The Hummingbird (15 page)

“Sometimes the truth is nasty, knuh.”

“Actually,” I said, “a little perspective would be helpful right now.”

“See?” Joel leaned down into Michael’s face. “Part of the story, Milk. You know it is.”

Michael’s shoulders slumped.

“Life ain’t like Hollywood,” Joel persisted.

“This is my wife—”

“Makes it even more important that she sees.”

The Professor’s instruction came to mind: To understand a warrior, understand his weapon. My shoulder hurt, but not enough to quell my curiosity. “I don’t know what this exercise is about,” I said, “but if it helps me understand . . .”

“There you go,” Joel said. “C’mon, Milk. Explain the jug lesson.”

Michael sighed and stood up. “Deb, what is the human body like ninety percent made of?”

“Water. Though it’s closer to sixty percent.”

“So here’s this,” Joel said, shaking the jug. It was full of water. Then he held it toward Michael. “Do the honors? Maybe fifty yards. Whatever you think for a definite hit.”

Michael took the jug with a defeated air. While he strode back into the field, Joel skittered over beside me.

“In the movies, you know, a guy gets popped in the noggin, there’s a little black dot in the center of his forehead, right?”

“Sure.”

“And the hero, he always gets shot in the arm, right? Maybe a red blotch on his shirt, but he keeps on going.”

“Pretty much every time.”

“Well, I’m here to give you the news, which is that all that stuff is one hundred percent Grade A bullshit. As you are about to see.”

“I’ve worked in emergency rooms, you know,” I felt compelled to say.

“Maybe so.” Joel eyed me. “But I’m betting you saw handgun wounds. Nobody, knuh, nobody came in after getting hit by a banger like this here.”

“Is that kind of gun so rare?”

“Naw. But if anybody got shot by this, they went straight to the morgue.”

Michael had returned, and he loaded the rifle without looking at me. “She can hit this one with her eyes closed,” he said. The jug sat on a little rise of dirt, strangely homey among the tattered targets and cardboard boxes.

“You take your time there, Deborah, and just pop that puppy.” Joel sighted down his pointing finger. “If you can, don’t blink. Oh yeah. You need to see what happens.”

I imagined it would make a little hole in front, a bigger hole in back. I’d read such things. Still, I was uneasy. Joel’s energy—and Michael’s reluctance—made me feel as if I was being played with somehow. Both men stood there, not saying anything more. Michael had agreed that this exercise would give me perspective. What would I accomplish by saying no?

Sliding eye and ear protectors back into place, I sat again at the platform table, lowered myself to the scope, and saw how much easier a shot was at that range. I could read the lettering on the jug’s label. I aimed for the O in Orange, breathed out as Joel had told me, and squeezed the trigger.

There was a splash, of course, water spraying in all directions. But that was nothing beside the fact of the jug vanishing. It wasn’t broken, or split into pieces. The container had disappeared completely.

I panned the scope over and around the dirt pile. There was nothing, not even the orange cap.

“I don’t understand,” I said, sliding off my ear covers.

“Look here,” Joel answered. He drew a hand across his chest at sternum height. “You hit a human being anywhere above this line, there’s no neat bullet hole or little old bleeding. You hit a guy anywhere here on up, you pop his fucking balloon.”

It was as if he had punched me in the stomach. I staggered back, my arms dropping. This was what they saw. This was what they remembered.

I turned to Michael, who stood with his shoulders still stooped. I came before him, wilted. “Thirty-one times?”

His lips pressed hard against one another.

“Oh, lover.” Forgetting the boundaries I had promised to respect, the reserve and fragility of my husband, I fell into him, just pressed myself against his chest. All those people, no wonder he drew their faces night after night. I burrowed into him.

After a while Michael raised his hands and placed them on my back. They were as stiff as boards, nowhere near the caress or comfort that I needed. But I thought: I’ll take it for now. I’ll take it, and take it, and take it.

