Days of Infamy (7 page)

Shindo flew at four thousand meters. The thick, black, greasy smoke had already climbed past him. How high would it go? How far would the pall spread? He couldn't begin to guess. He also couldn't see the ground as well as he would have liked, for the smoke obscured it. The very success of the attack was ruining reconnaissance.

“We were attacked by carrier-based aircraft flying in from the west,” Shindo said into the radio. He knew the carriers wouldn't answer, but Admiral Nagumo, Commander Genda, and Commander Fuchida urgently needed to hear. “Repeat: attacked by carrier-based aircraft from the west. Approximate bearing 290 degrees from Pearl Harbor. Range unknown, but not likely to be far. Out.”

His lips curled up at the corners in the disciplined beginnings of a smile. He'd knocked down two Wildcats himself. The pilot of one had managed to get out and get his chute open; he thought he'd killed the other American flier in the cockpit. The enemy was brave—no doubt about that. But Shindo had quickly seen he and his men were better trained. And the Zero could fly rings around the slow, stubby Wildcat.

Shindo laughed softly. He knew how the Americans looked down their noses at Japan and what she made. Well, the arrogant white men had got themselves a little surprise today.

Back aboard the task force, they'd be launching a flight of Nakajima B5N2s. They'd held the torpedo bombers out of the third wave just in case American carriers showed up. Now at least one was on the board. Shindo would have bet there was only one, or the enemy would have thrown more fighters at his force.

The plan called for his planes to plaster Schofield Barracks after they'd finished with Pearl Harbor. But he knew he could fly along the bearing from which the Wildcats had come and have a good chance of finding the carrier that had launched them. The B5N2s would be coming from much farther away. They wouldn't know where along that bearing the carrier might lie, so they'd have to waste time searching.

Shindo made up his mind. He pulled half a dozen Zeros and ten Aichi
D3A1 dive bombers out of the Schofield Barracks attack and ordered them off to the west with him. If that carrier was there, he wanted to be in at the kill. Taking it out might be the most important thing the Japanese Navy did.

There was Ewa down below. Planes still burned on the runways, where they'd been lined up almost wingtip-to-wingtip: a perfect target. The Americans had a couple of antiaircraft guns up and working. They fired at Shindo's detachment, but the shell bursts didn't come close.

On he flew, out over the Pacific. It was so much bluer and more beautiful than it had been around Japan. The air above Oahu had smelled sweet and spicy before battle began. This was a wonderful place. It would make a fine addition to the Japanese Empire. But to make sure it did, where was that carrier?

If I'm on a wild-goose chase. . . .
Alone in the cockpit, Shindo shrugged. If he was, he was. He had to take the chance.

There was Kauai, off to the northwest of Oahu. The Garden Island, its nickname was. He'd run into that in an intelligence briefing. It was supposed to be even lovelier than Oahu. Shindo wondered if that were possible.

Then all thoughts of Kauai, all thoughts of beauty, vanished from his head. There south of the island were ships, their white wakes very visible as they steamed towards Oahu at full speed. Shindo's heart thuttered with excitement. Now—was the U.S. carrier with them? Yes, that had to be it, there at the heart of the flotilla. The escorting ships—were those battleships, or only cruisers?

He couldn't tell. He didn't care, or not much. The carrier counted for more than all the others put together. He radioed its position to his own fleet and to the torpedo bombers that already had to be on the way.

Then he spoke to the pilots he led: “The carrier is your first priority. Attack it at all costs. Only after it is destroyed will you worry about any other ships.
Banzai
for the Emperor!”

Answering
Banzai!
s dinned in his earphones. The American ships swelled as he drew closer to them. Flame and smoke burst from the guns of the forward vessels. They'd spotted him, then. Black puffs of smoke dotted the sky ahead. They hadn't quite found the range. But they would. They would.

“Enemy fighters ahead!” a Zero pilot yelled.

Shindo swore, but only mildly. Of course the American carrier would have a combat air patrol overhead. Zeros orbited the Japanese task force, too—just in case. “Our job is to keep those fighters off our dive bombers,” he radioed
to his comrades. “We are expendable. They are not. Let's go.” He didn't shout
Banzai!
again. He was not a showy man.

