Joe Steele

XX

It was over. Half of it was over, anyhow. Along with everybody else in Washington, Charlie had gone nuts with joy over reports from German radio that Adolf Hitler had died fighting against the Russians in the blazing ruins of Berlin. Shortly afterwards, Radio Moscow claimed he’d done no such thing-he’d blown out his own brains in his fortified bunker when it finally dawned on him that the Nazis wouldn’t win their war and the Reich wouldn’t last a thousand years.

A few days later, the Germans surrendered unconditionally. A reporter wound up in trouble for breaking the story before it became official. As an ex-reporter with a brother who’d got in trouble for what he’d reported, Charlie sympathized. He still thought the guy was a prime jerk, though.

Slippery to the last, the Germans tried to give up to the Americans and English but not to the Russians. On Joe Steele’s orders, Omar Bradley told them they could do it the way the Allies wanted or they could go back to fighting everybody. They did it the way the Allies wanted. They even staged a second ceremony in Berlin for the Red Army’s benefit. Marshal Koniev signed the surrender there for Leon Trotsky. The guns in Europe fell silent after almost six years.

Joe Steele went on the radio. “This is victory, victory in Europe, V-E Day,” the President said. “And victory is sweet, no doubt of that. It is all the sweeter because it came against such a cruel and heartless foe.”

Charlie grinned when he heard that. He’d suggested it. The reports on what the Nazis had done in their prison camps and their death camps still seemed impossible to believe. How could a famously civilized country go mad like that? But photos of skeletal corpses piled like cordwood had to be real. No one could be sick enough to imagine such things. No one except Hitler’s thugs, anyhow. And they hadn’t just imagined them. They’d made them real.

“And it is all the sweeter because it comes after so much pain and heartache,” Joe Steele went on. “And so we deserve to celebrate-for a little while. Only for a little while, though. Because our job is not done. Japan still fights against the forces of freedom and democracy.”

He could say that with a straight face, because Russia and Japan remained neutral to each other. Trotsky had promised Joe Steele and Churchill he would enter the war against the Japs. Of course he would-he wanted to grab as many goodies from the chaos convulsing Asia as he could. But he hadn’t done it yet.

“Unless the Japanese follow the German lead and yield to our forces without conditions, we will treat their islands as we have treated Germany.” Joe Steele sounded as if he looked forward to it. “We will rain fire and destruction from the skies upon them. We will make a desert, and it will be peace. If the Emperor of Japan and his servants do not think we are determined enough to follow through, they are making the last and worst in a long string of disastrous mistakes. The fire-bombing of Tokyo month before last was only a small taste of what they have to look forward to.”

Charlie whistled softly. Beside him in the front room of their apartment, Esther nodded. Hundreds of B-29s had dropped tons of incendiaries on Tokyo in March. They’d burned-cremated was a better word-more than ten square miles in the heart of the Japs’ capital. Tens of thousands died. Outside of Japan, nobody could be sure how many tens of thousands. Charlie didn’t know if anyone inside Japan could be sure, either.

“So celebrate, Americans, but carry on. I know we will fight as well and as bravely in the Pacific as we did in Europe. I know that victory will be ours there as well,” Joe Steele said. “And I know our country will be a better place once peace returns. Thank you, and God bless America.”

“Like he said, one down, one to go,” Charlie said.

“The big one down, as far as I’m concerned. Hitler wanted the whole world, and he came too close to getting it,” Esther said. “I had cousins and aunts and uncles in Hungary. I don’t know how many of them are still alive. I don’t know if any of them are.”

“Mike’s still in the Pacific somewhere,” Charlie said quietly. “If the Japs don’t quit, we’ll need an invasion that’ll make the one in France look like a day in a rowboat on the Lake in Central Park.”

“There is that,” she said. “I hope he’s all right, too. But that’s all we can do, hope, same as with my kin. The Japs are never going to beat the United States, though, never in a million years. Hitler. . If he’d flattened Trotsky fast, the way he tried, he might have got England, too. Then it would have been our turn. Oh, maybe not right away, but he wouldn’t have waited real long.”

