All in all, though, King was pleased. He’d gotten the promise of reinforcements and seen the president apparently shake off his unexpected case of nerves. On a really good note, King hadn’t been invited to have one of the president’s famous martinis. Maybe he’d been too blunt with his commander in chief, but that was okay. In King’s opinion, the President of the United States made a lousy martini.
Colonel Shigenori Omori and his kempetei detachment landed on the second day of the invasion. By that time, the Japanese perimeter on Oahu extended several miles inland, and there was no danger from American artillery, which had been either overrun or knocked out by Japanese airplanes and the big guns from the warships.
Omori thought that Hawaii was a beautiful place, and he briefly enjoyed the serenity of walking the beaches and watching the majestic waves as they crested on the clean white sand. He did not, however, permit himself to linger over these thoughts. The time for luxury would come later. Instead, he examined the smashed American defenses, where the dismembered and bloated bodies of the dead still lay where they’d fallen. At least they had died warriors’ deaths, he thought. Not like the prisoners who clogged the pens and clustered in numbed groups within their barbed-wire compounds.
Omori walked to one of the pens, where he looked through the fence at the face of the enemy and was unimpressed. “If they were Japanese,” he said, “they would be considered as dead. These, however, don’t seem to care.”
His aide, Lieutenant Goto, laughed. “The Americans aren’t warriors. They have no sense of duty or pride. These creatures remind me of Chinese beggars. They are less than human and should be treated as such.”
Both by virtue of his position as aide and as a result of his political connections, Goto felt that he could speak more freely than a normal subordinate. Omori tolerated it, sometimes even appreciated it. Even though Goto was occasionally a brute, he was intelligent, a good aide, and not a sycophant, and his connections were a fact of life.
Omori and Goto continued their examination of the area. The civilian population had not escaped completely. Several mangled and bloated bodies were visible in and around the blasted villages, and a number of ragged islanders, mainly native Hawaiian, watched in confusion as the Japanese army moved past them. Any American civilians in the area appeared to have escaped or been killed.
“Schofield will fall shortly,” Omori said. “And then we will be on the threshold of taking both Pearl Harbor and Honolulu. At that point, it will become essential that we end the battle quickly. A prolonged struggle for the island is not in our interests. That being the case, what do you think General Tadoyashi will do and how might we help him?”
The first assault waves had been Imperial marines, who had taken surprisingly heavy casualties, but they had been leapfrogged by the reinforced 38th Infantry. The marines had accomplished their purpose by establishing the beachhead; now it was the army’s task to complete the conquest. For once, cooperation between the two services had been fairly good. Neither wanted to bear the onus of failure, and both wanted the laurels of victory.
“I don’t know,” Goto answered after some thought.
Omori smiled. The boy had so much to learn, but at least he was honest. “Terror.”
Colonel Collins waved Jake Novacek into his office and shut the door. “Jake, in your humble opinion, what’re our chances of winning this thing?”
The junior officer laughed harshly. “Slim to none.” After several days of gathering their forces, the Japanese had moved. A double-pronged attack had been launched against the hastily made defensive line that ran across the middle of the island. Both American flanks were anchored on Schofield Barracks. Japanese infantry and armor had probed and, with suffocating air support, breached the line in several parts. As a result, Schofield was surrounded on three sides and was in grave danger of being cut off entirely.
An earlier attempt at a counterattack had been launched over Collins’s and Jake’s vehement protests. Both men had stressed the fact that any forward movement was hazardous and could be countered by the Japanese. To say the attack had fizzled would have been a compliment. Very few units even reached their jump-off points, and none launched their attacks at the assigned time. Those that finally did make piecemeal attacks were cut to pieces by the Japanese. At least a third of Oahu’s garrison was dead, wounded, or missing. If the pocket at Schofield was cut off or wiped out, the casualties would be at 50 percent.
Pearl Harbor and Honolulu were becoming a defensive perimeter with most of the garrison’s best soldiers already out of action. As in the Philippines, the Americans were fighting bravely and hard but were being overwhelmed. Within the Honolulu-Pearl perimeter, there was a great deal of confusion, with thousands of soldiers either separated from their units or, worse from Jake’s standpoint, noncombat troops who hadn’t held a rifle in years. Useless mouths was the phrase kicked around at headquarters.
Collins nodded thoughtfully. “You think Short’ll surrender?”
“He has to,” Jake answered.
“Will you?” Collins asked and saw surprise register on Jake’s face. “Look, Jake, I know what you’ve been up to. After all, I’m intelligence too, aren’t I? You’re going to bail out of the surrender and go it alone on this island, aren’t you?”
“True.” In the last couple of weeks, Jake had taken guns, ammunition, and rations from various storehouses and cached them in a number of places on the island. While he had given a good deal to Alexa and Melissa, much more had been buried elsewhere.
“Were you planning to run your own war?” Collins asked with a grin.
Jake took a deep breath. “Sort of. Joe, you ever been in jail?” Collins hadn’t. “As a young, dumb kid, I spent a few days in various smalltown jails and hated it. A POW camp is nothing more than a jail, only worse. In jail, at least you know how long your sentence is, or that you’ll be let out on Monday when you’ve sobered up. If the Japs put us in one of their camps, you’ll have no idea when you’ll get out. If ever.”
Collins agreed. News of atrocities in Japanese-run prison camps was slowly filtering through to the rest of the world. Both men knew that an extended stay in a Jap camp was equivalent to a death sentence. An ugly, agonizing death sentence.
“And no,” Jake said, “I wasn’t planning anything as foolish as starting a guerrilla war. The weapons and supplies are reserves in case they’re needed, but I was first planning to stay alive, and then I’d organize some kind of resistance, but not a war.”
Collins handed Jake an envelope. “I’m leaving tonight on that big Pan Am flying boat. It’s been painted black, and it’ll be taking off with a full complement of people. You’ll be on it.”
“What?”
“It’s all in the envelope. The navy has a problem. They’ve lost something important, and they want us to find it, and you in particular have been chosen to do it. The fools sat on the problem until it was almost too late. Apparently some important people were on a ship that got sunk and they wound up on the Big Island. Your job is to find them and make certain they don’t fall into Jap hands. That ought to tie in with your plans to skip the surrender ceremonies.”