FOE BOMBS OREGON!!!
So read the 72-point headline in the September 10, 1942, edition of the
Oregon Journal
of Portland. Beneath, smaller headlines declared that the sub might have been sunk. Also that Japan was preparing a major attack on the U.S. coast. Also that the submarine had returned to Tokyo.

The initial headline was correct, the smaller three not so.

Two days later, hubris had overcome alarm. An editorial cartoonist drew a giant boot stomping out a fire. The boot was marked “US Forest Service,” while the tiny whiff of remaining smoke was labeled, “Jap incendiary raid.”

By September 14, the
Times
of Coos Bay carried an advertisement for “war risk property insurance.” The attack had disrupted local capitalists not a whit.

Meanwhile the I-25 carried four more bombs. Although sailors biding their time on the ocean floor had no way of knowing how severe a fire might be scorching the Oregon woods, by every other measure the mission had been a success. The catapult worked, the plane took off and landed, and at least one fire was burning. Moreover, Soga was still alive.

Lieutenant Commander Tagami ordered the sub to draw westward, away from shore. Some days would need to pass before another mission could constitute a surprise. Furthermore, instead of attacking at dawn, Soga would fly when a bomber was least expected, at night.

On September 29, 1942, twenty days after the first bombing, the I-25 surfaced sixty miles north of Brookings. This time, the bomber flew over a blacked-out coast. For navigation, Soga therefore relied on the Cape Blanco Lighthouse, which sat on a promontory above dramatic cliffs.

Documentation of this flight was less thorough than that of the first, except to note the difficulties Soga experienced. The mission began after midnight, and taking off was vastly more challenging in the dark. Nonetheless, Soga flew successfully toward Mount Emily, Okuda released both bombs, and the E14 turned back to sea. However, on his return Soga could not find the submarine.

Without the I-25, death was certain. Only weeks before, a Japanese ship had sailed out of a bomber’s range, and the aircraft’s pilot and crew were never heard from again. Now low on fuel, Soga circled back past the lighthouse, then reversed course again. In the predawn light, he finally spotted the submarine’s wake.

This time the plane dismantling and storage took place without American discovery. The I-25 cruised to the bottom unattended by depth charges.

Nonetheless, Soga’s extra flight time bore consequences. Two lookout towers, fully manned this time, reported sighting (and identifying) the aircraft at about 5:20
A.M.
Nine people confirmed hearing an explosion. By 7:15 a U.S. Forest Service supervisor near Grassy Knob, Oregon, had spotted rising smoke. Before a fire crew reached the site, wet weather spoke again, and the blaze sputtered out.

The second bomb remained unaccounted for. Search teams from the 174th Infantry, the Forest Service, Civil Defense, and the Advance Warning System all spent the full day scouring the approximate target area. They returned at dark without success. The unexploded device lay somewhere in the undergrowth.

The I-25 waited through another week of bad weather before Tagami ordered his crew to sail for Japan. On the way he damaged one Allied oil tanker, sank another, and torpedoed a Russian submarine so expertly it sank in seconds. The men returned to the port of Yokosuka with legs swollen by beriberi, an affliction of submariners who receive insufficient vitamins.

Soga’s second mission experienced a media blackout, as the U.S. Department of War sought to suppress news of incidents that could spark a panic. So began the process of this unprecedented invasion falling out of public memory.

In Tokyo, however, Soga’s mission led to headlines, crowing that Japan had struck the American mainland. When the submarine reached home port, Soga was whisked away on a victory tour intended less for celebration than for propaganda.

The firebombing team would never serve together again. A few weeks later the I-25, refueled and re-provisioned, set out toward Australia. However, the USS
Patterson,
a destroyer, encountered the sub near the New Hebrides Islands and sank it. All hands perished.

Navigator Okuda had already been reassigned to a special team of attack pilots known as the “divine wind.” The term derived from the thirteenth century, when it was used to describe typhoons that drove away the invading fleets of Kublai Khan. Okuda’s team would go on to sink 47 ships, damage 368 others, kill 4,900 sailors, and wound as many more. The Japanese translation of divine wind: kamikaze.

