Days of Infamy (6 page)

“Where are the American carriers?” Nagumo demanded.

That was the one fly in the ointment. They hadn't caught any of the carriers in port. Shindo gave the only answer he could: “Sir, I don't know.”

Those lines between Admiral Nagumo's eyes got deeper yet. “You are thinking about what happens to Hawaii,” he said heavily. “I am thinking about what happens to my fleet. What if the Americans strike us while we linger here?”

From behind him, Commander Genda said, “Sir, we have six carriers. At most, the Americans have three, and they probably aren't concentrated. We have the best fliers in the world. They have . . . less than the best. If they find us,
they
will be the ones to regret it.”

“So you say.” Nagumo still sounded anything but happy. Shindo had yet to hear him sound happy since the fleet sailed from Japan. Even the astounding damage the first two waves of attackers had caused did nothing to cheer him. He went on, “I tell you, gentlemen, if it were not for the landing forces accompanying us, I would turn around and sail for the home islands now.”

Commander Fuchida couldn't hide his horror. “Sir, we have a job to finish!” he exclaimed.

“I know,” Nagumo answered. “And I will stay, and I will carry it through. Those are my orders, and I cannot abandon the soldiers. But what I told you is no less true. We are in danger here.”

“So are the Americans,” Shindo said. Genda and Fuchida both nodded. At last, reluctantly, so did Admiral Nagumo.

T
HE MESSAGE CAME
in to the
Enterprise
from one of the scouts just after eight in the morning: “White 16—Pearl Harbor under attack! Do not acknowledge.”

Aboard the carrier, rage boiled. “Those little slanty-eyed cocksuckers want a war, they've got one!” Lieutenant Jim Peterson shouted to whoever would listen.

“You were the one who said they wouldn't fight.” Three people reminded Peterson of that at the same time.

He was too furious to get embarrassed at being wrong. “I don't give a shit what I said,” he snarled. “Let's knock the yellow bastards into the middle of next week.”

But that was easier said than done. Everyone knew the Japanese were somewhere off the Hawaiian Islands—but where? Had they come down out of the north or up from the south? The
Enterprise
couldn't even ask the harried men at Pearl Harbor what they knew. As soon as that horrifying message came in, Admiral Halsey slapped radio silence on the whole task force. No Japs were going to spot the carrier and her satellites by their signals.

In the wardroom, the pilots drank coffee and cursed the Japanese—and also cursed the Pearl Harbor defenders, who'd shot down some of the scouts trying to land in the middle of the attack.

The ships steamed furiously toward Pearl Harbor. They'd been about two hundred miles northwest of Oahu when they got the dreadful news—about
seven hours at top speed. And they were making top speed. Bull Halsey was not a man to hang back when he saw a fight right in front of his nose—far from it. He wanted to get in there and start swinging. The only trouble was, he had no more idea than anybody else where to aim his punches.

As the minutes passed and turned into hours, fury and frustration built aboard the
Enterprise
. The news in the wardroom was fragmentary—people on Oahu were clamping down on radio traffic, too—but what trickled in didn't sound good. “Jesus!” somebody said after the intercom piped in yet another gloomy report. “Sounds like Battleship Row's taken a hell of a licking.”

“
That
won't end the world,” Peterson said. “The Navy's needed to get rid of those wallowing tubs for years.” He spoke like what he was: a carrier fighter pilot. Billy Mitchell had proved battleships obsolete twenty years earlier. Nobody'd paid any attention then. It sounded as if the Japs were driving home the lesson. Would anybody pay attention now?

“You're a coldhearted bastard, Peterson,” a lieutenant named Edgar Kelley said. “It's not just ships, you know. It's God knows how many sailors, too.”

“Yeah? So?” Peterson scowled at the other pilot. “If they didn't get it now, they sure as hell would when they took their battlewagons west to fight the Japs. Carrier air would take 'em out before the carriers came over the horizon.” He didn't think of himself as coldhearted. But if you weren't a realist about the way the world worked, you'd take endless grief in life, sure as hell you would.

Just after noon, a cry not far from despair came over the intercom: “Third wave of attackers striking Pearl!”

That was followed almost immediately by Admiral Halsey's unmistakable rasp: “Boys, we've got to give the land-based air a hand. The Japs have knocked out a lot of it on the ground, and I'll be double-damned and fried in the Devil's big iron spider before I let those monkeys have it all their own way when I can give 'em a lick. Go get 'em! I only wish I were up there with you.”

