Days of Infamy (10 page)

That was good advice, and Corporal Shimizu took it. No one got crushed between the
Nagata Maru
and the landing barge. There were a couple of close calls, passed off with laughs and bows and exclamations of, “Hard work!”

The whole company squeezed onto the barge. Shimizu wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. Lieutenant Yonehara seemed
pleased. “All according to plan,” he said. “We should start for Oahu any minute now.”

“I thought we were going to Hawaii,” a soldier said.

“Oahu is one of the islands of Hawaii,” the platoon leader explained. “It's the one with the good harbor, and the one where the Americans have all their soldiers. Once we take it away from them, all the Hawaiian Islands are ours.”

It all sounded very easy when Lieutenant Yonehara put it like that. Shimizu let out a soft sigh of relief. He wanted it to be easy. People said the planes from the carriers had done a good job of hitting the harbor and the rest of the island's defenses. Shimizu had been in the Army long enough not to trust what people said. This time, though, he hoped rumor told the truth.

The diesel engine at the stern of the landing barge took on a deeper note. The barge pulled away from the
Nagata Maru
. Another took its place. The motion was fierce—up hill and down dale, much worse than it had been in the freighter. Shimizu's stomach lurched.
I won't be sick
, he told himself sternly. A few soldiers did puke up whatever was in their bellies.

Twilight began turning the eastern sky pale as the barge—one of a whole flotilla of invasion craft—lumbered toward the shore. Most of the other landing craft carried soldiers, as Shimizu's did. Some had howitzers or light tanks aboard. Shimizu hoped they were well chained down. If they shifted, they could capsize their barges and take them to the bottom.

Other men worried about other things. “If American planes come overhead right now, we're sitting ducks,” a sergeant said. Nobody could contradict him, for he wasn't wrong. What pilot could want a better target than wallowing invasion barges?

“Will the Americans be waiting for us on the beach?” Shiro Wakuzawa asked.

That was another good question. Shimizu didn't know how to answer it. It was a day now since the carrier task force had started pounding Oahu. Would the Americans think it was just a hit-and-run raid, or would they expect an invasion to follow the attack from the air? Shimizu would have, but he didn't know how Americans thought.

Lieutenant Yonehara found his own way to deal with the question: “Whether they are on the beach or not doesn't matter, Private. If they are, we'll beat them there. If they aren't, we'll move inland and beat them wherever we find them. Plain enough?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Wakuzawa would goof off whenever he got the chance, but he wasn't foolhardy enough to show an officer disrespect. A man who did that soon regretted the day he was born.

The sky grew ever lighter. Soldiers pointed ahead and exclaimed, “Land!”

“Well, what did you expect when we got into the barges?” Shimizu demanded. “That they'd dump us in the middle of the sea?” The men laughed. Some of them probably hadn't thought much about getting into the barges one way or the other. A lot of soldiers were like that: they took things as they happened, and didn't worry about them till they happened.

“It's so warm, and the air smells so good,” Private Wakuzawa said. “The weather sure is better than it was when we left the Kurils.”

“
Hai!
” Several soldiers agreed with him. Maybe Siberia had worse weather than the Kurils did, but maybe not, too. After all, most of the weather those northern islands got blew straight down from Siberia.

The machine guns at the landing barge's bow began banging away. Shimizu followed the lines of tracers rising up into the brightening sky and saw his worst nightmare—everybody's worst nightmare—realized. Three American fighter planes were swooping down on the fleet of barges. Their guns started winking. Bullets kicked up spurts of water. Screams from other barges said not all the bullets were splashing into the Pacific.

But then the American planes suddenly broke off the attack. They darted away. Zeros swooped down on them like falcons after doves. Takeo Shimizu let out a wordless cry of joy and relief. An American fighter caught fire and cartwheeled into the sea. Another went down a moment later. Shimizu didn't see what happened to the third, but it didn't come back. Nothing else really mattered.