By New Year’s Day 1943, America had begun achieving greater military success, which shifted Japan’s naval strategy. There would be no more salvos conducted on the U.S. coast. Furthermore, the Allied victory at Guadalcanal in February drew the Japanese fleet into a defensive posture, which the Admiralty was forced to maintain for the duration of the war. Despite their capacity for stealth and destruction, submarines became primarily supply tools. Japanese expansion had reached its zenith, and the long bloody decline had begun.

Hailed as a national hero, Ichiro Soga was also the Oregon mission’s sole survivor.

HIS STORY DID NOT END
with two small fires, however, and one man alive to tell the tale. The attacks of 1942 constituted only the first chapter.

Nearly three years later, on May 5, 1945, the Reverend Archie Mitchell of Bookings went on a fateful picnic. He was leading a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds on an afternoon outing near Klamath Falls. They were joined by his wife, Elise, a Sunday school teacher who was six months pregnant. The end of the school year was nearing, and with it the conclusion of that spring’s Bible group.

By then Japan stood on the precipice of defeat. The thirty-five-day battle of Iwo Jima in March, for example, brought 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 deaths before the Allied victory. But Japanese losses were nearly triple that number. Of the 22,000 soldiers stationed on the island at the battle’s start, only 216 were taken as prisoners of war. The rest died, committed suicide, or starved in the tunnels beneath Iwo Jima’s rocky soil. While the image of Marines raising an American flag on the island’s summit became iconic, some military tacticians questioned whether the territory was worth such a high cost.

The answer came in two forms: First, Iwo Jima prepared the Allied forces for the clash at Okinawa, at eighty-two days the longest battle of the war. While sacrificing 14,009 American lives, that clash cost Japan more than 77,000 soldiers and provided the Allies with a base of operations only 340 miles from the Japanese mainland.

Second, the island footholds were military prizes because they provided staging support for B-29 bombers. These aircraft, which could fly 3,200 miles without refueling, also cruised at 30,000 feet—above the reach of all Japanese defenses. Thus did the Allies bomb at will, including the firebombing of Tokyo in March. Almost sixteen square miles of the city burned, with an estimated 100,000 fatalities.

On the May afternoon that Rev. Mitchell embarked on his picnic, Okinawa remained at full rage, outcome unknown. However, ninety-one days later American planes would drop thousands of leaflets on Hiroshima, urging people to flee. Two days later, an atomic bomb would level the city. (The
Enola Gay
took off, incidentally, from that previously debatable staging ground at Iwo Jima.)

Three days further down the calendar, Nagasaki was next to experience mighty atomic fire. Two additional atomic bombs, hidden on a classified navy ship, would never be loaded onto a bomber. Instead, on August 15 the emperor surrendered.

Thus in Oregon that May, the war was charging toward its conclusion. For a man of the cloth, years of prayers were on the verge of being answered. Yet the reach of warfare is often longer than anyone anticipates.

On the winding uphill drive toward their picnic site, the pregnant Elise Mitchell felt carsick. Her husband pulled over, encouraging everyone to take a walk to clear their heads. They wandered in various directions, Archie ambling over to a road construction crew with whom he chatted about fishing. His wife and the students headed the opposite way.

When they were some hundred yards apart, Elise called to her husband: “Look what I found.”

There was an explosion. Branches flew in the air. By the time the minister and road crew reached the scene, a cloud of dirt had risen. Inside the dust, they found Jay Gifford, Edward Engen, Sherman Shoemaker, and Dick Patzke, all dead. Elise Mitchell was dead as well, her dress on fire until the men put it out. The group’s one girl, Joan Patzke, lived a few minutes more.

These unfortunate people proved to be the only mainland casualties in all of World War II: civilians, innocents, a teenage Bible study group and a pregnant preacher’s wife. Almost three years after his aircraft dropped firebombs on American soil, Soga’s mission had claimed its victims.