The bombers didn’t linger very long. After ten or fifteen minutes, they droned away. The Marines and Peterson emerged from their makeshift shelter. A bomb had knocked over the old Navy airship mooring mast the Marines used for a control tower. Another had hit the enlisted men’s barracks, which the Zeros had shot up the day before. One end had fallen down, and what was still standing was on fire. And that second cup of coffee never got finished, because the mess hall had taken a direct hit.
Bombs had hit the asphalt X of the runways, too. If Ewa had had any flyable planes, they wouldn’t have been able to get off the ground till the craters were repaired. “Son of a bitch!” Peterson said, looking around at the devastation. “Son of a bitch!”
“That’s about the size of it,” agreed the captain who’d taken charge of him the day before. He hadn’t been in the pool, and Peterson hadn’t seen him at breakfast, either. By his drawn features, he hadn’t had any sack time the night before. He went on, “You were talking about drawing a helmet and a rifle and making like a soldier. Were you serious about that?”
“Hell, yes,” Peterson answered without hesitation. But then he thought to ask, “How come?”
“About what you’d expect,” the Marine officer answered. “The Japs are on the island.”
LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO didn’t much care for flying combat air patrol above the Japanese task force. As far as he was concerned, that was a job for the float planes from the battleships and cruisers that had accompanied the aircraft carriers to Hawaii. But Admiral Nagumo had ordered differently, and so Shindo buzzed along with his engine throttled back to be as miserly with fuel as he could.
He would rather have been strafing the American soldiers on Oahu and finishing the job of knocking out the U.S. aircraft on the island. But he was not the sort of man to protest orders. When Commander Genda told him to take charge of the patrol, he’d just nodded and saluted and said, “Aye aye, sir.”
In a way, he could see the need. They’d sunk one carrier. But they thought three or even four had been based at Pearl Harbor. If planes from any of those showed up at the wrong moment… well, life could get more interesting than Shindo really wanted. He preferred things to go according to plan.
His eyes darted now right, now left, now center. He kept flicking them here and there. If anything was in the sky to see, he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss it. Stare straight ahead all the time, and even important things wouldn’t register.
He’d been flying for a couple of hours, and almost dismissed the float plane off to the west as one of his countrymen. But the lines weren’t quite right. Neither was the color-Japan seldom painted her aircraft that oceanic blue.
“That’s an American plane!” The words crackled in his earphones. One of the other pilots had spotted it too, then. “It’s seen us. I’ll shoot it down!”
“No!” Shindo said sharply. “No one is to shoot at that airplane until I do. The rest of you, continue on your normal patrol.”
Had another man given orders like that, the fliers under him would have thought him out for glory, out to run up his own score. With Lieutenant Shindo, that was unimaginable. He gunned his Zero toward the American plane.
The enemy pilot took awhile to spot him. No doubt the Americans were paying more attention to the ships spread out ahead of them. That was their duty, after all. Not until just before Shindo fired a machine-gun burst at him did they realize they had company. Only after the burst did the pilot turn toward the west and try to escape. The radioman, who also had charge of the rear-facing machine gun, shot back at the Zero.
Shindo pulled back out of range, as if afraid. Then he made a couple of feckless lunges at the float plane. He fired each time, but his bursts went wide. “What are you doing, Lieutenant?” one of the other fliers demanded. “For heaven’s sake, finish him. Do you want him to get away?”
“No,” Shindo said, and said no more for a little while. Then he radioed the carriers: “Enemy aircraft’s bearing is 280. I say again, 280. Along that bearing, we will find American ships, and we may also find planes on the way to attack us.”
He got no acknowledgment. He’d expected none. Even if the enemy had spotted them, the carriers needed to maintain radio silence, especially if a U.S. carrier had launched against them.
Now that he had the bearing, he could end the little farce he’d been playing out. He felt proud he’d been the one to get it here as well as from the Wildcats near Pearl Harbor the day before. He climbed and then dove. The enemy gunner couldn’t fire at him without shooting off his own tail. Shindo put several cannon shells into the float plane’s belly. This held no sport. It was simply killing: a part of war. The American plane tilted in the air. Smoke poured from it. The pilot fought for control-fought and lost. Down toward the water he fell. He and his gunner had both been brave and skillful. Flying a scout plane against the best carrier-based fighter in the world, that hadn’t helped them a bit.
The next question was twofold. What could the task force throw at the U.S. ships off to the west? And what were the Americans throwing at them?
COMMANDER MITSUO FUCHIDA counted himself lucky. If his Nakajima B5N1 hadn’t come back to the Akagi to refuel at just the right time, he wouldn’t have been able to join in the search for the newly suspected American ships. The Japanese air commander shook his head. Somewhere off to the west, there were American ships; they weren’t just suspected. That float plane hadn’t come from nowhere. How many ships and of what sort remained to be seen, but they were there.
As soon as the deck officer gave him the signal, he gunned the bomber toward the Akagi ’s bow. There was, as usual, that sickening dip when the bomber went off the flight deck, that moment of wondering whether it would splash into the sea instead of rising. But rise it did. Fuchida took it up to join the rest of the scratch attack force Admiral Nagumo and Commander Genda were throwing together.
B5N1s loaded with bombs, B5N2s with torpedoes slung beneath their fuselages, Aichi dive bombers, and Zeros to shepherd them along all mustered together. Fuchida was glad the Zeros had longer range than most fighters; they’d probably be able to protect the attack aircraft all the way to the target. If the American plane had found the Japanese fleet, surely the Japanese would be able to return the favor.
Fuchida waited impatiently for planes to fly off the six Japanese carriers and join the attacking force. He was never one to like loitering-he wanted to go out there and hit the enemy. And the Americans would not be idle. If one or more of their carriers was with that force, they would have launched as soon as they got word their scout had located the fleet that was punishing Oahu.
After half an hour, he radioed, “I am commencing the search,” and flew off to the west with the planes already in the air. A timely attack with fewer aircraft was better than a great swarm that came too late. Somewhere north and west of Kauai, the enemy waited.
Forty-five minutes went by. Then one of the pilots with him exclaimed, “Airplanes! Airplanes almost dead ahead!”
Almost dead ahead they were: a little north of the course on which the Japanese were flying. As they got nearer, Fuchida saw they were about the same sort of force as the one he led: torpedo planes and dive bombers with fighters flying cover. Those fat, stubby fighters weren’t Wildcats. They had to be Brewster Buffaloes, the U.S. Navy’s other carrier-based fighter planes.
Wildcats had proved themselves no match for Zeros. What about Buffaloes? We’ll find out, Fuchida thought. “Odd-numbered Zeros, attack the U.S. planes,” he ordered. “Even-numbered Zeros, stay with our force.” As nine or ten Zeros peeled off, the sun shone brightly on the Rising Suns on their wings and fuselages. Some of the stumpy Buffaloes turned to meet them. Fuchida sent a message back to the task force: “From size of enemy force, estimate it comes from one carrier. Repeat, from one carrier.”