actually do come. Somehow, we’ve got to stop thinking of the Japs as nearsighted, buck-toothed, and stupid when they’ve proven they are anything but. As it is currently configured and trained, the Hawaiian Division will fight bravely and hard, but it will be defeated should the Japs come in force.”
Collins agreed. It had been his assessment as well. The structure of the Hawaiian Division was a relic of World War I, too unwieldy for the war of maneuver that had just occurred in France and Russia.
To compensate for the lack of mobility, the Hawaiian Division’s four infantry regiments had been dispersed across Oahu. Two were in the approximate central part of the island, at Schofield Barracks; one outside Honolulu; and one in the north of the island, near Haleiwa’s famous beaches.
“You agree with Short’s disposition of the troops?”
“Yes. Under the circumstances, there’s not much else he can do. I might be tempted to have a second regiment near Haleiwa, since that’s the most logical place for a landing and only twenty miles from Pearl Harbor, but, hell, we’ve done a bad job of outguessing the Japs lately.”
“What’s the navy doing?”
“Bailing out as fast as they can. The Pennsylvania’s the only big ship still here, and she’ll leave in a couple of days at the most. We’ve got a handful of subs and a few destroyers, but that’s it. There are a number of damaged ships, but they aren’t going anywhere. A few navy ships are passing through from the Philippines, but all they do is use up what little fuel the navy still has. Most of the navy’s shore facilities are shutting down and moving out too. It’s a mess, Colonel, and from what I hear, the navy still isn’t patrolling more than fifty miles out. The fuel problem again. Of course,” he added ruefully, “not many of our planes are in the air, either.”
“Then the Japs could be right over the horizon, and, once again, we’d know nothing about it.”
“Unless we got lucky, Joe, and we haven’t been lucky in a while.”
Collins was about to say something when an air-raid siren went off in the distance. “Another false alarm?” he asked. “Somebody spot a seagull?”
False alarms were common, and both men waited for the usual all-clear or for the grim sounds of additional sirens. There was a pause; then the chorus of sirens increased to full volume. Behind the wailing could be heard the pap-pop-pap of antiaircraft fire. The Japs had returned.
They were about to run to a shelter when Collins’s phone rang. The colonel answered, listened, and slammed the receiver down. “The Japs are landing on Molokai. Damnit, they fucked us again.”
Now they could hear bombs exploding. “We needed more time,” Collins said angrily.
But we’re not going to get it, Jake thought sadly.
Alexa hadn’t planned to return to teaching so soon, but she had a compelling need to do something. She couldn’t dwell on Tim’s terrible death, and no amount of moping would bring him back to her. She hoped that working with the lively children would bring a degree of normalcy to her life.
Even though she now had the use of Tim’s car, she walked to the school and found that the gentle exercise made her feel good. If she didn’t walk the two miles, she rode her bike, which meant that the gas rationing had not yet affected her.
Father Monroe and the students had welcomed her. She cried just a little when the children presented her with small gifts and welcomed her with hugs.
After a couple of days back at work, she knew that her decision had been the right one. It felt good to be active, particularly with the children, who were so innocent and so very much alive.
The one-room school had only forty students, all of whom were at least partially native Hawaiian, in grades one through eight. After eighth grade, the children, most of whom came from very poor families, either dropped out or continued at McKinley High School. McKinley was so racially mixed that it was often disparagingly referred to as Tokyo High. Although most of the students at Father Monroe’s school were poor, there were a few whose families did have some money and whose children might go on to the University of Hawaii.
Alexa’s favorite student, Kami Ogawa, was one of those who did not seem to have money problems. She was helping Kami with an English essay when the sirens went off, shocking them. For an instant, Alexa froze as the memories of December 7 came flooding back. Then she shook herself free from the past and stood up. “Everybody outside,” she commanded, and her young charges obeyed. Father Monroe followed hastily, a stunned look on his face. In single file, everyone trooped out to the freshly dug trenches behind the bare dirt playground. They weren’t much in the way of an air-raid shelter, but they would have to do.
