Days of Infamy by Harry Turtledove

would take ’em out before the carriers came over the horizon.” He didn’t think of himself as coldhearted. But if you weren’t a realist about the way the world worked, you’d take endless grief in life, sure as hell you would.
    Just after noon, a cry not far from despair came over the intercom: “Third wave of attackers striking Pearl!”
    That was followed almost immediately by Admiral Halsey’s unmistakable rasp: “Boys, we’ve got to give the land-based air a hand. The Japs have knocked out a lot of it on the ground, and I’ll be double-damned and fried in the Devil’s big iron spider before I let those monkeys have it all their own way when I can give ’em a lick. Go get ’em! I only wish I were up there with you.”
    Cheering, the pilots ran for their Wildcats. Peterson’s was third in line. He fired up the engine even before he’d closed the canopy and fastened his safety belts. The fierce roar of the 1,200-horsepower Wright radial engine filled him. His fingernails, his bones, his guts all shook with it. It made him feel not just alive but huge and ferocious— he might have been making that great noise, not his plane.
    A red flag hung from the bridge: the signal that the Enterprise was about tolaunch her airplanes. No men in blue jerseys were left on the deck but the two who stood by to remove the chocks from the squadron leader’s wheels. Sailors in yellow smocks formed a line across the deck.
    What might have been the voice of God thundered from the island: “Prepare to launch planes!”
    The sailors in blue whipped away the chocks. The lead Wildcat rolled forward, a man in yellow walking backwards just ahead of it, leading it on to a point midway up the flight deck. A little ahead of the island stood another man in a yellow jersey. This one held a checkered flag in his right hand.
    That biblically amplified voice roared again: “Launch planes!”
    As the man with the flag turned his free hand in a grinding motion, the squadron leader gunned his engine. When the note suited the sailor in yellow, he dropped the flag. The plane sped down the deck and zoomed off into the air. The next fighter taxied up to the takeoff line. At the flagman’s orders, the pilot built up the boost on his engine. The flag fell. The Wildcat roared away.
    Then it was Peterson’s turn. The sailors in blue jerseys pulled away the chocks. Up to the line he went, following the man in yellow. The flagman made his grinding motion. Peterson gave his engine the gun. Down went the flag. Peterson whooped with delight. Acceleration shoved him back in his seat as the fighter raced down the Enterprise ’s flight deck.
    As always when he went off the end of the deck, there was that sickening lurch, that moment when he wondered whether he’d go into the sky or into the drink. But the Wildcat climbed after the two planes that had taken off ahead. Peterson whooped again. This was where he was meant to be, what he was meant to do.
    More fighters rose from the carrier. They formed in pairs: leader and wingman. Peterson’s wingman was a j.g. named Marvin Morrison. He had a squeaky tenor voice that broke when he got excited, which happened frequently. It sounded in Peterson’s earphones now: “We’re going to clean the Japs’ clocks for them.”
    â€œOh, hell, yes,” Peterson agreed. “If they want a war, Marv, we’ll give ’em all the war they want—you bet your ass we will.”
    Similar outraged chatter crackled through the squadron. Along with the outrage was a sense of astonishment: how could the Japanese, with their buck-toothed, bespectacled pilots and their lousy scrap-metal planes, dare to take on the United States of America? The fighter pilots also monitored radiotraffic from Pearl Harbor. When one frantic officer relayed rumors that the Japs had German pilots doing some of their flying for them,