1942

CHAPTER 17

Lieutenant Brooks was appalled at the Japanese reaction to his killing of Major Shimura. Still, Jake felt compelled to read the young lieutenant the riot act, which he did with a vengeance.

It had taken Brooks several days to return from Hilo through Japanese patrols that were suddenly out in force. Prudently, he had taken a circuitous route back to the main American camp, and it was only then that he found out about what was being called the Massacre of the Innocents.

“I never thought the Japs would do anything like that,” Brooks had said with sincere contrition. He had never dreamed that he would cause anything so awful to occur, and the news had made him physically ill. He had killed an enemy soldier, which was what he had been trained to do.

“You never thought is right,” Jake had snapped. “Look, I’m sorry your brother was killed in the Philippines, damned sorry, but that doesn’t give you the right to go off and start your own private war. If I’d known you were going to shoot that Jap, I’d have stopped you from leaving camp. That Jap you killed was so stupid he was one of our best allies. Now they’ve replaced him with someone who can actually think, and that’s likely to cause still more people to die.”

“It won’t happen again, sir.”

Jake pushed his face right up to Brooks’s. He was taller than the small, wiry Raider. “Damn right it won’t. You take any actions without my orders and I’ll bust your ass right down to buck private. Is that understood?”

“Yessir.”

“And another thing. I have just promoted Hawkins to the temporary rank of captain. Whether or not I have that authority, I don’t care.

I just want it clearly understood that he’s in command and not you if something should happen to me. Understood?” Brooks’s head bobbed up and down. “Good. You’re dismissed.”

Hawkins came over as Brooks departed, his shoulders slumped in dejection. “Everybody makes mistakes, Colonel, but he made a doozy. A hundred dead people because of his actions is a little hard to take. We gotta help him live with that so it doesn’t destroy him.”

Jake agreed. “I’ll ease up on him tomorrow. You’re right, I don’t want to destroy him as an officer or as a person. Let him spend a night thinking about it, though. Now, let’s talk about our new member. Who the hell is Charley Finch, and why does he make me uncomfortable?”

Hawkins chuckled. “For one thing, if he’s been on the lam for a couple of months, like he says, he looks too well fed and plump to me.”

“Right. Did you know him before the war?”

“I knew of him, but I never really met him. I saw him a few times at the NCO club and knew he was in supply, but we never hung around.”

“What was his reputation?”

“A low-level crook and overall shady character, which may explain why he is so plump and juicy. He’s one of those guys who could hustle his way out of anything, so he may have been doing exactly what he said he was, being fed and cared for by locals and by stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down.”

Finch had arrived the day before. He claimed that he’d escaped from a Japanese work gang a couple of months earlier, and that his fellow prisoners had all been shipped to Japan. He said he’d been hidden by sympathetic Hawaiians on Oahu who’d helped him make his way to Maui, where he’d stayed with an old Hawaiian woman who’d cared for him and kept him hidden. Then, as Finch explained it, she died and he made his way to Hawaii all by himself in a small boat he’d swiped.

“It’s a great story,” Jake said, “and there’s nothing that can be verified. His fellow prisoners are gone, the old lady’s dead, the boat’s stolen, and he’s already said he can’t quite recall the people on Oahu who helped him because he was so sick at the time. He may not be a yachtsman, but he just could be good enough to take a small boat from Maui to Hawaii. It’s less than thirty miles from one island to the other, and I don’t think he’d ever even be out of sight of land on a sunny day.”

Hawkins grinned. “I take it you don’t trust him.”

“Hawk, the old army was a small club, and the garrison on Oahu was an even smaller chapter of that club. Everyone knew everybody else, and, yeah, I knew about good ol’ Sergeant Charley Finch. Hell, everybody did. You’re right, he was a minor crook and a total shit. Keep this under your rusty helmet, Hawk, but he was under investigation by the FBI.”

Hawkins whistled. “Why?”

“Stealing army stores and selling them. I got involved in my intelligence capacity because the FBI thought he was selling weapons to gangsters and other people who didn’t like the United States.”

“Jesus, now what?”

“Well, we gotta remember that he was never arrested, never indicted, never tried, and never found guilty. Who knows, he may be innocent of anything major.”

Jake thought of the supplies he’d “liberated” before the surrender. Did they make him different from Finch? “At any rate, he’s the type of person who actually could show up fat and healthy when everyone else is starving, and that doesn’t necessarily make him a crook. In fact, it might make him the kind of cunning son of a bitch who could help us.”

