“Not really,” said Merchant. “In fact, it’s utterly inconceivable, almost as illogical as suicide.”
“But that’s exactly what the Japanese Army did in Manchuria and China, and the Japanese Navy boys I talked with are totally, thoroughly pissed. I’ll bet you a dollar the attack on Pearl Harbor was at least in part a payback for the army’s unannounced move into China.”
Merchant stood up abruptly and bumped his head on a pipe. “Damn it,” he snarled and rubbed his skull. “Dane, when we do get to safety, I want you to write up a report, a paper, on what you learned.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just curious,” Torelli asked, “but did the combination of war and Depression damage your father’s business with the Land of the Rising Sun?”
Dane chuckled. He was very proud of his old man. “Not really. He saw the war coming and sold out a few years ago to a group of Japanese businessmen who probably, hopefully, lost their shirts. He thinks the combination of the war and the Depression is going to cause a real-estate explosion in the United States when the war ends, so he’s buying up vacant properties in areas around major cities. If he’s right and the war doesn’t last beyond 1950 or so, he’ll probably be rich. I’ll be his heir, of course.”
There was a sudden commotion on deck and the conversation was over. Torelli shouted orders as men tumbled down from the conning tower in a well choreographed dance that only looked like chaos. Ships had been spotted on the horizon, and the submarine quickly and quietly slipped under the sea. Ships meant the enemy. There were no American warships in this area of the Pacific. With luck, their low silhouette had not been spotted.
Back in their bunks, they waited, helpless to do anything about the peril they were in. Dane wondered if the air had just gotten staler and hotter, or was it just his imagination. He’d never been claustrophobic, but being prone and helpless in a too-small cot in a sub maybe hundreds of feet under the ocean was a truly frightening experience.
An explosion shook them, rattling everything in the sub. They were being depth charged. Dane wanted to run and ask Torelli what was happening, but that was painfully obvious. The Japanese had somehow spotted them and were attacking.
Another explosion, this one much closer—it almost threw him out of his bunk. He held on tight and the lights went off. For an utterly horrible instant, they were plunged into total darkness. Dane thought they would plunge to the bottom of the Pacific and be there forever, dying slowly, gasping like fish on the floor until the air finally ran out.
After an eternity, the lights flickered and came back on. Someone in the group was screaming and sailors pounced on him, stuffing a rag in his mouth. Dane was shocked to realize that cold water was dripping on him. Were they sinking? His heart began to pound as if it wanted to explode from his chest.
He smelled urine and wondered who’d pissed himself. He checked, and thankfully, it wasn’t him.
Another set of explosions shook them, but these were farther away. Even better, the leak had stopped. After what seemed an eternity, Torelli approached them.
“I think we got away. One of their floatplanes saw us and we were damned lucky. Maybe they thought they got us or maybe they just don’t give a damn. From now on we’ll travel submerged during the day and on the surface only at night. In the meantime, we’ll stay submerged for a couple of hours to make sure the Japs have cleared the area. It may take us a little longer to get to San Diego, but I’d rather be safe than sunk.”
Only Torelli’s eyes betrayed the fact that he was as frightened as they were. He took an obvious deep breath and the fear disappeared. “We identified two Kongo-class battleships and two aircraft carriers. We were too far away to get a specific make on them, although one carrier might have been the Akagi, but their course said they were headed toward Hawaii. We got off a radio signal, fat lot of good that will do. Hawaii’s got nothing to fight with, at least nothing that flies or floats, and the army in Hawaii will just be a sitting duck. I hate to think what those carrier planes and the battlewagons’ fourteen-inch guns could do to a defenseless city like Honolulu.”
Dane sagged back on his too-small bunk and thought about the Japanese flotilla headed toward Hawaii. What would happen to the people in paradise, he wondered? What would happen to Amanda Mallard?
Amanda and her roommates cowered amid other tenants and passersby in the basement of their two-story frame apartment building while waves of Japanese planes flew over Honolulu and Pearl Harbor.
“There can’t be much left to bomb,” said Grace Renkowski. At thirty-five, she was the oldest of the three roommates. The Japanese planes had been overhead almost constantly since morning. Hawaii was almost defenseless, little more than a punching bag. When the attacks began, they’d watched as a handful of American planes rose to meet the Japanese horde. They’d been saddened and sickened as the brave American pilots had their planes blown from the sky by Japanese Zeros that seemed to dance among them. There were few parachutes and those that did blossom were attacked by the Japanese and shredded, the pilots falling to their deaths.
“Why don’t we have any good planes!” lamented Sandy Watson, the other roommate. She was twenty-three and, like the others, a civilian contract nurse.
Or good leaders, Amanda thought. Somebody should go to jail for this litany of disasters. Why weren’t we prepared when the first attack on Pearl Harbor occurred? She’d been in bed on December 7th after a normal Saturday evening dancing with young officers. She’d awakened to the explosions and the improbable fact that Pearl Harbor was being attacked and the fleet slaughtered before her eyes. Why did so many good young men have to be killed and wounded before somebody woke up to the fact that the Japs wanted to kill us? And now it was even worse and not very likely to change.
The explosions changed in volume. One of the older men in the basement with them nodded solemnly. “Those aren’t bombs, girlies, those are shells. The damned Japs are close enough to shoot at us with their ships.”
Normally, Amanda would have resented being called a girlie, but this was too serious for trivialities. If Japanese warships were close enough to shoot at land-based targets, would the Japanese soon be landing troops? God help them if this was the invasion they all feared and anticipated.
After half an hour, there was silence. The all clear sounded, and they left their shelter and went outside. The area around her apartment was largely untouched, although a few small fires burned and were being attacked by neighbors with brooms and buckets. The old man explained that the fires were probably caused by American shells being shot into the air and coming down on something flammable. The harbor was again in flames as the giant fuel tanks that provided oil, the lifeblood of the fleet, sent enormous clouds of black smoke billowing thousands of feet into the sky. The only good news was that there didn’t appear to be a Japanese landing force approaching the shore.
Shouting and screams distracted them. Scores of people were headed toward a grocery store. The plate glass windows were broken and a small elderly Japanese man was futilely waving a broom at the mob pouring in while others left with armloads of bread, beer, canned goods, and anything else that struck their fancy.
The owner grabbed a looter’s arm and was knocked down. The looter and a couple of his companions kicked and stomped the poor man until he lay bloody and still. A woman, probably the grocer’s wife, emerged screaming. Her face was bloodied and bruised. She fell down beside the injured man and continued to scream. A police siren wailed and the crowd vanished as quickly as it had appeared.