“If I ever meet those Zero pilots, I'll buy them all the
sake
they can drink,” Private Wakuzawa exclaimed. “I thought we were in trouble.”

“The Navy will not let us down,” Lieutenant Yonehara said. He might have said much more than that; Wakuzawa had shown not just a lack of confidence but a lack of martial spirit. But the platoon leader dropped it there. Maybe he'd had a moment of alarm, too. Shimizu knew
he
had, even if he'd kept quiet about it.

He peered south. The sun came up over the horizon, spilling ruddy light across the golden beaches dead ahead, the palm trees just behind them, and the jungle-clad mountains a little farther inland. The sight was one of the
most beautiful Shimizu had ever seen. It all seemed so peaceful. It wouldn't stay that way for long.

Waves broke on the beach. They looked like pretty good-sized waves to Shimizu. Could the barge get through them without flipping over? He hoped so. He'd find out any minute now.

A few machine guns on the shore started shooting at the invasion barges. The barges shot back. Something bigger and heavier threw shells at the Japanese—those were big splashes rising from the sea. Zeros dove at the beach. Dive bombers appeared overhead. They swooped down, too. The shelling suddenly stopped.

Some of the machine guns kept firing. Two bullets ricocheted off the shield that protected the sailor at the wheel. A soldier howled when another one, instead of ricocheting, struck home. Shimizu had fought in China. He'd seen plenty of gunfire worse than this. It was just something a soldier went through on the imperial way. To the new men, it must have seemed very heavy and frightening.

Shiro Wakuzawa said, “The Americans won't have any ammunition left for when we come ashore if they keep shooting like this.”

“Oh, I think they'll save a bullet or two,” Shimizu said. “Maybe even three.” Some of the first-year soldiers, taking him seriously, gave back solemn nods. Most of them, though, joined the men who'd been in the Army longer and laughed.

Somebody pointed to the water, right where the waves began breaking. “Are those people? What are they doing? They must be out of their minds!”

Two nearly naked men rode upright on long boards toward the beach. Bullets must have whipped past them in both directions. They seemed oblivious. They skimmed along on the crest of a wave, side by side. Shimizu stared at them, entranced. He'd never dreamt of such a skill.

“They must be Americans. Shall I knock them down?” asked a machine gunner at the bow of the barge.

“No!” Corporal Shimizu was one of the dozen men shouting the same thing at the same time. He added, “They might almost be
kami
, the way they glide along.”

“Christians talk about their Lord Jesus walking on water,” Lieutenant Yonehara said. “I never thought I would see it with my own eyes.”

The two men reached the beach still upright on their boards. Then they did the first merely human thing Shimizu had seen from them: they scooped the boards up under their arms and ran. That was also an eminently sensible thing to do. Machine-gun bullets kicked up sand around their feet. Not all the men on the landing barges must have felt as sporting as the soldiers on this one. But Shimizu didn't see them fall. Maybe they really were spirits. How could an ordinary man be sure?

His own barge came ashore, much less gracefully than the surf-riders had. It didn't quite bury its bow in the sand, but it came close. He staggered. He didn't know how he stayed on his feet. Somehow, he managed. “Off!” the sailors were screaming. “Get off! We have to go back for more men! Hurry!”

He scrambled out of the barge and jumped down. His boots scrunched in the sand. Some Americans were still shooting from the plants—almost the jungle—on the far side of the road. Machine-gun and rifle muzzles flashed malevolently. A bullet cracked past Shimizu's head, so close that he felt, or thought he felt, the wind of its passage.

He couldn't run away. There was no
away
to run to, not at the edge of a hostile beach. He ran forward instead. If he and his comrades didn't kill those Americans, the Americans would kill them instead. “Come on!” he shouted, and the men in his squad came.