The Zero's engine roared as he brought it up to full combat power. He and his fellow fighter pilots left the D3N1s behind as if they were nailed to the sky. There were the Wildcats, boring in on them. He'd already seen the American Navy fliers had courage and to spare.

What they didn't have was enough in the way of airplanes under them. The Zeros slashed into the enemy planes. One Wildcat after another tumbled toward the Pacific. A Zero fell, too, and then another. The Japanese fighters were lighter and faster and more maneuverable than the Americans, but the Wildcats could take more punishment and keep flying.

There—Shindo turned quicker and harder than any Wildcat could hope to do. His thumb came down on the firing button. The twin 20mm cannon in his wings roared. A tracer round scored a line of what Japanese pilots called
ice candy
across the sky. Shells blew holes in the Wildcat just behind the cockpit. No plane could survive punishment like that. Spinning wildly, flames pouring from it, the American fighter went down.

Where were the dive bombers? In the fight to keep the Wildcats off them, Shindo had lost track. Then the glint of sun off a cockpit let him spy them. They'd gone into their attack run, stooping on the frantically zigzagging carrier like so many falcons.

In these cerulean seas, the American Navy's camouflage scheme—dark gray below and light gray above—left something to be desired. It was better suited to gloomier climes farther north. Even from his height, Shindo could make out the planes on the flight deck. Whether the carrier was going to fly them to Oahu or launch a strike against his task force, he didn't know. Too late now, either way.

Antiaircraft fire snarled up at the diving Aichis. One of them was hit, caught fire, and spiraled into the Pacific. Its bomb went off when it struck, sending up a white geyser of water. But the rest of the dive bombers pressed on fearlessly. They released their bombs one after another and pulled up and away.

“
Banzai!
” Shindo shouted when the first bombs exploded. But they were near misses, one astern, the other to port. The carrier kept dodging, staggering across the sea like a drunk. It did not save her, though. The next three bombs
were
hits: one near the stern, one on the island, and one not far from
the bow. The bursts of flame and great clouds of black smoke showed him the difference between what he'd thought a hit looked like and the real thing.

The hit near the stern, among the airplanes loaded with fuel and torpedoes and bombs, was the one that devastated the carrier. Secondary explosions followed almost at once as the munitions, bathed in fire, went off on their own. Engines damaged, the stricken ship slowed to a crawl. Brave men crewed her, though. The antiaircraft guns that hadn't been knocked out kept firing at the Japanese planes.

Seeing their comrades' success, the last three dive bombers pulled up without dropping their bombs. “What are you doing?” Shindo called to them.

“Sir, the carrier is dead in the water,” one of those pilots replied. “We request permission to attack a battleship instead.”

“I think they're cruisers,” Shindo said. “But even if they are battleships, the carrier is the primary target.” He looked down at it. The Aichi pilot was right; it could not move at all. Still, the Americans were supposed to be very clever, very skillful, at damage control. Shindo made up his mind. “Two of you will strike the carrier again. The third may use his bomb against a cruiser. Do you understand me? All three of you—speak up!”

“Aye aye, sir!” they chorused.

“Obey, then.” Shindo radioed the rest of the D3A1s: “Go back to the ships. If you pass the torpedo bombers coming this way, give them a course.”

The three bomb-laden Aichis climbed back up into the sky, then dove once more. As Shindo had commanded, two of them attacked the carrier. One missed even though the target lay dead in the water. The other bomb, though, struck square amidships. Shindo thought afterwards that that one might have been enough to sink her all by itself. She began to list to starboard. The list quickly grew. Whatever men remained aboard her could do nothing to stop it.

Shindo was so intent on watching her that the fire and smoke suddenly spurting from a cruiser's—or was it a battleship's?—superstructure took him by surprise. “
Banzai!
” an excited young pilot shouted in his earphones. “That is a very solid hit!”

