Devil's Garden

Chapter 5

Tibbets was up early that morning, watching the ordnance crews in the secret hanger on North Field, Tinian. The whole squadron was flying today. The call had come in late the previous night, and they were told to be ready with all planes-including those of the 509th Composite Air Group with their special “Silverplate” bomb bay modifications.

They were stuffing something really sinister in the belly of his plane today, he knew. He wasn’t sure what to expect, really, but he knew it would be spectacular. The briefing and training he had completed had prepared him for the most difficult job any man could ever be asked to do-deliver the bomb in an act of supreme hostility to beat down a defiant enemy with overwhelming force and more violence than he could possibly imagine.

His plane had come all the way from Wendover Army Air Field in Utah, hopping to Guam and then on to Tinian where it arrived July 6. They changed the plane’s tail symbol and Victor number, and then the long training runs started dropping pumpkin bombs over Japan, big fat high explosive conventional bombs that looked almost identical to the thing they were loading that day. He had hit Kobe and Nagoya with a couple of practice runs, but they were cities. Now the word came down that he was being sent up to go after ships at sea!

“Who ever heard of a B-29 being sent out to look for a ship, Deak?” he said to Captain William S. “Deak” Parsons, who would serve as the Chief Weaponeer on the Enola Gay that day, arming the bomb in flight to avoid any mishaps on takeoff.

“Sounds as crazy to me as it does to you,” said Parsons. “But that’s our primary. They’re sending the whole group up.”

“Well, hell, I thought we were supposed to go with just three planes?”

“They want the sky full of wings,” Colonel. “Scuttlebutt says these ships are using some slick new rocket weapon for air defense. They chopped up a couple carrier air groups the other day, and so now they think if they put enough B-29’s up there it will increase the chance of our plane getting over the target safely.”

“I’m not sure whether I should be reassured by that or not. But look, Deak, we never trained to hit a fast moving target at sea. I was supposed to put this thing on a city.”

“You may end up doing exactly that,” said Parsons. “Halsey is out after these Russian ships now, and he’ll likely get the job done before we even get there.”

“Yeah? Then why all this theater?”

“Because the Russians lobbed one of these things Halsey’s way this morning, that’s why…” He thumbed at the special ordnance pit where the bomb they had come to call “Little Boy” was still sitting ominously on its trailer cradle, ready to be loaded into the plane.

Tibbets gave him a look of real surprise. “The Russians have the goddamned bomb?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“And they used it on Halsey?”

“Fired the damn thing from a rocket, but it didn’t hit anything. Word is it was a deliberate show of force to try and get us to back off. They think the Russkies want all of Hokkaido, and that they sent these new ships of theirs out to warn us off.”

“God almighty…”

“You’ll hear all this in the pre-flight briefing, Colonel. I got it through back channels. I may even be shoveling shit here for all I know. But I think you’ll have a secondary target on this mission too, in case we can’t find these Russian ships or Halsey gets to them first. Hell, we’re out here loading for bear, but they may even call the whole damn mission off. We were going to hit Japan last week, and that never went down.”

The sound of a siren blowing in the distance pulled their attention to the command barracks at the other end of the field. Tibbets looked to see something odd there. They were lowering the flag to half mast. The only other time he saw something like that was when FDR died. What was going on? A jeep was racing across the field right towards their hanger, and the two men stepped outside as it came rolling up in a billow of dust. The driver was an Army Air Corps Sergeant, who saluted crisply.

“Colonel Tibbets, sir?”

“Yes, I’m Tibbets.”

“I’m to tell you your mission is on, sir, and the pre-flight briefing has been moved up.”

“Moved up? When is it scheduled?”

“Right now, sir. I’m your wheels to the briefing bunker. Haven’t you heard, sir?”

“Soldier, I’ve been locked up in this hot house of a hanger here for the last five hours. Heard what?”

“The Iowa, sir. The Russians dropped the bomb on the Big Stick. She’s gone, sir.”

Tibbets gave him an incredulous look. “Gone?” He looked at Parsons. “Come on, Deak, we’ve got a briefing to go to. Let’s get a move on.”

The two men were up and on to the back of the jeep and it sped away, across the wide airfield for the command bunker. Tibbets folded his arms, jaw set, and looked over at Parsons.

“Secondary target? What do you figure this is all about, Deak?”

“Well I thought about that when I heard the rumor, and I could only come up with one name on the list of potential targets.”

