LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO RARELY GOT EXCITED about anything. Some people said the Navy pilot was a cold fish. He didn’t see it like that. To his way of thinking, most people got excited over nothing.
He stood on the Akagi’s flight deck and looked around Pearl Harbor. The view here wasn’t what it had been before Japan and the United States went to war. Then the American ships in the harbor were tied up alongside piers or rested easily at anchor. Now they were nothing but twisted, blackened, rusting metal. Some of them still leaked oil into the water. Shindo could see several of those rainbow patches. The mineral stink of the fuel oil fouled the tropical breeze.
The third wave of Japanese planes over Oahu had sunk two American destroyers in the channel leading out from Pearl Harbor to the Pacific, trapping the rest of the U.S. Pacific Fleet inside the harbor and letting the Japanese pound it to pieces at their leisure. Shindo nodded to himself. The Americans would have tried to sortie against the Japanese strike force. They probably wouldn’t have had much luck, not without carrier support, but just as well they hadn’t got the chance.
Japanese naval engineers had got the destroyers out of the channel only a few weeks before the failed American invasion. Shindo was glad they had. Now Akagi had somewhere local to make repairs without worrying about American submarines: the antitorpedo net was back in place at the mouth of the channel.
Shindo laughed unpleasantly. The Yankees hadn’t bothered with torpedo netting for individual ships last December. They hadn’t figured anyone could rig torpedoes to run in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. Japan taught them otherwise. The devastation here proved that.
Devastation held sway on land, too. Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, had been palm trees and ferns where it wasn’t U.S. Navy installations. Now it was rubble with greenery poking through; hardly anything held greenery in check for long here. The Americans had fought house to house in Pearl City, north of the harbor. The town where Navy personnel and the civilians who worked for them lived was as battered as the island.
And the land to the east was worse. The Americans had stored their fuel there, and Japanese bombs sent the oil and gas up in smoke. Shindo vividly remembered the smoke: the funeral pyre of U.S. ambitions in the Pacific. The great black greasy plume had stayed in place for weeks, till the fires finally burned themselves out. Nothing grew there. Shindo wondered whether anything ever would. Ford Island and Pearl City had seen war. The tank farms had seen hell.
Near those fuel tanks had stood the U.S. Navy repair facilities. The Yankees wrecked those themselves when they realized they weren’t going to be able to hold Oahu. Japanese engineers were full of professional admiration for the job their American counterparts did. It made operating Pearl Harbor as a base for the Japanese Navy much harder-much harder, but not impossible.
As if to underscore that, Akagi’s flight deck vibrated under Shindo’s feet. Metallic clatters and bangs came from below. A dive bomber had got one home on the carrier during the fight north of the Hawaiian Islands. The bomb penetrated the flight deck near the bow and exploded in the hangar. Luckily, just about all the ship’s planes were in the air, defending Akagi or attacking the enemy’s carriers. Otherwise, things would have been even worse.
Damage-control parties had got steel plates over the hole in the flight deck so the carrier could launch aircraft. That was the essential, the indispensable, repair. Everything else had waited. The crew was attending to the rest now, as best they could here in Hawaiian waters.
Zuikaku, much more badly damaged than Akagi, had had to limp back to Japan for repairs. That left her sister ship, Shokaku, the only undamaged Japanese carrier in the Eastern Pacific. Shindo muttered to himself. Shokaku ’s fliers and sailors had less experience than Akagi’s. In a crisis…
No less a personage than Admiral Yamamoto thought a crisis unlikely any time soon. The Americans had hurt the Japanese carrier force. Japan had crushed the Americans. Two of the three U.S. carriers that had sailed from the American mainland lay on the bottom of the Pacific now. The third, hurt worse than either Akagi or Zuikaku, had barely staggered back to the West Coast. Whatever invasion fleet followed behind the carriers and their escorts had also run for home.
We smashed them, Shindo thought complacently. If they come back here again, we’ll smash them again, that’s all.
A tall, horse-faced officer came up onto the flight deck from below. Seeing Shindo, he waved and walked toward him. Shindo waved back, then saluted as the other man drew closer. “How are you feeling, Fuchida-san?” he asked.
“Better day by day, thanks,” Commander Mitsuo Fuchida answered. He’d come down with appendicitis during the fight with the Americans. He’d completed his attack run, brought his bomber back to Akagi, gone straight to sick bay, and parted with the inflamed organ.
“Glad to hear it,” Shindo said. He’d led Akagi’s fighters during the last wave of the attack on Oahu and in the recent battle against the Yankees north of Hawaii. Fuchida had been in overall command in the first wave and also, illness or no, in the fight where he’d come down sick.
“It’s over. I got through it. They patched me up,” Fuchida said as more clanging and banging came from the hangar deck. Fuchida smiled. “Akagi can say the same thing.”
“I wish it weren’t taking so long,” Shindo grumbled. A thoroughly businesslike man, he didn’t notice Fuchida’s joke till it was too late to respond. Keeping his mind on business, he looked north and east. “I wonder what the Americans are doing with that beat-up flattop of theirs.”
“She’s under repair up in Seattle,” Fuchida answered.
“Ah, so desu? I hadn’t heard that,” Shindo said.
“I just found out a few hours ago myself,” Fuchida said. “One of our H8Ks spotted her. They’re amazing aircraft.” Enthusiasm filled his face. And the big flying boats were remarkable planes. Flying out of what had been the Pearl City Pan Am Clipper base, they could reach the West Coast of the USA for reconnaissance work or even to drop bombs. Fuchida had flown on one in a three-plane raid on San Francisco. That, no doubt, accounted for a good part of his enthusiasm.
It also made Shindo jealous as could be. Fuchida was very able. Nobody would have quarreled with that; Shindo certainly didn’t. Because he was so able, he sometimes got to do things he wasn’t strictly entitled to do. Sitting in the copilot’s seat of an H8K was one of those, sure enough.
None of what Shindo thought showed on his face. That was true most of the time, but he made a special point of it now. The two of them served together, but they weren’t close friends the way Fuchida and Minoru Genda were. And Fuchida had two grades on Shindo. Letting a superior see what you thought of him was never a good idea.
All Shindo asked, then, was, “What else are the Yankees doing in Seattle?”
“Working around the clock, seems like,” Fuchida answered. “It’s that way whenever we get a look at one of their ports. They haven’t given up.”