“Okay, Colonel Jake, then what does it really make him?”

“Someone we watch very carefully, Hawk. Either he’s telling the truth, or he’s doing things I don’t even want to think about.”

Hawkins took a deep breath as he realized what Jake was implying. “The killing on Lanai? Those seven guys who got caught by the Japs? You think he had something to do with that?”

“It’s almost too awful to contemplate, isn’t it? I can’t believe a fellow American would have anything to do with it, but I can’t get the possibility out of my mind. Nobody has any proof, and you can’t send somebody to jail on my hunches. On the other hand, if Sergeant Finch is such a damned great hustler, he may be an invaluable asset to us. We’re gonna use him, Hawk, but”-Jake grinned tightly-”we’re going to watch him like a hawk.”

The giant flying boat wasn’t particularly difficult to get or keep airborne, although keeping it on the straight and narrow in a stiff desert wind was a challenge, even for a skilled pilot like Colonel Jimmy Doolittle.

Below him were a series of rectangles painted in white on the flat and barren ground east of San Diego. They were approximately one thousand feet by one hundred feet and were intended to simulate a very large ship, and a ship that was anchored. Doolittle and Nimitz had concluded that anyone could hit a tank farm full of large and combustible oil storage tanks. It would take real skill to hit a carrier if, by chance, one was in Pearl Harbor at the time of the strike.

The priorities were ironically like those given the Japanese on December 7. First were the carriers. In their absence, the oil storage tanks. Nowhere on the list were battleships. Even if there were battlewagons in Pearl, they were to be ignored in favor of the carriers and the oil storage facilities. My, Doolittle thought, how the mighty have fallen. His personal opinion was that battleships were particularly dramatic dinosaurs that could do damage only if they were permitted to get within range. The purpose of a plane was to keep them out of range and to sink them.

After numerous attempts, Doolittle and the other pilots had come to the conclusion that the Boeing Model 314 flying boat was a lousy bomber, and that hitting any target was extremely difficult.

Of course, if they’d been able to use one of the new, secret Norden bombsights, it might have been different. High command, however, had nixed that idea. Too much chance of the bombsights falling into enemy hands, they’d said, which pretty much told him what they thought of his chances for survival.

This conclusion was further reinforced when Doolittle was informed that he would be promoted to brigadier general on his return, and not before. He understood fully. Enough generals had been killed or captured in this war. They did not need another one for the Japanese press to trumpet as a triumph. Colonels, even bird colonels, were a dime a dozen.

The massive plane came in over the target at five hundred feet. Five other planes flew at the same height over other, similar rectangles.

The original eight planes had been reduced to six because of maintenance problems and had been cannibalized for parts.

The bombardier signaled and released the bags of flour that served as dummy bombs. The plane shuddered slightly as the bombs were dropped, and Doolittle pulled hard to lift her out of harm’s way. In his mind he could visualize scores of antiaircraft guns shooting at him, while a dozen Zeros streaked downward to blow him out of the sky. He decided that he must have been nuts to have volunteered for this.

“Got some hits,” exulted Bart Howell from the tail of the plane. The skinny little engineer was usually airsick, but this time he actually looked happy. Then Doolittle saw the caked puke on the front of his coveralls. Doolittle laughed. Howell was giving his all for his country, even his lunch.

Howell had worked day and night to install and then modify the bomb chutes, and those efforts had caused Doolittle’s and the other pilots’ impression of him to increase immeasurably. So what if he sometimes was a pompous jerk; the pompous jerk knew what he was doing.

“This is the right altitude, isn’t it?” Howell asked.

“Yeah,” muttered Doolittle, “five hundred feet.” There had been a number of attempts at altitudes that were higher and safer, but the only consistent hits came from flying low. It was almost treetop level, only there wouldn’t be any trees on the ocean. Five hundred feet was almost tantamount to suicide unless something happened to distract the fighters. With surprise on their side, they might just be able to make it through the antiaircraft storm, but the Zeros would follow them and swat them into the sea. “God help us all,” said Doolittle.

Sergeant Charley Finch thought that he might just have outsmarted himself. Local Hawaiians had been very helpful in getting him in touch with someone who got him in contact with others who finally took him to the American camp. No one was suspicious of him until he actually made it to the American base and realized that the commanders were people he knew personally or had heard of.