That all sounded disturbingly likely to Charlie. Likely or not, though, it wouldn’t happen now. Because Hitler couldn’t do what he’d wanted to do, other things would happen instead. Charlie said, “Instead of Hitler, Joe Steele’s watching Trotsky and the Reds.”

“And Trotsky’s worth watching.” Esther sounded sad. “Nothing big will happen between us and the Russians till we KO Japan. We need each other till then. After that, watch out.”

“Looks the same way to me.” Charlie smiled a crooked smile. “And now that we’ve tied up all the world’s problems in pink string and put a bow on them, what do you say we make some lunch?”

“Sounds good,” Esther said. “We’ve still got some fried chicken from the other night in the icebox.”

“Yum! But what will you eat?” Charlie said. Laughing, she poked him.

* * *

Mike gnawed on a D-ration bar. They were what the Army gave you to eat when you didn’t have anything else. They were slabs of chocolate made to keep pretty much forever. They tasted something like a Hershey bar and something like a birthday candle. The wax or tallow or whatever it was made them chew like no chocolate bar you’d eat if you didn’t have to.

Rain poured down. Mike’s foxhole had six inches of water in it. It had started raining on Okinawa several days earlier, just after soldiers and Marines had beaten back a Jap counterattack from the Shuri Line. By all the signs, it could keep right on pouring for the next week, too. The downpour didn’t make the war move any faster.

He’d heard about men who drowned in foxholes like this. His other choice was to stand up. If he did, the Japanese soldiers still in the Shuri Line would shoot him. They’d given up most of Okinawa without a big fight, but they were hanging on ferociously here in the mountainous south. The Americans had to dig them out one foxhole, one strongpoint, one tunnel at a time-and to pay the price for doing it.

Tarawa. Saipan. Angaur. Iwo Jima. Now Okinawa. Gnawing away on the hard, waxy chocolate, Mike thought, I am a fugitive from the law of averages. He had a Purple Heart with two oak-leaf clusters. He couldn’t imagine going through the fights he’d been through without getting hurt. The miracle was, he’d come through them without getting maimed for life or killed. Damn few of the guys he’d trained with outside of Lubbock were still in there fighting. They’d been used, and they’d been used up.

Miracles did happen, of course. They didn’t always happen to the good guys, either. Hitler had been a runner during the last war. He’d taken messages from the officers to the front-line trenches and back again, the kind of thing you had to do before there were radios and field telephones in every company. The usual life expectancy for a runner was measured in weeks. Hitler had done it all through the war. He’d got gassed once, not too badly, but that was it.

And much good it did him in the end. He was sure as hell dead now, and the Nazis had thrown in the sponge. Mike had heard that just before the last Jap counterattack. He’d been dully pleased, and that was about it. The enemy in front of him was not in a surrendering mood.

Eventually, the rain would stop. Eventually, the fighting would pick up again. Eventually, in spite of everything the Japs here on Okinawa could do, they’d be exterminated. The Americans had too many men, too many guns, too many tanks, too many planes, too many bombs.

Suppose I’m still alive and in one piece when that happens, Mike thought. What comes next?

Motion seen from the corner of his eye distracted him. He swung his grease gun towards it. He’d picked up the submachine gun on Iwo. For the kind of close-quarters fighting the punishment brigade did, it was better than an M-1. If you sprayed a lot of lead around, some of it would hit something. That was what you wanted. (He’d also picked up his third stripe on Iwo, not that he cared.)

But this wasn’t a Jap. “Jesus fucking Christ, Captain!” Mike burst out. “Get down in here! I almost drilled you!”

Luther Magnusson slid into the hole with him. He was all over mud. The Japs couldn’t have seen him. But moving around above ground this close to the Shuri Line was dangerous. Machine guns and mortars meant they didn’t have to see you to kill you. They could manage just fine by accident, or by that goddamn law of averages.