“Yes, it is,” Shindo agreed. He ordered the remaining D3A1s back to the carriers, and all the Zeros except his own. If he spotted the torpedo bombers, he could guide them down to the American ships. He throttled back. His plane had more endurance than the dive bombers, especially when he wasn't
going all out in combat. He could afford to loiter here for a while. And he wanted to watch that carrier sink.

She went to the bottom about twenty minutes later. A few boats and rafts bobbed in the water. He supposed individual men were floating and swimming, but he was too high to spot them. Destroyers and cruisers, including the damaged one, gathered to pick up survivors.

Then the ships scattered. They couldn't possibly have finished picking up all the men from the carrier, but they abandoned them and started throwing up flak. Saburo Shindo spotted the torpedo bombers a couple of minutes later. How had the Americans known about them so soon? Had a cruiser launched a scout? If so, wouldn't he have seen the slow, clumsy plane catapulted off its ship and shot it down? But if not, how had they done it? Did they have detection gear the Empire of Japan lacked?

That was a question for later. Now Shindo dove on a cruiser and strafed the deck, doing everything he could to distract it from the oncoming Nakajimas. Tracers sizzled all around him. He counted himself lucky that he wasn't hit. If he had been, he'd intended to try to fly his plane into one of the U.S. ships.

Lieutenant Fusata Iida had tried that sort of thing at Kaneohe. He'd said before the attack began that he would do his best to strike an enemy target if he was shot down. He
had
been hit, and he'd aimed his Zero at a hangar housing flying boats. He hadn't been able to hit it, but he'd made the effort. His spirit deserved praise.

One of the Nakajima B5N2s caught fire and tumbled into the Pacific. The planes had to fly low and straight to launch their torpedoes. It made them dreadfully vulnerable. Had the Americans here still had any fighters flying, things would only have been worse. Their ships maneuvered desperately. Two destroyers almost collided. “Too bad!” Shindo exclaimed, seeing they would miss. If the foe had hurt himself, that would have been sweet.

Another torpedo bomber exploded in midair—a big shell must have hit it. But torpedoes splashed into the sea one after another. Here the B5N2s had open water of unlimited depth. This wasn't a problem like the one Pearl Harbor itself had presented. The narrow, shallow lochs at the American base had made the Japanese modify their torpedoes so they wouldn't bury themselves in the bottom after they fell from their planes.

No such worries here. Just white wakes in the water, straight as arrows.
Shindo cursed when a dodging destroyer managed to evade one of those arrows. But then he shouted, “
Banzai!
” again—a torpedo hit the damaged cruiser amidships. The cruiser shuddered to a stop. A destroyer was hit, too, and her back broken. She sank faster than the carrier had.

And there was another cruiser (or battleship? Shindo could still hope) hit, her bow torn off by the force of the blow. Shindo wished for more bombers to finish off the whole flotilla. He shrugged, then let out another cheer as a second destroyer was struck. Despite the cheer, he knew the carrier-based planes were lucky to have accomplished this much. The American carrier was dead. That mattered most. The Japanese Navy also had a swarm of submarines in Hawaiian waters. Maybe they could finish off some of the U.S. ships that had escaped the torpedo bombers.

That wasn't Shindo's worry, or not directly. He'd done everything he could here. The surviving Nakajimas were flying back toward the northeast. He followed them, as he'd trained to do. They had better navigation gear than he did. He smiled as he buzzed along over the Pacific. It wasn't as if he had to worry about American pursuit. No, everything had gone just like a drill.

T
HE FIRST ATTACKS
on Oahu passed Schofield Barracks by. Listening to the radio, looking at the smoke rising from nearby Wheeler Field, Fletcher Armitage was almost insulted. “What's the matter?” he exclaimed. “Don't they think we're worth hitting, the lousy yellow bastards?”

Little by little, the brass started waking up from the haymaker they'd taken. Orders came for units to move to their defensive positions. The Twenty-eighth Infantry Regiment headed for Waikiki. The Ninety-Eighth Coast Artillery Regiment (Antiaircraft) rolled out for Kaneohe, on the windward side of Oahu. And, along with the Nineteenth Infantry Regiment, the Thirteenth Field Artillery Battalion hurried up to the north shore, to defend the beach between Haleiwa and Waimea.