So did the tall bronze statue of Oliver Hazard Perry. The folding chairs for the ceremony were set up in front of it. “This is a good place for doing what we’re doing,” Joe said to Orson Sharp.
Sharp nodded. “I’ll say. ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours!’ ” he quoted.
Joe had forgotten that. He suddenly laughed. “And the enemy he was fighting was England, and she’s the best friend we’ve got.”
“Yeah.” The young man from Utah laughed, too. “And do you remember who his younger brother was?”
“Afraid not,” Joe admitted. He’d done okay in history, but he hadn’t set the world on fire.
“Matthew Perry-the guy who opened up Japan,” Sharp said.
“Holy Jesus!” Joe said. “Boy, he never knew how much he has to answer for, did he? He should have left it closed. That would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.”
“Places, gentlemen, places,” someone called in an official-sounding voice.
Places were in alphabetical order. Joe sat up near the front, his roomie toward the back. The mayor of Buffalo made a speech praising all the bright young patriots who passed through his city on their way to knocking the stuffing out of the Axis. It sounded like every other political speech Joe had ever heard until his Honor pointed to the bridge spanning the Niagara River at the north end of the Front. “That’s the Peace Bridge,” he said. “This end is in the United States; the other end is in Canada. We want peace all through the world, but we will have to win this war before we can get it.”
Along with the other cadets, Joe applauded. Most of the clapping sounded dutiful. Joe’s was a little more than that. The mayor’s words echoed what he’d been thinking himself. What would Oliver Perry have made of a Peace Bridge between the USA and what was still a dominion of the British Empire? And what would Matthew Perry have made of a war between the United States and what had been a backward, hermit kingdom-especially of a war the Japanese looked to be winning at the moment? Which of the old sea dogs would have been more surprised?
After the mayor sat down, another speaker limped up to the microphone. The cadets greeted him with a hand much more heartfelt than the one they’d given his Honor. Lieutenant Zachary Gunston was a Buffalo native. Like Jack Hadley, he’d also been a Wildcat pilot in the battle in the North Pacific the summer before. Also like Hadley, he’d had to ditch his fighter, and a destroyer had plucked him from the drink.
He pointed out to the cadets. “It’s up to you to carry the ball,” he said. “My buddies and I, we took it as far as we could go. We didn’t quite have the machines we needed, and we didn’t quite have the techniques we needed, either. You’ve learned in your training a lot of what we had to find out the hard way. Your ships will be better. Your planes will be better-I hear the fighters aboard the new carriers are a long step up from Wildcats. But in the end”-he pointed again-“it’s going to be up to you, and what you’ve got inside you.
“We made a mistake,” Gunston went on. “We figured the Japs were patsies, pushovers. We’ve been paying for that mistake ever since we made it. They’re tougher and smarter than we ever dreamt they could be. Now it’s going to be up to you to teach ’em a lesson: no matter how tough they are, no matter how smart they are, nobody sucker-punches the United States of America and gets away with it. Nobody! Am I right or am I wrong?”
“Right!” The word came out as a fierce growl from the throat of every graduating cadet. Joe felt like a dog snarling at another dog on the street-and God help that other sorry mutt, too!
“Okay, then, gentlemen. I think you are about ready to be commissioned now,” Lieutenant Gunston said.
“Please rise, raise your right hands, and repeat the oath after me.” Along with his classmates, his squadmates, Joe Crosetti did. Pride tingled through him. If he had to blink rapidly several times to keep tears from forming and running down his face, he wasn’t the only one. Beside him, another kid’s eyelids were marching doubletime, too. When the oath was complete, Gunston looked out at the brand-new officers. “Welcome to the Navy, Ensigns! You’ve got a big job ahead of you.”
Joe looked down at the gold stripe on his sleeve. He was as junior an officer as possible-an ensign with no seniority-but he was, by God, an officer! Crosetti the fisherman’s son, an officer in the U.S. Navy! If this wasn’t one hell of a country, he didn’t know what would be.
“Congratulations, Ensign Crosetti,” said that youngster beside Joe who’d also been blinking. He was blond and handsome and looked as if he came from a Main Line family. Maybe he did. But he wasn’t any more an ensign than Joe was.
“Thanks, Ensign Cooper. Same to you,” Joe said. Nobody was ragging on anybody today, and who your father was, what he did for a living, or how big a bankroll he had didn’t matter. The way it looked to Joe, that they didn’t, or shouldn’t, matter was a big part of what the war was about.
Twisting, he looked back towards Orson Sharp. He couldn’t see his roomie. Too many other newly minted officers stood between them. Guys were starting to move around and find their special friends. Even when Joe did, he had trouble seeing past the taller people in his class. But he knew about where Sharp would be, and headed back there. Sharp was coming up toward him. They clasped hands.
“We’ve been waiting a long time,” Joe said-it seemed like forever since he’d volunteered. “Now-”
“We get to wait some more,” the ensign from Utah finished for him. “We have to get a ship. We have to get trained up on whatever we fly, whether it’s a Wildcat or one of these new jobs Lieutenant Gunston was talking about. And we have to wait till enough carriers are ready to give us the best shot at licking the Japanese.”
Every word of that was eminently sensible. Joe liked it no more because of that. If anything, he liked it less. “You’re no fun,” he said.
“I know,” said Sharp, who laughed at the wet-blanket reputation he’d had all the way through the training program. “Before too long, though, the Japs will say the same thing.”
“Yeah!” Joe said.
WATCHING SOME OF THE PILOTS who’d come to Hawaii as replacements, Lieutenant Saburo Shindo wondered how they’d ever made it out of flight school. They had trouble finding Haleiwa, let alone landing at the airstrip there. A few of them might never have made the acquaintance of their airplanes before these flights, or so it seemed to Shindo.
When he finally couldn’t stand watching any more, he got on the telephone to Commander Fuchida.
“Moshi-moshi,” the head of the Japanese naval air effort said. “Fuchida here.”
“This is Shindo, Fuchida-san. What the devil’s happened to flight school since we went through it?” Mitsuo Fuchida laughed, not all together comfortably. “By all I’ve heard from Japan, nothing much has happened to it.”
“Then what’s wrong with the chowderheads it’s turning out?” Shindo demanded. “Plenty of the Americans we faced were good pilots. We had better planes, and that helped a lot, but we had better fliers, too. These people… Yes, a Zero is better than a Wildcat, but it’s notthat much better-not enough to let these people go up against Wildcats with good pilots and hope to beat them.”
“They’re about the same as we were when we got out of flight school,” Fuchida said.
“No!” Shindo denied the mere possibility.
But Fuchida said, “Hai. The difference, Shindo-san, is that we had plenty of combat experience against the Chinese and the Russians who flew for them before we took on the Americans. We were veterans. We were ready.”