“Good,” Magnusson said. “I was looking for you.”

“Oh, yeah? How come?” A lot of the time, you didn’t want an officer looking for you. But Magnusson was all right, even if he did still drink like a fish every chance he got. By now, they’d been through a hell of a lot, and a lot of hell, together. So many familiar faces gone. Magnusson was lucky, too, if you wanted to call this luck.

“Got something for you.” The captain pulled a brand-new twenty-pack of Chesterfields, the kind you bought in the States, out of his breast pocket. The cellophane around the paper kept them dry and perfect. “Here you go.”

“You didn’t have to do that!” Mike yipped, which was an understatement. Magnusson had risked his life to deliver these cigarettes.

“No big deal,” he said. Considering life as they lived it, he might not have been so far wrong.

“Well, smoke some with me, anyway.” Mike draped a dripping shelter half over their heads so the downpour wouldn’t drown their cigarettes. Magnusson’s Zippo-painted olive drab to keep the sun from shining off the case and giving away his position-worked first time, every time. They puffed through a couple of fresh, fragrant, flavorful Chesterfields apiece. Then Mike said, “Those were terrific! Where’d you get ’em?”

Magnusson jerked his thumb back toward the north. “Took ’em from a colonel-no P, natch. He didn’t need ’em any more. I figured they might as well not go to waste.”

Yeah, real colonels got all kinds of goodies men in punishment brigades never saw. Fat lot of good that had done this one. He’d been brave to come up to the front with his men. Now he wasn’t brave. Now he was just dead.

After one more cigarette, Mike asked, “How many of the old guys you think’ll be left after we invade Japan?”

Magnusson looked at him. Along with being dirty, his face was also stubbly. So was Mike’s. The closer you got to the front, the less time you had to worry about stupid things like how you looked. “You sure that’s the question you wanna ask?” the captain said at last.

“Uh-huh.” Mike nodded. “It’s what I was thinking about when you went and dropped in at my mansion here.” Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived in a mansion for real just about his whole life. And what had that won him? An end even nastier than most soldiers got, which was really saying something.

“Mansion, huh?” Mike squeezed a short chuckle out of Luther Magnusson. After a beat, the company CO went on, “Well, a few of us may still be hanging around. Or else none of us. Me, I’d bet on none, but I could lose. War’s a crazy business.”

“Man, you got that right,” Mike said. “Okay, thanks. Pretty much the way I read the odds, too, but I wanted to see what somebody else thought. Other side of the coin is, we may all be gone before Okinawa’s over with.”

Magnusson leaned toward him under the shelter half and kissed him on the cheek. Mike was so caught off guard, he didn’t even slug him. “I couldn’t resist,” the captain told him. “You say the sweetest things.”

Mike told him what his mother could do with the sweetest things. To manage all of it, she would have needed more native talent, as it were, and more stamina than God issued to your garden-variety human being. “In spades,” Mike added. “You can get off this fucking island with a Section Eight.”

“Nah.” More seriously than Mike had expected, Magnusson shook his head. “It’s as near impossible as makes no difference for anybody from a penal brigade to get a psych discharge. The way the head-shrinkers look at it is, if you weren’t crazy already, you never woulda signed up for an outfit like this to begin with.”

“Oh.” Mike chewed on that, but not for long. He nodded. “Well, shit, it’s not like they’re wrong.” From behind them, American 105s threw death at the Shuri Line. A short round might take out this foxhole instead. Mike didn’t waste time worrying about it. He couldn’t do anything about it, so what was the point? The rain drummed down. He wondered if he could dig a little channel so it wouldn’t get too deep in the hole. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt. That, he might actually manage.

* * *

A couple of weeks after the Army announced the fall of Okinawa, Charlie got a card from Mike, addressed to him at the White House. It was a dirty card, not because it had a naked girl on it but because somebody’s muddy bootprint did its best to obscure the message.

