“Yes, sir!” Fuchida still sounded fuzzy-from painkillers, Genda suspected-but Yamamoto’s voice could and would galvanize anybody.
“What were our aircraft losses?” asked the commander of the Combined Fleet.
“Just over a hundred planes, Admiral.” Fuzzy or not, Fuchida had the numbers he needed at his fingertips. Anyone who came to a meeting with Yamamoto unprepared deserved whatever happened to him.
The admiral grunted. “Could have been worse, I suppose. But these were highly trained men, some of the best we had. How soon can we replace them, and how good will the replacements be?”
“As for numbers, sir, we can replace them as soon as the new pilots and radiomen and bombardiers arrive from Japan,” Fuchida replied. “Quality… Quality is harder to gauge. Nothing but experience can make a man a veteran. The fliers from Shokaku and Zuikaku know this now.”
“Hai,” Yamamoto said noncommittally. He rounded on Captain Yokokawa. “How long before Zuikaku is back in service?”
“Sir, she’ll have to return to Japan for repairs,” Yokokawa answered. “There’s no help for it. We’re lucky we kept her afloat after the pounding she took. The Americans pressed their attacks with all their strength.”
Another grunt from Yamamoto. He hadn’t been aboard Zuikaku or seen for himself how she was fought. All he could know was that she’d taken much more damage than either of the other Japanese carriers. He said, “A pity the Americans did such a good job of wrecking the navy yard here before they surrendered.”
“They were thorough,” Genda agreed.
“Have the engineers looked at what we’d need to do to get the yard operational?”
Genda’s specialty was air operations. But he was also the man with the answers; Yamamoto’s wasn’t the only head to turn his way. He said, “Sir, I’m told it’s not practical, since we would have to bring all our fuel from Japan. You might want to talk with the engineers, though, to see if things have changed since the last time I checked with them.”
“I’ll do that,” Yamamoto said. “Having to take a ship back more than five thousand kilometers to get it repaired is inefficient, to say the least.”
“The Americans had no trouble maintaining a yard here,” Captain Takatsugu said. “What they can do, we should be able to do, too.”
Just for a moment, Admiral Yamamoto looked angry. Genda knew what to watch for, and when to look. The eyebrows that came together, the lips that thinned… The expression vanished almost as fast as it appeared, but Yamamoto did not care for officers who failed to think things through before they spoke. “The Americans are only a little more than half as far from Hawaii as we are. And they have more fuel than they know what to do with. They had no trouble shipping some of it here. We, on the other hand…”
He didn’t go on, or need to. Had the USA not cut off oil shipments to Japan, the war never would have started. If everything went well from here on out, Japan wouldn’t have to depend on a rival for the oil she desperately needed. The formerly Dutch East Indies would see to that.
Yamamoto let Captain Takatsugu down easy. “We fought well,” he said. “As long as we do that, all will be well for us.”
“Hai.” Several officers agreed with that. Some of them sounded relieved, too.
Turning to Captain Kaku, Yamamoto said, “I am pleased at how well the damage-control parties have worked here on Akagi. That she can launch planes again is a credit to her officers and men.”
“Thank you very much, sir.” Kaku modestly looked down at his hands. “We were lucky that only one bomb hit us. And the repairs, of course, are emergency makeshifts. She needs much more work.”
That was an understatement. Genda had seen the gaping hole in the hangar deck. The bomb would have done even more damage had it struck while planes were stored there and not in combat.
“I understand,” Yamamoto said. “But you’ve done what’s essential. If the ship has to fight, she can. I don’t expect the Americans to come back to these waters for some time, but I might be wrong. In case I am, we’ll need every carrier and every plane we can get our hands on.”
Genda looked north and east. He didn’t expect the Americans back any time soon, either. They’d just had a lesson. Now they knew how much they didn’t know about conducting carrier operations. With luck, that would be enough to keep them thoughtful for some time. In the meanwhile, Japan would grow stronger, and so would her grip on Hawaii.
Admiral Yamamoto dismissed the meeting. Shokaku ’s skipper, and Zuikaku ’s, went over the side and down to the boats waiting to carry them back to their carriers. Genda stood with Fuchida on the Akagi ’s battered flight deck. Because of the stitches in his belly, Fuchida listed to starboard. The deck put Genda in mind of a man who’d had a head injury and went around forever afterwards with a steel plate in his skull. The repairs here were ugly, but they were functional.
Even through the masuku, Genda tasted the sweetness of the tropical air. He asked Fuchida, “How are you doing?”
“Not so well,” his friend answered. “But I’m getting better. How about you?”
“The same, more or less,” Genda said. “We made it through the fight. That’s the most important thing. Now we take our time recovering.”
Fuchida nodded. “That’s right.” He looked back toward some of the planes parked on the flight deck near Akagi ’s stern. “From now on, I think we’d better equip all the Nakajimas with torpedoes. In a sea fight, they have a much better chance of scoring a hit than level bombers do.”
“Put it in your action report, Fuchida-san,” Genda said. “It makes good sense to me. As long as we don’t dither between one and the other, we’ll be all right.”
“That would be bad, wouldn’t it?” Fuchida said. “Suppose the enemy caught us while we were switching from bombs to torpedoes in combat. Can you imagine what a Helldiver hit would do then?” He shuddered at the idea.
So did Genda. A carrier caught betwixt and between like that would go up like an ammunition dump-which, in effect, she would be. No damage-control party in the world could hope to save her. With a deliberate effort of will, he made himself dismiss the frightening possibility. “It didn’t happen,” he said firmly. “It won’t happen, either.”
BEING ABLE TO walk straight felt wonderful to Mitsuo Fuchida. The three weeks since his appendectomy felt like forever, but the doctors had finally taken the stitches out of his abdomen. The one who did the work said, “If people look at you when you go to the public baths, you can tell them you started to commit seppuku but changed your mind.”
He’d chortled loudly. Fuchida didn’t think it was so funny. For one thing, the scar wasn’t quite in the right place for that. For another, the feel of the sutures sliding through his flesh as the doctor snipped them and pulled them out one by one was-not painful, but distinctly unpleasant.
Now he strode across the lawn to one side of Iolani Palace toward the folding chairs set up there. Genda and the two lieutenant colonels, Minami and Murakami, rose to greet him. They bowed. So did he. It made his belly twinge, but only a little.
The Coronation Pavilion hadn’t been used for its original function for most of a lifetime. It hadn’t gone altogether unused since then, though. King David Kalakaua had built it directly in front of the palace, connecting it to the veranda there with a bridge. After he held his coronation ceremony in 1883, the pavilion was moved to the side and became the home of the Royal Hawaiian Band. Now it would again see the crowning of a monarch… of sorts.
Fuchida wasn’t sorry to sink into a chair by Genda-who still wore his masuku — and the two Army officers. Other Japanese military men, including Admiral Yamamoto (who’d stayed in Honolulu for the ceremony) and General Yamashita, filled most of the seats on the left side of the aisle. Others were taken by representatives from the Foreign Ministry and by allied diplomats: men from Germany and Italy, from Romania and Hungary and Bulgaria, from Croatia and Vichy France, from Manchukuo and Siam, from the Japanese puppet government of China in Nanking, and from the even less powerful authorities Japan had set up with the aid of nationalists in Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines.