Bradford looked up to the sky. “Other thing is, we don’t have any of those goddamn Zeros strafing our asses here. If we can’t get air superiority-”
“Sir, if we can’t get air superiority, we’ll never make it to the beach, let alone off it,” Dillon said.
“Uh-huh.” The company commander nodded. Dillon had seen more optimistic nods. Hell, he’d felt more optimism himself. Zeros had proved much more effective than anything anybody had dreamt the Japs owned. From Pearl Harbor to Australia to Ceylon, they’d chewed up Wildcats and Buffaloes and Warhawks and Spitfires. Allied planes hadn’t done a whole hell of a lot of chewing back, either.
“Up to the flyboys,” Dillon said.
“Yeah.” Captain Bradford nodded again. “They reckon they can do it-and we get to go along for the ride and find out if they’re right.”
“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right,” Dillon agreed. If the Japs kept control of the air over Hawaii… Well, Pearl Harbor had shown what air superiority was worth. And if it hadn’t, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse and the disaster in the Philippines would have. It wasn’t a battleship world, not any more-carriers had more clout.
The Marines continued their advance inland. Dillon kept shouting to his men to be careful. He kept warning them that it wouldn’t be so easy when the real thing started. He kept reminding them that the Japs would shoot back, and nobody was doing any of that here. And he kept seeing that all his warnings were going in one ear and out the other. More than half the Marines he led hadn’t been born when that machine-gun bullet took a bite out of his leg in 1918. They didn’t know what being under fire was like. Live-fire exercises made them think they did, but those weren’t the real thing. Nobody shot to kill in live-fire exercises. The Japs, on the other hand, would be playing for keeps.
Dillon wasn’t worried that his Marines would turn tail when they came under fire. He wasn’t even worried that they would freeze up and not shoot back. He had absolute confidence in their courage. He did fear that too many of them would stop bullets because they leaped before they looked, or because they didn’t know what to look for before they leaped. A few hours-sometimes a few minutes-of real combat would teach a lot of those lessons. Sadly, he didn’t know anything else that would. Some of his Marines would get killed before they could learn, and that pained him.
Unlike a real amphibious assault, this one ended with a bus ride back down to Camp Elliott. Some of the men pointed to Camp Pendleton, where bulldozers and steam shovels and carpenters and masons swarmed. The big new base was going up lickety-split. Les Dillon remained glad he had nothing to do with it. The men on this bus with him-they were the ones who’d go into action first, and that was what he wanted to do himself.
Some of them were looking out across the Pacific instead of at the construction on land. His own eyes kept sliding west and south, too. A little more than two thousand miles away: that was where he wanted to be.
In a low voice, he asked Captain Bradford, “We really gonna ship out soon, sir? Is that the McCoy, or is it just the usual bullshit?”
“Well, you never can tell for sure,” Bradford answered, just as quietly, “but I’d sure as hell be ready to sling a duffel over my shoulder and haul ass in a hurry if I was you.”
“Right.” Excitement flared through Dillon. He sometimes wondered why. He did know what combat was like-and he wanted to go back to it? But, crazy or not, he did. “I’ll have the men ready, too,” he promised.
“Reckoned you would,” the company commander said, and not another word after those three. Dillon was proud.
He let his Marines know what was what without making a big fuss about it. He didn’t want them too excited, in case the rumor turned out to be just a rumor after all. The next day, Dutch Wenzel tipped him a wink. The other platoon sergeant thought it would happen, too, then.
And it did happen. Four days later, they were ordered onto buses again, this time to the port of San Diego. They climbed aboard the B. F. Irvine, a converted freighter. By everything Dillon could see, the conversion was hasty and incomplete. The accommodations he and his men got were better than the railroad cars he’d used in France. Of course, those had been marked 36 MEN OR 8 HORSES. These weren’t a hell of a lot better, either.
Seeing the narrow, gloomy, airless space in which he’d make the journey to Hawaii, a Marine said, “I ought to complain to the Red Cross.”
“Fuck that,” his buddy answered. “They’re treating us like dogs, so complain to the goddamn SPCA.”
They had their first abandon-ship drill a little more than an hour after leaving port. Part of Les approved; they were doing what they needed to do in case of disaster. The rest of him worried. Did they have so little confidence that they could evade Japanese subs? If they did, how much trouble was the invasion fleet liable to be in?
He shrugged, down there in the bowels of the troopship. He couldn’t do anything about it, one way or the other.
CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU felt every gram in the pack on his back. He and his men had spent too long in Honolulu, and hadn’t done enough while they were there. Now they were marching again, and he could feel that they hadn’t done it for too long. He could also feel that it was summertime. Oahu didn’t get cold in the winter or hot in the summer, but it was warmer now than it had been when he fought his way south across the island. As the sweat streamed down his face, he felt every degree, too.
“Come on, keep it up!” he called to his men. “You’ve got soft! You’ve got fat! You’ve got lazy!” He’d got soft and fat and lazy himself, but he wasn’t about to admit it to the soldiers in his squad. He would march till he fell over dead before he showed weakness. Noncoms had to act that way. If they didn’t, if they let their men get the edge on them, they couldn’t hope to do their job.
The very landscape had changed since he last came this way. It wasn’t that he was heading north instead of south, either. What had been fields full of sugarcane and pineapple were now rice paddies. That gave the countryside a much more familiar feel. The men who had grown the other crops were now hard at work to feed the island. Some of them looked up from the fields as the regiment marched by. Others just kept on with what they were doing.
“I wonder if they’d rather be doing this or the work they had before,” Senior Private Furusawa said. He’d always had an inquiring turn of mind.
“They’d rather eat,” Shimizu said. “You can’t live on that other stuff, even if it’s nice once in a while. Rice, now…” He didn’t go on, or need to. To him, to all of them, rice was food. Everything else added variety.
All the blown bridges on the north-south highway had been repaired. All the damage from mines and shells had been fixed, too. Cars and trucks and tanks could travel without any trouble. So could soldiers.
Shiro Wakuzawa asked, “Are the Americans really going to attack us? Didn’t we teach them enough of a lesson when we took Hawaii away from them?”
“Who knows for sure?” Shimizu answered. “That’s not for us to worry about. If they try to land on Oahu, what we’ve got to worry about is throwing them back. We can do it-if we’re in the right place when they try to land. If we’re there and they don’t have the nerve to try anything, that’s all right. But if we aren’t and they do, then we’ve got a problem.”
Mynah birds scolded the Japanese soldiers as the men marched north. Corporal Shimizu did his best to ignore them. They were noisy and pushy and had no manners. They might as well be Americans, he thought.
When he said that out loud, the men in his squad laughed. Of course, any joke a noncom made was automatically funny to the men he commanded. Corporals and sergeants had too many ways to avenge themselves on soldiers who didn’t think so-or, more to the point, who acted as if they didn’t think so.