Besides, some of the men in charge of Honolulu might have been blind. If they didn’t think they could throw the Americans back, you wouldn’t know it to listen to them. The garrison commander was a Navy captain-in Army ranks, he counted as a colonel-named Iwabuchi.
“We can do it!” he shouted to anyone who would listen. “We will do it! The white men have no stomach for blood! Well, before long we will drown them in an ocean of it!”
Furusawa remembered him drilling his special naval landing forces before the Americans landed. He’d been just as fanatical then. He’d sounded like a screaming madman, as a matter of fact, and he still did. But he did more than just scream. Furusawa wouldn’t have wanted to attack Honolulu. Artillery hid inside buildings here. Machine guns had elaborately interlocking fields of fire. If you took out one nest, you exposed yourself to fire from two or three others.
The only thing Captain Iwabuchi hadn’t worried about in Honolulu was its civilians. If they starved, if they got shot, if they got blown to pieces-well, so what? And if a fighting man wanted a woman for a little fun before he went back to his foxhole-again, so what?
You knew what kind of screams those were when you heard them. They sounded different from the ones that came from wounded people: they held horror as well as pain. Commander Genda clucked in distress. “This is not a good way to fight a war,” he said.
“Sir, this is what the Army did in Nanking, too,” Furusawa said. “I hadn’t been conscripted yet, but the veterans in my regiment would talk about it sometimes.” Most of them had sounded pleased with themselves, too. He didn’t tell Genda that.
“But American propaganda will have a field day,” the Navy man said. “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is supposed to protect Asia from Western imperialism. Now who will protect Asia from Japanese imperialism?”
He put his life in Furusawa’s hands when he said something like that. If the senior private blabbed to someone like Iwabuchi… Well, one more time, so what? Genda would die a little sooner than he might otherwise, and perhaps a little more painfully. Given the perversity of war, though, neither of those was certain. None of the Japanese defenders was likely to get out of this any which way.
The Americans probed with infantry. They got a bloody nose and pulled back. Captain Iwabuchi was jubilant. “They can’t stand up to us!” he shouted. “If they come again, we’ll smash them again!”
Commander Genda sounded less gleeful. “They aren’t done,” he said to Furusawa. “They’re putting a rock in their fist, that’s all.”
“A rock, sir?” The senior private didn’t follow him for a moment.
“You’ll see,” Genda answered.
About fifteen minutes later, Furusawa did. American artillery started pounding the Japanese front-line positions. Furusawa had never imagined so many guns all going off at once. His own forces were not so lavishly provided with cannon. Huddling in a ball to make as small a target as he could, he felt as if the end of the world had come.
When the barrage lifted, the Americans surged forward again. Furusawa was too dazed to shoot for a little while, but Japanese machine guns opened up on the Yankees again. He was amazed he’d lived through the shelling, and even more amazed anyone else had. The automatic-weapons fire drove the Americans back again in front of his foxhole, but they broke through farther north.
“What do we do, sir?” he asked Commander Genda. “If we stay here, they’ll outflank us and cut us off.”
“Hai,” Genda answered. Any Army officer would have ordered a fight to the death where they were. Furusawa was as sure of that as he was of his own name. After a moment’s thought, Genda said, “We fall back. It doesn’t look like we can do much more where we are, does it?”
“Not to me, sir,” Furusawa said in surprise.
To his even greater surprise, Genda smiled at him. “Well, you know more about it than I do.” They fell back, passing the wreckage of a machine-gun nest that hadn’t survived the barrage. Furusawa wondered if the Army would have done better with people like Genda in charge. He feared he’d never know.
WHY THIS IS HELL, NOR AM I OUT OF IT. KENZO TAKAHASHI REMEMBERED THE line from an English Lit class. It sounded like Shakespeare, but he didn’t think it was. Who, then? He couldn’t remember. Miss Simpson wouldn’t have approved of that at all. If Miss Simpson was still alive, though, she was just as busy trying not to get blown up as Kenzo was.
He and Hiroshi didn’t know where their father was. He’d headed for the Japanese consulate, and he’d never come back. Hiroshi and Kenzo both went looking for him, and neither one had any luck. Kenzo even went to the consulate himself. The guards let him in when he told them whose son he was, but nobody inside would tell him anything. Nobody of very high rank seemed to be there. He wondered where the consul and the chancellor and the other big shots were. Wherever it was, would they have taken Dad with them? Kenzo had trouble believing it.
When the big American push started, shells crashed into the refugee camp where he and his brother and their father had stayed since their apartment-and Kenzo and Hiroshi’s mother-burned in the Japanese attack on Honolulu. Japanese positions were nearby, so Kenzo could see why the Americans struck. Seeing why did nothing to ease the horror.
He and Hiroshi got out unhurt. That would do for a miracle till God decide to dole out a bigger one somewhere else. He’d seen bad things when the Japanese took Honolulu. He hadn’t seen the worst, because the Americans chose to surrender rather than let the worst happen to the civilians in the city. The Japanese didn’t care about civilians. They would fight as long as they had cartridges, and with bayonets after that.
And whether the Americans wanted to bring hell down on the civilians of Honolulu or not, what else were they going to do to get rid of the Japanese soldiers among them? Kenzo and Hiroshi stayed flat on their bellies all through the artillery barrage. They’d learned that much in the earlier round of fighting. It didn’t always help, but it was their best hope.
Shrapnel tore through their tent and the ropes that held it up. It fell down on them, which frightened Kenzo worse than he was already-something he wouldn’t have thought possible. Through the roars and crashes of exploding shells, he heard screams, some abruptly cut off.
When the shelling eased, he struggled free of the heavy canvas. The only words that came out of his mouth were, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”-something his missing father might have said. He could smell blood in the air. There lay a man gutted like an ahi-and there, a few feet away, lay most of his head.
Wounded men and women were worse than dead ones. They writhed and shrieked and moaned and bled and bled and bled. Kenzo bent to use a length of rope torn apart by shell fragments as a tourniquet for a woman who’d lost a big chunk of meat out of her leg below the knee. He hoped it would do her some good.
He was in the middle of that when someone shouted in Japanese: “Come on, give me a hand! Yes, you!” When he looked up, a soldier was leading Hiroshi away. The soldier had a stretcher, and needed Kenzo’s brother to help him carry wounded. No doubt they would deal with soldiers first, civilians later if at all.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said again. He couldn’t stop them from grabbing his brother, not unless he wanted to get killed himself and probably get Hiroshi killed with him. The other trouble was, they were both too likely to get killed anyway. More American shells screamed in, some on the Japanese positions, some on the luckless refugee camp. More screams rose, many of them screams of despair. Kenzo hugged the ground next to the injured woman and hoped none of the fragments would bite him. He had no idea what else to do.