This short story is scheduled to appear in an anthology of alternative World War II stories that explore what would have happened if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor, forcing the United States to go to war in December of 1941.
It will be published on Dec 7, 2001, commemorating the 60th anniversary of a day that will forever live in infamy.
Below is a sample of R.J. Pineiro's contribution to this anthology.
Preface
In the year of our Lord, 1940, French Canadians, unwilling to sacrifice themselves to defend England following the fall of France, rally alongside Canadian separatists for an independent Canada and vote to keep their troops home. As a result of the lost Canadian support, the British are forced to keep more of their forces home to defend their land against the growing Nazi threat, thus failing to keep Italy at bay in the Mediterranean. Consequently, the British never launch an air strike against the Italian port of Taranto.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is never inspired to attack Pearl Harbor . . .
In response to a plea from Japanese Emperor Hirohito in 1941, Adolf Hitler halts his plans to invade the Soviet Union, opting instead for sending General Paulus' Sixth Army to the Middle East in an effort to secure oil resources for his Far East ally, who is suffering a U.S. oil embargo in retaliation for its Manchurian campaign.
The United States and the Soviet Union remain out of the war . . .
1
It's the heat, you know. It really gets to you on days like today, spending hour after hour under a scorching sun in the Arabian Sea hauling bombs, torpedoes, depth charges, and rockets across the wooden flight deck to ready the next group of Hellcats--all under the impatient stare of the pilots, who don’t have an appreciation for how damned back-breaking our job is. But then again, they too have their own bag of shit to worry about. Poor bastards. Most of them have less than fifty hours in the Hellcat and already are being catapulted off to fight against seasoned Jap pilots in their Zeroes. Half of them won't last a week. Only ten percent will make the first month. But, hey, that's what happens when the bureaucrats in Washington decide to sit on their thumbs for two years under the pretext of giving embargoes and diplomacy time to work. While America was busy watching the 1942 and 1943 World Series pretending nothing was wrong, Germany, Italy, and Japan conquered half of the world; Germany and Italy securing Europe and Northern Africa with an eye toward the oil-rich nations of the Middle East while Japan razed across Indochina, the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Thailand, Burma, and India, sending British forces in the region running for cover. Russia joined the fight in late 1942, when the Germans violated their non-aggression pact and threatened the Russian's supply of oil from the regions surrounding the Black Sea. For the United States, it wasn't until the threat of losing access to Middle Eastern oil in 1943 became a reality that we finally declared war on the Axis, deploying our mighty naval force across the Atlantic to assist a decimated Great Britain, and toward the Middle East to protect our regional interests, also joining forces with Russia. I guess it was fine by us if the Axis raped, pillaged, and slaughtered half the world. But don’t fuck with our oil. My friend, Chico Martinez once told me that there's nothing like a good old war to nurture progress and innovation. Well, for the past few years Japan and Germany have certainly leaped forward in technology, designing and mass-producing amazing machines of destruction, from aircraft and tanks to naval vessels. There's even rumors out there about a fighter without propellers that can fly twice as fast as anything else ever built. And, of course, don't forget about those incredible V-1 and V-2 rockets that have turned London inside out, as well as the new V-3s, with three times the range of its predecessor, that had caused so much havoc in Moscow. There's even word out there about a prototype V-4 rocket with a range capable of reaching America. We, on the other hand, enjoyed our World Series and now find ourselves the underdog in a new kind of ballgame. A young pilot straps on his helmet, climbs up the side of his Hellcat, goes through his checklist, and moments later cranks up the engine. The fighter belches inky smoke and rumbles as the large propeller begins to whirl, disappearing in a shiny disk as he advances the throttle. He taxies into position, gets the signal, and off he goes, racing down the deck. The plane takes off as expected, shortly before reaching the forward edge of the carrier, and starts to climb while the next fighter taxies into position. A moment later the Hellcat's engine sputters and quits. We all turn our heads toward the bow and watch the frozen propeller. The pilot banks the fighter-bomber to the right, getting it out of the way of the carrier while