Somehow, Captain Jake Novacek had gotten promoted to light colonel, and Sergeant Will Hawkins was, even more incredibly, a captain in this ragtag army. Neither event boded well in Finch’s opinion. Novacek had been in intelligence, G-2, which probably accounted for his suspicious nature, and Hawkins had been one of the straight shooters who’d always looked down on Finch’s schemes. It was unfortunate, but there was little he could do about it right now.

What Novacek had done was very impressive. The camp was well organized and the people well armed and disciplined. Finch was afraid it would be a little tougher nut to crack than had been anticipated. The presence of marines and army personnel meant that he could be in grave danger should the Japanese find the place and attack. These weren’t the confused and lost souls he’d led to destruction on Lanai.

Finch was pleased that Novacek had assigned him to work with the storage of supplies. Other than being a natural fit because of his background, the task enabled him to figure out how the American force was organized. It also surprised him just a little to realize that he now thought of the Americans as “them” and not “we.”

Finch hoped his position would give him a chance to feed himself a little better than the rations that were provided. Despite the fact that Hawaii was fertile and grew just about anything, food was a chronic problem. The guerrillas did grow crops in a manner intended to make the fields look wild, and they did get other supplies from sympathetic and supportive locals, but they seemed to be always on the edge of scarcity.

In one regard, Finch gave Novacek grudging respect. The group he was with was the central command, but there were satellite enterprises that were very important, and about which he could find out very little. The problem was that only a handful of people knew what they did and where they were, and he wasn’t yet one of them.

He’d figured out that there was a radio station somewhere nearby. Hell, that had been common knowledge way back with Omori. But something else was going on that required a lot of material, and he didn’t know what it was. There were some disturbing references to airplanes that couldn’t possibly be true. Novacek did not have an air force, so what were they talking about?

Or could they? He had to find out. If Novacek’s force was planning something big, Finch had to find out so he could tell Goto and Omori. If he could do that, then he could count on an even bigger reward.

It occurred to him that the fact that the Americans were dispersed would likely mean there would be survivors when the Japanese finally acted on his information and attacked. That would be yet another good reason for his not ever returning to the United States. He laughed. As if he needed another one.

The only other disturbing thing about the camp was the virtual lack of women. What few there were either native Hawaiian or Chinese, and he’d had his fill of those. The only white woman was the widow of some navy guy, and she spent as much time as possible around Novacek, who was very possessive about her. That meant she was very much off-limits. Novacek was a burly guy who’d rip the arms off anyone who touched her.

Besides, Finch knew who she was. Alexa Sanderson was the bitch Omori had been fucking back on Oahu. She was okay as far as looks went but definitely not his type. She was too tall and too elegant, as well as too strong willed for him. He grinned. Omori had done all right by Charley Finch after the Lanai job-he’d seen to it that he’d had the services of one very classy American blonde.

Even though Admiral King had flown in a private plane from Washington, and thus managed to avoid the abominable hassles of travel, he was tired and more irritable than usual.

He finished reading the report and almost threw it across the table, where Admirals Nimitz and Spruance watched tolerantly.

“This is bullshit,” King finally said. “This isn’t an offensive or a counterattack. Hell, it doesn’t even qualify as a raid. It’s a fucking pinprick if it works and not even that if it doesn’t. I expected a plan, not a stunt like this.”

Nimitz was unfazed. “It’s the best we can do without a real fleet.”

King’s eyes flashed angrily. “That is not my fault. If I had my way, every ship in our navy would be over here fighting the Japs instead of helping the goddamned British. And it’s damned sure not my fault that you lost two carriers in the Coral Sea.”

The battle of early May had been the first in which the combatant ships had not seen each other. It had been entirely fought by carrier planes. The Lexington had been sunk in the fighting, while the badly damaged Yorktown had foundered and sunk while limping back to San Francisco. Had she been able to go only the shorter distance to Pearl Harbor, she might have made it. Most of her crew and almost all of her pilots had been rescued, but the task force commander, Admiral Frank Fletcher, was among the missing. The Yorktown was yet another casualty from the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent loss of Hawaii.

The Americans were certain they’d sunk one Japanese carrier and damaged two others. More important, they’d stopped Japan’s thrust toward Australia. Nimitz and Spruance were satisfied with the outcome, although it meant that the United States in the Pacific was almost as totally out of carriers as it was of battleships.

“All right.” King sighed, his anger spent. “What do you need?”

Nimitz answered. “Hornet and Enterprise are all we’ll have available for the next round. I want more carriers. All of them.”

