Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th Page 4

  What the hell kind of offensive rush was this? James wondered, but he was now so focused on the game he didn’t have time to analyze.

  Passing through each other, the offensive squads, with wild screams, charged at the poles of their opponents. The boys who were now obviously the defenders braced for the onslaught. Some even climbed on the shoulders of others, ringing the pole adorned with the pennant.

  At nearly the same instant, the offensive charges of both sides collided with the defenders.

  There was no strategy here. No feints, no flanking maneuvers, no organized squads moving to left or right, no diversions, just a head-on assault. The charges on both sides swarmed up onto the defenders.

  And James could see there were no rules. Kicks, punches, judo throws, karate blows were the order of the day. Cadets with bloody faces staggered out of the attack even as their comrades, wild with excitement, pressed in. Cadets standing on the shoulders of others leapt into the air, crashing down into the wild melee.

  The assault on the east side of the field surged up around the pole, shoving aside the defenders, kicking and punching. The flagpole started to waver back and forth as the attackers bodily tried to tear the pole out of the ground and bring it down.

  But then, on the west side of the field, the charge pressed in with wild screams, some of the cadets wearing headbands at the back of the seething mass, shouldering those who showed the slightest reluctance into the fight.

  Seconds later the flag atop the pole on the west was snatched down, the cadet who grabbed it waving it wildly while balanced atop the shoulders of a comrade.

  Whistles echoed and, amazingly for James, within seconds the fight was over. Cadets first coming to attention, bowing to their opponents, then as one extending helping hands to those who were collapsed on the ground, too injured to move, or who had been trampled under in the battle. There was even some backslapping between the opposing sides, leaders of the two teams shaking hands.

  “My God,” James whispered, “if that had been how we played Army-Navy games back in my day, every cadet in the stadium would have swarmed down on the field for one helluva donnybrook.”

  Cecil chuckled loudly. “Definitely not a proper game of cricket.”

  James looked over at his friend and back to the playing field, where victors and losers, all of them filthy, more than a few limping or having to be carried, began to form up, stretcher bearers loading up four boys who were not moving.

  Cricket versus this, he wondered. A glimpse of national character, of how we fight wars?

  “I’ve had boys show up in my English class a couple of hours after one of these, broken arm in a sling, eyes swollen half shut, and not a murmur of complaint, though I could tell the lads were in agony. My first week here, I tried to excuse one of them from class, told him to go to his barracks and rest, and he filled up with tears.

  “It wasn’t tears of pain. I had humiliated him in front of his comrades, implied he didn’t have the guts to take it. A lesson about them I never forgot, and a mistake I never repeated.

  “You know about their swim test?”

  James shook his head.

  “Every summer the entire academy camps out on an island for several weeks,” and he motioned across the bay, “wearing nothing but loincloths. The poor beggars get burned as black as an Indian and live just as primitively. On the last day they swim back here, and James, it’s a ten-mile swim. Good lord, man, that’s half the distance of the Channel in water just as cold.

  “They go off in teams of a hundred. It’s considered a disgrace to leave a comrade behind. Many of these lads have just come from villages inland, and until they go to the island for the summer camp have never swum a stroke in their life; but they go like all the others.

  “Ten miles, I tell you. They have sampans out there with officers on board to pull in someone who is obviously drowning, but if he is pulled in, that’s it. Pardon the pun, but he is washed out. Every year a couple of them die. They just quietly go under without a word, not wishing to shame themselves by calling for help, or they just collapse and die shortly after reaching shore from severe exposure. Believe me, when you witness that, the way they finally come staggering out of the ocean, sunburned from the island, damn near blue from the ocean, but still working as a team and not a word of complaint, you wonder just who these lads will turn into.”

  Cecil looked down at his wristwatch. “Nearly tea time, or would you prefer something a bit stronger?”

  James grinned. “Stronger, but I do have that speech after dinner, and it would not be proper for a serving officer to trigger a diplomatic incident, so let’s stick with the tea.”

  THE SHIMMER OF MOONLIGHT across Hiroshima Bay held a haunting quality, actually reminding James of the old Japanese prints of such scenes as he settled back in his chair, Cecil bringing out the bottle of single malt they had both denied themselves hours earlier.

  With a nod of thanks, James let him pour several ounces. They smiled and held their glasses up.

  “For the King and President, God bless them,” James said, and without any more fanfare he drained nearly the entire glass in two gulps, Cecil following suit.

  “Well, is it fair to say your speech was a bloody disaster?” Cecil said, offering a weak smile.

  James said nothing, looking off. His audience of cadets, to be certain, had been the model of politeness, attentive, eyes fixed upon him, chuckling good-naturedly a few times when he stumbled a bit on his syntax and pronunciation of Japanese, but he knew the talk had been a lead balloon.

  The implication of the Washington Treaty, now over ten years old, the so-called 5–5–3 agreement, had been bald-faced in its intent. For every five capital ships allowed to the Royal Navy and the United States Navy, Japan was limited to three. The rational argument had been that both America and Britain had multiocean responsibilities, even in this period of alleged peace, while Japan’s natural interests were limited to the Pacific.

