Days of Infamy (11 page)

By the time they got back to the beach, Oscar could see smoke rising in the south up over the mountains. He whistled softly. That was a hell of a lot of smoke. He and Charlie were both shaking their heads when they paddled out into the Pacific. No wonder the fellow on the radio sounded as if he'd just watched his puppy run over by a cement mixer. The Japs must have blown up everything that would blow.

They rode the waves all afternoon, then went back into Waimea for supper. Okamoto's seemed to be the only place open, and nobody but them was in it. Along with siamin, Oscar bought a loaf of bread and a couple of Cokes for breakfast the next morning. Getting the old man to understand
a loaf of bread
wasn't easy, but he managed.

He and Charlie slept in the car again that night. Some time after midnight, truck noises and swearing men woke them up. “The Army,” Oscar said, and went back to sleep.

Army or no Army, it never occurred to him not to go into the water at
dawn the next morning. It didn't occur to the soldiers to try to stop them till they were already in the ocean and could pretend not to hear. When fighter planes zoomed by overhead right afterwards, Oscar wished he'd listened.

He didn't know whether he spotted the incoming barges before the Army men on the beach did or not. He did discover getting stuck in a crossfire was no fun at all. By what would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along, he and Charlie made it back to shore alive. They piled into his Chevy and got the hell out of there.

J
IM
P
ETERSON HADN
'
T
thought the Japanese would hit Hawaii. He would have been glad to have his fellow fliers from the
Enterprise
tell him what a damn fool he'd been, but he didn't think many of them were left alive. Nobody was saying much about what had happened to the carrier, either.

And nobody was letting him get back into combat. The only Wildcats on Oahu were the couple that had survived the flight in from the
Enterprise
. They already had pilots. “Put me in anything, then!” Peterson raged after the golfers whose round he'd interrupted brought him to the Marine Corps Air Station at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. “I don't care what I'm in, as long as I get another swing at those little yellow bastards!”

They wouldn't listen to him. The first thing they did was send him to the dispensary tent, where a harried-looking medic confirmed that yes, he was still breathing, and no, he didn't have any bullet holes in him. That done, they took him out to the airstrip. It was nothing but wreckage, some still burning.

“You see?” a Marine Corps captain said. “You aren't the only one who wants another shot at the Japs—but you're gonna have to wait in line, just like everybody else.”

“Jesus!” Peterson said. And it could have been worse. The
Enterprise
had taken some of the Marine pilots and plants from Ewa to Wake Island just before the Japs came in. Otherwise, they might have got stuck on the ground, too. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“Beats me,” the captain answered.

“They kicked us in the nuts, and we weren't even looking!”

“Sure seems that way.” The Marine seemed to take a certain morose satisfaction in agreeing with him. “And it's not just this base, mind you.” He waved to the east. It looked like hell over there—literally. The pall of thick, oily black smoke filled that half of the sky. “Sons of bitches didn't just hit the fleet. They got the tank farms, too. God only knows how many million gallons of fuel going up in smoke.”

“Up in smoke is right,” Peterson said. Little by little, the sheer scale of the disaster began penetrating even his stubborn soul. “For God's sake, if you can't do anything else, give me a rifle and a helmet and let me shoot at 'em.”

For the first time, the Marine officer looked at him with something approaching approval, not barely concealed annoyance. “That, now, that may be arranged—if it turns out there's anybody to shoot at.”

Peterson stared at him. “If they've done this much, you think they
won't
follow it up with an invasion? They'd have to be crazy not to.” He was a born zealot; his views swung from one extreme to the other with the greatest of ease.

Supper was an oddly carefree meal, featuring some of the best lamb chops Peterson had ever eaten. Supper also featured hot and cold running booze. Admiral Halsey sometimes winked at the rules against shipboard alcohol, but Peterson had been mostly dry for a while now. The whiskey and rum and gin and Irish coffee added something to the rumors coming in from around the island. Some of the Marines believed everything, no matter how gloomy. Some refused to believe anything.

“Only stands to reason,” one of them insisted. “If the Japs plastered us and Pearl Harbor, they couldn't have had much left over to do anything else.”

“Bullshit,” said the captain who'd shown Peterson around. “If they did that much down here, they aren't going to forget about Schofield and Wheeler and Kaneohe. They'll hit everything.”

