Pacific Glory

TWELVE

Following their unscheduled holiday break at Pearl, Evans spent the next eight months with the Third Fleet as it battered its way up the Central Pacific island chains. As a lowly tin can in the Enterprise’s screen, they were not privy to any of the grand strategic plans. Every destroyer’s mission remained plain and simple: Protect its carrier, and run errands in the task force formations as assigned — move people, rescue downed aviators, run off snooping aircraft, steam as a plane guard behind the carrier during land-launch operations, refuel from the carrier or an oiler every third day, conduct training exercises and gunnery practice, train up the new guys on board, repair broken machinery, eat, and sleep when they could.

The ship routinely went to GQ just before dawn and again just at sundown. They shot at and hopefully downed any enemy aircraft that evaded the outer ring of combat air patrols thrown up by the carriers all day. Occasionally they were detached to join an amphibious group for inshore naval gunfire support duty, where they fired five-inch into the jungles on both named and unnamed islands. Sometimes the Jap army artillery fired back, but Evans seemed to lead a charmed life, never once being hit. Marsh remarked about that once to the captain, who said they were simply overdue. The captain was more afraid of mines than of Jap artillery. By this point in the war, Evans didn’t fire a gun that wasn’t under radar control. The Japanese were still mostly using optical fire control or sighting down the barrel.

By September of 1944, the United States was closing in on the Philippines, MacArthur’s holy grail and the scene of an especially painful defeat for America on the Bataan Peninsula. The Pacific had been divided by the high command in Washington into two command areas: General Douglas MacArthur commanded the South West Pacific Area, and Admiral Chester Nimitz the rest of the Pacific Ocean. For the past year, MacArthur’s Army and Navy forces had been working their way north from Australia through New Guinea and Borneo, while Nimitz’s Navy and Marine Corps forces had been blasting Japs out of the Solomons and then grinding up the Central Pacific to destroy the huge Jap bases at Rabaul and Truk Lagoon before concentrating on the Marianas Islands of Guam, Tinian, and Saipan.

From time to time elements of Halsey’s striking fleet were detached to augment MacArthur’s Seventh Fleet operations. In early August 1944, the captain had been given a heads-up that Evans was going to join the light carrier formations being assembled for the initial invasion of the Philippines. The target was the island of Mindanao, later changed to Leyte, which was south and east of the main island, Luzon. Three weeks before that, however, Marsh got a surprise. The captain called him aside in the wardroom one night after dinner and handed him a message. It contained the promotion list from commander to full captain. Evans’s captain was on the list, and he’d received news that he was going to be the commissioning skipper of a new Baltimore-class heavy cruiser.

“This means a change of command, XO,” he said. “As if you had nothing else to do.”

Marsh congratulated him while stifling a groan. Even out here in the western Pacific war zone, a change of command meant a full week of inspections, reports, audits, briefings, fitness reports, and all the other trappings of handing over absolute command of a warship from one commanding officer to his successor. It would all have to be done on top of the day-to-day operations with the carrier force. Department heads, who were standing six on, six off watches, would have to give up sleep to prepare briefings for the new captain on the material condition of machinery in their departments, an overview of their officers, chief petty officers, and enlisted men, an accounting of all high-value equipment, and then a physical inspection of all their spaces in the ship.

Usually a change of command would be scheduled for a period of time when the ship was going to be back in port, but for the Big Blue Fleet there was little in-port time, especially for the destroyers. The only time offline Evans got was a few days at one of the island anchorages, where the crew could go ashore, sit on a beach, and have a few beers and a softball game. If they were really lucky, they might get back to Pearl for Christmas, as they had in December 1943—although the fact that they had been pierside in Pearl for the past Christmas would actually work against their chances of getting back anytime soon.

“Just what we need,” Marsh said. “Do you know the new CO?”

“I do,” the captain said, “and that’s one of the things I need to talk to you about. Let’s get some coffee and go topside.”

They headed up to the bridge. There they went out onto the downwind bridge wing to watch the stars come out. A few miles away the Enterprise, showing red and amber flight deck directional lights, was recovering the last of the evening combat air patrols. There’d be no more flight operations until just before dawn, when the entire carrier task group would launch their dawn patrols. It was one of the consequences of Pearl Harbor that the Navy day now began at dawn. Prior to the sneak attack, a Navy ship company’s day in port began in earnest around nine in the morning, pretty much like their civilian brethren.

