“Hai.” Genda nodded. In a mess like this, he worried less about rank than he would have otherwise. He said, “You look like you’ve done your share of hard work and then some.”
“Could be, sir,” the soldier answered. “I started up at the north coast-and here I am.”
That was something unusual. Most Japanese soldiers who’d met the Americans on the invasion beaches were dead. Genda knew the Army preferred dying in place to retreating. Keeping his voice carefully neutral, he said, “You must have seen a lot of fighting. How did that happen, Senior Private, ah…?”
“My name is Furusawa, sir.” The soldier showed no reluctance to give it. He didn’t seem to feel he’d done anything wrong. And he explained why: “I found all my superiors killed around me. That left me free to use my own judgment. I thought I would be more use to the Emperor killing as many Americans as I could than throwing my life away to no good purpose.” By the way he eyed Genda, anyone who presumed to disagree with him would be sorry.
But Genda didn’t disagree. “And have you done that?” he asked.
“Sir, I have,” the soldier answered. His rifle-an American Springfield-had plainly seen a lot of use, but it was clean and in good condition. Seeing Genda’s glance toward the weapon, Furusawa went on, “My unit’s barracks in Honolulu were bombed, and we lost our Arisakas.”
“How do you like the American piece?” Genda asked.
“It’s a little heavy, sir, but not too bad,” Furusawa said. “And it fires a larger-caliber round than an Arisaka, so it’s got more stopping power. I do like that.”
Like the rest of what Senior Private Furusawa had to say, that was more clearly reasoned than Genda would have looked for from a lowly enlisted man. And, while Furusawa’s accent said he came from somewhere in the south-down by Hiroshima, perhaps-he also sounded better educated than the farmers and fishermen who made up a large part of the population there.
“Why are you only a senior private?” Genda asked, by which he meant, Why do you talk the way you do? Why do you think the way you do?
The younger man understood what he didn’t say, which showed Furusawa did think that way. With a crooked smile, he replied, “Well, sir, for one thing, I was a pretty new conscript when we came here, and there weren’t a lot of promotions after that. And my father is a druggist. That sort of made me a white crow to a lot of the country boys in my regiment.” He echoed Genda’s thought there, and continued, “Complaining wouldn’t have done me much good. And keeping me down made some sense, too, because the others might not have followed me the way they would have with someone else.”
Genda wondered if he himself could have spoken so dispassionately about being passed over for a promotion he obviously deserved. He doubted it. “What do you think will happen now?” he asked.
“That depends, sir. You’d know better than I do-has the Navy got enough ships and planes to beat the Americans and drive them away?”
“No.” Genda spoke without hesitation.
Senior Private Furusawa shrugged. He didn’t seem very surprised. “Well, in that case we’ll just have to give it our best shot, won’t we?” He shrugged again. “Karma, neh?”
He could speak indirectly at least as well as Genda. What he meant was, We’re all going to die here, and we can’t do a damn thing about it. Genda thought about that, but not for long. He didn’t need long. He sighed, nodded, and said, “Hai.”
YASUO FURUSAWA KNEW HE OUGHT TO GET AWAY from Commander Genda. The naval officer knew he’d fallen back from the north instead of senselessly charging and throwing his life away. That made Genda dangerous to him as the Japanese were driven back into Honolulu. If the officer wanted to make an example of someone, he had a nice, juicy target. And sticking around Genda endangered Furusawa in another way, too. The Navy man was a greenhorn at infantry combat. His white uniform only made things worse. He drew bullets as well as he could have without painting a target on his chest. And bullets meant for him could all too easily find someone nearby instead.
But Furusawa stayed by him. Before long, he found himself Genda’s unofficial aide and orderly. Genda, he thought, was the smartest man he’d ever met. And the officer didn’t seem to think he was a baka yaro himself. That made Furusawa proud. Right now, pride was about all any Japanese had left.
He shook his head. Japanese soldiers, or most of them, had a contempt for death the Americans couldn’t begin to match. Oh, the Yankees were brave enough. He’d seen that in the first invasion, and he saw it again now. But he could not imagine an American rushing out against a tank with a flaming bottle of gasoline and smashing it down on the cooling louvers above the engine. The Japanese who did that must have known he couldn’t get back to cover alive. And he didn’t; the Americans shot him before he made even three steps. But their snorting mechanical monster went up in flames, and the Japanese picked off the crewmen bailing out. Without the tank, the enemy attack bogged down.
Could I do that? Furusawa wondered. His long retreat from the north left him with doubts about himself and about his courage. He didn’t think he was afraid to die if his death meant something. The death of that soldier with the Molotov cocktail certainly had. He’d cost the Americans a tank and five men.
That was one side of the coin. The other side was, losing that tank and those five men wouldn’t cost the USA the battle. Honolulu would fall. Hawaii would go back under the Stars and Stripes. Nobody but a blind man could believe anything else.
Well, in that case, why don’t we throw down our rifles and throw up our hands and surrender? But Furusawa shook his head. No less than any other Japanese, he believed surrender the ultimate disgrace. And he didn’t want to spread his own disgrace and shame to his family back in the home islands.
Besides, some of the men in charge of Honolulu might have been blind. If they didn’t think they could throw the Americans back, you wouldn’t know it to listen to them. The garrison commander was a Navy captain-in Army ranks, he counted as a colonel-named Iwabuchi.
“We can do it!” he shouted to anyone who would listen. “We will do it! The white men have no stomach for blood! Well, before long we will drown them in an ocean of it!”
Furusawa remembered him drilling his special naval landing forces before the Americans landed. He’d been just as fanatical then. He’d sounded like a screaming madman, as a matter of fact, and he still did. But he did more than just scream. Furusawa wouldn’t have wanted to attack Honolulu. Artillery hid inside buildings here. Machine guns had elaborately interlocking fields of fire. If you took out one nest, you exposed yourself to fire from two or three others.
The only thing Captain Iwabuchi hadn’t worried about in Honolulu was its civilians. If they starved, if they got shot, if they got blown to pieces-well, so what? And if a fighting man wanted a woman for a little fun before he went back to his foxhole-again, so what?
You knew what kind of screams those were when you heard them. They sounded different from the ones that came from wounded people: they held horror as well as pain. Commander Genda clucked in distress. “This is not a good way to fight a war,” he said.
“Sir, this is what the Army did in Nanking, too,” Furusawa said. “I hadn’t been conscripted yet, but the veterans in my regiment would talk about it sometimes.” Most of them had sounded pleased with themselves, too. He didn’t tell Genda that.
“But American propaganda will have a field day,” the Navy man said. “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is supposed to protect Asia from Western imperialism. Now who will protect Asia from Japanese imperialism?”
He put his life in Furusawa’s hands when he said something like that. If the senior private blabbed to someone like Iwabuchi… Well, one more time, so what? Genda would die a little sooner than he might otherwise, and perhaps a little more painfully. Given the perversity of war, though, neither of those was certain. None of the Japanese defenders was likely to get out of this any which way.