“How do you call it?”

“Vladivostok…”

* * *

After Airman Bains pulled the firing lever he felt an sudden lift as the heavy ASM-N-2 BAT bomb fell from the fuselage of his Helldiver and ignited its rocket engine. Lord almighty, he thought as he watched the ponderous weapon surge ahead. He had lined it up right on the target, and the radar was supposed to do the rest. Kirov would have seen to it that the radar was useless-but Kirov was gone, and the technicians aboard Orlan had not had time to reprogram their jammers for the odd frequencies the Allies were using. The Bat Bomb had eyes, and it forged on beneath the flights of dark blue planes, its radar seeking the slippery target ahead.

Even lined up on the ship when fired, it was still hit and miss. The system was in its infancy, the first radar guided missiles ever deployed. The odd contours and radar scattering coating on Orlan’s hull and superstructure made it very difficult to acquire, but in a strange quirk, it locked on to a low flying Avenger coming in to make its torpedo run on Orlan, and was homing right on its tail!

As the weapon approached, the skies above and around the ship were bursting with fire, scored by missile wakes as the shorter ranged Kashtan system engaged with its combined missile/cannon close in defense. Yeltsin had been correct. The enemy planes in Halsey’s second wave had been heavily engaged by their medium range SAMs, their ranks thinned appreciably with over seventy more kills. But now the missile count ran down to just 24, and the last of Halsey’s brave wing was overhead, diving on the ship even as radar reported another 160 aircraft at twenty kilometers and coming at 400kph. In three minutes they were swarming over the ship as the Kashtans fired full out.

The missiles found two dozen planes, the cannons snarled at one after another, dropping six low flying torpedo planes off the starboard side. They saw the single Avenger hurtling in low some twenty degrees aft and the system rotated quickly, its great robot arms swinging the six barreled Gatling guns around to spin out a hail of 30mm rounds. They hit the Avenger, and it fire-balled before plummeting into the sea. The gun shifted quickly to the next target, its barrels steaming as they lifted up to fire at a swooping Hellcat trying to deliver a 500 pound bomb. The burning Avenger briefly masked the Bat Bomb, and it came barreling in to smash Orlan on the aft quarter, blasting the thin composite and aluminum hull with a 1000 pound bomb. Bains never saw the weapon hit. He had already turned for home, but he heard the radio chatter of his fellow aviators call out the hit, and crossed his fingers, hoping it had been his bomb that scored the kill. His luck was still good that day.

* * *

Orlan shuddered with the hit, a billowing cloud of dirty brown smoke enveloping the aft quarter of the ship when the bomb went off. The ship rolled with the impact, listing to the port side and then rolling back again, and speed fell off noticeably. The bomb had blown right through the hull, immolated three compartments there, ruptured the main deck, blasted away the helicopter on deck, and now a raging fire started. The speed deficit resulted from thick shrapnel blasting downward and striking the propulsion drive shafts, many decks below. They had almost blown completely through the ship. Another ten feet and the bottom of the hull would have been breached.

It was a near mortal blow but the Sea Eagle was still alive. Chief Engineer Yeremenko felt the blast as he was working in the engineering bay. He had managed to get one of the special warheads mounted on a test bench and was performing a manual arm routine with three technicians when the ship jolted with the impact of the Bat Bomb. It was agonizing work. The technicians with him thought the Captain had ordered the warhead made ready to use in the growing fight, but Yeremenko knew the worst. It wasn’t for the Americans this time. No… This time it’s for us. All of us.

He found it difficult to look the other men in the eye, and was increasingly nervous. There was just one further step he needed to perform. He would have to hot-wire the warhead on the test bench to a live fire control system on the ship, but he did not want to do this in front of the other men, for obvious reasons.

“Alright,” he said. “This will do. From the sound of that we just took a pretty bad hit. You men get aft and see what you can do. I’ll finish up here.”

When they had gone he returned to the work, banana clipping wires to the warhead detonators and running a connection to a nearby wall panel. He managed to patch in to the ship’s fire control system and reroute the signal cables for the number ten P-900 missile silo to the warhead he had here on the test bench. Only now the pulse of energy would not command a simple missile launch, but instead order the detonation of the warhead.

The sound of men running to try and fight the fires aft was loud and harassing as he worked, and it was tearing him up inside. They were out there fighting for the ship-fighting for their lives. Here he was quietly clipping a wire on the life lines of each man aboard, and ready to incinerate them all.

