His platoon commander didn’t seem worried. “This isn’t bad, men,” Lieutenant Yonehara called. “We could board in seas twice this high!”
“Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try it,” said a soldier protected from insubordination by darkness. Another soldier stepped in the new puddle of vomit and cursed monotonously.
Yonehara’s platoon did keep advancing toward the rail, so Corporal Shimizu supposed other men from the regiment were going down the side of the ship and onto the barges. It was either that or they were all going over the side and drowning. They could have done that back in Japanese waters, if it was what the High Command had in mind. They wouldn’t have needed to come all this way.
“Wait!” a sailor called. The tossing didn’t seem to bother him a bit. “Another barge is coming alongside. That’s the one you’ll go into.”
Corporal Shimizu wondered how he could tell. It was as dark as the inside of a pig. Something hard and cold caught him just above the belly button-the rail. Automatically, his hands reached out to take hold of it. His right hand closed on iron, his left on rope: part of the netting down which he’d scramble when the word came.
He stood there, hoping the pressure behind him wouldn’t send him over the side before he was supposed to go. Without warning, the sailor slapped him on the back. “Down you go,” the fellow said. “Hurry! Don’t hold things up.”
“Hai,” Shimizu said. He swung over the rail, hanging on for dear life while his boot found the net. If he’d been a monkey, able to grasp with feet as well as hands, everything would have been simple. As things were, he clambered down slowly and carefully.
“Hard work!” said a soldier scrambling down beside him. Corporal Shimizu nodded. This time, that was true literally as well as metaphorically.
The Daihatsu landing craft bobbed in the Pacific beside the Nagata Maru. It was about fifty feet long, with a beam of ten or twelve feet. Its hull was made of steel, supported by heavy wooden braces. It had twin keels riveted on to the hull. Except for the two machine guns at the bow and the steel shield protecting the wheel, it could have been a fishing boat going after sardines on the Inner Sea.
Getting down into the barge from the transport was tricky. Shimizu clung to the net. He didn’t want to get squashed between the two vessels. If he did, they’d scrape him off the steel.
“Come on!” a man on the barge called encouragingly. “Lean out. I’ll grab your boots and keep you safe.”
Leaning out, taking his feet out of the net, was the last thing Shimizu had in mind. Glumly, he realized he had no choice. With the burden he was bearing, how long could he hang on with arms and hands alone? How soon would he go into the water? “Hurry up!” he called to the fellow in the barge.
“I’ve got you,” the man answered, and so he did. “Let go. You’ll come in.”
Reluctantly, Shimizu obeyed. He was falling… into the barge. He laughed in relief as he straightened up. “Arigato,” he said.
“Do itashimashite.” The other man waved away his thanks. “Don’t pay back-pay forward. Help your friends coming down.”
That was good advice, and Corporal Shimizu took it. No one got crushed between the Nagata Maru and the landing barge. There were a couple of close calls, passed off with laughs and bows and exclamations of, “Hard work!”
The whole company squeezed onto the barge. Shimizu wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. Lieutenant Yonehara seemed pleased. “All according to plan,” he said. “We should start for Oahu any minute now.”
“I thought we were going to Hawaii,” a soldier said.
“Oahu is one of the islands of Hawaii,” the platoon leader explained. “It’s the one with the good harbor, and the one where the Americans have all their soldiers. Once we take it away from them, all the Hawaiian Islands are ours.”
It all sounded very easy when Lieutenant Yonehara put it like that. Shimizu let out a soft sigh of relief. He wanted it to be easy. People said the planes from the carriers had done a good job of hitting the harbor and the rest of the island’s defenses. Shimizu had been in the Army long enough not to trust what people said. This time, though, he hoped rumor told the truth.
The diesel engine at the stern of the landing barge took on a deeper note. The barge pulled away from the Nagata Maru. Another took its place. The motion was fierce-up hill and down dale, much worse than it had been in the freighter. Shimizu’s stomach lurched. I won’t be sick, he told himself sternly. A few soldiers did puke up whatever was in their bellies.
Twilight began turning the eastern sky pale as the barge-one of a whole flotilla of invasion craft-lumbered toward the shore. Most of the other landing craft carried soldiers, as Shimizu’s did. Some had howitzers or light tanks aboard. Shimizu hoped they were well chained down. If they shifted, they could capsize their barges and take them to the bottom.
Other men worried about other things. “If American planes come overhead right now, we’re sitting ducks,” a sergeant said. Nobody could contradict him, for he wasn’t wrong. What pilot could want a better target than wallowing invasion barges?
“Will the Americans be waiting for us on the beach?” Shiro Wakuzawa asked.
That was another good question. Shimizu didn’t know how to answer it. It was a day now since the carrier task force had started pounding Oahu. Would the Americans think it was just a hit-and-run raid, or would they expect an invasion to follow the attack from the air? Shimizu would have, but he didn’t know how Americans thought.
Lieutenant Yonehara found his own way to deal with the question: “Whether they are on the beach or not doesn’t matter, Private. If they are, we’ll beat them there. If they aren’t, we’ll move inland and beat them wherever we find them. Plain enough?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Wakuzawa would goof off whenever he got the chance, but he wasn’t foolhardy enough to show an officer disrespect. A man who did that soon regretted the day he was born.
The sky grew ever lighter. Soldiers pointed ahead and exclaimed, “Land!”
“Well, what did you expect when we got into the barges?” Shimizu demanded. “That they’d dump us in the middle of the sea?” The men laughed. Some of them probably hadn’t thought much about getting into the barges one way or the other. A lot of soldiers were like that: they took things as they happened, and didn’t worry about them till they happened.
“It’s so warm, and the air smells so good,” Private Wakuzawa said. “The weather sure is better than it was when we left the Kurils.”
“Hai! ” Several soldiers agreed with him. Maybe Siberia had worse weather than the Kurils did, but maybe not, too. After all, most of the weather those northern islands got blew straight down from Siberia.
The machine guns at the landing barge’s bow began banging away. Shimizu followed the lines of tracers rising up into the brightening sky and saw his worst nightmare-everybody’s worst nightmare-realized. Three American fighter planes were swooping down on the fleet of barges. Their guns started winking. Bullets kicked up spurts of water. Screams from other barges said not all the bullets were splashing into the Pacific.
But then the American planes suddenly broke off the attack. They darted away. Zeros swooped down on them like falcons after doves. Takeo Shimizu let out a wordless cry of joy and relief. An American fighter caught fire and cartwheeled into the sea. Another went down a moment later. Shimizu didn’t see what happened to the third, but it didn’t come back. Nothing else really mattered.
“If I ever meet those Zero pilots, I’ll buy them all the sake they can drink,” Private Wakuzawa exclaimed. “I thought we were in trouble.”