Cheering, the pilots ran for their Wildcats. Peterson's was third in line. He fired up the engine even before he'd closed the canopy and fastened his safety belts. The fierce roar of the 1,200-horsepower Wright radial engine filled him. His fingernails, his bones, his guts all shook with it. It made him feel not just alive but huge and ferocious—
he
might have been making that great noise, not his plane.

A red flag hung from the bridge: the signal that the
Enterprise
was about to
launch her airplanes. No men in blue jerseys were left on the deck but the two who stood by to remove the chocks from the squadron leader's wheels. Sailors in yellow smocks formed a line across the deck.

What might have been the voice of God thundered from the island: “Prepare to launch planes!”

The sailors in blue whipped away the chocks. The lead Wildcat rolled forward, a man in yellow walking backwards just ahead of it, leading it on to a point midway up the flight deck. A little ahead of the island stood another man in a yellow jersey. This one held a checkered flag in his right hand.

That biblically amplified voice roared again: “Launch planes!”

As the man with the flag turned his free hand in a grinding motion, the squadron leader gunned his engine. When the note suited the sailor in yellow, he dropped the flag. The plane sped down the deck and zoomed off into the air. The next fighter taxied up to the takeoff line. At the flagman's orders, the pilot built up the boost on his engine. The flag fell. The Wildcat roared away.

Then it was Peterson's turn. The sailors in blue jerseys pulled away the chocks. Up to the line he went, following the man in yellow. The flagman made his grinding motion. Peterson gave his engine the gun. Down went the flag. Peterson whooped with delight. Acceleration shoved him back in his seat as the fighter raced down the
Enterprise
's flight deck.

As always when he went off the end of the deck, there was that sickening lurch, that moment when he wondered whether he'd go into the sky or into the drink. But the Wildcat climbed after the two planes that had taken off ahead. Peterson whooped again. This was where he was meant to be, what he was meant to do.

More fighters rose from the carrier. They formed in pairs: leader and wingman. Peterson's wingman was a j.g. named Marvin Morrison. He had a squeaky tenor voice that broke when he got excited, which happened frequently. It sounded in Peterson's earphones now: “We're going to clean the Japs' clocks for them.”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Peterson agreed. “If they want a war, Marv, we'll give 'em all the war they want—you bet your ass we will.”

Similar outraged chatter crackled through the squadron. Along with the outrage was a sense of astonishment: how
could
the Japanese, with their buck-toothed, bespectacled pilots and their lousy scrap-metal planes, dare to take on the United States of America? The fighter pilots also monitored radio
traffic from Pearl Harbor. When one frantic officer relayed rumors that the Japs had German pilots doing some of their flying for them, Peterson nodded to himself. The little yellow men couldn't have done it all on their own. Say what you would about the Nazis, but they'd shown the world they knew what the hell they were doing when it came to war.

He saw the thick black smoke rising into the blue tropical sky when he was still a devil of a long way out from Pearl. More and more of it came up every minute, too. “Jesus,” he said softly. With or without help from Hitler's Aryan supermen, the Japs had done something really terrible here.

Radio from Pearl Harbor abruptly cut off. He didn't think it was silence imposed by command. More likely, a bomb had wrecked the transmitter—the signal went away in the middle of a word.

As Peterson drew closer to Oahu, he saw more smoke rising from the Marine Corps airfield at Ewa, west of Pearl Harbor. In fact, people in Honolulu used
Ewa
as a synonym for
west
, the same as they used
Waikiki
for
east
. Till he got close, though, the small smoke from Ewa was lost in the greater conflagration of Pearl Harbor.

And the closer he got, the worse those fires looked. The tank farms had to be burning, sending untold millions of gallons of fuel oil up in smoke. Peterson swore softly, more in awe than in anger. This was a disaster, nothing else but. Somebody'd been asleep at the switch, or it never could have happened. Heads would roll among the big brass. They'd have to. But that did nobody one damn bit of good now.

“Bandits!” In Peterson's earphones, that was more a cry of exultation than a mere word. “Bandits dead ahead!”

He peered through the bulletproof windscreen. Sure as hell, there they were: shiny silver planes with meatballs on their wings and sides. They were tiny as toys now, but swelled even as he watched. “Come on, Marv!” he called to his wingman. “Time to go hunting!”

“I'm right with you,” Morrison answered.

Peterson more than half expected the Japs to run away. Now they'd have to fight, after all, not just kick somebody while he was down. Did they really have the balls for that? But they'd seen the planes from the
Enterprise
, too, and here they came.