trying to restart the engine. The propeller begins to turn. Smoke puffs off the side, but the needed thrust comes too late. The Hellcat plunges into the sea, its propeller momentarily hammering the swells. Escorts from our task force steer into position for a rescue, but he apparently can’t cut himself loose from his straps, sinking with the plane seconds later. Shit. You feel bad, but after a year of this crap every disaster is taken in stride, with a sad glance before moving on. I guess that's war, and as Chico says, it also means that every weapon at our disposal was made in a rush and by the lowest bidder. Now, don't get Chico wrong. The Hellcat is a fine enough plane, certainly an improvement from the smaller Wildcats, which could barely keep up with the Zeroes, but he's right about the unfortunate fact that it's still machinery designed and manufactured in a hurry by a government subcontractor before all of its systems have been properly wrung out, leaving it up to us to shake out the last few kinks. We're not just at war with the Japs, the Germans, and the Italians, but also with our own equipment. Two years late, with poorly-trained personnel and flawed hardware--not the ideal way to prevail against such formidable opponents. But we chose to wait, not relishing the thought of sending our young generation to fight a distant war. Now we're paying the price. A year into this and we're still barely containing the Axis, which continues to be on the offensive. I don’t even remember anymore who won the darned World Series back in '43. The sun must have fried my brain cells this past year. Irony aside, we're actually the first real opposition the Axis has had since this whole thing blew up in 1940, unless you want to count England's refusal to surrender and Russia's modest victories in the Caucasus Mountains and the Ukrainian plains. Our Navy gained control of both the Arabian and Mediterranean Seas, securing the Suez Canal while sinking a number of enemy ships, including two Japanese carriers and a number of Italian and German surface vessels and submarines. Meanwhile, General McArthur's armies engaged the Japanese in India with the assistance of any British forces that had managed to survive the Japanese onslaught of '42 and '43. General Patton focused his forces on the northern front, trying to halt the German advance from Turkey. He's being assisted by Russian troops under the command of some general whose name I can’t pronounce. Over in England, General Eisenhower has been working on something with the Brits to keep Hitler busy on that front. There's even the rumor of an impending continental invasion somewhere along the French border. But that's supposed to be hush-hush. So here we are, the so-called Allied Forces, stuck in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from home, sandwiched between two advancing armies, and always short of everything, from ammunition to carriers and destroyers. And it's not that we can’t manufacture them. Our factories back home are surely cranking out all of the hardware that we need. The trick is getting it past those sneaky German U-boats, which have sunk so many of our convoys in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. I frown. Nazi bastards. The other day, in spite of recent improvements in naval countermeasures to protect our vessels from submarine attacks, we got word that they had torpedoed a clearly-marked hospital ship packed with wounded GI, sinking it before the staff could get a tenth of the patients out. So much for honor in battle. Although that episode really hurt, don’t expect sympathy from the world. Remember that we chose to play the isolationist card, turning a blind eye while that same world was being looted and murdered. Guess now it's our turn to suffer. It's time for the sons of America to step forward and join in the pain and hardship alongside Britain and Russia to stop the Axis. And the sons of America are definitely here. There's guys from every corner of America; from Maine to Texas; from California to Florida; from sea to shining sea--though lately the sea seems more gloomy than shiny. The latest statistics--if you chose to believe them--indicate that anywhere from four to five thousand of our boys die each day in the front lines, and that number seems to grow every day. I tell you, we'd better win this thing soon or we'll be out of soldiers in another year. Unfortunately, there is no end to the struggle. Germany, Japan, and Italy are incredibly powerful, even with their oil shortages, and they have dug themselves pretty deep in all of their controlled territories, making us pay dearly for every square inch of soil we take back. There's blood from Idaho, Wisconsin, New York, Utah, Arizona, and the rest of the Union spilled all across India and Turkey. But we're holding the line. How do I know so much for being just a lowly ensign? My dad's a radio aficionado and taught me everything he knew about them. By the time