Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Ears burning, Joe mumbled, “Yes, sir.”

“Okay.” Goodwin sounded amused, not angry. “Seems about two cadets out of three are like that. They get the hang of it, though. Let’s go through the list.”

Through it they went, everything from the attachment of Joe’s safety belt to pedals and stick to throttle and magneto with the motor running. Everything checked out the way it was supposed to. “All green, sir,” Joe said above the roar of the seven-cylinder radial.

“Looks that way to me, too,” Goodwin agreed. “Take her over to Runway Three-West and let the tower know you’ll be going into the air.”

“Three-West. Aye aye, sir.” Slowly and carefully, Joe taxied to the end of the required runway. A plane was meant to fly, not to waddle along on the ground; taxiing was nothing like driving a car, the way he’d thought it would be. He exchanged formalities with the control tower. He also looked down the runway to make sure nobody else was landing on it or taxiing across it. That was like automobile traffic: charging out from a stop sign without looking was liable to get you creamed. “Seems all clear, sir,” he said to Goodwin. He wasn’t far enough along to take off without the instructor’s permission.

“So it does. Get us airborne, Mr. Crosetti.”

Joe advanced the throttle. The engine’s roar got louder and deeper. The Stearman shot down the runway. Actually, the little biplane was one of the most sedate airplanes ever manufactured, but it didn’t seem that way to him. Even though he was still on the ground, he kept one eye glued to the airspeed indicator. When it showed he was going fast enough, he pulled back on the stick. The Yellow Peril lurched into the air.

“Smoothly, Mr. Crosetti, smoothly,” Goodwin said. “You’re not bulldogging a steer.”

“Yes, sir.” Joe thought he’d made a great takeoff. He was flying, wasn’t he?

“It’s like learning to drive a car,” Goodwin told him. “After you get enough hours, you won’t need to tell your hands and feet what to do. They’ll know by themselves, and they’ll do everything together. It’ll seem like second nature-if you don’t kill yourself before then, of course.”

That comparison made sense to Joe. It also told him he wasn’t as far along as he’d thought. He remembered how ragged he’d been the first few times he got behind the wheel. A few less than perfect turns here-and the instructor’s sardonic comments accompanying each one-went a long way toward cutting him down to size.

But he was flying! Even if he wasn’t such hot stuff yet, he was up in the air and learning what he needed to learn so he could go out and shoot down Japs one of these days. There was the Naval Air Station, and the woods and swamps behind it, and the blue bay in front, and the even bluer Gulf of Mexico out beyond the bay. Birds got a view like this all the time. The Stearman could outperform any bird ever hatched. (Even had it carried machine guns, it would have been helpless against anything this side of a Sopwith Camel, but Joe didn’t dwell on that.)

Much sooner than he wanted to, he was coming in for a landing. “Gently,” Goodwin urged. “Smoothly. You’re juggling eggs. Cadets make ninety percent of their mistakes in the last twenty feet. If you only knew where the hell the ground is, you’d be Charles Lindbergh.”

“I don’t want to be Charles Lindbergh,” Joe snapped. Lindbergh had done everything he could to keep the USA out of the war till the Japs jumped Hawaii. He’d been the Nazis’ teacher’s pet. And he’d been mighty quiet since December 7.

“Okay, you’d be Jimmy Doolittle,” Lieutenant Goodwin said equably.

“That’s more like it.”

Jimmy Doolittle Joe wasn’t, or not yet, anyhow. The Stearman bounced hard when he put it down. His teeth clicked together. The instructor said something Joe hoped didn’t go out to the control tower. He brought the recalcitrant beast to a stop and killed the engine.

“Well, sir?” he asked unhappily into the sudden silence that seemed so loud.

But Goodwin had recovered his sangfroid in a hurry. “Well, Mr. Crosetti, you’re learning, that’s all,” he said. “I’ve seen men at your stage of training do better, but I’ve seen plenty do worse. You’ve got plenty of work ahead of you, but you can get where you want to go.”

Joe knew where he wanted to go: where Jimmy Doolittle had gone before him. Doolittle had raided. Joe wanted to take Hawaii back all by his lonesome. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He knew that. But it was what he wanted.

COLONEL MITSUO FUJIKAWA had been promoted for bravery after the conquest of Hawaii. But, even though Corporal Takeo Shimizu’s regimental commander now wore three stars on his collar tabs instead of two, he looked anything but happy. Like the rest of the men in the regiment, Shimizu stood at stiff attention on the grass of a park doing duty for a parade ground. His face held no expression. He stared straight ahead. He might have been carved from wood.

It wasn’t going to help him. He could feel that in his bones. Nothing would help the soldiers, not after what had happened a few days before.

Colonel Fujikawa prowled back and forth. Once upon a time, Shimizu had seen a picture of a daimyo hunting a tiger with a spear in Korea three and a half centuries earlier. The great noble wore fancy armor and a tall headgear with a floppy tip. Shimizu remembered that, but what he really remembered was the ferocity that blazed from the tiger. He’d never seen anything like it since-not till now.

Even when Fujikawa stopped pacing, he still looked ready to roar and to spring. Instead of roaring, though, he spoke softly, and somehow made that more wounding than the loudest shouts could have been.

“You are in disgrace,” he hissed. “Disgrace! Do you hear me? Do you hear me? ”

“ Hai! We hear you, Colonel!” The men spoke as if they were part of a perfectly trained chorus. In an abstract way, Shimizu was proud of them-but only in an abstract way, because no matter how perfect they were, that wouldn’t do them any good, either.

“Disgrace!” Colonel Fujikawa said once more. “You are disgraced, I am disgraced, the whole Japanese Army in Hawaii is disgraced, and the Japanese Navy in and around Hawaii is disgraced, too. And do you know why?”

Everyone knew why, of course. Shimizu knew why all too well. This time, though, no one said a word. It was as if, if no one admitted what had happened, somehow it wouldn’t have happened after all.

But Colonel Fujikawa was intent on plumbing the depths of their iniquity. “The Americans-the Americans! — made us lose face. They bombed Oahu. They torpedoed one of our carriers. And most of their bombers escaped. It is an embarrassment. It is a humiliation. It is a disgrace, truly a disgrace.”

As one man, the soldiers of the regiment hung their heads in shame. Shimizu lowered his at the same time as everybody else. Even as he did, though, he wondered why this was his fault. What could an infantry noncom do about bombers overhead except jump for cover and hope he didn’t get killed? Nothing he could see.

The regimental commander went on, “The captain of the picket boat that spotted the American carriers was fished out of the water after the enemy sank it. He has committed suicide to atone for his failure to see that they had long-range bombers aboard. The commander of the antiaircraft defenses on this island has also committed suicide, to atone for his failure to shoot down even a single enemy airplane.”

Now real fear ran through the regiment. Honorable seppuku was always a way out after failure. Saying good-bye to everything was not only honorable, it was also easier than living on as an object of scorn to everyone around you. But how far would that particular form of atonement reach?