He could do something for injured men, but not much. He bandaged wounds. He helped get people out of the trenches, and helped lift rubble so others could move them. The doctor who showed up after a few minutes quickly looked overwhelmed.
A fire engine screeched to a stop in front of the barracks. The crew-locals-started playing water on what was left of the building. That wouldn’t do the rifles in there any good. It might keep the ammunition with them from cooking off, though, which would save some casualties.
Private Shiro Wakuzawa pointed west. “Look!” he said.
Shimizu did. Smoke was rising from the direction of the airfield, and from Pearl Harbor just beyond it. The American bombers had indeed hit that area harder than they’d hit Honolulu. A lieutenant started shouting at the firemen: “Don’t worry about this place! Go there! There, do you hear me?” He pointed west, as Wakuzawa had.
The firemen answered him-in English. A couple of them looked Japanese, but nobody admitted to knowing the language. The officer jumped up and down, getting madder and madder. That did him no good at all. He pulled his katana from its sheath. The firemen backed away from him. Almost apoplectic by then, he put it back. He could kill the locals, but he couldn’t get them to understand what he was talking about, and that was what he needed to do.
Other officers started screaming then. “Zakennayo! The rifles!” one of them howled. “How are we supposed to fight the Americans if our rifles are in there?” He pointed at the smoldering, dripping wreckage of the barracks.
Just when all the men with more gold than red on their collar tabs seemed to have lost their heads, a major said, “We have plenty of captured American rifles and ammunition at armories here in Honolulu. We can use them if there aren’t any Arisakas handy. They have better stopping power than our rifles anyway.”
Someone else who’d kept his wits about him added, “Whatever we do, we’d better do it fast. Night is coming, and that will make things harder. Plainly, the Yankees are going to try to invade. We’ll need to be ready to march first thing in the morning.”
That was how Shimizu and his squad found themselves the not too proud possessors of American Springfields. He didn’t much care for his. It was larger and heavier than the Arisaka he was used to: plainly a weapon made for a bigger soldier than the average Japanese.
Yasuo Furusawa worked the bolt on his Springfield a few times. “Smooth-it’s well made,” he said grudgingly.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Shimizu said. “It will kick like a donkey, though.”
“Shigata ga nai, Corporal-san,” Furusawa said, and Shimizu had to nod.
Not getting supper couldn’t be helped, either. The officers had worried about weapons first and everything else only afterwards. Shimizu was sure the regiment would start marching for its position in the northern part of Oahu as soon as it grew light, too. He wondered if he and his men would get breakfast before they set out.
As it happened, they did: rice cooked somewhere else and brought in by horse-drawn wagon. And then, some of the regiment with Arisakas and others with Springfields, all of the men in dirty, often bloodstained, uniforms, they started marching toward the positions prepared for them before the last attempted enemy invasion.
“We should have trucks,” Senior Private Furusawa grumbled. “We could get there in an hour or two if we had trucks.”
But they didn’t-or rather, they had no fuel for them. That fire engine had been the first motorized vehicle-except for airplanes-Shimizu had seen in operation in weeks. And so… they marched.
To get to the Kamehameha Highway, they had to tramp past Hickam Field. A lot of airplanes remained unharmed in their revetments. The only trouble was, at the moment that did them no good at all. The American bombers had plastered the runways for all they were worth. Snorting bulldozers and swarms of men with picks and shovels-POWs, locals forced into labor gangs, and even Japanese-were doing their best to make the field usable again. Their best wasn’t good enough yet.
Shimizu didn’t like what he saw. How were the Japanese going to attack American ships if their planes couldn’t get off the ground? For a moment, fear made his strides light. Then he remembered the aircraft carriers that had let his country conquer Hawaii in the first place. They would take care of the Yankees.
He marched on, feeling better.
JIM PETERSON WAS DEEP in the bowels of the Koolau Range when he heard explosions outside the tunnel mouth. He leaned on his pick for a moment, trying to catch his breath. Any excuse to pause for a little while was a good one. Every time he lifted the pick and bit into the mountainside with it, he wondered if he could do it again. The question was altogether serious. Men quietly fell over and died every day. He’d helped carry Gordy Braddon to a grave-after his usual shift was over, of course. If your knees were bigger around than your thighs, as Gordy’s had been for quite a while, you weren’t a prime physical specimen. By now, there were damn few prisoners in the Kalihi Valley of whom that wasn’t true. It was sure as hell true of him.
The Japanese cared less about the tunnel than they did about working the POWs to death-or beating them to death or shooting them at the slightest excuse or just for the fun of it. The only way they might have got rid of the prisoners faster was by building a railroad through the jungle. Unlike the tunnel, it wouldn’t have gone anywhere, but that might not have stopped them.
More explosions. “What the hell?” Charlie Kaapu said. He stood out in the mob of tunnel rats, because he was twice as strong as most of them. He hadn’t been there long enough to deteriorate badly. And he’d been a civilian before, not a POW, so he’d just gone hungry; he hadn’t been on a starvation diet.
“Sounds like bombs,” Peterson said.
“Lots of bombs, if that’s what it is,” Charlie said, and Peterson had a hard time disagreeing. U.S. raids on Hawaii hadn’t amounted to anything but annoyances up till now. Still more distant booms came echoing up the shaft. Whatever they were, they were too big to be just an annoyance.
The same thought occurred to somebody else. “Can’t be bombs,” a weary but authoritative voice said.
“Wish it could, but there’s too damn many of ’em. How could the USA get that many bombers over Oahu? No way, nohow. Gotta be the Japs blowing something up.”
“They can blow themselves up-or just blow themselves. Don’t make no difference to me,” somebody else chipped in.
When the men with picks paused, the men with shovels couldn’t load rubble for the men with baskets to carry out of the tunnel: there wasn’t any rubble to load. And when the men with baskets didn’t come staggering out of the tunnel at intervals short enough to suit the Japanese, guards came in to find out what the hell was going on. A POW near the tunnel mouth called, “Heads up!” to warn the men at the end of the shaft.
With a groan, Peterson lifted the pick. It seemed to weigh sixteen tons. He swung it back and brought it forward. It bit into the volcanic rock. Grunting, he pulled it free and swung it again.
Moments later, he heard the Japs yelling as they approached. They sounded mad as hell. They often did, but this was worse than usual. And their progress up the shaft could be noted by cries of pain from the prisoners they passed. That meant they were swinging their damn bamboo swagger sticks at whoever was unlucky enough to get within range.
They hadn’t done that much for a while, not inside the tunnel. What were they so jumpy about? Peterson got a crack across the back that sent him staggering into the rough rock wall. That gave him more scrapes and lumps.
Charlie Kaapu got whacked, too. He took it with a grin, which made the guard hit him again. He kept grinning, and hefted his pick. It wasn’t a threat, or didn’t have to be one, for he slammed the pick into the rock a moment later. But that guard found something else to do pretty damn quick.