Charlie had to hold the card right in front of his nose to read it. It was short and to the point. Call Ripley! it said. Still here-believe it or not. Underneath that was a scrawled signature and NY24601. Charlie laughed. In spite of himself, the card sounded like his brother. So did sending it where he had.

“That’s good news!” Esther exclaimed when he showed it to her. “Nice somebody’s getting some.” She and her folks weren’t having much luck finding out if any of their Hungarian relatives survived. Magyar officials cared little for Jews. Their Red Army occupiers and overlords cared even less for letters from the United States.

“Half an hour after the mailroom clerk put the card on my desk, Scriabin walked in,” Charlie said. “He asked me, ‘How do you like having a hero for a brother?’”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said it was nice there was one in the family, anyhow. He kind of blinked and went away. Now I’ve got to call my mom and dad. I don’t know how many cards they let those guys send.”

It turned out that the elder Sullivans had also heard from Mike. Their card announced that he was alive and well and doing fine. It was the kind of card you sent to your parents, as the one Charlie had got was the kind you sent to your brother.

“Did you tell Stella?” Charlie asked his mother, figuring she’d miss no chance to rub it in with her ex-daughter-in-law.

But Bridget Sullivan said, “No. Hadn’t you heard? She’s engaged to one of those draft-dodging sheenies she works for.”

“Mom. .” Charlie said. No, his mother and father had never warmed to Jews, no more than they had to.

“Esther is all right,” his mother said. “But the ones Stella works for, that’s just what they are.”

“Whatever you say.” Charlie got off the phone as soon as he could. He relayed a censored version of his mother’s message to Esther.

By the way his wife lifted an eyebrow, she could read between the lines. “Stella didn’t tell me, but I suppose she wouldn’t, all things considered. I hope she ends up happy, that’s all. She never would have dumped Mike if the Jeebies hadn’t taken him.”

“I guess not.” Charlie didn’t want to think anything good about the gal who’d left his brother. Esther was probably right, but that had nothing to do with the price of beer, not to him.

“Let’s hope they knock Japan for a loop before Mike has to go in,” Esther said.

“Amen!” Charlie said. “The Japs, they’re like a boxer on the ropes taking a pounding. The B-29s are flattening their cities one at a time. God only knows why they won’t give up and say enough is enough. Joe Steele doesn’t get it-I’ll tell you that.”

Esther’s mouth narrowed into a thin, unhappy line. “I don’t know how you can stand to work at the White House,” she said. “I can’t understand why it doesn’t drive you nuts.”

He shrugged helplessly. “When I started there, all my other choices looked worse. And you know what? They still do. If I walk away, just tell ’em I quit, you think I won’t go into a labor encampment inside of fifteen minutes? I sure don’t think I won’t. You want to raise two kids on what you’d make without me?”

“I don’t want to do anything without you,” Esther answered. “But I don’t want your job to wear you down the way this one does, either.”

Charlie shrugged again. “I like to think I do some good once in a while. Stas and me, we’re the ones who can slow Joe Steele down sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. Scriabin and Kagan and J. Edgar Hoover, all they ever do is cheer him on. If they get a new speechwriter, you can bet your boots he’d be another rah-rah guy. That’d leave Mikoian even further out on a limb than he is already.”

“How does he manage to hang on if he doesn’t see eye-to-eye with most of the people in the White House?” Esther asked.

“Funny-I asked him pretty much the same thing once,” Charlie said. “He looked at me, and he smiled the oddest smile you’ve ever seen in your life. ‘How?’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you how. Because if I go somewhere without my umbrella and it’s raining when I come out, I can dance my way home between the raindrops. That’s how.’”

“Nice work if you can get it-if you can do it, I guess I should say. If he can, good for him,” his wife said. “But when you go out in the rain, you come home dripping wet like a normal person. And I wish you didn’t have to.”

“Well, so do I,” Charlie said. “Now wish for the moon while you’re at it.”

