Instead, there was only the clear blue Pacific stretching all the way to Japan. He thought about that for a moment. He knew that the distance to Japan was nearly a tenth of the circumference of the earth from this spot. Had the Japanese somehow managed to cross that vast distance without warning and attack Pearl Harbor? That was a long arm, all right. He had the uneasy thought that even the West Coast might be within striking distance now.
“I don’t see any Japs,” a sailor muttered.
“Keep your eyes open,” O’Connell snapped. “They’re out there somewhere.”
But try as they might, all they saw was the distant black column of smoke, growing darker by the moment, rising ever higher into the blue sky.
O’Connell realized, the war that everyone had talked about finally seemed to be happening.
In New York City, newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle stood at the hotel window and looked down at Fifth Avenue. He couldn’t hear the people from up here, but he could sense their excitement in the way that they scurried about the street. He’d already heard the news on the radio, and the newsroom had already called.
“It was only a matter of time,” he said. “It’s war. It’s what Roosevelt wanted, and now he’s got it.”
“Against the Japanese?” asked his wife, Jerry, taking a drag on her cigarette. Both of them smoked like fiends, and their hotel room seemed to have a permanent fog of tobacco smoke. Overflowing ashtrays littered the dining room table, bedside tables, and coffee table, right beside a few empty mugs and glasses, some holding the dregs of old coffee, others that smelled of bourbon or gin.
“Against the Japanese and the Germans, both at the same time,” Pyle said, sucking deeply on his own cigarette. “It’s a world war. Gee, we haven’t had one of those since the last war that was supposed to end all of the others. The Great War. You’d think we’d have learned our lesson.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
It was a natural question, but one that was fraught with tension.
Pyle had worked himself to the bone as a reporter, seemingly always traveling or always on the job, working all the time, which created tension at home. For the last several months, he had been in London, covering the Battle of Britain. He had recently returned to the United States to spend more time with Jerry, who had been unwell.
“What am I going to do?” He repeated the question, pondering the answer. “Well, maybe I’m not too old to be a sailor.”
His wife snorted at the very idea of her husband in uniform. “You a sailor? Ha! I’d like to see you do a push-up.”
“Very funny,” he said, without taking any offense. “The navy might not have me as a sailor, but I can still go to war. Cover the war, I mean.”
“Will they need you?”
“Believe me, generals don’t go to war without an army of journalists to take their picture and write down their quotes.”
“If you want to write about the war, then you’d better hurry,” she said. “This war might be over by next week.”
Pyle shook his head, looking down at the street. People hurried to and fro, scrambling to buy the latest edition of the newspaper, with the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor plastered across the front in headlines so big that Pyle could almost read them from their hotel room.
As a journalist, he probably knew more than most of the people down there about the coming war. America and the other democracies of the world were like a little island, surrounded by despots. In Europe there was Hitler and the Third Reich, intent on creating a new empire. A lot of Americans had wanted to stay out of the fight, figuring that it was Europe’s problem, not ours. America had already paid its dues fighting in the Great War. If England and Europe had gone and broken that peace, that was their problem.
It was troubling that not all Americans even disagreed with Hitler. An organization called the Bund had even staged huge rallies in support of National Socialism, right here in New York. Of course, many Americans also had German heritage and were proud to see Germany doing so well economically. For FDR, war against Germany was a tough sell.
But the Japanese were a foreign power that Americans could easily vilify and hate. By striking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had also shown that someplace like Seattle or Los Angeles could be next.
President Roosevelt had wanted America to get into the war. For the president, Ernie knew, the Japanese attack was like a gift.
In the street below, he could see that the news had stirred everyone up like a nest of ants poked with a stick. Already, men were eager to get into uniform — and even some women were asking about how they could sign up as nurses or join the Red Cross. He felt a lump in his throat, prouder than ever to be an American.
Pyle took another deep drag on a cigarette. “There’s no hurry,” he said. “Darling, this war is going to go on for years. Thousands of people are going to die. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe even millions.”
She shuddered visibly. “And you want to be part of all that?” she asked, although deep down she thought that she already knew the answer.
“It’s what I do,” he said. “This war is going to be America’s greatest chapter. Anyhow, somebody needs to tell the story, and that somebody might as well be me.”
CHAPTER THREE
Deacon Cole was hunting. With his dead pa’s rifle held in hands calloused from farmwork, he watched the morning light spread across the mountains. He was on the trail of a big buck he had seen once or twice from a distance while roaming these hills.
Most days in the woods, he carried a shotgun with him, an old Iver Johnson double-barrel, because it was usually small game that he scared up, rabbits or squirrels that chattered down at him, scolding, until he settled things with the shotgun. If he was lucky, he’d startle some quail or a pheasant.
Whatever game he brought home helped to feed his mother and sister, Sadie, back at the Cole family’s hardscrabble farm. Like most people these days in the mountains, they were barely scraping by. Sadie was just as good of a shot, but she had stayed to help their ailing mother.
“You go on, Deke,” Sadie had said.
He felt his belly rumble. When was the last time they had eaten a decent meal? Sometimes Deke thought that he should be like his cousin, Jasper, who had joined the navy. He was out in Hawaii, a place so distant and exotic in Deke’s mind that it may as well be the moon, eating regular, and sending money home. But there was more than one boy in that branch of the Cole family to work the farm. Without Deke, what would his ma and Sadie have done?
He smirked at the thought that Sadie would inform him that she could take care of herself just fine. Deke had to admit that she’d be right about that. While it was a toss-up as to which one of them was the better shot, there was no doubt that Sadie was his equal when it came to farmwork. The trouble was, there was a lot more work than the two siblings could do.
With their pa gone and Ma so sick, he and Sadie had done the best they could to keep the farm going. Having fallen into a struggle for subsistence, there wasn’t much to take care of anymore: some hogs and a few chickens, a couple of horses to pull the plow over the rugged fields. The rocky land was stingy, and their crops hadn’t been good for years.
The Depression had sunk its teeth into the mountain people like a mean dog, and it hadn’t let go. Pa had taken out a mortgage on the land that the Cole family had owned since at least the Civil War. That mortgage had turned out to be a disaster.
To be sure, he had distant relatives all over these hills and mountains. The Coles were Scotch Irish, having settled the area when there were still Indians in the woods and valleys. Mostly, it was poor land that nobody else wanted. It had suited the extended Cole clan just fine.