The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (61 page)

PETE MCGILL GOT
something he never expected in a million years: a combination Christmas and get-well card from the leathernecks of the Shanghai garrison. Almost everybody signed it, even guys he couldn’t
stand and who he knew couldn’t stand him. Herman Szulc wrote,
You don’t know how lucky you are to get away
. Max Weinstein said,
Power to the proletariat!
If he’d told that to Pete face-to-face, Pete would’ve wanted to punch him in the snoot. Seeing the cramped scrawl on the card only made Pete miss the stubborn pinko.

More air-raid alarms sounded in Manila these days. At first, they’d panicked the Filipinos. Now the locals ignored them. So did Pete. He was up and about, but not exactly swift. Even though the
Boise
had accepted him aboard, he remained on light duty. There were times when he wondered if somebody’d pulled strings to get him out of the military hospital, but he didn’t worry about it.

He still wished he were back in Shanghai with the men he’d known for so long. If the Japs did jump, the leathernecks in China would get it in the neck. They couldn’t very well do anything else except run—and running wasn’t Marine Corps style. They’d make the best fight they could, but when there were hundreds of them and zillions of little yellow monkeys.… Even the hero of a bad Western shoot-’em-up couldn’t blast that many redskins before they got him.

Pete remembered the bet he’d won from his buddies by barging into a line of Jap soldiers and watching a movie with them. The samurai warriors in their movie wore funny clothes and had funnier haircuts. They used swords instead of six-shooters. They spoke a language he didn’t begin to understand. Such minor details aside, the flick might have been a grade-C Hollywood oater.

Whenever Pete heard airplane engines over Manila, he got nervous. The Japs bombed the crap out of Chinese cities every chance they got. If they decided to mix it up with the USA, of course they’d do the same thing here. They’d have to be nuts not to.

For a wonder, the American government seemed to realize as much. Some of the engines Pete heard belonged to P-40 fighters. People said those would blast the Japs’ scrap-metal planes out of the sky. Others came in pairs on fat-bellied B-18 Digby bombers. If the Japanese did come, flying to their bases and blowing them sky-high looked like a pretty decent plan.

The American government also waved its magic wand and turned Philippine Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur back into American General
Douglas MacArthur. Some of the guys Pete drank with off duty applauded that. Others just jeered. The longer soldiers had served under MacArthur, the more skeptical they seemed. Pete leaned toward the doubters. MacArthur belonged to the Army, didn’t he? Of course that meant he was likely to screw things up.

Christmas came. So did New Year’s. Pete got a wire from his folks in the Bronx. That was nice, but it might as well have come from another world. The card from the fellows he’d served with meant more to him.

Foreign news didn’t get any better. No one would confuse 1941 with the Millennium, not any time soon. The Nazis and their little friends kept bashing heads with the Reds. The Japanese kept banging away in China. Their foreign minister said, “No power can accept the dictates of another without becoming a slave.” That was the translation, anyhow. Maybe it sounded friendlier in Japanese, but, again, Pete leaned toward the doubters. Then the foreign minister clammed up altogether. Nobody at all took that for a good sign.

Manila went right on having air-raid drills. The day after New Year’s, a nervous antiaircraft-gun crew opened up on a Digby. They shot it down. That was good news as far as gunnery went. Pete didn’t suppose the other Digbys’ flyers thought so. If a bunch of jumpy, half-trained American soldiers could knock a B-18 out of the sky, what would Jap veterans do to them? What would Jap fighters do to them? Those were … interesting questions, weren’t they?

The second Sunday of January was the twelfth. The night before, Pete had gone out and got crocked. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d got crocked on Saturday nights in the Far East. He couldn’t remember what all had happened on some of those nights, either. That was the point, for him and a swarm of guys just like him. If getting crocked on Saturday night wasn’t a great American military tradition, he didn’t know what would be.

Maybe waking up on Sunday morning feeling like death. Pete lived up to that one, in spades. “The fuck?” he muttered, trying to figure out exactly what kind of ungodly racket had ripped him untimely from the womb of sleep—and from the oblivion of all the cheap whiskey he’d poured down the night before.

