Days of Infamy (51 page)

Usually, the noncoms would have kept the common soldiers at it, making sure they didn't slow down and making sure they didn't pull their blows. The noncoms were also caught in the web of humiliation today. The regimental officers stalked through the ranks. “Harder!” they shouted. “Keep at it! Who told you you could slack off? What kind of soldier do you think you are?”

Unless Shimizu concentrated, he saw two of Corporal Aiso. He hoped he was just as blurry to the older man. His whole face felt on fire. He tasted blood in his mouth, and he wasn't sure whether that was blood or snot dribbling from his nose. Probably both. Aiso wasn't trying to box his ears, any more than he was trying to box those of the other corporal. That didn't mean they didn't get walloped now and again. Even Shimizu's palm started to sting from giving too many blows.

He couldn't have told how long it went on. Privates started falling over. Cursing officers kicked them. Nobody was trying to get away with faking, not this time. Only when a polished boot in the belly or the spine failed to prod them to their feet were they suffered to stay on the ground.

At last, contemptuously, Colonel Fujikawa yelled, “Enough!”

Corporal Aiso had his arm drawn back for another blow. Shimizu hardly cared whether it landed or not. After so many, what difference did one more make? But Aiso stayed his hand. Shimizu swayed. Stubbornly, he kept on his feet. He didn't care to crumple where his squad could see him do it. Since most of them were still upright, he would have lost face by falling.

He felt as if he'd lost his face anyway. At the same time, he wished he
could
lose it. Then he wouldn't have to feel it any more.

“Go clean yourselves up,” Colonel Fujikawa commanded. “You are disgusting. The way you look is a disgrace to the Japanese Army, too.”

And whose fault is that?
Shimizu wondered blearily. But he would never have said such a thing, not even if the Yankees were disemboweling him with a dull, rusty bayonet. Discipline ran deep. After bowing to Corporal Aiso—who returned the courtesy—Shimizu gave his attention, or as much of it as he had to give, back to his squad.

All of them were on their feet now. He didn't know who had fallen and then got up again. He didn't intend to ask, either. That would make whoever might have gone down lose face. The whole regiment had lost face. The whole Hawaii garrison had lost face. What point to singling out one or two common soldiers after that?

Heads up, backs straight, they marched off to the barracks. Once there, they lined up at the sinks to wash their bloody faces, rinse out their bloody mouths, and soak their tunics in cold water to get the bloodstains out of them.

“I thought my head was going to fall off.” Shiro Wakuzawa spoke with more pride than anything else.

“We all did,” Shimizu said. The men he led nodded, one by one. His rank usually exempted him from such spasms of brutality. Not this time, though. He was as bruised and battered as any of them. No one could say he hadn't been through it. No one could say he hadn't come through it, either. For now, he was one of them.

Senior Private Furusawa said, “If the Americans come again, we'll be ready for them.”

“Of course we will. Who'd want to go through this more than once?” Even after the abuse Wakuzawa had taken, he could still joke.

“How could the Americans come again?” somebody else said. Shimizu was splashing his face with cold water—which hurt and felt good at the same time—and couldn't tell who it was. The soldier went on, “They can't try another raid like that. Furusawa's right. We'd smash them flat.”

Shimizu pulled away from the faucet blowing like a whale. He shook his head, which made drops of water fly everywhere—and which also reminded him how sore he was. “If the Americans come again, they won't just raid,” he said. “They'll run in a pack like wild dogs, and they'll try to take Hawaii away from us.”

Some of the soldiers in his squad nodded again. Others, men who hurt too much for that, softly said, “
Hai
.”

W
RITING THE REPORT
on how the Americans had caught the Japanese garrison on Oahu flat-footed fell to commander Mitsuo Fuchida. He felt more as if the duty had fallen
on
him. Before sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper, he went to pick Minoru Genda's brain. Genda was one of the few men on the island with whom he could speak frankly.

“It's not very complicated,” Genda said. “They did something we didn't expect, that's all. You can't get ready for what you don't anticipate.”

“Easy enough to say,” Fuchida answered. “What do I do for the other forty-nine and three-quarters pages of the report, though?”

As it usually did, Genda's smile made him look very young. “You can tell General Yamashita and Captain Hasegawa that we won't get fooled again.”

Fuchida bowed in his seat, there in Genda's office. “
Domo arigato
,” he said, spicing the thanks with all the sarcasm he could. “We'd better not. If we do, we'll all have to open our bellies.” He wasn't joking, or not very much. The garrison had put itself through a painful orgy of self-reproach. If it was humiliated again . . . much more blood would flow than had this time.

“They
are
going to come sniffing around these islands. They haven't given up, the way we hoped they would,” Genda said. “Carrier raids, submarines, maybe even flying boats, too.”

“We need better ways to detect them,” Fuchida said.

“The picket boats did their job,
neh?
” Genda said. “The skipper of that one was too hard on himself, I think. Why blame him for not looking out for B-25s when nobody else did, either?”

“Picket boats can only do so much,” Fuchida insisted. “Things can sneak past them, or their skippers can make mistakes. Yes, I know we all made the mistake, but we should have
known
what the Yankees were up to before they got here.”

“How?” Genda asked reasonably.

“I don't know,” Fuchida said. “Or maybe I do. Have the engineers ever figured out what that installation up at Opana was supposed to do before the Americans wrecked it?”

“Whatever it was supposed to do, it didn't do it,” Genda pointed out. “We caught them napping. They had no idea we were there till the bombs started falling. You were the one who signaled
Tora! Tora! Tora!
to show we'd taken them by surprise.”