  It was an asinine agreement, James always thought. Though like many he had real reservations about Japan’s ever-increasing Imperialistic goals, nevertheless, she had indeed been a loyal ally, especially to England in the Great War. Bound by treaty, Japan had declared war on Germany when the show started in 1914, swept the small German enclaves out of the Pacific, and then dispatched a squadron of ships to help Britain in the Mediterranean. At war’s end she had aligned herself with her allies in the expedition to occupy part of Siberia during the Soviet revolution, until all had withdrawn in 1921. Those with a sharp eye toward the geopolitics of East Asia argued that a closer alliance with Japan should be sought as a counterforce to Soviet expansion into China.

  There had been several serious bumps in the situation between America and Japan, dating back to of all things the racism of the city of San Francisco, which had banned Japanese students from its public schools back in 1905; from immigration laws that essentially banned Japanese from settling in America, to the current diplomatic flurry about the takeover of Manchuria. But in general, a broad-thinking Occidental could see the potential of actual cooperation, if handled adroitly.

  The Japanese were as anxious about expanding communism as were most Americans, and the Soviet Union was right on Japan’s back doorstep. With this Stalin now firmly in control and apparently drenching his tortured nation in yet more blood, Japan could be seen as a potential counterforce in the region.

  But the 5–5–3 treaty had thrown a monkey wrench in the works for the time being. James felt as if he were navigating through a mined channel as he delivered his talk, having to adhere to policy, not able to mention the Soviets by name, and trying to emphasize points of agreement, all done in a language he had learned from his wife, a Nisei, half-Japanese, whom he had met when stationed in Hawaii right after the war; thus his knowledge was more colloquial than formal, and he knew he was making mistakes.

  The whole thing had been a bloody embarrassment, not a single question asked by the cadets afterward, a sure sign they had b
een ordered to behave thus.

  The obligatory reception afterward had been polite but relatively short, the various staff of the academy quickly begging off, claiming papers to correct, reports to write, and given the cool reception to James’s speech, Cecil had finally led him out on the excuse that their American guest had endured a most exhausting day and needed to ship out come morning.

  “So, how is it here?” James asked. “I mean really?” He paused and looked around a bit cautiously.

  Cecil laughed and shook his head. “We can talk freely. No one is listening. They would see that as underhanded and rude to a fellow naval officer to try and eavesdrop or wire my place. Really, on a personal level most of the blokes here have a love of His Majesty’s Navy, more than a few of them serving alongside us during the last war. We can talk.”

  James nodded.

  “The lads are a delight to work with, best I’ve ever seen. Our navies could use a dose of them, and that’s no mistake. Most come from the back country, curious, same way you have so many in your navy from the Midwest. Entrance exams are brutally competitive, and as you know more than a few have committed suicide when not accepted.

  “They endure eighteen-hour days with no letup. Usual range of subjects, but strong emphasis as well on either English, German, or Russian. Of course that’s where I come in.

  “English is the most popular, and it does make me wonder is it because their navy is patterned after ours because we helped them build it, even supplied their first ships,” he sighed and took a drink, “or is it because they think the next fight will be with us.”

  “What I would wonder…” James paused, and instinct actually made him stand up, walk to the edge of the veranda to look over the porch, before settling back down.

  “Your houseboy?”

  “Gave him the night off.”

  James nodded.

  “All right, old friend,” Cecil asked, “out with it.”

  “Just that some higher-ups remembered you and I worked together in the war. I was asked to come down here and have a chat with you and see what you think. You have your ear to the ground. What do you think?”

  “Ah, so you might say I was sent here to spy?”

  “Dirty word that,” James replied, imitating Cecil’s clipped style of speech when stirred, “let’s just say, observing.”

  “But first you,” Cecil said, and he reached over, putting his hand on James’s knee. “I’m so sorry about your son, James.”

  James nodded, unable to speak. It had been a year now since his son had died. He knew that if he started to talk about it, he would break down. He coughed shyly, motioning for a refill of his drink, and the two old friends smiled.

  Both could be defined as spies, though their specialty was a new field, of radio signal intercepts and cryptology. It had been their job together in the last war, but in peacetime more than a few of the higher-ups were of the old school that “gentlemen did not read gentlemen’s mail” or for that matter intercept their signals and try to decode them, especially if the other gentleman was allegedly an ally. It was a specialization that was a guaranteed slow track for promotion.

  Cecil looked off, the crescent moon touching the horizon on the far side of the bay. The campus was quiet, lights out having already been sounded.

  He sighed. “It’ll come,” he said softly.

  “Go on.”

  “They think they’re us in a way.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, we bloody well ran riot over the world for a couple of hundred years. Plant the flag, build the Empire, assuage any sense of guilt by spreading the gospel and calling it the white man’s burden, but it was imperialism plain and simple; and now that’s done, we see ourselves as being proper gentlemen having done the right thing in spreading our civilization.

  “You could say we did in a way, but still, it was a grab and we made the most of it.