King snorted. “You don’t want much, do you? Roosevelt wants them in the Atlantic when we invade German-controlled North Africa in November, and I don’t have to tell you how important it is that we succeed. As much as I opposed it, North Africa’s a go, and a defeat there would knock us back a long ways.”

Nimitz and Spruance had long heard the rumors that an attack was pending, and now it was confirmed. It meant that they had only a small window of opportunity for action in 1942, but, if that was what FDR wanted, that was what the president would get.

Nimitz pressed that point, and King took a deep breath. “All right. You get Saratoga, Wasp, and Ranger, but on one condition. They must not be unduly risked, and they must be returned to the Atlantic theater by mid-September.”

“They won’t be risked,” Spruance said. “No carrier will move against the Japanese unless the pinpricks we’re devising actually work.”

King was far from convinced. “You think they can?”

Nimitz answered. “I’m reminded of a story I read about a wasp or hornet, or maybe even a bee, getting inside a moving car with four people in it. When everyone tried to swat the pesky little insect, the car lost control and crashed. All four were killed and the wasp flew away. In fact,” he said with a slight smile, “I’ve just decided to rename this pinprick Operation Wasp. It fits marvelously and sounds better than Operation Cork.”

“I just hope you’re right,” King said. “At least it does look like the Japs will be coming to Hawaii.”

Listening stations in the United States had decoded diplomatic messages to the effect that the annexation of Hawaii was going to occur in midsummer. It stood to reason that the Japanese would make it an impressive show, and that meant the presence of a sizable portion of their fleet.

“At the very least,” Nimitz continued, “we should be able to embarrass them with a raid on the fuel tanks. At the best, we might actually do great damage. But rest assured, our carriers will not move unless there is an excellent opportunity for success. If there is little or no chance, our fleet will not move from Samoan waters. At the worst, we will have sacrificed nothing more than a few dozen brave men, but it will not be a catastrophe. With a little bit of luck, we could hide the fact of the loss for years.”

Nimitz didn’t like having to make that last statement, but he understood the realities. Failure was an orphan, and the United States couldn’t afford to have another debacle like Pearl Harbor.

“Do I know everything I should about this venture?” King asked.

Spruance chuckled. “Hell, we’re still making it up as we go along.”

Nimitz’s eyes twinkled. “Thanks for the carriers, Ernie; now, what about escorts? Same terms as with the carriers. We’ll get them back to you in September and we won’t risk them.”

“What do you want?”

“Battleships, Ernie. I want the North Carolina, Washington, South Dakota, and Indiana. You know that the Japs will show up with at least the Yamato to go along with their carriers. They didn’t build that monster to put her in storage. If she’s there, I want revenge for the Pennsylvania. No, we’re not going to set up a duel. I just want surface protection for the carriers that’ll pack a wallop if we need it.”

A task force built around five carriers and four battleships would be a powerful one, but still much weaker than what the Japanese could put against them. It would also be much smaller than the fleet the United States had under construction and would have afloat in a year or two if they wished to wait that long. They didn’t.

“The Indiana won’t be ready by then,” King said and ventured a small smile. “Maybe I can do something else for you.”

Colonel Omori sat in the back of his car as it rolled slowly down the almost deserted streets of Hilo. The few people who remained were that handful of Hawaiians and Japanese who were sympathetic to the Japanese cause, or who pretended to be that way. Omori trusted none of them. The rest, the majority, had gone inland to the other villages and hamlets to escape the possibility of yet another massacre. Omori gestured, and the driver stopped quickly. The colonel got out, and Lieutenant Goto, who’d been in the front seat, quickly stepped alongside him.

Omori looked toward the mountains that glared down on Hilo. The colonel could almost feel enemy eyes on them. If the Americans ever got artillery on the hills, they could pound the small Japanese garrison into little pieces. The two Japanese destroyers at anchor in Hilo Bay gave him some comfort. Their four-inch guns would return fire at anyone who chose to insult Japan.

At least for now they would, which made it all the more imperative that the Americans be rooted out. The size of the island and the difficult terrain-forested and nearly jungle on the Hilo side, barren and craggy on the other side-meant it would be impossible to find the Americans without help.

Omori scuffed idly at a pebble with his boot. He fully understood the difficulty Goto was having in finding the Americans. “And your Mr. Finch, has he produced?”

Goto shrugged. “He’s disappeared into the interior, and we believe he’s in contact with the Americans. What he’s found out, we won’t know until he gets back to us.”