Reports seemed to bear him out. With the radio off the air, though, Peterson found it hard to be sure of anything. He supposed the big wheels here knew what was really going on. He hoped they did, anyhow. They should have—phones were still working, even if the radio had been yanked. But whatever they knew, they weren't talking. That by itself seemed to say the news wasn't good.

Peterson got a cot in a tent that night, and counted himself lucky. When
reveille sounded, he thought for a moment he was back aboard the
Enterprise
. Then memory returned. He was swearing as he bounced to his feet. A Marine climbing out of another cot a few feet away nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, Navy, it's a bitch, isn't it?” he said.

“A bitch and a half,” Peterson answered. “What the hell do we do now?”

“Might as well have breakfast,” the Marine said practically. “Soon as the brass wants anything from us, I figure they'll let us know.”

Breakfast was bacon and eggs and hash browns, not much different from what Peterson would have eaten on the
Enterprise
—she hadn't been at sea long enough to switch from fresh to powdered eggs. But the walk to the mess hall reminded him where he was and what had happened. The west was light, but in the east the sun couldn't penetrate the smoke rising from Pearl Harbor. They hadn't even slowed down the fires there during the night. How much fuel was burning?

He'd just got a second cup of coffee when air-raid sirens began to howl. He sprang up and followed the Marines as they ran for shelter. Most of them made for a nearly finished swimming pool not far away. “First time I ever jumped into one of these when it was dry,” he said.

He got a laugh. Minutes later, though, bombs started whistling down. Being on the receiving end and unable to hit back was anything but funny. A few antiaircraft guns banged away, but the enemy airplanes were high in the sky. Peterson didn't think any of them got hit. No U.S. planes rose to challenge them. No U.S. planes at Ewa could.

“This isn't how it was yesterday morning,” said one of the Marines in the pool. “Then they came in with fighters, right over the rooftops. We shot back with Springfields, .45s, anything we could get our hands on. Didn't do a hell of a lot of good, not as far as I could see.”

The bombers didn't linger very long. After ten or fifteen minutes, they droned away. The Marines and Peterson emerged from their makeshift shelter. A bomb had knocked over the old Navy airship mooring mast the Marines used for a control tower. Another had hit the enlisted men's barracks, which the Zeros had shot up the day before. One end had fallen down, and what was still standing was on fire. And that second cup of coffee never got finished, because the mess hall had taken a direct hit.

Bombs had hit the asphalt X of the runways, too. If Ewa had had any flyable planes, they wouldn't have been able to get off the ground till the craters
were repaired. “Son of a bitch!” Peterson said, looking around at the devastation. “
Son
of a bitch!”

“That's about the size of it,” agreed the captain who'd taken charge of him the day before. He hadn't been in the pool, and Peterson hadn't seen him at breakfast, either. By his drawn features, he hadn't had any sack time the night before. He went on, “You were talking about drawing a helmet and a rifle and making like a soldier. Were you serious about that?”

“Hell, yes,” Peterson answered without hesitation. But then he thought to ask, “How come?”

“About what you'd expect,” the Marine officer answered. “The Japs are on the island.”

L
IEUTENANT
S
ABURO
S
HINDO
didn't much care for flying combat air patrol above the Japanese task force. As far as he was concerned, that was a job for the float planes from the battleships and cruisers that had accompanied the aircraft carriers to Hawaii. But Admiral Nagumo had ordered differently, and so Shindo buzzed along with his engine throttled back to be as miserly with fuel as he could.

He would rather have been strafing the American soldiers on Oahu and finishing the job of knocking out the U.S. aircraft on the island. But he was not the sort of man to protest orders. When Commander Genda told him to take charge of the patrol, he'd just nodded and saluted and said, “Aye aye, sir.”

In a way, he could see the need. They'd sunk one carrier. But they thought three or even four had been based at Pearl Harbor. If planes from any of those showed up at the wrong moment . . . well, life could get more interesting than Shindo really wanted. He preferred things to go according to plan.

His eyes darted now right, now left, now center. He kept flicking them here and there. If anything was in the sky to see, he wanted to make sure he didn't miss it. Stare straight ahead all the time, and even important things wouldn't register.

He'd been flying for a couple of hours, and almost dismissed the float plane off to the west as one of his countrymen. But the lines weren't quite right. Neither was the color—Japan seldom painted her aircraft that oceanic blue.