His thumb tensed on the firing button on top of the stick. Just when he thought he had the first of the enemy fighters in his sights, though, the Jap
did a flick roll and zoomed upwards.
Christ, but he's maneuverable
, Peterson thought, and then, with a twinge of alarm,
He climbs like a son of a bitch, too
.

He gave his Wildcat full throttle. If the Jap wanted to dogfight, he'd play along. Marvin Morrison stuck to him like a burr, the way a good wingman was supposed to. Several of the Wildcats were shooting now, flames spurting from the four .50-caliber machine guns each one carried. A Japanese fighter fell from the sky trailing smoke and flame. Peterson whooped.

But the enemy planes were firing, too, and the shells from their wing-mounted cannon bit chunks out of the fighters from the
Enterprise
when they hit. And they seemed to be able to hit whenever they pleased. Peterson rapidly discovered that dogfighting the Japs was a mistake. It was like trying to pick up water with a fork. Their fighters could turn inside his and out-climb him as if the Wildcat were nailed to the mat.

This isn't right
, he told himself.
What the hell are they doing with hotter planes than we've got?

“I'm hit!” Morrison wailed in his earphones. “I'm going down!” The wingman's Wildcat spun toward the ground and the sea far, far below. Flames licked back from the engine cowling toward the cockpit.

“Get out!” Peterson screamed. “Get out while you can!” But he didn't think Marvin Morrison could.

And then he had to stop worrying about Marv and try to save his own skin. The Jap he'd been hunting had been hunting him, too. Now the bastard was on his tail. Peterson jinked like a maniac, but he couldn't shake the enemy or turn the tables on him. Tracers flashed past. Peterson tensed, not that that would do him any good if a shell slammed through his armored seat and into his back.

Machine-gun bullets stitched across his wing. Two cannon shells hit his engine, one right after the other. It quit. None of his cursing and clawing brought it back to life. All of a sudden, he was flying the world's most expensive glider.

He'd told his luckless wingman to get out. Now he had to follow his own advice—if he could. He pushed back the canopy. The slipstream tore at him as he unfastened his harness. Then he was out, and past the tail that could have cut him in half, and falling free . . . right through the middle of this mad aerial combat. A couple of tracers seemed close enough to touch as he plunged earthward.

He probably pulled the ripcord sooner than he should have. The jolt of the parachute opening made the world go red for a moment. He tried to steer himself toward land and away from the Pacific. He had a Mae West, but even so. . . . Better the jungle than the sharks.

Oh, Jesus, here came a Jap fighter, straight for him. Was that the pilot who'd shot him down? One burst from the bastard's machine guns and he was a dead man. The fighter roared past. The man in the cockpit waved to him as it went by.

Peterson waved back with a one-finger salute. Fortunately, the enemy flier either didn't see it or didn't know what it meant. He flew back into the fight instead of returning to wipe out the insult in blood.

Like bad-tempered dandelion fluff, Peterson floated down. He spilled air from the chute and swung his weight this way and that, fighting not to go into the drink. And he didn't. He came down on the fairway of a golf course about a quarter of a mile from the sea.

Two gray-haired men advanced on him with upraised five-irons. “Surrender!” they shouted.

In spite of everything, he almost burst out laughing. Here he was, taller than either one of them, fairer than either one of them—and they thought he was a goddamn Jap because he came out of the sky. “Get me to a car and get me to an airfield,” he growled. “If they can find a plane for me, I've got some more fighting to do.”

The golfers gaped at him as if he'd started spouting Japanese. If they'd lived here a while, they might even have understood some Japanese. Did they understand English? “I think he's an American, Sid,” one of them said, as if announcing miracles.

“You're right, Bernie,” the other declared after cogitations of his own.

Peterson felt like murdering them both. Instead, they drove him back towards Ewa. To the east, the flames and smoke of the U.S. Navy's funeral pyre climbed higher into the air every moment. Soot floated down like black rain.

I
N HIS
Z
ERO
, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo watched Pearl Harbor go up in smoke below him.
This
was the blow Commander Fuchida had wanted to strike: the blow against the harbor's great tank farms and repair facilities. Even if the invasion of Oahu failed by some accident, the Americans would
have a devil of a time getting much use out of their forward base in the Pacific. The channel was plugged, too, with ships sunk trying to steam out and fight. The Japanese task force wouldn't have to worry about sorties, not for a while.