Pearl Harbour - A novel of December 8th (26 page)

He went over to the coffeepot, tilted it to get the thick near- syrupy liquid at the bottom. Someone had brought in a cake; a few crumbled pieces were left. He absently bolted down the stale “meal” and went back to his desk.

The Soviets or someone else? Which would it be?

Off the coast of Kyushu, Japan: 29 June 1941

They were four thousand meters out from the target.

“Now, dive now!”

The six Kates with Fuchida in the lead plane nosed over sharply, rapidly dropping down from a height of five hundred meters.

It was difficult in one sense for him to watch. He was in the aft seat, actually the tail gunner’s position, converted over to his special use as an observer; sitting in direct line ahead was the pilot. He had no control over the aircraft but knew he could trust the pilot, his old friend Hideo, even though his fingers tingled with the desire to have them on the control stick; Hideo was not diving steep enough.

“Throttle back! Throttle back!” he snapped. The trade-off of altitude was of course increased air speed.

“One hundred and eighty kilometers per hour, fifteen meters altitude. You know how to do it!”

He turned in his seat to look back at the other five Kates flying in echelon to the right behind him. They were his best, they were keeping formation well, but still they were coming in too fast.

“Three thousand meters to target,” Hideo shouted.

Fuchida looked forward again, half rising out of his seat. The target was straight ahead, but he could tell they were still flying too high and too fast.

“Lower, and slower!” Fuchida snapped into his mike. “Still lower, not more than fifteen meters above the water!” Even for skilled pilots this was becoming dangerous. Judging height over water, especially the flat calm of the bay but minutes after sunrise, was tricky work. Sunlight was reflecting off the ocean, nothing to gain perspective from, far too low to trust any altimeter. The slightest mistake and the pilot would ram into the sea.

They ignored the risk; they had to. He had worked out the calculations; and if this was to work, it had to be no more than 180 kilometers per hour at fifteen meters above the ocean.

He could sense the plane slowing, Hideo cutting the throttle back to idle, a bit of a stomach knot as he nosed over slightly, then leveled out, throttled back up slightly.

“No deflection,” Fuchida announced, “no deflection!”

The target was not moving. That made the calculation far easier; no need to estimate target speed and then lay in the proper deflection for a hit as the enemy attempted to maneuver out of harm’s way.

Straight ahead was the target, and his heart swelled at the sight of it, a carrier, anchored in the shallows just below Etajima.

Releasing his shoulder harness Fuchida half stood. The canopy was open, wind blast buffeting him as he turned and looked at the formation and then back forward.

“Fifteen hundred meters.” Hideo announced, “fourteen hundred...” Every two seconds another hundred meters closer.

“Eleven hundred meters ... !”

“Release!”

The Kate surged up as the half-ton torpedo slung below their belly dropped away.

Excitedly Fuchida turned to look back at the other five planes, spaced out correctly. At one-second intervals each released in turn, torpedoes dropping, splashing into the sea. He held his breath ... Make it work. .. make it work!

A few seconds later he saw a trail of bubbles, the oxygen driver of a torpedo, then a second one ... and no more.

“Damn!” he snarled.

His plane surged up, and he dropped back into his seat.

The bulk of the target, the carrier Akagi, was just a few hundred meters ahead. They were heading straight at it, still below the level of the deck. It was doctrine to fly so low that the antiaircraft gunners could not depress low enough to hit them. Now they were surging up, Hideo pulling back on the stick, full throttle, a heart-racing instant where he thought Hideo had miscalculated and would ram into the side of the ship.

Then a glimpse of men on the deck waving their white forage caps, some ducking low as Hideo cleared the starboard side of the deck by not much more than half a dozen meters.

“Bank to port!” Fuchida snapped.

If simply a practice attack, Hideo would have skimmed across the enemy deck, so low that no one could effectively shoot at them, cleared the port side, dived down to skim the waves, then raced off pulling evasive turns until out of gunnery range. But he wanted to see the results.

Hideo went into a sharp banking turn, the force of it pressing Fuchida down low in his seat, as they pivoted above the deck of his beloved carrier, men on the deck now running to the starboard railing to watch the results of the attack.

There were only two tracks of bubbles approaching the Akagi. The torpedoes were approaching at just thirty kilometers per hour, barely half speed, throttled back so if they hit the torpedo net deployed out ten meters from the carrier, they would simply snag without damage.

It took nearly two minutes for them to reach the target, one slicing fifty yards behind the stem--to his shame, it looked to be the one launched by Hideo--the second striking amidships a few seconds later, head crumbling in the torpedo net. Of course there was no hundred-meter-high pillar of water from the explosion, just a dull thump, and seconds later the inflatable bladder, set in the torpedo so it could be recovered, brought the bent weapon to the surface.

“The rest of you, head back to base,” Fuchida announced sharply to the squadron; then he ordered Hideo to circle back over the drop point and skimmed in low. A small tender was already approaching the area. One torpedo was on the surface, bladder inflated; why it failed completely would have to be carefully studied. Bubbles were surfacing from the drop point of two others. The sixth torpedo there was no sign of at all; most likely it was broken apart on the bottom, shattered as it hit.

Damn, damn all, he sighed. The torpedoes were obviously stuck in the mud at the bottom of the bay.

It was another failure.

The drop point for the attack and positioning of Akagi had been carefully selected. The bottom at low tide, exactly thirteen meters deep, the depth of Pearl Harbor’s main channel and anchorage.

Four torpedoes damaged by the drop or hitting the bottom, only two successfully launched, only one striking the target, a huge carrier, stationary and only a thousand meters away.

