Senior Private Furusawa said, “If the Americans come again, we’ll be ready for them.”
“Of course we will. Who’d want to go through this more than once?” Even after the abuse Wakuzawa had taken, he could still joke.
“How could the Americans come again?” somebody else said. Shimizu was splashing his face with cold water-which hurt and felt good at the same time-and couldn’t tell who it was. The soldier went on, “They can’t try another raid like that. Furusawa’s right. We’d smash them flat.”
Shimizu pulled away from the faucet blowing like a whale. He shook his head, which made drops of water fly everywhere-and which also reminded him how sore he was. “If the Americans come again, they won’t just raid,” he said. “They’ll run in a pack like wild dogs, and they’ll try to take Hawaii away from us.”
Some of the soldiers in his squad nodded again. Others, men who hurt too much for that, softly said, “Hai.”
WRITING THE REPORT on how the Americans had caught the Japanese garrison on Oahu flat-footed fell to commander Mitsuo Fuchida. He felt more as if the duty had fallen on him. Before sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper, he went to pick Minoru Genda’s brain. Genda was one of the few men on the island with whom he could speak frankly.
“It’s not very complicated,” Genda said. “They did something we didn’t expect, that’s all. You can’t get ready for what you don’t anticipate.”
“Easy enough to say,” Fuchida answered. “What do I do for the other forty-nine and three-quarters pages of the report, though?”
As it usually did, Genda’s smile made him look very young. “You can tell General Yamashita and Captain Hasegawa that we won’t get fooled again.”
Fuchida bowed in his seat, there in Genda’s office. “Domo arigato,” he said, spicing the thanks with all the sarcasm he could. “We’d better not. If we do, we’ll all have to open our bellies.” He wasn’t joking, or not very much. The garrison had put itself through a painful orgy of self-reproach. If it was humiliated again… much more blood would flow than had this time.
“They are going to come sniffing around these islands. They haven’t given up, the way we hoped they would,” Genda said. “Carrier raids, submarines, maybe even flying boats, too.”
“We need better ways to detect them,” Fuchida said.
“The picket boats did their job, neh? ” Genda said. “The skipper of that one was too hard on himself, I think. Why blame him for not looking out for B-25s when nobody else did, either?”
“Picket boats can only do so much,” Fuchida insisted. “Things can sneak past them, or their skippers can make mistakes. Yes, I know we all made the mistake, but we should have known what the Yankees were up to before they got here.”
“How?” Genda asked reasonably.
“I don’t know,” Fuchida said. “Or maybe I do. Have the engineers ever figured out what that installation up at Opana was supposed to do before the Americans wrecked it?”
“Whatever it was supposed to do, it didn’t do it,” Genda pointed out. “We caught them napping. They had no idea we were there till the bombs started falling. You were the one who signaled Tora! Tora! Tora! to show we’d taken them by surprise.”
“No, it was Mizuki, my radioman,” Fuchida said.
“And here I thought you were a Navy man, not a damn lawyer,” Genda said.
“I am a Navy man,” Fuchida said. “As a Navy man, I want to know about that installation.”
“I don’t have a whole lot to tell you. I don’t think the engineers have a whole lot to tell you, either,” Genda said.
Commander Fuchida started to get angry. “They damn well ought to by now, Genda-san. They’ve had months to unravel it. Have they found documents talking about what it does?”
Genda only shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
“They should have!” Fuchida exclaimed. “If they haven’t, the Americans must have destroyed them. And why would the Americans destroy them? Because they must show the Opana installation was important. What other possible reason could they have?”
“You’d better be careful,” Genda said. “Next thing you know, you’ll hear little men who aren’t there talking behind your back.”
“So you think I’m crazy, do you?” Fuchida growled. “I’ll tell you what I want to hear. I want to hear the Americans who worked at that thing, whatever it was. They’ll know, and we can squeeze it out of them. Some of them-a lot of them, probably-will just be enlisted men. They won’t much care what they blab.”
“Go ahead, then. Find them. Interrogate them. You’re not going to be happy till you do,” Genda said. “Get it out of your system. You’ll feel better then.” He might have been recommending a laxative.
“I will,” Fuchida said. “And you’ll see-something important will come from this.”
With another shrug, Genda said, “It could be. I’m not convinced, but it could be. I hope you’re right.”
“I intend to find out,” Mitsuo Fuchida said.
JIM PETERSON WAS in a funk. So were a lot of the POWs up at Opana. They’d got less of a look at the American bombers that had raided Oahu than just about anybody else on the island. Peterson knew why. Opana was nowhere. It wasn’t even worth flying over.
Nothing he could do about it. Nothing anybody could do about it. All the prisoners could do was sit behind barbed wire, look out at the green countryside all around them and the blue Pacific to the north, and slowly starve to death.
He almost wished the Japs would stop feeding them altogether. Then it would be over. The way things were, he felt himself losing ground a quarter of an inch at a time. Everything he did, everything he thought about, centered on the miserable breakfast and lousy supper he’d got.
“You know,” he said to Prez McKinley one afternoon a few days after the raid, “I don’t hardly think about women at all any more.”
The sergeant let out a grunt. Peterson thought it was surprise. “Me, neither,” McKinley said. “I like pussy as well as the next guy-bet your ass I do. But I don’t think I could get it up with a crane right now.”
“Same here,” Peterson said. “Pussy’s the best thing in the world when your belly’s full. When it’s not… you forget about women.” He fooled with his belt. Day by day, his waistline shrank. He closed the belt several holes tighter than he had when he got here. Pretty soon, even the last hole would be too loose, and he’d have to trade the belt for whatever he could get and use rope to hold up his pants. And after a while, I’ll have enough rope to hang myself with, too, he thought. Surprisingly few men here had killed themselves. Maybe they wouldn’t give the Japs the satisfaction.
McKinley looked northeast, the direction from which the B-25s had come, the direction in which the mainland lay. “I wonder if they’re really gonna try and take Hawaii away from the Japs again.”
“Don’t wonder if. Wonder when,” Peterson said. “They haven’t forgotten about us. That’s one thing those bombers showed.”
“Wonder if they can do it, too,” McKinley said.
It was Peterson’s turn to grunt. The Japs shouldn’t have surprised the defenders here. They had, but they shouldn’t have. He couldn’t imagine an American armada catching the new occupiers asleep at the switch. How much damage could the Japs do before a landing party hit the beach? Even if Americans did land, the Japanese would fight like rabid weasels to hold on to what they’d taken.
At lineup the next morning, the Japanese didn’t release the POWs to breakfast once they had the count straight, the way they usually did. Standing there at attention in his row, Peterson eyed the guards with suspicion. What the devil were they up to now?
A nervous-looking Oriental in Western clothes-plainly a Jap from Hawaii-came into the camp along with more guards and the commandant. The Japanese officer spoke in his own language. The local turned it into English: “The following prisoners will make themselves known immediately…” The commandant handed him a piece of paper. He read off half a dozen names.