“The American presence is as big an insult as is this abandoned town,” Omori said with a touch of petulance. “Tell me, are the Americans here capable of doing anything to disrupt the coming arrival of the fleet?”

“Then it’s true?”

“Indeed. Yamamoto will personally command a major force that will arrive in late July. They will bring with them an official proclamation declaring the Hawaiian Islands to be part of Japan. Now, what can the Americans do about it?”

Goto pondered a moment. “When will the navy’s arrival be announced?”

“When the fleet arrives, and not sooner.” Omori did not need to add that, after that, the entire world would know.

“Then the Americans will be helpless. They might try something childish to embarrass us here, but they have no military capability that would hurt us.”

This was Omori’s assessment as well. Yet he was not totally comfortable with the almost cavalier dismissal of the American guerrillas. The fact that they survived, perhaps even thrived, pointed to a sophisticated organizational and support structure. They should not be taken lightly.

A part of him recalled that, somehow, Alexa Sanderson had been spirited away. Omori was confident that she was with the Americans in the hills of the Big Island. When he found her, she would be turned over to Goto, and, when that sadist was through, the rest of the army could have her. She had caused him embarrassment and aggravation beyond her usefulness. More important, her presence on the island meant that she’d had help on Oahu. The Americans had to be destroyed.

Goto read his mind. “Do you want Captain Kashii to send patrols out farther into the hills? The captain would very much like to go chasing the Americans.”

Omori nodded. “Yes. Keep the Americans worried that a Japanese patrol could be right behind them.”

Even as he said it, the colonel knew it was wishful thinking. An entire army could hide in the hills and crags that glowered down on him. It was an amazing island. There were even active volcanoes and flowing lava out there. How the devil did an army deal with a lava flow? The Americans would be found either through Finch’s treachery or blind, dumb luck. He’d put his money on Finch.

Kentaro Hara laughed and bowed. “How do I look? Am I not a worthy soldier of the empire of Japan?”

Akira Kaga laughed at his friend’s antics. “No, you do not look like a Japanese officer. For one thing, you are too neat.”

Hara pretended to be hurt. “I have my pride.”

“And so do the Japanese soldiers,” Akira answered seriously, “but they show it in different ways, and looking slovenly is one of them. The true warriors in the Japanese army are contemptuous of spit and polish. They prefer to affect the look of a rugged warrior, a seasoned campaigner; thus, their uniforms always look like they’ve been stolen from someone larger and slept in for a great while.”

Hara sighed as he took off the Japanese army tunic that had been made for him by one of several seamstresses employed to copy Japanese uniforms. It had been determined that it would be easier and safer to have them made by trusted people. Thefts would alert the Japanese to the fact that not everyone wearing a uniform was on their side. The conspirators’ infiltration was something they wanted kept hidden for as long as possible.

Akira was pleased with the progress they’d made. Already there were enough uniforms to outfit thirty volunteers, and he had more than that ready to fight.

“All right,” Hara said. “I’ll get something that doesn’t fit, but I won’t be happy. It won’t be up to my standards.”

“Screw your standards.” Akira laughed. Behind him, his father entered the room.

“A marvelous display,” the older man said.

“Too bad they don’t allow one-legged officers in the Japanese army,” Akira said with regret. Although several of his volunteer force had experience in the national guard, none had served in the Japanese army and none had seen combat. His men would have the benefit of his experience, but he could not lead them.

“Is there still no word as to what will be expected of us?” Hara asked.

“None,” Toyoza answered honestly. The Americans on the Big Island had been silent about what a rebel force of Japanese might be used for. The message sent to Colonel Novacek had been received with surprise and apparent delight. The colonel had responded that he would be happy to coordinate with a force of Japanese-Americans at a time in the not too distant future.

But as to what, when, and where, Novacek had not said. Either he was being prudently tight-lipped regarding his plans or he hadn’t figured out what to do. Toyoza Kaga suspected the latter. A force that could pass as Japanese was not to be squandered.

“Weapons,” Akira said. “What good are all the uniforms in the world if we don’t have weapons?”

“The Americans said they would take care of that,” his father said tolerantly. Again, just how they would accomplish this had not been mentioned.

“And I want to lead, Father,” Akira said angrily. “No, I have to lead.” Toyoza Kaga nodded his head sadly. He had regained his son and did not want to risk losing him again. “I know. It will be done. I’ve contacted a doctor who will direct the making of an artificial leg for you. You won’t be able to run or march very well, but, yes, you will be able to lead.”