Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Kenzo froze with his shovel in midair. Up the street toward him came Elsie Sundberg and a couple of other girls. The last time she’d seen him, she’d pretended she hadn’t. The memory of that still burned. Would she do it again? He didn’t think he could stand it if she did, even though she wasn’t exactly his girlfriend and never had been.

He knew just when she recognized him. She half missed a step, then turned to one of her friends and said something Kenzo was too far away to catch. The other girls just shrugged, which told him nothing.

Elsie squared her shoulders. She kept walking. When she came to where Kenzo was working, she nodded and said, “Hello, Ken. How are you?”

He felt like cheering. Instead, he nodded back. “I’m okay. How are you? Is your family all right?”

“I’m… here,” she answered. That could have meant anything. “My family’s safe, yes. How about you? I see your brother’s here.”

“Yes.” Kenzo nodded jerkily. “And my father’s fine. My mother…” He didn’t go on. His face twisted. I won’t cry in front of her. I won’t, he told himself, and somehow he didn’t.

“Oh, Ken! I’m so sorry!” All of a sudden, Elsie sounded like the girl he’d known for so long, not the near-stranger who thought he was nothing but a Jap.

One of the girls she was with, a brunette named Joyce something who’d graduated a couple of years ahead of her and Kenzo, said, “I didn’t know the Japs did anything to their own.”

He gripped the handle on the shovel very tightly. She probably hasn’t got any brains to knock out, he told himself. He made himself hold still. It wasn’t easy. Neither was holding his voice steady as he answered, “I’m not a Jap. I’m an American, just as much as you are-or I would be if you’d let me.”

By the way Joyce looked at him, he might as well have spoken to her in Japanese. Elsie’s other friend rolled her eyes, as if to say she’d heard it before and didn’t believe a word of it. Kenzo waited to see what Elsie would do. She eyed him as if she were seeing him for the first time. In a way, maybe she was. She said, “Take care of yourself. I’ve got to go.”

And she did. Joyce wagged a finger at her. She just shrugged. The straw boss yelled, “You work, Takahashi, you lazy baka yaro!” Kenzo did. Maybe the world wasn’t such a wretched place after all.

LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO strode along the runway at Wheeler Field. His boots clumped on concrete. The wreckage of American warplanes caught on the ground had been bulldozed off to the grass alongside the runways. Japanese technicians attacked the wrecks with pliers and wrenches and screwdrivers and wire-cutters, salvaging what they could. A lot of Japanese flight instruments were based on their American equivalents. In a pinch, the American ones might do. And spare parts, wherever they came from, were always welcome.

Turning to Commander Fuchida, Shindo said, “The Americans had so much here!”

“ Hai.” Fuchida nodded. “We knew that before we started this.”

“We knew it, yes, but did we know it?” Shindo said. “Did we feel it in our bellies? I don’t think so. If we had known how much they had, would we have had the nerve to try what we tried?”

This time, Fuchida shrugged. “What you have is one thing. What you do with it is something else. And we had the advantage of surprise.” He waved to the shattered hulks of airplanes. “Once we caught them on the ground, they never had the chance to recover.”

“Yes, sir,” Shindo said. “That was the point of the exercise, all right.”

Fuchida turned away, toward the northeast. “Now we make them come to us. If they want to fight a war in the Pacific from their own West Coast, they’re welcome to try.” He paused, then resumed: “Commander Genda was right. If we’d struck the fleet and gone away, they would have used this for their advance base, not San Francisco, and who knows what they might have interfered with? But Hawaii shields everything we’re doing farther west.”

“Oh, yes. We make good progress in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, they say.” Shindo paused, for the first time really hearing something. “Commander Genda, sir?”

“That’s right,” Fuchida answered, a small smile on his face.

“But I thought the plan for the attack on Pearl Harbor came from Admiral Yamamoto,” Shindo said.

“And if you ask Genda- san about it, you’ll go right on thinking the same thing,” Fuchida told him. “I sometimes think Genda is much too modest for his own good. But I happen to know he was the one who persuaded Yamamoto to follow up the air strike with an invasion. He’ll say Yamamoto was the one who persuaded the Army, and that was what counted. But he gave Yamamoto the idea.”

“I had no idea,” Shindo murmured. “Genda has said not a word of this.”

“He wouldn’t. It’s not his style,” Fuchida said.

From what Shindo knew of Genda, that was true. To Genda, the operation counted for more than anything else, including who proposed it. Shindo suddenly snapped his fingers: an unusual display for him. “Something I’ve been meaning to ask you, sir-have the technicians made any more sense of the wreckage we found at that Opana place?”

“Not so much as I’d like,” Fuchida answered. “Whatever it was, the Americans didn’t want us to know anything about it. They did a good, thorough job of destroying it after we landed.”

“I can make a guess,” Shindo said. Fuchida gestured for him to go on. He did: “When we attacked the first American carrier-the one that turned out to be the Enterprise — she had fighters up and waiting for us before we got there. We didn’t see any American patrol planes as we flew toward her. I don’t think there were any. I think the Americans have instruments that let them spot planes at some very long distance.”

Fuchida frowned thoughtfully. “And you think the Opana installation is one of these?”

“Opana is a logical place for one,” Shindo replied. “It’s as far north as you can go on Oahu, near enough. Any attack was likeliest to come from the north. And the Yankees would do a good job of destroying something that important.”

“If they had that kind of device there, why didn’t it find our first attack wave?” Fuchida asked. “It didn’t, you know. Our surprise was complete.”

Lieutenant Shindo shrugged this time. “Maybe something went wrong with it. Maybe the Americans just didn’t pay any attention to it. They were like those big birds that stick their heads in the sand.”

“Ostriches,” Fuchida supplied. “They don’t really do that, you know.”

“So what?” Shindo shrugged once more. “The Americans did, and that’s what counts.”

“Yes.” Fuchida turned toward the northeast once more. “They did a bad job of scouting, and it cost them. We’d better not imitate them, or it will cost us, too. We’ll need long-range patrols to make sure they don’t try to cause trouble.”

“Can we afford the fuel to do a proper job of it?” Shindo asked.

“The cost of using up the fuel is one thing. The cost of not using it up is liable to be something else again,” Fuchida said. “Or do you think I’m wrong? If you do, don’t be shy.”

Lieutenant Shindo was seldom shy. He was, if anything, unusually forthright for a Japanese. Because he didn’t ruffle easily, he didn’t think anyone else should, either. But he shook his head now. “No, sir, you’re not wrong. It’s just one of the things we’ve got to think about.”

“Oh, yes.” Fuchida mimed letting his shoulders sag, as if the weight of the world lay heavy upon them. But then he gestured, not just at the technicians stripping U.S. airplanes but at all of Wheeler Field. “So many things to think about. And this would be much harder if not for everything we’ve captured from the Americans.”