“Yeah, well, I love you, too, buddy,” Dutch Wenzel answered. His hand was still bandaged, but he showed he could open and close his fingers. “They decided not to waste cargo space shipping me back to the mainland, so here I am.”
“Good to see you. Good to see anybody who knows his ass from third base,” Les said. “Some of what we’re getting to fill casualty slots…” He shook his head, then laughed. “They must’ve been saying the same crap about me when I went into the line in 1918.”
“They were right, too, weren’t they?” Wenzel said. Les affectionately cuffed him on the side of the head. Wenzel looked around. “Boy, we liberated the living shit out of this place, didn’t we?”
“Bet your ass,” Dillon said, not without pride. Iolani Palace would never be the same. Half of it-maybe more than half-had fallen in on itself. Somebody’d put up a flagpole on the ruins, though. The Stars and Stripes flew from it. Les figured he would start selling sweaters in hell before the old Territorial flag showed up again. Nothing like being used by a collaborator king to turn it unpopular in a hurry.
Over to the east, Honolulu Hale was in even worse shape. Being a modern building, the city hall was more strongly made than the old royal palace. That meant the Japs had used it for a fortress. After gunfire from tanks and artillery pieces leveled it, Marines and Army troops had to clear out the surviving Japs with flamethrowers and bayonets. The Stars and Stripes flew over that pile of wreckage, too. Les was proud to see the Star-Spangled Banner waving, but he wasn’t sorry to have missed that fight. He’d been in enough of them, and then some.
The rest of Honolulu wasn’t in much better shape. Even the buildings that still stood had pieces bitten out of them. The Japs had made a stand, or tried to, in just about every stone or brick building in town. They’d taken it out on civilians, too, which only added to the stench in the air.
Les sighed, thinking of what was left of the honky-tonks on Hotel Street: not bloody much. “This town is never gonna be the same,” he said.
“This whole island is never gonna be the same,” Dutch Wenzel said. “Pineapples? Sugar cane? All that crap’s down the drain now. Nothin’ but fuckin’ rice paddies left. The Doles’ll be on the dole, by God.” He laughed at his own wit.
So did Les. “Who’s gonna worry about any of that for a while?” he said. “Who’s gonna worry about cleaning up this mess here, either? Only thing anybody’s gonna give a damn about is getting this place ready to fight from. Hickam and Wheeler are up again, so the carriers don’t all have to hang around, but Christ only knows how long it’ll be before we can use Pearl again.”
“Tell me about it,” Wenzel said. “More wrecks in there-ours and the Japs’-than you can shake a stick at. All the fuel burned or blown up, the repair yards smashed to scrap… It’ll be a while yet.”
“Reckon so.” Les lit a cigarette, partly to fight the stink from his friend’s cigar. He looked north and west.
“Even before then, we’ve gotta clear those bastards off of Midway and Wake-especially Midway. I won’t be sorry to get rid of Washing Machine Charlie.” Bettys from Midway could reach Oahu. Every few nights, a handful of them would buzz overhead, drop their bombs, and then head for home. They were only an annoyance… unless one of those bombs happened to come down on you.
Wenzel nodded. “Yeah, the sooner that starts, the better. And after we take care of those places-well, it’s wherever we go next, that’s all.”
“Wherever the fuck it is, they’ll need Marines,” Les said positively. Dutch Wenzel nodded again. Both of them looked west, towards islands whose names and dangers they didn’t know. Les blew out a cloud of smoke. “Wonder how many of us’ll be left by the time it’s all over. Enough, I expect.” Dutch nodded one more time.
ONLY A FEW HUNDRED JAPANESE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS had been captured in the downfall of Oahu. The Americans kept them in a camp not far from Pearl City, near the northern tip of Pearl Harbor.
Yasuo Furusawa suspected one reason the Americans did that was to let their prisoners watch them at work. Getting Pearl Harbor usable again would have taken Japan years, if the Japanese had tried at all. Furusawa would have judged it an impossibly big job. The Americans threw more machines at it than he would have guessed there were in all the home islands put together. They had plenty of fuel, too, even if they were bringing every liter of it from the mainland.
And things got done. Sunken ships were raised. Some were refloated for repair. Torches attacked others, turning them into scrap metal. Buildings went up on the shore and on Ford Island. It all happened so fast, it reminded him of a movie run at the wrong speed.
“We didn’t know how strong they were when we started fighting them,” he said gloomily as he stood in line for rations. Even those were a sign of U.S. might. He ate more and better as an American prisoner than he had as a soldier of the Japanese Empire. He remembered what his own side had fed American POWs, and how they’d looked after a while. The comparison was daunting.
The prisoner in front of him only shrugged. “What difference does it make?” he said. “What difference does anything make? We’ve disgraced ourselves. Our families will hate us forever.”
Even among the humiliated Japanese prisoners of war, a hierarchy had sprung up. Though only a senior private, Furusawa stood near the top of it. He’d been captured while unconscious. He couldn’t have fought back. Men like him and those who’d been too badly hurt to kill themselves stood ahead of those who’d simply wanted to live, those who’d thrown away their rifles and raised their hands instead of hugging a grenade to their chest or charging the Americans and dying honestly.
Several captured prisoners had already killed themselves. The Americans did their best to stop prisoners from committing suicide. Some of the captives thought that was to pile extra disgrace on them. Furusawa had at first. He didn’t any more. The Americans had rules of their own, different from Japan’s. Suicide was common among his people, but not among the Yankees. He would have said they were soft had he not faced them in battle. Even the first time around, they’d fought hard. And trying to stop their reinvasion was like trying to hold back a stream of lava with your bare hands.
Every so often, prisoners got summoned for questioning. The enemy had plenty of interrogators who spoke Japanese. Furusawa wondered how many of the locals now working for the USA had served the occupation forces before. He wouldn’t have been surprised if quite a few were doing their best to cover up a questionable past with a useful present.
Whatever they wanted to know, he answered. Why not? After the disaster of being captured, how could anything else matter? “Did you ever see or know Captain Iwabuchi, the commander of the defense in Honolulu?” an interrogator asked.
“I saw him several times, drilling his men. I never spoke to him, though, nor he to me. I was only an ordinary soldier, after all.”
The interrogator took notes. “What did you think of Captain Iwabuchi?” he asked.
“That he asked more from his men than they could hope to give him,” Furusawa said.
“Do you think there are other officers like him? Do you think there will be other defenses like this?”
“Probably,” Furusawa said. By the way the local Japanese’s mouth tightened, he hadn’t wanted to hear that. Furusawa went on, “How else would you fight a war but as hard as you can? The Americans weren’t gentle with us when they came back here, either.”
“It will only cost Japan more men in the long run,” the interrogator said. “You must have seen you can’t hope to win when America strikes with all her power.”
Furusawa had seen that. It frightened him. Even his full belly frightened him. But he said, “I am only a senior private. I just do what people tell me to do. If you had caught a general, maybe you could talk to him about such things.”