“That's an American plane!” The words crackled in his earphones. One of the other pilots had spotted it too, then. “It's seen us. I'll shoot it down!”

“No!” Shindo said sharply. “No one is to shoot at that airplane until I do. The rest of you, continue on your normal patrol.”

Had another man given orders like that, the fliers under him would have thought him out for glory, out to run up his own score. With Lieutenant Shindo, that was unimaginable. He gunned his Zero toward the American plane.

The enemy pilot took awhile to spot him. No doubt the Americans were paying more attention to the ships spread out ahead of them. That was their duty, after all. Not until just before Shindo fired a machine-gun burst at him did they realize they had company. Only after the burst did the pilot turn toward the west and try to escape. The radioman, who also had charge of the rear-facing machine gun, shot back at the Zero.

Shindo pulled back out of range, as if afraid. Then he made a couple of feckless lunges at the float plane. He fired each time, but his bursts went wide. “What are you doing, Lieutenant?” one of the other fliers demanded. “For heaven's sake, finish him. Do you want him to get away?”

“No,” Shindo said, and said no more for a little while. Then he radioed the carriers: “Enemy aircraft's bearing is 280. I say again, 280. Along that bearing, we will find American ships, and we may also find planes on the way to attack us.”

He got no acknowledgment. He'd expected none. Even if the enemy had spotted them, the carriers needed to maintain radio silence, especially if a U.S. carrier had launched against them.

Now that he had the bearing, he could end the little farce he'd been playing out. He felt proud he'd been the one to get it here as well as from the Wildcats near Pearl Harbor the day before. He climbed and then dove. The enemy gunner couldn't fire at him without shooting off his own tail. Shindo put several cannon shells into the float plane's belly. This held no sport. It was simply killing: a part of war. The American plane tilted in the air. Smoke poured from it. The pilot fought for control—fought and lost. Down toward the water he fell. He and his gunner had both been brave and skillful. Flying a scout plane against the best carrier-based fighter in the world, that hadn't helped them a bit.

The next question was twofold. What could the task force throw at the U.S. ships off to the west? And what were the Americans throwing at them?

C
OMMANDER
M
ITSUO
F
UCHIDA
counted himself lucky. If his Nakajima B5N1 hadn't come back to the
Akagi
to refuel at just the right time, he wouldn't have been able to join in the search for the newly suspected American ships. The Japanese air commander shook his head. Somewhere off to the west, there
were
American ships; they weren't just suspected. That float plane hadn't come from nowhere. How many ships and of what sort remained to be seen, but they were there.

As soon as the deck officer gave him the signal, he gunned the bomber toward the
Akagi
's bow. There was, as usual, that sickening dip when the bomber went off the flight deck, that moment of wondering whether it would splash into the sea instead of rising. But rise it did. Fuchida took it up to join the rest of the scratch attack force Admiral Nagumo and Commander Genda were throwing together.

B5N1s loaded with bombs, B5N2s with torpedoes slung beneath their fuselages, Aichi dive bombers, and Zeros to shepherd them along all mustered together. Fuchida was glad the Zeros had longer range than most fighters; they'd probably be able to protect the attack aircraft all the way to the target. If the American plane had found the Japanese fleet, surely the Japanese would be able to return the favor.

Fuchida waited impatiently for planes to fly off the six Japanese carriers and join the attacking force. He was never one to like loitering—he wanted to go out there and hit the enemy. And the Americans would not be idle. If one or more of their carriers was with that force, they would have launched as soon as they got word their scout had located the fleet that was punishing Oahu.

After half an hour, he radioed, “I am commencing the search,” and flew off to the west with the planes already in the air. A timely attack with fewer aircraft was better than a great swarm that came too late. Somewhere north and west of Kauai, the enemy waited.

Forty-five minutes went by. Then one of the pilots with him exclaimed, “Airplanes! Airplanes almost dead ahead!”

Almost dead ahead they were: a little north of the course on which the Japanese were flying. As they got nearer, Fuchida saw they were about the same sort of force as the one he led: torpedo planes and dive bombers with fighters flying cover. Those fat, stubby fighters weren't Wildcats. They had to be Brewster Buffaloes, the U.S. Navy's other carrier-based fighter planes.