“Oh, Ken! I’m so sorry!” All of a sudden, Elsie sounded like the girl he’d known for so long, not the near-stranger who thought he was nothing but a Jap.
One of the girls she was with, a brunette named Joyce something who’d graduated a couple of years ahead of her and Kenzo, said, “I didn’t know the Japs did anything to their own.”
He gripped the handle on the shovel very tightly. She probably hasn’t got any brains to knock out, he told himself. He made himself hold still. It wasn’t easy. Neither was holding his voice steady as he answered, “I’m not a Jap. I’m an American, just as much as you are-or I would be if you’d let me.”
By the way Joyce looked at him, he might as well have spoken to her in Japanese. Elsie’s other friend rolled her eyes, as if to say she’d heard it before and didn’t believe a word of it. Kenzo waited to see what Elsie would do. She eyed him as if she were seeing him for the first time. In a way, maybe she was. She said, “Take care of yourself. I’ve got to go.”
And she did. Joyce wagged a finger at her. She just shrugged. The straw boss yelled, “You work, Takahashi, you lazy baka yaro!” Kenzo did. Maybe the world wasn’t such a wretched place after all.
VIII
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO strode along the runway at Wheeler Field. His boots clumped on concrete. The wreckage of American warplanes caught on the ground had been bulldozed off to the grass alongside the runways. Japanese technicians attacked the wrecks with pliers and wrenches and screwdrivers and wire-cutters, salvaging what they could. A lot of Japanese flight instruments were based on their American equivalents. In a pinch, the American ones might do. And spare parts, wherever they came from, were always welcome.
Turning to Commander Fuchida, Shindo said, “The Americans had so much here!”
“Hai.” Fuchida nodded. “We knew that before we started this.”
“We knew it, yes, but did we know it?” Shindo said. “Did we feel it in our bellies? I don’t think so. If we had known how much they had, would we have had the nerve to try what we tried?”
This time, Fuchida shrugged. “What you have is one thing. What you do with it is something else. And we had the advantage of surprise.” He waved to the shattered hulks of airplanes. “Once we caught them on the ground, they never had the chance to recover.”
“Yes, sir,” Shindo said. “That was the point of the exercise, all right.”
Fuchida turned away, toward the northeast. “Now we make them come to us. If they want to fight a war in the Pacific from their own West Coast, they’re welcome to try.” He paused, then resumed: “Commander Genda was right. If we’d struck the fleet and gone away, they would have used this for their advance base, not San Francisco, and who knows what they might have interfered with? But Hawaii shields everything we’re doing farther west.”
“Oh, yes. We make good progress in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, they say.” Shindo paused, for the first time really hearing something. “Commander Genda, sir?”
“That’s right,” Fuchida answered, a small smile on his face.
“But I thought the plan for the attack on Pearl Harbor came from Admiral Yamamoto,” Shindo said.
“And if you ask Genda-san about it, you’ll go right on thinking the same thing,” Fuchida told him. “I sometimes think Genda is much too modest for his own good. But I happen to know he was the one who persuaded Yamamoto to follow up the air strike with an invasion. He’ll say Yamamoto was the one who persuaded the Army, and that was what counted. But he gave Yamamoto the idea.”
“I had no idea,” Shindo murmured. “Genda has said not a word of this.”
“He wouldn’t. It’s not his style,” Fuchida said.
From what Shindo knew of Genda, that was true. To Genda, the operation counted for more than anything else, including who proposed it. Shindo suddenly snapped his fingers: an unusual display for him. “Something I’ve been meaning to ask you, sir-have the technicians made any more sense of the wreckage we found at that Opana place?”
“Not so much as I’d like,” Fuchida answered. “Whatever it was, the Americans didn’t want us to know anything about it. They did a good, thorough job of destroying it after we landed.”
“I can make a guess,” Shindo said. Fuchida gestured for him to go on. He did: “When we attacked the first American carrier-the one that turned out to be the Enterprise — she had fighters up and waiting for us before we got there. We didn’t see any American patrol planes as we flew toward her. I don’t think there were any. I think the Americans have instruments that let them spot planes at some very long distance.”
Fuchida frowned thoughtfully. “And you think the Opana installation is one of these?”
“Opana is a logical place for one,” Shindo replied. “It’s as far north as you can go on Oahu, near enough. Any attack was likeliest to come from the north. And the Yankees would do a good job of destroying something that important.”
“If they had that kind of device there, why didn’t it find our first attack wave?” Fuchida asked. “It didn’t, you know. Our surprise was complete.”
Lieutenant Shindo shrugged this time. “Maybe something went wrong with it. Maybe the Americans just didn’t pay any attention to it. They were like those big birds that stick their heads in the sand.”
“Ostriches,” Fuchida supplied. “They don’t really do that, you know.”
“So what?” Shindo shrugged once more. “The Americans did, and that’s what counts.”
“Yes.” Fuchida turned toward the northeast once more. “They did a bad job of scouting, and it cost them. We’d better not imitate them, or it will cost us, too. We’ll need long-range patrols to make sure they don’t try to cause trouble.”
“Can we afford the fuel to do a proper job of it?” Shindo asked.
“The cost of using up the fuel is one thing. The cost of not using it up is liable to be something else again,” Fuchida said. “Or do you think I’m wrong? If you do, don’t be shy.”
Lieutenant Shindo was seldom shy. He was, if anything, unusually forthright for a Japanese. Because he didn’t ruffle easily, he didn’t think anyone else should, either. But he shook his head now. “No, sir, you’re not wrong. It’s just one of the things we’ve got to think about.”
“Oh, yes.” Fuchida mimed letting his shoulders sag, as if the weight of the world lay heavy upon them. But then he gestured, not just at the technicians stripping U.S. airplanes but at all of Wheeler Field. “So many things to think about. And this would be much harder if not for everything we’ve captured from the Americans.”
“I’ve thought the same thing ever since I saw the bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment we used to fix the airstrip up at Haleiwa,” Shindo said.
“And that was just civilian stuff: what the local builders used,” Fuchida said. “The military gear is even better, though a lot of it got ruined in the fighting and the Americans sabotaged what they could of the rest.”
“By what I’ve seen, they might have done a better job with that,” Shindo said.
Now Commander Fuchida shrugged again. “They’re rich,” he said, and said no more. Lieutenant Shindo inclined his head in silent agreement. He understood exactly what his superior meant. Because the Yankees had so much, they didn’t seem to realize how valuable even their scraps and leavings were to the Japanese. Along with the earth-moving machinery, they’d left plenty of automobiles behind as they fell back from the northern part of Oahu, and they hadn’t torched all the filling stations, either. The Japanese had made good use of both the cars and the precious gasoline.
The same held true elsewhere. Hawaii had an astonishing telephone network: there was a phone for every ten people in the islands. In Japan, the figure was more like one for every sixty people; outside of Tokyo, it wasn’t far from one for every hundred people. You could talk to anyone here, or any place on the islands, almost instantly. The Americans took that so much for granted, they hadn’t bothered to destroy the phone lines or the switching system. That would make it much easier for Japan to defend its conquests. Japanese soldiers slept in U.S. barracks that hadn’t been blown up to deny them to the invaders. They lived softer than they would have at home. The list went on and on.