of my fifteenth birthday I could disassemble and reassemble just about anything with tubes. The recruiter back in Houston quickly latched on to that skill and next thing I knew I had become a radio technician for the United States Navy. As one of a dozen Assistant Chief Radioman aboard the USS Sargent Bay (CVE 83), I get to listen in on many on-going operations, keeping abreast of the rapidly-developing situation on all fronts. The radio room is next door to the CIC--that's the Combat Information Center--where technicians plot all airborne planes and surrounding vessels on a clear plastic wall according to the information fed to them by the radar operators, whose equipment picks up anything that moves in our area of interest. Unidentified blips on the radar screen are plotted and their coordinates fed to our aircraft to go and intercept. Our radio room receives encrypted transmissions, which we decode and run over to the CIC. In some cases, the commanding officer (CO) will confer with his executive officer (XO) and formulate a reply, which one of us would have to encrypt before transmitting it back out to the original sender. Another reason I know more than I should is because I have to repair those damned radar units all the time. Their tubes never seem to last more than a few weeks, and since spares are slow coming--just as everything else around here--I find myself cannibalizing old systems with the help of my trusty soldering iron, a gift from Dad before I sailed away. We're part of the largest naval task force ever deployed by the United States, with the aircraft carriers Lexington, Enterprise, and Yorktown as center pieces, along with tons of support ships, from the mighty battleships Arizona, Oklahoma, and California, to destroyers, cruisers, light cruisers, submarines, mine sweepers, oilers, and, of course, a number of escort carriers, like the Sargent Bay, roughly half the size of the Enterprise. There's a second task force patrolling the Mediterranean, though not as large as this one. Our job is to keep at least a dozen planes stationed at 10,000 feet covering this side of the task force, plus as many Hellcats providing air support to the ground troops hammering the Japs in India, over a hundred miles away. For the Sargent Bay that means maintaining a twenty-four-by-seven operation to keep the fighters airborne, which for us means non-stop action as planes are constantly taking off and landing. But why is a radio technician hauling explosives across the controlled chaos of a flight deck you ask? As fate would have it, eighty-two of our guys bought it last month when the tail hook of a landing Hellcat, weakened by antiaircraft fire during an air raid north of Bombay, broke off as it snagged one of the arresting wires stretched across the deck. The plane proceeded to plunge into the barrier cable that snapped up a moment later, but the fighter's momentum was such that it simply tumbled past the cable and into fully-fueled and armed planes. The large explosion that followed pretty much vaporized the entire day shift operating the flight deck--along with several planes and their pilots. But a carrier is built to take it, and our beloved Sargent Bay took the punishment quite well. Another crew extinguished the flames within the hour, and the next day, following a burial at sea of all the charred body parts we could find, we were back in business--with a number of us pulling double duty. I'm now a deck hand by day and a radioman by night. I sleep, eat, and take a crap somewhere in between. About seventy new sailors arrived last week supposedly to replace those we lost. In reality though, the new guys are just that: new, rookies. It will probably takes us six months to whip them into shape. Meanwhile, seasoned guys like Chico and me have to hold the fort. "Marshall!" I glance behind me. It's Master Chief Rollings, a real son of a bitch who became even meaner after the incident a month ago. The man's over six-feet-five and probably exceeds three hundred and fifty pounds of tanned muscle in spite of his middle age. Really, the guy is a gorilla, making my two hundred pounds look as intimidating as a light cruiser in the presence of the Arizona. Sometimes I wonder if we belong to the same species. "Sir!" The Chief gets an inch from my face. I can smell coffee in his breath as he sprays me with spit while shouting, "I thought I told you to get those damned bombs over to the fucking fighters! What have you been doing? Playing with yourself? Son, we've got a war to fight around here! We've got troops in India counting on our ability to deliver air cover all day long. We ain't got time to screw around!" I'm overworked, sleep deprived, sun burned, sweaty, and downright tired of this double-duty shit plus this ape's verbal abuse. I've been lugging bombs without a break for six straight hours, just barely keeping up with the fighters, and, given the recent Japanese advances toward our task force, there is no