“No, it was Mizuki, my radioman,” Fuchida said.

“And here I thought you were a Navy man, not a damn lawyer,” Genda said.

“I
am
a Navy man,” Fuchida said. “As a Navy man, I want to know about that installation.”

“I don't have a whole lot to tell you. I don't think the engineers have a whole lot to tell you, either,” Genda said.

Commander Fuchida started to get angry. “They damn well ought to by now, Genda-
san
. They've had months to unravel it. Have they found documents talking about what it does?”

Genda only shrugged. “I don't think so.”

“They should have!” Fuchida exclaimed. “If they haven't, the Americans
must have destroyed them. And why would the Americans destroy them? Because they must show the Opana installation was important. What other possible reason could they have?”

“You'd better be careful,” Genda said. “Next thing you know, you'll hear little men who aren't there talking behind your back.”

“So you think I'm crazy, do you?” Fuchida growled. “I'll tell you what I want to hear. I want to hear the Americans who worked at that thing, whatever it was. They'll know, and we can squeeze it out of them. Some of them—a lot of them, probably—will just be enlisted men. They won't much care what they blab.”

“Go ahead, then. Find them. Interrogate them. You're not going to be happy till you do,” Genda said. “Get it out of your system. You'll feel better then.” He might have been recommending a laxative.

“I will,” Fuchida said. “And you'll see—something important
will
come from this.”

With another shrug, Genda said, “It could be. I'm not convinced, but it could be. I hope you're right.”

“I intend to find out,” Mitsuo Fuchida said.

J
IM
P
ETERSON WAS
in a funk. So were a lot of the POWs up at Opana. They'd got less of a look at the American bombers that had raided Oahu than just about anybody else on the island. Peterson knew why. Opana was nowhere. It wasn't even worth flying over.

Nothing he could do about it. Nothing anybody could do about it. All the prisoners could do was sit behind barbed wire, look out at the green countryside all around them and the blue Pacific to the north, and slowly starve to death.

He almost wished the Japs would stop feeding them altogether. Then it would be over. The way things were, he felt himself losing ground a quarter of an inch at a time. Everything he did, everything he thought about, centered on the miserable breakfast and lousy supper he'd got.

“You know,” he said to Prez McKinley one afternoon a few days after the raid, “I don't hardly think about women at all any more.”

The sergeant let out a grunt. Peterson thought it was surprise. “Me,
neither,” McKinley said. “I like pussy as well as the next guy—bet your ass I do. But I don't think I could get it up with a crane right now.”

“Same here,” Peterson said. “Pussy's the best thing in the world when your belly's full. When it's not . . . you forget about women.” He fooled with his belt. Day by day, his waistline shrank. He closed the belt several holes tighter than he had when he got here. Pretty soon, even the last hole would be too loose, and he'd have to trade the belt for whatever he could get and use rope to hold up his pants.
And after a while, I'll have enough rope to hang myself with, too
, he thought. Surprisingly few men here had killed themselves. Maybe they wouldn't give the Japs the satisfaction.

McKinley looked northeast, the direction from which the B-25s had come, the direction in which the mainland lay. “I wonder if they're really gonna try and take Hawaii away from the Japs again.”

“Don't wonder if. Wonder when,” Peterson said. “They haven't forgotten about us. That's one thing those bombers showed.”

“Wonder if they can do it, too,” McKinley said.

It was Peterson's turn to grunt. The Japs shouldn't have surprised the defenders here. They had, but they shouldn't have. He couldn't imagine an American armada catching the new occupiers asleep at the switch. How much damage could the Japs do before a landing party hit the beach? Even if Americans did land, the Japanese would fight like rabid weasels to hold on to what they'd taken.

At lineup the next morning, the Japanese didn't release the POWs to breakfast once they had the count straight, the way they usually did. Standing there at attention in his row, Peterson eyed the guards with suspicion. What the devil were they up to now?

A nervous-looking Oriental in Western clothes—plainly a Jap from Hawaii—came into the camp along with more guards and the commandant. The Japanese officer spoke in his own language. The local turned it into English: “The following prisoners will make themselves known immediately. . . .” The commandant handed him a piece of paper. He read off half a dozen names.

Looking confused, a lieutenant and several privates stepped out of ranks. Peterson wondered what the hell they'd done, and whether the Japs were about to make a horrible example of them. He'd already seen enough examples to last him the rest of his life, and several lifetimes yet to come.

But, to his surprise and relief, nothing dreadful happened. Guards came up to the men and hustled them away, but that was all. They didn't beat them or kick them or anything of the sort. They weren't gentle, but Peterson had a hard time imagining gentle Japs. They were businesslike, which in itself was out of the ordinary.

After the handful of prisoners were taken away, things went back to normal. The rest of the swarm of POWs queued up for breakfast. They had something new to buzz about. Somebody not far from Peterson said, “Those guys hadn't even hardly left home before.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” somebody else asked.

“They were stationed at some kind of installation right around here, and this is where they ended up, too,” the first man said. “Small world, ain't it?”

“Well, I'll be a son of a bitch,” Peterson said as a light went on inside his head.

“What's up?” Sergeant McKinley asked. What he'd heard didn't mean thing one to him.

In a low voice, Peterson said, “Ever hear of radar, Prez?”

“I dunno. Maybe.” McKinley screwed up his face in concentration. “Some kind of fancy range-finding gear, right?”

“Yeah.” That was as much as McKinley, a born ground-pounder, needed to know. As somebody who'd got paid from flying off a carrier deck, Jim Peterson knew a good deal more. Among the things he knew was . . . “They had a radar station up here at Opana.”