  “You Yankees did the same, though to a lesser degree. They were too polite in there tonight to ask the question, but just what the bloody hell was America doing in the Philippines anyhow?”

  “We got stuck with it,” James replied a bit weakly, “after beating the Spanish.”

  “And made sure of supplies of rubber, manila, even your busboys for your navy.

  “So these chaps see it as the same. Remember, they are the only, the only non-European nation to have successfully resisted European encroachment. Remember, they thrashed the old czar good and proper back in ’05, and frankly we all cheered them on when they did it. So now they want, as the kaiser used to say, ‘their place in the sun.’”

  “Manchuria,” James said.

  “Oh please, stand corrected, dear friend. Remember, it is Manchukuo now.”

  “Still it was a grab.”

  “Who would you rather see have it? Them, that insane Chinese warlord who was terrorizing the place, or the Soviets who were just itching to grab it?”

  James nodded slowly in agreement.

  “You have to remember that there is a big, deep argument underway in this country. The army sees itself as a continental force and is focused on defeating the Soviet Union and conquering China. The navy sees itself as a Pacific power and has focused on defeating you Americans ever since the end of the World War.

  “They don’t let me sit in the courses where they discuss strategy and planning, but it is clear from conversations with both students and faculty that they have been consistently thinking about war with America here at Etajima for over a decade. They think objective reality about resources will force a conflict sooner or later, and they are determined not to be dictated to and dominated by you Americans.

  “England had its advantages when this new age started. We had mountainsides of coal, plenty of iron, the building blocks of empire. But by God if ever there was a spot on this earth not to start an Empire from, it’s Japan. Smaller than Britain, not counting that frozen northern island of theirs, and yet half again the population, barely 20 percent of the land worth trying to farm, no coal, precious little iron, and yet in sixty years they’ve tried with success to leap onto the global stage.”

  “So let them have Manchukuo, if that’s what they want to call it,” James said.

  “Ah, but there’s the rub. Did you Yanks stop at the Mississippi? What about all that land you took from Mexico and then Spain back in ’98? You called it Manifest Destiny and maybe it was. Well, these folks think they have a Manifest Destiny as well.”

  “And that is, in your opinion?”

  “A unified Asia.”

  “Under their dominance of course.”

  Cecil smiled.

  “If it was us, would we want it any other way?”

  James shook his head.

  “And there is the race question. They do ask the logical question, why is Southeast Asia run by the French, the East Indies by the Dutch, you in the Philippines?”

  “So that will lead to war? Damn all, it would be suicide in the end,” James replied.

  “There are far bigger worries for all of us. They might have Manchuria, or whatever they call it, but I dare say the Soviets would love payback for 1905. This little corporal in Germany is getting downright bothersome. Why not play on our side?”

  He said it with passion because there was a personal reason behind this as well. His wife was a Nisei, half-Japanese, a wonderful racial mix so typical of Hawaii, where they had met when he was stationed there in the early twenties. Her father was Portuguese, her mother Japanese, and Margaret had inherited the best of both in terms of intellect, beauty, charm. He had to say, as well, that he was one of the lucky few, truly blessed with a mother-in-law whom he outright adored. His own mother had died giving birth to him, his father was remote, distant, and James sensed deep down resentful of a son who had cost him a wife. So he had grown up with a sense of being alone, until Margaret came into his life and with her a mother who took him in as if he were her own son as well. The thought that Japan was emerging as an enemy was hard to swallow in
a way. How could the people who had given him such a wonderful family ever truly be an enemy?

  Cecil motioned to James’s tumbler, and he nodded agreement for a refill.

  “Oh, there are many in their government, and in their navy, who would fully agree,” Cecil continued, while he poured the scotch. “But it gets strange, to Western eyes. It has to do with race, with the gods, with an image of destiny, with their own individual submersion into a greater whole, a submersion that disdains individual worth for the greater good of the family, of the race, of this mystery of destiny. In some ways each as an individual sees himself as nothing more than a mote of dust tumbling on the wind, and that wind is national destiny. Of himself he is meaningless, but a hundred million such specks of dust, driven by the wind of national destiny, can blast down a castle wall, reshape mountains, change the world.”

  “You are beginning to sound like some of those mystics from your India.”

  Cecil smiled.

  “That’s another problem right there, and believe me, they are quick to point to it and ask if it is alright for England to be in the Raj, then why not they in China, bringing order out of chaos the same way we did a hundred years ago.”

  “Good points,” James said softly, “but damn all, there are rumors about the brutality of their occupation of Manchuria: executions of civilians, beheadings, torture.”

  Cecil nodded.

  “Dare I mention what we did in our not-so-distant past? How we put down the Sepoy Rebellion, or what about your Wounded Knee?”

  “I know, I know,” James said, sadly, “but this is the twentieth century.”

  “Exactly their point, and they want a part of that; and our arguments, when pitched on moral grounds, well, they feel they have the counter. Valid or not, it is their own self-justification, and though we might disagree we must understand that is how they see it.”

  They had been speaking in low tones and therefore the knock on the door was startling. Both stood up, falling silent. James felt a moment of paranoia, wondering if Cecil had been incautious.