The Americans probed with infantry. They got a bloody nose and pulled back. Captain Iwabuchi was jubilant. “They can’t stand up to us!” he shouted. “If they come again, we’ll smash them again!”
Commander Genda sounded less gleeful. “They aren’t done,” he said to Furusawa. “They’re putting a rock in their fist, that’s all.”
“A rock, sir?” The senior private didn’t follow him for a moment.
“You’ll see,” Genda answered.
About fifteen minutes later, Furusawa did. American artillery started pounding the Japanese front-line positions. Furusawa had never imagined so many guns all going off at once. His own forces were not so lavishly provided with cannon. Huddling in a ball to make as small a target as he could, he felt as if the end of the world had come.
When the barrage lifted, the Americans surged forward again. Furusawa was too dazed to shoot for a little while, but Japanese machine guns opened up on the Yankees again. He was amazed he’d lived through the shelling, and even more amazed anyone else had. The automatic-weapons fire drove the Americans back again in front of his foxhole, but they broke through farther north.
“What do we do, sir?” he asked Commander Genda. “If we stay here, they’ll outflank us and cut us off.”
“Hai,” Genda answered. Any Army officer would have ordered a fight to the death where they were. Furusawa was as sure of that as he was of his own name. After a moment’s thought, Genda said, “We fall back. It doesn’t look like we can do much more where we are, does it?”
“Not to me, sir,” Furusawa said in surprise.
To his even greater surprise, Genda smiled at him. “Well, you know more about it than I do.” They fell back, passing the wreckage of a machine-gun nest that hadn’t survived the barrage. Furusawa wondered if the Army would have done better with people like Genda in charge. He feared he’d never know.
WHY THIS IS HELL, NOR AM I OUT OF IT. KENZO TAKAHASHI REMEMBERED THE line from an English Lit class. It sounded like Shakespeare, but he didn’t think it was. Who, then? He couldn’t remember. Miss Simpson wouldn’t have approved of that at all. If Miss Simpson was still alive, though, she was just as busy trying not to get blown up as Kenzo was.
He and Hiroshi didn’t know where their father was. He’d headed for the Japanese consulate, and he’d never come back. Hiroshi and Kenzo both went looking for him, and neither one had any luck. Kenzo even went to the consulate himself. The guards let him in when he told them whose son he was, but nobody inside would tell him anything. Nobody of very high rank seemed to be there. He wondered where the consul and the chancellor and the other big shots were. Wherever it was, would they have taken Dad with them? Kenzo had trouble believing it.
When the big American push started, shells crashed into the refugee camp where he and his brother and their father had stayed since their apartment-and Kenzo and Hiroshi’s mother-burned in the Japanese attack on Honolulu. Japanese positions were nearby, so Kenzo could see why the Americans struck. Seeing why did nothing to ease the horror.
He and Hiroshi got out unhurt. That would do for a miracle till God decide to dole out a bigger one somewhere else. He’d seen bad things when the Japanese took Honolulu. He hadn’t seen the worst, because the Americans chose to surrender rather than let the worst happen to the civilians in the city. The Japanese didn’t care about civilians. They would fight as long as they had cartridges, and with bayonets after that.
And whether the Americans wanted to bring hell down on the civilians of Honolulu or not, what else were they going to do to get rid of the Japanese soldiers among them? Kenzo and Hiroshi stayed flat on their bellies all through the artillery barrage. They’d learned that much in the earlier round of fighting. It didn’t always help, but it was their best hope.
Shrapnel tore through their tent and the ropes that held it up. It fell down on them, which frightened Kenzo worse than he was already-something he wouldn’t have thought possible. Through the roars and crashes of exploding shells, he heard screams, some abruptly cut off.
When the shelling eased, he struggled free of the heavy canvas. The only words that came out of his mouth were, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”-something his missing father might have said. He could smell blood in the air. There lay a man gutted like an ahi-and there, a few feet away, lay most of his head.
Wounded men and women were worse than dead ones. They writhed and shrieked and moaned and bled and bled and bled. Kenzo bent to use a length of rope torn apart by shell fragments as a tourniquet for a woman who’d lost a big chunk of meat out of her leg below the knee. He hoped it would do her some good.
He was in the middle of that when someone shouted in Japanese: “Come on, give me a hand! Yes, you!” When he looked up, a soldier was leading Hiroshi away. The soldier had a stretcher, and needed Kenzo’s brother to help him carry wounded. No doubt they would deal with soldiers first, civilians later if at all.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said again. He couldn’t stop them from grabbing his brother, not unless he wanted to get killed himself and probably get Hiroshi killed with him. The other trouble was, they were both too likely to get killed anyway. More American shells screamed in, some on the Japanese positions, some on the luckless refugee camp. More screams rose, many of them screams of despair. Kenzo hugged the ground next to the injured woman and hoped none of the fragments would bite him. He had no idea what else to do.
When the barrage eased, he asked the woman, “How are you?” She didn’t answer. He took a look at her. A chunk of shrapnel had clipped off the top of her head. Her brains spilled out onto the dirt. Kenzo threw up. Then he spat again and again, trying to get the horrible taste out of his mouth. And then he staggered to his feet and stumbled away. Any place in the world had to be safer than where he was.
At first, his flight was blind. Before long, though, it had purpose: he headed for Elsie Sundberg’s house. If anything happened to her… If anything happened to her, he didn’t think he wanted to go on living. He’d been through a lot just then, and he was only twenty years old.
Getting to her house in eastern Honolulu was a nightmare in itself. He had to pass several checkpoints manned by special naval landing forces, and they would just as soon have shot civilians as looked at them. That was no exaggeration. Bodies lay in the street, blood pooled around them. Some of the women’s skirts and dresses were hiked up. Kenzo bit his lip; the occupiers hadn’t killed them right away.
Had he tried sneaking by, he was sure they would have put a bullet in him. Instead, he came up to each barricade and roadblock openly, calling, “I’m the Fisherman’s son! I’m looking for my father!”
He hated using his father’s collaboration in any way, but it got him by. And one of the men at a sandbagged machine-gun nest said, “Didn’t he get out on the submarine the other night?”
“What submarine?” Kenzo asked-this was the first he’d heard of it.
“There was one,” the landing-forces man said. Kenzo couldn’t very well argue with him, because he didn’t know there hadn’t been one. The fellow went on, “I don’t know whether your old man was on it or not, though. They don’t tell guys like me stuff like that.” He gestured. “Go ahead, buddy. I hope you find him. I always did like listening to him.”
“Thank you,” Kenzo said, wishing he hadn’t heard that quite so often from Japanese military men. He could have done without the compliment. Would his father have got on a submarine-one probably bound for Japan? Muttering unhappily, Kenzo nodded to himself. His father would be able to see the jig was up here. And he must have been afraid of what the Americans would do to him when they came back. He likely had reason, too, even if he was a Japanese citizen. Collaborators would catch it.