He didn’t need long to figure out what the racket was: all the air-raid
sirens in town were going off at once. “Jesus H. Christ!” groaned the guy in the bunk above his. “Has to be that cocksucking MacArthur. He’s the only asshole big enough to boot us out of the sack at sunup on a fucking Sunday morning!”

If MacArthur was that big an asshole, Pete was all for stringing him up by the balls. He was also all for gallons of hot coffee, a handful of aspirins to finish corroding his stomach lining but quiet his pounding head, and some more ZZZs after the sirens quit screeching.

If they ever did. A moment later, antiaircraft guns added a bass note to the cacophony.
More Digbys?
Pete wondered vaguely. Some of the guys at the guns would catch hell.

Or would they? If those were Digbys overhead, they were fighting back. Bombs crumped down. They didn’t land that close to the cruiser—but they weren’t that far away, either.

“Holy motherfucking shit! I think we’re under attack!” exclaimed the Marine in the upper.

“Nothing gets by you, does it, Sherlock?” Pete said.

“Huh?” the other guy said. It wasn’t a brilliant comeback, but Pete didn’t gig him for it. Instead, he scrambled out of the bunk, trying to find out what the hell was going on. He didn’t forget his hangover—he would have had to be dead for real to do that—but he did shove it aside. For once, he had more important things to worry about.

Klaxons hooted. “All hands! Battle stations! All hands! Battle stations!” boomed from the loudspeakers.

On light duty, Pete didn’t
have
a battle station. He got topside as fast as he could anyway. The sky was full of planes and puffs of antiaircraft fire. Shrapnel started pattering down. He suddenly wished for a tin hat. Some of those chunks of shell casing could put your lights out for good if they came down on top of your head.

Most of the planes overhead had unfamiliar lines—but not
that
unfamiliar, not to him. He’d seen them every now and then in China. He’d seen the big red meatballs on their wings and fuselages, too. Sure as hell, they were Japs. He didn’t know why he should be so surprised and outraged, but he was. The Philippines belonged to the US of A, God damn it to hell! Those enemy warplanes had no business coming here, no business at all.

Overhead, a brightly painted Peashooter dueled a Japanese fighter. Americans laughed at the shit the Japs manufactured, but the plane with the meatballs was far faster and more maneuverable than the (admittedly obsolescent) American machine. The Peashooter spun toward the ground, trailing a plume of fire and smoke. No parachute blossomed in the muggy air.
Scratch one American flyer
, Pete thought.

Then the Japanese fighter’s pilot spotted him and the other Marines and sailors on the
Boise
’s deck. He dove on them, machine guns blazing. Pete couldn’t move fast no matter how much he wanted to—and he wanted to one hell of a lot. Bullets spanged off steel. Wounded men screeched. The fighter roared away at not much over stack height.

Something not nearly far enough away blew up with a rending crash. Of course the Japs were coming after the Far East Fleet. Small as it was, they were bound to have carriers offshore. They’d want to make damn sure nobody could go after those precious ships.

They knew how to get what they wanted, too. A bigger explosion followed the first one. An enormous cloud of black smoke toadstooled up into the sky.

“Rifles!” yelled another Marine coming up from below. “I’ve got rifles, so we can shoot back at the lousy yellow bastards!”

Pete gratefully grabbed a Springfield. You could shoot down a plane with a rifle. (You had to be mighty goddamn lucky—
mighty
goddamn lucky—but you could.) And even if you didn’t shoot anything down, you were trying to. You were in the fight. No—you were in the war. It had taken almost two and a half years, but the United States was finally in the war.

WAR!
THE HEADLINE
on the
Philadelphia Inquirer
took up most of the space above the fold. Peggy Druce had to turn the newspaper over to learn that Japan had launched attacks on the Philippines and Hawaii, and was also moving into French Indonesia and British Malaya.

It wasn’t that she didn’t already know some of that—she and Herb had been glued to the radio ever since news of what was going on halfway around the world broke here in the States. But the paper had more details than the hasty radio bulletins she’d heard before, many of
them delivered by men who sounded as if they could hardly believe the copy they were reading.

She brought the
Inquirer
in to her husband, who was eating fried eggs and buttered toast and getting down a second cup of coffee heavy with sugar and almost white with cream. She remembered some of the rationed breakfasts she’d had in Europe, and what passed for coffee in Germany. Americans didn’t always understand how lucky they were.