What do I say to Genda, he wondered. He had hoped that the lower, slower approach into the target, the diving planes on the torpedoes calibrated so that they would not sink more than ten meters after drop, rather than the usual twenty to thirty before surfacing back up for the run into the target, would work. It had not worked. They could go no slower without stalling, and for that matter making themselves absolutely nothing more than suicidal targets before even launching, and they could go no lower.

Damn all, some other way to launch the torpedoes had to be found, otherwise all of Genda’s elaborate plans would be for naught.

“Take us back in, Hideo,” he said dryly, dreading the report he would have to file upon return to base.

Tokyo: 2 July 1941

The years of debate within the army, between its young aggressive officers and older conservatives, between army and navy as to potential directions to take, between military and government and within government between conservatives such as himself and hotbloods like Foreign Minister Matsuoka, so enamored with Hitler . . had now at last come to this moment.

Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye felt trapped, as he most certainly was, trapped into the ritual now about to take place, and at such a moment, as they stood waiting, he knew there was no room for maneuver this day.

The side door to the audience chamber opened and all bowed low, from the waist as first the President of the Privy Council Yoshimichi Hara entered the small room, followed then by the Emperor himself.

Related by blood to the Royal line. Prince Konoye had, since childhood, always felt himself in somewhat of a unique relationship with the Emperor. They were nearly of the same age, had known each other as boys, and in the privacy of some inner chambers of the palace the relationship was as close as possible to what a living god could call a friendship. The prince would tell jokes, gossip, play go, and felt a close kinship, though even then, there was the sense that here must be the living presence of all that was Japan, the manifestation on Earth of Japan’s unique position in all the world, the one nation blessed and entrusted with the “eternal presence,” a presence which all Japanese shared, from prince to the lowest peasant, and which therefore placed upon them a mandate unique in history.

And this new age might very well make manifest that destiny intended by the gods. Isolated, remote, while the rest of the world grew, expanded, fought wars, empires rose and fell, Japan had always been remote, and in that remoteness had honed its own steel against itself, the tradition of the samurai, the ultimate example of the warrior ideal, cultured, refined, faithful and yet when called upon, deadly, with the quickest of strokes barely seen. In the two hundred plus years of the Tokugawa regime, Japan had safely insulated itself from the rest of the world while the Westerners ran greedily rampant through the world. In this, the time of Meiji, Japan had stirred out of its self-imposed isolation, for to not do so would mean ultimate submission to the vastly superior technologies of the West.

And now, was the moment at last arriving when the nation with the living presence of a god begin to achieve its destiny?

Konoye knew that all around him felt he was a cipher. He could be urbane, witty, even Western in style, dress, manner, and humor. He had traveled the world and knew the world and enjoyed the latest in gadgetry and luxury the West had to offer. Yet he could also appear to be so traditional, frequently preferring the kimono to the three-piece suit, a quiet evening at home with wife and family rather than the accepted practice of spending those evenings in the geisha houses. Some thought him weak, for whoever came before him to press a case, he always seemed to agree. And yet none, not even the Emperor himself, truly knew his heart; and at this moment, his heart was filled with infinite sadness, even as he fully prepared to perform the ritual forced upon him.

Foreign Minister Matsuoka had been the one, at last, to force the crisis and the decision to take place this day. Several months back he had crossed Russia to visit Berlin, there to meet with Hitler and Ribbentrop, and there he had been mesmerized by the power and glory of the Reich, triumphant on every field of battle. On his return, ironically he had been hosted by Stalin as well, even publicly embraced by the wily dictator when departing and boarding his train in Moscow. Stalin had personally come to see him off and swept him up in a bear hug, while dozens of photographers recorded the moment of the diminutive Japanese foreign minister enfolded in the dictator’s friendly embrace. Matsuoka was the opposite of everything Konoye felt himself to be: admired, brash, crude, a show-off, given to extremes, and above all else a manipulator without any finesse and thought for the higher ideals of Japan. Boasting for weeks of his friendship with “Stalin-san and Hitler-san.” he pushed his proposal that now was the time for Japan to finish with the Western presence in the Pacific, and the army radicals had gladly embraced him, talking of a vast axis of power, stretching from Europe to the Atlantic to the Pacific, the three great new powers humbling forever the effete and decadent democracies of the West.

Thrown momentarily off guard by the stunning turn of events of June 22, when one of the proposed great allies had turned on the other, with Hitler turning on Stalin (something Matsuoka’s own professional diplomats had warned of months earlier), he had barely missed a beat, again joining hands with the army, this time with the slogan “Don’t miss the bus,” a slogan ironically based on Chamberlain’s famous remark about Hitler.

Absurd, Konoye thought as he remained bent low, waiting for the Imperial Presence to come to the center of the room and sit down, the signal for all of them to resume an upright position and then sit as well.

Join the bus, join the bus, and it did not matter in which damn direction it was going. At this junction some in the army had shouted that now was the time to jump out of Manchukuo and expand into Siberia, perhaps in their wilder dreams meeting the Germans along the slopes of the Urals.

Madness! To do what? Conquer a frozen wilderness into which a million additional troops might disappear forever, breaking the budget, and bringing back not one yen of true profit, as was still the case in China after nearly four bitter years of fighting.

But in a way, it was Hitler against Stalin that Konoye knew had finally forced his own hand as well. He had never been totally dismissive of the use of war, for after all, he was Japanese, and the code of the samurai, of courtly patience but if need be of swift direct action in service to the Emperor and to the ideal of what it was to be of Japan, was in his blood.