When not exercising, the soldiers mostly stayed on their mats. They had no room to move around. Some were too sick to do anything but lie there and moan. Others gambled or sang songs or simply slept like hibernating animals, all in the effort to make time go faster.

The Kuril Islands seemed like an afterthought to Japan: rocky lumps spattered across the Pacific, heading up toward Kamchatka. Etorofu was as windswept and foggy and desolate as any of the others. When the Nagata Maru anchored in Hitokappu Bay, Shimizu was unimpressed. He just hoped to get away as fast as he could. He wouldn’t even have known where he was if the platoon commander hadn’t told him.

He had hoped to be able to get off the freighter and stretch his legs. But no one was allowed off the ship for any reason. No one was allowed to send mail. No one, in fact, was allowed to do much of anything except go up on deck and exercise. Every time Corporal Shimizu did, more ships crowded the bay. They weren’t just transports, either. Ships bristling with big guns joined the fleet. So did flat-topped aircraft carriers, one after another.

Something big was building. When the men went back down into the hold, they tried to guess what it would be. Not a one of them turned out to be right.

YOU CAN BE unhappy in Hawaii as easily as anywhere else. People who cruise over from the mainland often have a hard time believing this, but it’s true. The sea voyage from San Francisco or Los Angeles takes five days. They set the clocks back half an hour a day aboard ship, so that each outbound day lasts twenty-four hours and thirty minutes. By the time you get there, you’re two and a half hours behind the West Coast, five and a half behind the East.

And then, after Diamond Head and the Aloha Tower come up over the horizon, you commonly stay in a fine hotel.