O
SCAR VAN DER
K
IRK
and Charlie Kaapu spent their Sunday morning surf-riding at Waimea Beach and grumbling that the waves weren't bigger. Every so often, one of them would look up at the planes flying back and forth overhead. At one point, Charlie remarked, “Army and Navy must have a hair up their ass. That's the biggest goddamn drill I ever saw. Has to cost a fortune.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said, and thought no more about it. Six-foot waves weren't so much, not when he'd been hoping for surf three or four times that size, but you could still find all sorts of unpleasant ways to hurt yourself if you didn't pay attention to what you were doing.

Finally, his stomach started growling so loud, he couldn't stand it any more. He and Charlie went into Waimea for something to eat. It wasn't a big town. There weren't a lot of choices, especially on a Sunday. As they usually did when they were up there, Oscar and Charlie headed for Okamoto's
siamin stand. For a quarter, you could get a bowl of noodles and broth and sliced pork and vegetables that would hold you for a hell of a long time.

Old man Okamoto looked faintly apprehensive when they walked in. Oscar wondered why. They hadn't cadged a meal off him in a year and a half, and they'd paid him back for that one the next time they were here. They ordered their noodles and sat down to wait while the gray-haired little Japanese man ladled them out of the big pot he kept bubbling in back of the counter. He set the bowls on the table along with the short-handled, big-bowled china soup spoons every Japanese and Chinese place in Hawaii seemed to use.

“Thanks, Pop,” Oscar said, and dug in. He and Charlie both ate like wolverines. He was halfway down the bowl before he noticed old man Okamoto had the radio tuned to KGMB, not to the nasal-sounding Japanese music he usually listened to. KGMB should have been playing music, too, if of a more normal sort. It wasn't. Instead, an announcer was gabbling into the mike. He sounded as if he'd have kittens right there on the air.

That was how Oscar—and Charlie, too—heard about Pearl Harbor. “Jesus,” Charlie said. Then he spooned up some more siamin. Oscar nodded. He went on eating, too. After a couple of minutes, he glanced over to old man Okamoto. No wonder the old guy was nervous! If the Japs had done that down there, he probably counted himself lucky that his neighbors hadn't come by with pitchforks and tar and feathers.

Oscar laughed. Like most old-country Japanese, Okamoto had come to Hawaii to work in the fields. He'd been running this place for as long as anybody could remember, though. You had to be crazy to think of him as a danger to the United States. His neighbors must have felt the same way—no sign of tar and feathers.

“Your KGMB time is eleven-forty-eight,” the man on the radio said, his voice getting shriller every minute. “We have been ordered off the air by the United States Army, so that our signal does not guide Japanese airplanes or parachutists. We will return only to transmit official bulletins and orders. Please stay calm during this period of emergency.”

This time, Charlie laughed first. Oscar followed suit. The radio signal cut away to sudden, dead silence. How would the horrible news, followed by the station's disappearance, make anybody stay calm?

Something else crossed his mind. Japanese parachutists? What would
happen if the Japs invaded Oahu? He hoped the Army would trounce them. What else was it here for? But suppose it didn't. It sounded as if the Japs had landed on things with both feet. Suppose . . .

Oscar eyed old man Okamoto again, more thoughtfully this time. If the Japanese Empire's soldiers came to Oahu, how
would
the local Japanese respond? He'd heard Army and Navy brass had sleepless nights about questions like that.

But it was their worry, not his. He and Charlie got to the bottom of their bowls at the same time. “What now?” Charlie asked.

“I don't want to go back to Honolulu right away. Everybody's gotta be going nuts down there,” Oscar answered. “Besides, if the Japs are shooting up Wheeler and Schofield and Kaneohe, God knows if we can even get there from here. We might as well hang around and surf and hope the waves get better. What do you think?”

Charlie nodded. “Suits me. I was gonna say the same thing, but some
haoles
, they figure they all the time gotta
do
stuff, you know what I mean?”

“If I saw anything I could do, I'd do it,” Oscar said. “You want to join the Army right now?” Charlie shook his head. Oscar shrugged. “Okay. Neither do I. In that case, we might as well do what we're doing.” He left a dime on the table for old man Okamoto as he and Charlie headed out to his car.