The port lookout moved into the pilothouse to give them some privacy, but even so, the captain kept his voice down. There were no bigger gossips in the world than sailors.

“The new CO is Commander Bill Hughes,” he said. “He’s a classmate.”

That spoke volumes: The captain was completing his commander-command tour, promoting to four stripes, and on his way to an even bigger ship. His classmate was obviously a little bit behind the career power curve.

“I haven’t seen him for several years,” he said, “but the nature of your job here as exec is probably going to change, and I think I owe you a heads-up.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Well, I had some reservations when you were sent in as XO, mostly because you were so junior. On the other hand, you had recent and downright vivid combat experience, you’d won a Silver Star for bravery, and you were academy. And you’ve done damn well.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I mean it. The crew and the wardroom respect you, and that brings me to what I have to tell you: Bill Hughes is a notorious screamer.”

Marsh’s heart sank. He’d heard of that type, officers who knew only one method of command: absolute tyranny, accompanied by a perpetually furious personality. They found fault with everything and everybody while demanding the highest standards of professional performance and discipline.

“This is what you need to know,” the captain said. “You will have to become the buffer between the CO and the rest of the ship’s company. The Lord Protector of your officers and enlisted men. That doesn’t mean that you become a disloyal subordinate: The captain is the captain. But when he loses his temper and verbally demolishes a junior officer in front of his subordinates, then you are the one who gets that JO to come around to your stateroom after hours, where you’ll explain that whatever he did was not an act of high treason. That the CO just lost his temper, and that he’s not going to have him shot on the fantail at dawn. You get the picture?”

“Who will do that for me?” Marsh asked, being only halfway facetious.

The captain grinned in the dark. “That’s the hard part, XO. If destroyer command is going to work, the CO and the XO have to merge professionally and, if possible, personally, as I think you and I have managed to do. With Bill Hughes, you are going to be operating in the lightning rod mode.”

“Sounds great.”

“What I mean is this: Try to set it up so that he yells at you rather than the troops. You know, chain of command. When he does yell at the troops, do damage control as best you can. Otherwise they will become dispirited. It’s bad enough to have Jap planes dropping torpedoes at you, only to then have the skipper scream at you for not shooting the bastard down before he dropped his torpedo.”

“Tell me this, then: If I’m the guy he spends most of his time screaming at, what chances do I have of getting a decent fitness report?”

“You started out in cruisers, didn’t you?” he said.

“Yes, sir. Three in a row.”

“The cruiser Navy is a little more formal than we are in the tin can Navy,” he said. “We sound the GQ alarm. A cruiser blows a bugle call. We stand watch in our short-sleeve wash khakis; a cruiser bridge requires a long-sleeve shirt and tie. A cruiser skipper occasionally visits the wardroom for dinner. A destroyer skipper eats in the wardroom with the rest of the officers.”

“I remember all that,” Marsh said.

“Well, the tin can Navy’s a much tighter community, especially when it comes to professional reputations. I’m talking about the regular officers now, not all these ninety-day wonders. If the ship does well, accomplishes her missions, and doesn’t run aground, then even a lousy fitness report from someone like Bill Hughes would be interpreted as a mark of respect for you. The people who sit on promotion and command screen boards know how this works, and they also know about screamers like Bill Hughes.”

“If he has this kind of reputation, why is he getting a command?”

“I don’t know — some admiral called in a marker somewhere, maybe? There’s probably a shortage of qualified skippers. We’ve lost a lot of middle-grade officers these past two years. Hell, you were at Savo: Three American cruisers had their entire wardrooms decimated. How many prospective XOs and COs did we lose, just in one night?”

Marsh thought back to Winston and could remember at least a half-dozen officers who would have gone on to command, except that now they were asleep in the deeps of Ironbottom Sound. The wind blowing through the pilothouse hatch was warm enough, but even so he felt a chill. Silver Star not withstanding, he still felt in his own mind that he had not distinguished himself that night. Beast was probably right, he thought: When the day came to face a real battle, he’d probably clutch up. He was starting to feel that way about the new commanding officer, and he hadn’t even met him.

