After a few more minutes, he even began to feel a little hungry, but he didn't think his stomach could handle a nice, juicy worm. And he had been doing so well, he thought again.
But doing better had come with a price. With hunger pangs satisfied, he was no longer able to avoid thinking of life back home in California. When he slept, he saw his wife's face. In his dreams Barb was always smiling at him with that half-wicked, half-insolent look that he loved, and her golden hair was loose and hanging down on her tanned shoulders and to her firm breasts. Then, when he awoke, he felt empty and alone.
Then he heard the voices. At first he thought he was delirious and imagining things. But then he realized that the voices were in Japanese, that they came from the other side of the ridge, and that the voices were all males. This was bad. He had checked out the area before and found it empty, but obviously something had changed and it couldn't be for the better.
He stayed where he was until night fell. Then he moved carefully up the few yards from where he lay to where the hill crested. Crawling on his hands and knees, he slithered over the top and found a place where he could look down the slope to the valley below. A handful of men were hard at work heaping leaves and branches on sections of canvas that covered a pair of Japanese fighters. He blinked in disbelief. The planes were Zeros or, more precisely, Mitsubishi A6M2 carrier fighters. Once they'd been the finest plane in the air, but they'd been eclipsed by the newer American planes, and Dennis had shot down two of them himself. But what were they doing here? Of course, he answered himself, without carriers to launch from, the Japanese had to stash them on land.
The Japanese were dispersing their aircraft in small groups to avoid the overwhelming superiority America had in the air. During his strength-building and worm-eating days in the hills, he had seen a number of U.S. planes flying overhead. B-29 bombers, like schools of silver fish, flew high up in the sky, and hordes of fighters searched and stalked their prey from much lower altitudes.
Once, he had stood on the top of a hill and watched a P-51 Mustang streak through the air below him. Below him! He was lost in a strange land and standing above an American plane! He had screamed at the sight of the Mustang so near, yet so far away. The fighter had swept the valley again and had flown so close that he could see the pilot's face as he insolently surveyed his domain and looked for targets. The P-51 pilot gave no thought to the ragged-looking man on the hill, if he saw Dennis in the first place.
Dennis jerked his thoughts back to the present. What was he to do about the Jap planes and the men who were so close to him? He counted four people at the little camp. That made sense. Two pilots and two mechanics. There were no other guards- after all, they were safe in Japan, weren't they?- but all four probably had weapons. All Dennis had was a piece of metal he had sharpened against a rock and used as either a knife or a shovel, depending on the need of the moment.
It was, he decided sadly, time to move from this place to a safer one. Then he saw something that changed his mind. One of the mechanics opened the flap of a tent and, stacked neatly in the back, were several bags of rice. Even better, they were filled with wild rice, which was much more nutritious than the white version. If he could somehow get his hands on that rice, then he would be able to really improve his health and his chances of surviving. But was it worth the risk? He closed his eyes and wondered what Barb would have him do. The answer came quickly. Her last words to him had been "Come back to me."
On a densely wooded hillside in Kyushu near Nagasaki, Joe Nomura struggled with the radio supplied him by the OSS. It wasn't that the thing was bulky. It was surprisingly small and compact. The problem was operating it with only one hand with a beginner Boy Scout's skills with Morse code. There simply hadn't been time to make Joe Nomura an expert, and he struggled with what he had to say. This too was difficult. Never a great scholar, he now had to be the soul of brevity and conciseness, which were language skills he'd never considered important.
Of the two, brevity was the most in his best interest. It had been hammered into him that the Japs had listening devices and would, sooner or later, likely pick up his transmissions. Then they would try to locate him using triangulating devices that he only barely understood. He could only hope that they would discover him later, much later. Like 1950.
To help maintain his security, he'd been given a number of radio frequencies to use and the order in which to use them. All of this, coupled with the need to frame a concise yet accurate message about what he'd learned about conditions at Nagasaki and the other parts of Kyushu he'd seen, made him sweat with frustration. Then, of course, he had to put it into the very basic code they'd given him to use, which was basic to Johnson and Peters, but was difficult for him. Joe wondered how long it would take the Japs to decode it if they picked up his transmissions.
Finally he tapped out his message. It told his superiors of the lingering horrors of Nagasaki, of the people still dropping over and dying from the radiation sickness, and of the Japanese government's total inability to do anything about it. He closed his message by telling his unseen compatriots that he would have more information for them soon.
As he shut down the radio, he automatically looked skyward. He had been told that he would be transmitting to specially equipped planes that would be waiting for him to call. He fervently hoped they were indeed up there, circling. Then, using his teeth and his one hand, he repacked his gear. It was difficult, but he half-dragged and half-carried the equipment to a new site about a mile away. He didn't think the Japs had picked up this first signal, but he wasn't going to take unnecessary risks by transmitting from the same place twice.
When he'd finally hidden the radio in the ground and covered the site with leaves and branches, he walked away. In a few minutes, he was just another displaced and crippled Japanese soldier. Only he knew just how lonely and afraid he really was.
Chapter 16
President Truman slowly read through the handful of summary sheets while the others waited for him to finish. He was reading the updated overall plan for the invasion of Japan. It bore the code name Downfall and was divided into two different and sequential operations.
The first phase of Downfall, Olympic, was scheduled for November 1, 1945, which was only a little more than six weeks away. The second phase, Coronet, had a tentative date of March 1, 1946. Truman noted that the invasion dates were called X-Day, in silent testimony to the fact that D-Day would forever be associated with the Allied landings in Normandy in June of 1944. Prior to Normandy, every invasion date was referred to as D-Day.
Olympic was the invasion of the island of Kyushu, while Coronet was the invasion of the Kanto Plain on the island of Honshu. The Kanto Plain contained the cities of Tokyo and Yokohama and was the ultimate goal of the operation that would end the war. With Coronet clearly dependent on the success of the imminent Operation Olympic, the president found himself staring at the numbers and trying to assign them some identity.
Olympic would be the largest amphibious invasion ever attempted in military history. Nine divisions in three corps would assault three separate landing areas simultaneously. They would be backed up by five other divisions and at least one independently operating regimental combat team. Three of the divisions in the initial assault were marines, while the rest were army.
The numbers for the navy were even more staggering. Halsey's Third Fleet contained fourteen large carriers and six light carriers, along with nine new battleships, twenty-six cruisers, and seventy-five destroyers. Halsey was to attack targets inland.