1942 A Novel

Japan invades and conquers Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in the most provocative alternate history novel yet from the author of "1901, 1862," and "1945."

Robert Conroy was a business and economic history teacher who lived in Detroit. His alternate-history novels include 1901, 1862, 1945, 1942, and Red Inferno: 1945. He died in 2014.

Chapter 1

The day threatened to be pleasantly uneventful for U.S. Army Captain Jake Novacek as he dressed and got ready for another Sunday in paradise. After a hard week’s work, he thought he might go to Waikiki, lie in the sun, and stare at the attractive young women in their bathing suits.

His only concern was that he still ached from Saturday’s Army-Navy touch football game with other officers. They were ex-athletes like himself, but unfortunately, they were several years younger than Jake’s thirty-six and had nearly run him into the ground. Jake was larger than most at just under six feet and almost two hundred pounds, which somewhat compensated for the age disparity when he managed to catch up with one of the young navy pups. It may have been touch football, but some of the touches were damned hard.

Jake grimaced from a stiffness in his shoulder as he finished shaving. He was in his overnight quarters at Hickam Field’s officers’ club instead of the small apartment he had in Honolulu, and admitted he had no one but himself to blame for the situation. But then he grinned. Touch football or not, it was fun to knock a sailor-boy officer on his ass every now and then. He checked his thick black mustache—which pushed the limits permitted by the army—and trimmed a couple of errant hairs.

Jake had just put on his trousers and was deciding whether to eat breakfast in town or at the officers’ club when he thought he heard thunder. At first, he ignored it, but it was sunny out; why the thunder?

As he pondered this, the sounds got closer. “Oh, shit,” he muttered. Somebody was going to get in a whole lot of trouble for scheduling gunnery practice on a Sunday morning in December.

Then he was on the floor and gasping for breath while his ears rang from the shock of an explosion. His small room was full of dust, and something cut his arm.

Jake got up and ran down the stairs and outside, where other officers were gathering, shock and disbelief on their faces.

“What the hell’s going on?” Jake yelled, and no one answered. Had some asshole dropped a bomb or plunked a shell down on the wrong spot? He felt a twinge of sorrow for the poor bastard. Then a plane flew overhead, and he saw the rising sun on its wing.

“Japs!” someone yelled. “We’re being attacked by the Japs!”

Another bomb landed nearby, and he felt the concussion. Jake ran in the general direction of the airfield, dreading what he would see when he got there. He knew that the planes on the ground were vulnerable. Nobody was prepared for an attack.

He arrived just in time to see a Jap plane peeling off from a strafing run. It passed over his head by no more than a hundred feet, and he saw the pilot’s face. It looked like the monkey-faced bastard was grinning.

Jake wrenched his eyes back to the runways, where so many planes had been parked nearly wingtip to wingtip in anticipation of a saboteur’s attempt to sabotage them, which General Short feared in these tense times. Jake had said it was a bad idea, and now, as he watched them burn and explode by the dozens, he knew he had been vindicated and hated the fact.

Across the runway, a pair of 37 mm antiaircraft guns pointed uselessly at the sky while their crews watched the destruction. Angered, he ran across the field to the guns, dropping to the ground when another Jap plane streaked overhead. He comforted himself with the thought that a single man foolish enough to dash across a runway wasn’t much of a target for a Jap in an airplane.

He reached the guns, where a sergeant saluted him quickly. “Sergeant, who are you and why the hell aren’t you shooting at them?” Jake yelled, his voice shaking in anger.

The sergeant shrugged in utter disgust. “I’m Sergeant Steinmetz and I’v

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Excerpted from 1942: A Novel by Robert Conroy
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