break in sight. Every part of my anatomy hurts, and I'm in no mood for this man, but I still manage to control the urge to go and tell him where to shove his attitude. Chief Rollings lost his oldest son in that explosion a month ago and just last week his second boy, a Hellcat pilot, didn’t come back from a sortie over southern India. He either died or bailed over enemy lines, which is probably worse. The Jap's ain't nice to POWs. The man's earned the right to be a first-class asshole--though sometimes he abuses this unspoken privilege. "Sorry, sir. I'll try to go faster." "Don’t try, Son! Do, dammit! Do! Or in six months you'll be eating sushi and speaking Jap like the rest of Asia!" "Aye, Master Chief!" He marches on to scream at the next guy. Wiping the spit off my face, I roll the cart over to one of the Hellcats crowding the starboard side of the flight deck, out of the way from most of the action--though the incident a month ago taught me that any portion of the deck can be dangerous with so much movement amidst so many explosives and high-octane fuel. Despite the Master Chief's warning about screwing off, I take a moment to admire this stubby-looking fighter, currently being fueled and prepped by the ground crew. The Hellcat's definitely an oddity among American warplanes. Grumman designed it specifically to fight against the Zero, which is one of the slowest fighters in the war, but a damned maneuverable one. The Hellcat has huge fuel tanks, which is a definite plus when fighting sorties in India, but do affect its ability to turn when fully-fueled. However, the fighter has a phenomenal air brake capability, meaning it can slow down so fast during a dogfight that a pilot could almost swear the plane had just deployed a tail parachute, thus allowing for sudden tight turns and the ability to stay on the enemy's tail without the fear of flying by. Although the plane lacks the streamlined looks of a P-51 Mustang, it out climbs both the Mustang and the Zero. It's heavy armor allows it to take heavy punishment and still keep on fighting, which the Hellcat does quite well with its six 50-caliber machine guns and a capacity of 2400 rounds for plenty of Jap spraying. The crew takes my bomb and I start to haul the empty cart back to the stack of bombs. On the way I spot Chico Martinez. The Master Chief's got him hauling belts of 50-cal ammo. "Hey, Ray!" Chico calls out, rushing over to me while pushing his cart. A small crucifix dangling at the end of a chain rattles against his dog tags. "Yeah?" The native of Los Angeles, California is sweating profusely, like the rest of us. But unlike the rest of us, Chico's brown skin seems to just soak up the sun without burning. A bright-red bandana wrapped around his forehead, his dark eyes glinting with excitement, he says, "Just heard from one of my pals in Battle Ops that the Japs have launched a massive counteroffensive against MacArthur, including an all out naval and aerial assault on his supporting Navy--that's us, amigo. Would you believe that shit? Looks like the little bastards just can’t get enough of us." I suppress a laugh. Chico's calling the Japs little bastards when he's barely five feet four inches and weighs less than one hundred ten pounds soaked and wet. Humor aside though, I simply shrug off the possible threat. Had I heard that a year ago, soon after I was shipped over here, anxiety would have instantly wormed through my intestines, wondering if I would make it through a large-scale Japanese attack. For the first few months here I had lived with such fear, always concerned that something terrible was just about to happen, having heard one too many stories about Japanese brutality and their borderline suicide tactics. And many exciting things did happen, including a number of intense battles against Japanese planes trying to pierce the task force and come after their preferred targets: aircraft carriers. But our Hellcats plus tons of AA fire pushed them back every time, preventing a single hit to our ships, boosting our confidence that we could actually beat these guys. Just last week, two flights of Jap bombers made a desperate attempt to break through the destroyers' shield and once again failed. We roasted them. Having survived so many attacks unscathed--although not without a couple of close calls--I came to the conclusion that if I eliminated that terrible fear, life aboard the Sargent Bay would not be nearly so bad. To my pleasant surprise, bravery filled the void left behind when I managed to shove anxiety aside. I realized that being brave was easy once you got the hang of it. Chico, who arrived to the Sargent Bay at the same time I did, has also learned to play brave. "Right on, pal," I finally say. "Let those bastards come back. We'll give them some more." A couple of rookies nearby hear us talk and shoot us the new guy stare. They simply can't believe we can be so cool about such matters. I just wink at them and get on with my job.
