The third wave of Japanese planes over Oahu had sunk two American destroyers in the channel leading out from Pearl Harbor to the Pacific, trapping the rest of the U.S. Pacific Fleet inside the harbor and letting the Japanese pound it to pieces at their leisure. Shindo nodded to himself. The Americans would have tried to sortie against the Japanese strike force. They probably wouldn’t have had much luck, not without carrier support, but just as well they hadn’t got the chance.

Japanese naval engineers had got the destroyers out of the channel only a few weeks before the failed American invasion. Shindo was glad they had. Now Akagi had somewhere local to make repairs without worrying about American submarines: the antitorpedo net was back in place at the mouth of the channel.

Shindo laughed unpleasantly. The Yankees hadn’t bothered with torpedo netting for individual ships last December. They hadn’t figured anyone could rig torpedoes to run in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. Japan taught them otherwise. The devastation here proved that.

Devastation held sway on land, too. Ford Island, in the middle of Pearl Harbor, had been palm trees and ferns where it wasn’t U.S. Navy installations. Now it was rubble with greenery poking through; hardly anything held greenery in check for long here. The Americans had fought house to house in Pearl City, north of the harbor. The town where Navy personnel and the civilians who worked for them lived was as battered as the island.

And the land to the east was worse. The Americans had stored their fuel there, and Japanese bombs sent the oil and gas up in smoke. Shindo vividly remembered the smoke: the funeral pyre of U.S. ambitions in the Pacific. The great black greasy plume had stayed in place for weeks, till the fires finally burned themselves out. Nothing grew there. Shindo wondered whether anything ever would. Ford Island and Pearl City had seen war. The tank farms had seen hell.