* * *

Mike’s pack weighed him down as he trudged along the wharf to the waiting troopship. He’d landed on Okinawa in April. Here it was six months later, and he was finally getting off the miserable island. That was the good news. The bad news was that the punishment brigade, rebuilt yet again, was going somewhere that promised to be even worse.

Operation Olympic, the brass was calling it. Kyushu. The southernmost Home Island. If Tojo’s boys wouldn’t say uncle, the United States would go in there and take their own country away from them. It would cost a lot of American lives. As one of the Americans whose life it was likely to cost, Mike knew that much too well. But the number of Japs who were going to get killed beggared the imagination.

And if Operation Olympic didn’t convince the Emperor and Company the lesson Joe Steele wanted them to learn, Operation Coronet was waiting around the corner. That would seize Honshu, the main island. From what Mike had heard, something like a million men would go in if they needed that one. How many dead would come out was anybody’s guess.

Mike had a section of his own now-a couple of dozen men to ride herd on. They’d all come into the brigade after he had. Captain Magnusson was still here. Or rather, he was here again. He’d taken a bullet in the leg, but by now he’d had time to recover and risk getting one in a really vital spot.

As the soldiers settled themselves on the crowded bunks, one of them asked, “Hey, Sarge, is it true what Tokyo Rose says?”

“Jugs, if Tokyo Rose says it, bet your ass it ain’t true,” Mike answered. “Which pile of bullshit are you wondering about in particular, though?”

Jugs was properly Hiram Perkins, a Southerner who’d wound up in a labor encampment because-he said-somebody with connections had taken a shine to his wife. It was possible; people went into the encampments for all kinds of reasons. Mike wouldn’t have cared to guess if it was true. The way Perkins’ ears stuck out gave him his nickname. He said, “The one where she says the Japs’ll spear us if they don’t shoot us.”

“You’ve got a grease gun, don’t you?” Mike said.

“No, Sarge. Got me an M-1.”

“Okay. Either way, you can shoot anybody who comes after you with a spear before he sticks you, right?”

“I reckon so, yeah.”

“Well, all right, then. You won’t get speared unless somebody catches you asleep in a foxhole or something.”

Jugs worked that through. Mike could practically see the gears turning inside his head. They didn’t turn very fast; Jugs wasn’t the brightest ornament on the Christmas tree. He finally said, “That makes sense. Thanks, Sarge. I purely don’t like me no pig-stickers.”

“Other thing is,” Mike said, “if the Japs do come at us with spears, it’s because they don’t have enough rifles to go around. So let’s hope they do. The easier they are to kill, the better I like it.”

He wondered how many kamikaze planes the enemy had left. They’d been troublesome around Okinawa. Mike figured the Japs would throw everything they could at a force invading the Home Islands.

Later, he also wondered if he’d jinxed things. Less than half an hour after kamikazes crossed his mind, the troopship’s antiaircraft guns started bellowing. Down in the bowels of the ship where the enlisted men waited out the passage from Okinawa to Kyushu, they swore or prayed, depending on which they thought would do more good.

In the bunk across from Mike, another Catholic worked a rosary. Mike still more or less believed, but not that way. God was going to do what He was going to do. Why would He listen to some stupid human who wanted Him to do something else instead?

No flaming plane with a bomb under its belly slammed into the troopship. Either the gunners shot it down, or it missed and smashed into the sea, or the pilot was aiming at some other ship. The Japs were terribly, scarily, in earnest. The way their soldiers fought showed that. But kamikazes? Didn’t you have to be more than a little nuts to climb into a cockpit and take off, knowing ahead of time that you weren’t coming back? The things some people would do for their country!

Mike started to laugh. What he’d done for his country was volunteer for a punishment brigade. And his country had rewarded him how? By sending him to hell five different times. It hadn’t managed to kill him off yet, so here he was, going in for a sixth try at suicide. What was he but a slow-motion kamikaze pilot?