Yeremenko had known Yeltsin for over fifteen years, and served on two other ships with him. He knew the man to be a sober, no-nonsense officer, with sound judgment and a fair hand. The Captain knew what was going to happen here. It was simple math, and the Americans had overcome the ships formidable SAM defense by sheer weight of numbers. My God, he thought, they flew right through that mushroom cloud, right around it to get at us! What kind of men are these?

They were the men who had just fought and won a long four year war that had inflicted 36 million casualties in the Pacific region alone. They said they would be coming, and here they were, fighting, dying, yet determined to put their bombs and torpedoes on the targets they were assigned. Yeremenko knew the ship would not last another fifteen minutes.

He walked to the ship’s command interlink to call the Captain. “I am ready, sir,” he said. “I have everything routed to the number ten missile on the P-900 system. To do this I had to disable that silo and route the firing command signal here to the test bench. But if you activate missile number ten on your board and fire…” The silence on the line spoke volumes as he waited. Then he heard Yeltsin’s voice. Low, weary, as if the weight of every man’s life on the ship, and all their successive generations was now on his shoulders.

“Standby, Yeremenko.”

The Engineering Chief waited, the lights suddenly flickering. If they lost power….What then?

* * *

Ziggy Sprague was on the bridge of Old Wisky, the battleship Wisconsin, really one of the newest ships in the fleet. But the men called her “Old Wisky” and that was well enough. It was spelled that way too, without the letter “h”, and sometimes they would capitalize the K so the last two letters would stand for Kentucky. That was also a ship slated for the Iowa class, BB-66, though it was never completed. Years later, the Wisconsin was fated to collide with the destroyer escort USS Eaton on a foggy night off the Virginia coast. The big battlewagon almost took the entire bow off Eaton, and Wisconsin had a 100 foot section of the bow made for Kentucky fitted at the Norfolk Naval ship yard to repair her damage. After that the ship had even more reason to bear a nickname composed of the abbreviations of two states. How the sailors of WWII came up with the name, as if they had some strange intuitive knowledge of the ship’s fated collision in 1956, no one really knew. Some said it was because the ship had some parts that had been originally machined for the Kentucky when it first put to sea.

Call it what you will, it was a mean and angry ship at that moment when Ziggy Sprague spied the low, burning silhouette of what looked to be a light cruiser or destroyer on his horizon. They had been sailing full out at 33 knots to catch the Russians when word came in that the Iowa had engaged. Then they saw it, the massive mushroom rising from over the far edge of the sea. It wasn’t long before he learned what had happened. The Russians had the bomb! He was still; astounded to think that was the case, but they had fired one across Admiral Halsey’s bow as a warning shot that morning. Now, as the long day ended, a second sunset appeared on the horizon, and Iowa was gone in a hot minute.

My God, this weapon makes a whole new thing of war, he thought. No matter how big and tough we build them, if you could drop an atomic bomb on a ship it was history. Another man might have been chastened by the sight of that mushroom cloud, and inclined to steer clear of an enemy that could wield such a weapon, but not Ziggy Sprague.

“God-damnit, they hit Iowa with the bomb!” He said aloud, and most on the bridge had no idea what he was even talking about. They had heard rumors, whispers passed from one hammock to the next below decks. They knew they were building the bombs bigger, the ships faster, the guns and planes better every year. Now they had something really big, and it was going to change everything. The Russians had been lobbing some mean ordnance our way, they said, but we have something even bigger.

“Damn Russians think they can back us off, do they?” Sprague was mad as a hornet. “Well they’ve got another thing to learn then. I’m taking Wisky up there and I’m going to blow the living hell out of anything left after ‘Big T’ gets finished.”

He could see that the boys from Ticonderoga were over the enemy now, swarming like angry hornets. Years later American carrier strike planes would be named exactly that, the “Superbugs” that had gone after Karpov and the Red Banner Fleet in 2021, but Sprague would know nothing of that.

He gave the order to announce his arrival with a salvo from his A and B turrets up front. The roar of the big 16 inch guns gave him great satisfaction.

“Helm, come right ten degrees and ready on all main guns.”

Ziggy was going to get his broadside in one way or another. “Save something for me, Big T,” he said under his breath. “I want a piece of these bastards.”

He would get his wish that day.