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.