The guy who was telling his beads paused between one Our Father and the next. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Mike said. “Believe me, nothing.”

“Too bad. I could use a yock,” the other soldier said, and went back to the rosary.

When they scrambled down nets from the troopship to the landing craft, that green to the north rising up out of the sea was the Japanese mainland. The punishment brigade was going in on the west side of Kagoshima Bay, a little south of the middle-sized city of Kagoshima. Orders were to push toward the city once they got off the beach. Those orders assumed they would get off the beach. That had to mean the fellow who wrote them was a damned optimist.

To be fair, the USA was doing everything it knew how to do to keep its men alive, even the ones in punishment brigades. Warships shelled the coast, sending clouds of dust and smoke into the air. Fighter-bombers raked the landing zone with machine guns, rockets, and firebombs made from jellied gasoline. From farther overhead, heavier bombers flying out of Okinawa and Saipan and other islands bloodily taken from the Japs dropped high explosives on the enemy.

Mike had been through the preliminaries too many times before to think they’d murder all the Japs waiting to murder him. No matter how much hellfire you rained on the bastards, you killed only a fraction of them. The rest would require more personal attention.

Even now, the Japs were trying to fight back. Shells kicked up waterspouts among the wallowing landing craft. Just by the luck of the draw, a few of those would be direct hits, and God help the poor fools in those boats.

The landing craft mounted.50-caliber machine guns as token antiaircraft protection. Suddenly, all of them seemed to start going off at once. Tracers stitched across the sky.

Some kamikazes went after the bigger warships and freighters. Some pilots decided they’d be doing their duty for the Emperor if they took out a landing craft’s worth of Americans. They weren’t so far wrong, either-if they could do it. A lot of them got shot down trying, or else missed their intended targets and went into the drink.

One flew terrifyingly low over Mike’s landing craft, so low he got a split-second glimpse of the young pilot’s face. Then the kamikaze was gone. Whatever he did, Mike never found out about it.

A swabby manning the.50 that had been banging away at the Jap flyer sang out: “Beach just ahead! Good luck, you sorry assholes!”

Mike would be happy to take all the good luck he could get. The Japs knew the Americans were coming. Kagoshima Bay was the closest part of the Home Islands to Okinawa. You didn’t have to be a military genius to see what that meant. All you had to do was look at a map.

So they’d put mines in the beachside water. A couple of landing craft hit them and went up with a boom. But the one Mike was riding made it onto the sand of Kyushu. Down went the landing gate.

“Come on, you fuckers!” Mike shouted to the men he would lead for as long as he could. He dashed out. They followed. His boots scuffed across the Japanese beach.

People were shooting at him again. That seemed to happen every goddamn time he visited a new island. The only polite thing to do was to shoot back.

A Corsair roared in at just above treetop height, almost as low as the kamikaze had passed over the landing craft. It machine-gunned and napalmed the ground in back of the beach. Mike whooped when the fireball from the napalm sent black, greasy smoke into the sky. He whooped again when he realized a lot less Jap fire was coming in. That Navy plane had done some good.

“Keep moving!” he called. “The farther off the beach we get, the better off we are.” He didn’t know that was true, but he hoped like hell it was.

Enemy fire picked up again. The Japs were doing everything they could to drive the invaders into the ocean. As if to underline that, a soldier stepped on a land mine. What happened next reminded Mike of an explosion in a butcher’s shop. He had nightmares often enough as things were. That memory would only make them worse.

Pretty soon, his boots were thumping, not scuffing. Whenever he saw anything moving ahead, he squeezed off a burst. He assumed anyone alive here would try to kill him with even a quarter of a chance.

You weren’t supposed to shoot civilians. Then again, they weren’t supposed to shoot at you, either. A gray-haired man in farmer’s clothes fired a rifle at him. The range wasn’t long, but the fellow missed. A big puff of white smoke poured from his weapon. Mike greased him before he could duck back into his hole. Then he ran up to make sure the guy was dead.