Alexa and the children squatted in the dirt and kept their heads down while guns barked in the distance. After a while, she peeked over the lip of the trench. As on December 7, the sky above Pearl Harbor was filled with planes and the dirty black dots of antiaircraft shells exploding. Although farther from the naval base, the school was higher in the hills, which gave her a better view than she’d had at her home.
From behind, she heard the sound of planes and started to cower back in the dirt. “Ours,” said Father Monroe. “Go get ‘em,” he yelled in a most unpriestly manner.
Above them flew several dozen fighters headed out to meet the Japs. “P-40s and P-36s,” one of the male students happily informed her. These were followed by six large bombers, which they all knew were B-17s, the superbombers, the Flying Fortresses that were supposed to knock the Japs silly.
“That’s the way,” Father Monroe exulted. “This’ll teach the Japs to take on the U.S. of A.”
Alexa felt good about the counterassault. For once America was striking back instead of allowing itself to be punched out. She quickly realized the incongruity of her current emotions and her deep feelings of pacifism. What had Jake Novacek said about being a pacifist himself when the war was over? She was certain Novacek had been joking, but there was more than an element of truth in his statement. Just as her life with Tim had been permanently disrupted, so too were her cherished beliefs about the evils of war. War might be evil, all right, but January 1942 was not the time to be against all wars. In particular not when someone was making a concerted effort to destroy the country she held dear. Pacifism was a luxury she could not afford at this time.
Alexa considered that her school was not likely to be the focal point of the Japanese attack, so she climbed out of the trench to get a better look at the planes. The rest of her flock and Father Monroe followed with varying degrees of difficulty as they ruefully discovered that it was much easier to get into a five-foot-deep trench than it was to get out. Alexa had worn a dress and moved carefully; she was determined not to give the male students a free show.
By now the line of American planes from Oahu’s interior had flown past and were rapidly disappearing in the distance. In growing dismay, she recalled the swarms of Japanese who’d attacked the fleet and compared it with the smaller number of American planes that had just flown overhead. The American numbers were so few. Even with the supposedly invincible B-17s, the U.S. force was pitifully small. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, those planes would be joined by others from Hickam and Ewa, and the other fields.
It also occurred to her that she would not be leaving the Hawaiian Islands anytime soon. Perhaps she would never leave, she realized with a shock.
Toyoza Kaga put down the phone and walked to the window of his office. The attack on the harbor and military installations was over. It had begun quickly and ended just as quickly. It was as if the Japanese navy wasn’t all that interested in damaging Pearl Harbor again, and he felt that he knew why. They were taunting the Americans and waiting for a reaction.
Only a moment earlier, he’d received a phone call from an associate on Molokai, who’d informed him that the Japanese soldiers were landing at the midpoint of that narrow island. Thanks to his business sources, Kaga knew as much about the situation as anyone in the American military. He also knew that Molokai was undefended. The Japanese would own it in a matter of hours. He hoped that no one in the local police or national guard was foolish enough to resist and precipitate a massacre.
“A tragedy,” he muttered. But it was an event he was prepared for. Now it was time to convene a series of meetings with trusted associates who agreed with him that this could be the beginning of a period of agonies for Hawaii’s Japanese population.
Unless Kaga’s efforts bore fruit, his people could easily find themselves between two fires and with no friends, only enemies. It could easily mean the destruction of everything he had worked for over the past decades. His family, his businesses, everything was now at great risk.
However, he thought as he smiled grimly, it could just as easily mean a time of tremendous opportunity. But first, he had to survive long enough to find out who would ultimately win this conflict.
Within an hour of the attacks on Molokai, Japanese planes began landing on private airstrips near the coast while the marines pushed inland so quickly that astonished and terrified civilians had no chance to flee and were
