “Hard work!” in sympathy. Shimizu didn’t care. Somebody had to do it. He’d done it himself often enough in China, before he got promoted.

Wakuzawa came back with a big burlap sack slung over his shoulder and an enormous smile on his face. “You look like the monkey who found the apple tree,” Shimizu said. “What have you got in there?”

“Wait till you see, Corporal- san.” Wakuzawa let the sack down on the grass by the fire the Japanese had started. The fire was purely force of habit; Hawaiian nights didn’t come close to requiring one. As the youngster reached into the sack, he went on, “I came across a grocery store that hadn’t been looted empty.”

“Ahhh!” the whole squad said as one man. They said it again when Wakuzawa took out three cartons of mild, flavorful American cigarettes. Boxes of crackers followed, and then Wakuzawa’s triumph: can after can of meat, its pink glory displayed against a dark blue painted background. Big yellow letters told what it was, but Shimizu couldn’t read the Roman alphabet.

“Does anyone know what it says?” he asked.

“It’s called ‘Spam,’ Corporal,” Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa answered.

He’d always struck Shimizu as a bookish type. “How do you know?” the corporal asked.

“My father is a druggist in Hiroshima,” Furusawa said. “I was learning the trade till I got drafted. Some of the medicines he got came from the West, so I had to learn the characters the gaijin use.”

The Spam cans opened with keys conveniently soldered to them. The meat inside them looked just like the tempting illustration. The soldiers hacked it into rough slices with their bayonets and ate it on crackers. Some of them toasted the Spam over the fire first; others didn’t bother. Shimizu didn’t-he was too hungry to care. He wolfed down the meat.