He was, or he would be in a few minutes. Half his head was blown off. Mike stared at the piece he was carrying more than he did at the horrible wound. It looked like something a farmer might make for himself. The Jap had a powder horn with black powder in it. He had percussion caps. His bullets were half-inch lengths cut from an iron bar. When Mike looked down the barrel, he saw it wasn’t even rifled. It looked to have been made from ordinary metal pipe. The whole setup belonged to 1861, not to 1945.

But by the end of the day he’d seen three or four more of those smoothbore muskets, all in the hands of civilians. Jap soldiers here carried Arisakas, the same as they did everywhere else he’d been. Those weren’t as good as M-1s, but they were reasonable military weapons. The muskets. . You could make stacks of them in a hurry and pass them out to anybody who wanted to use them.

They wouldn’t do much good. They weren’t a whole lot more dangerous than the spears Jugs had heard Tokyo Rose talking about. When you fired one, the smoke that burst from the muzzle yelled Here I am! to the world. With a smoothbore, you’d hit a man out past fifty yards only by luck.

What the makeshift weapons did say was that the Japs aimed to fight to the last man. Their soldiers had done that everywhere Mike had seen. He remembered the women on Saipan throwing their children off the cliffs and then jumping after them. Here in the Home Islands, it would be even worse.

And it was. Some of the people with those muskets weren’t old men who hadn’t gone overseas. Some were young women and girls. You had to shoot them, or they would shoot you. Mike hadn’t puked since Tarawa, but killing a musketeer in a kimono damn near did it for him.

A guy in his section, a burly fellow who went by Spider from a tattoo on his left forearm, didn’t kill one of those lady musketeers. He just wounded her. When he went up to see if he could save her and take her prisoner, she waited till he got close, then blew herself up with a grenade, and him with her.

From then on, the guys in Mike’s section shot first and didn’t ask questions even afterwards. That had to violate the laws of war. He didn’t worry about it. The Japs weren’t playing by the rules, either. If they armed civilians and sent girls into battle, they had to take their chances.

American Sherman tanks clanked forward. Mike was happy to trot along behind one for a while. It was like having a shield that also blew things up and killed things for you. The Japs had only a handful of tanks, and the ones they did have were no match for Shermans. Mike had heard that Shermans were death traps against German panzers, but they were almost unstoppable on this side of the world.

Almost. Something exploded under the one Mike was following. Fire and smoke burst from the hatches. A couple of crewmen got out. The rest. . didn’t. Mike peered under the Sherman’s flaming carcass. An arm hung out of a hole in the ground. A Jap had been in there with an antitank mine or an artillery shell. He’d killed himself when he set it off, but he’d killed the tank, too.

“Fuck,” Mike muttered. He lit a cigarette, wishing he had whiskey in his canteen. How were you supposed to fight people like this? Most military planning assumed that the other guy wanted to live as much as you did. The Japs tore up that rule and danced on it.

Fighting barely slowed down when night fell. The Japs kept coming, wave after wave of them. Mike snatched a little sleep like an animal, curled up in a hollow. Nothing this side of getting wounded would have woken him.

Firepower let the Americans push forward. The only planes in the sky had stars on their wings and fuselages. The Japs fought for Kagoshima street by street, house by house, just the same.

Eating C-rations behind a wrecked building, Mike said, “This must be what Trotskygrad was like.”

One of his men nodded wearily. By then, the section was down to seven guys: less than a squad’s strength. The tired soldier said, “That reminds me, Sarge. I heard the Russians are finally fighting the Japs with us.”

“About time,” Mike said between bites of canned ham and eggs. The ration wasn’t bad if you heated it. You could eat it straight from the can, the way he was, but you’d like it less. He went on, “I sure as hell wish they’d come fight the ones we got here.”

“There you go,” the soldier said.

Something blew up near them. “Here we go,” Mike said, and made sure he had a full magazine on his grease gun.