She handed Herb the front page without a pang. She’d glanced at the headlines, and he’d fill her in on anything important she might have missed. He took the
Inquirer
with a word of thanks. As soon as he had it in front of him, he lit a cigarette. Breathing out smoke, he said, “Lord, what a mess!”

Peggy nodded but didn’t answer. She’d been in the middle of such an exploding mess. Herb, of course, had seen and done even worse things when he went Over There a generation earlier. That wasn’t quite the same, though. The mess then had already exploded by the time he got to it. He knew what he was supposed to do and how to go about it. Things now were up in the air, as they had been when Peggy found herself too close to the German border as Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. Some of those things had been machine-gun bullets and 105mm shells and 500kg bombs. They’d come down, much too close to her head.

“Looks like Manila got caught napping,” Herb remarked, exhaling more smoke. “Hawaii’s not so bad. We were ready for ’em there—but why didn’t we spot ’em while they were on the way, darn it?”

“Maybe they came from a funny direction,” Peggy said.

“Maybe they did—but we ought to be looking every which way at once when there’s liable to be a war on, don’t you think?” Herb opened the
Inquirer
to get a look at the inside pages. He shook his head. “We were ready in Hawaii, and we still lost a carrier and a battlewagon and some of the fuel store we’ve got there.” He held up a page with a photo for Peggy. She supposed it was smoke from burning fuel oil or whatever the hell. It looked more like a volcano going off.

“What about Manila?” she asked.

“It’s a lot closer to the Japs, and it got hit a lot harder,” Herb answered. “They’ll probably try invading the Philippines if they haven’t already.”
He went to another inside page. “MacArthur says, ‘We shall prevail.’ That sounds pretty, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does,” Peggy said. “I wonder how he expects to do it, though.”

“Ha!” Her husband finished the toast and stubbed out his cigarette. “There’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right.”

“What does FDR have to say about it?” Peggy asked, adding, “There wasn’t anything on the front page.”

Herb nodded, acknowledging that she’d looked as she brought in the paper. He settled his bifocals more firmly on his nose as he looked for an answer. He grunted, not much liking what he found. “A White House aide says, ‘Obviously, we are at war. Obviously, we didn’t want to be.’ ”

“Our goldfish could tell us that much, and we haven’t got a goldfish,” Peggy said.

“Yeah, I know.” Herb nodded. Then he let out a different grunt, one that said
Now we’re getting somewhere
. “The President’s going to address Congress at noon. Emergency session. It’ll go by radio all over the country.”

Peggy wondered how many people would miss church to hear him. It was still Sunday morning here—still very early Sunday morning on the Pacific Coast. It had been Sunday morning for quite a while in Manila, though. Hawaii had got hit at midday Saturday, their time.

When Peggy remarked on that, Herb grunted one more time, now as if to convey
Well, what do you expect?
“Some of the guys there were still sober, I bet,” he said. “Odds are that’s why they did better.”

“Why does everybody get smashed on Saturday night?” she wondered.

His look told her she could have asked a better question. She thought he’d grunt yet again, but he fooled her: he only rolled his eyes. “You’re in the service, what else is there to do?” he said. Then, slowly and deliberately, he lit another cigarette. His cheeks hollowed as he took a deep drag. When he let it out in twin streams through his nose, he looked like a locomotive venting steam. Peering down at the paper rather than at Peggy, he went on, “If they’ll have me, hon, I’m going to put the uniform on again.”

“Oh, no!” But that was dismay, not surprise. Peggy knew him too well for such a thing to surprise her. She did take her best shot at changing his mind: “You did your bit the last time around—your bit and then some.”

Herb chuckled sourly. “If they have to stick a Springfield in my paws, the USA’s in deep water, all right,” he admitted. “But I know some stuff I didn’t back in 1918. All kinds of things’ll run smoother if somebody like me who knows the ropes is there to keep an eye on ’em.”

She imagined swarms of canny, successful middle-aged men with gimlet eyes and skeptical stares descending on war plants all over the country and telling Army regulars how to do their jobs better. “If you think the regulars will thank you for it, you’re nuts,” she predicted.