“And here’s one last thing,” the captain said. “What I’ve told you tonight? You can’t share this openly with the wardroom. All you can do is protect the good guys as best you can. You cannot openly denigrate the captain, or you become part of the problem. No matter how you feel, you must rigidly support the chain of command.”

“These guys aren’t dumb, Skipper. They’ll see right through that.”

“Yes, they might, but remember, discipline is the only thing that keeps a ship going, especially in wartime. If a popular and respected XO becomes openly disloyal to the captain, then the crew loses confidence in the captain. Then along comes one of those moments of extreme peril, where he gives an order, the exactly correct order, and someone questions it. Then everybody dies.”

“Suppose it’s the wrong order, though?”

“That’s the deeply embedded hook in the military seniority system, XO. A junior officer can never know whether or not his boss might be privy to information that he, as the junior officer, is not. If you think it’s a mistake, you can say that, but once the CO shakes his head and says no, do it, you must comply. Somebody has to be the ultimate authority, and that’s the captain. That’s why he gets that great big cabin.”

That was a joke, of course; the captain’s in-port cabin was maybe eight feet wide and twelve long. Marsh knew what he was talking about, though.

“Sometimes I feel that we’re all actors,” he said. “Pretending that we have the answers to everything.”

“A surprising amount of this command business is an act. I don’t mean play-acting in the Hollywood sense. I mean that when you’re the captain, everyone is watching you, every moment. So you have to present a calm, confident, wise, compassionate, patient demeanor, even if personally you are none of those things.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that, I think. But what if you’re the XO and the captain doesn’t live up to those rules?”

“Then you have to fill in for his professional failings while not appearing to. In the end it’s not about the XO or the CO — it’s all about taking care of the ship and her people. You concentrate on doing that, and your fitness reports will take care of themselves, one way or another. It’s actually a beautiful system.”

“Did you know all about this when you took command?” Marsh asked.

“Nope,” he said with a smile. “The screening boards select officers for command based on their potential to step up and fill the shoes. Sometimes they get it wrong, but for the most part they get it right, as I think you’ll find out when your turn comes.”

Marsh shook my head. “The closer I get…”

The captain chuckled in the darkness. “Yeah, I know. That’s the amazing thing, when you think about it. We regulars are more afraid of screwing up professionally than we are of the Japs and their bombs and torpedoes. I think you’ll do just fine when the time comes, and it’ll come sooner than you think.”

“I just made lieutenant commander,” Marsh said. “I’m years away.”

“You’re probably one year away, XO. If nothing else, Bill Hughes will be superb training for when you get your own ship. On how not to act under fire.”

“And a free education at that.”

The captain laughed quietly. Marsh was going to miss him.

Commander Bill Hughes came aboard a week later, after a long trip from Pearl through a succession of waypoints across the Pacific and finally to the Enterprise. The Evans came alongside the bird farm one fine morning and Hughes and his seabag were highlined aboard. He was a tall, rangy officer, with a narrow, bony face and pronounced dark circles under his eyes; he was obviously exhausted by the long trip to join Evans. The captain gave him his in-port cabin and moved himself to the even tinier sea cabin right behind the bridge. Commander Hughes slept for the first twelve hours of his stay on board. He even slept right through the next morning’s dawn gunnery practice, with five-inchers banging away fore and aft.

Commander Hughes was accompanied by a second officer, who was as short and round as Hughes was tall and thin. He was Rabbi Sidney Morgenstern, and he was Evans’s brand-new chaplain. Marsh had not known they were getting a chaplain, and his surprise showed when they met on the midships highline platform.

“Welcome aboard, Rabbi,” he said after Morgenstern introduced himself. “Are you rotating through the screen ships or are you our new chaplain?”

“I think I’m all yours, XO,” he said with a grin. “We had three rabbis on the Bunker Hill, and I was voted most likely to become expendable, so they sent me to a tin can.”

“Well, let’s find you a berth, then,” Marsh said. “We have maybe three men aboard who are Jewish, but I assume you can counsel anyone who needs it, right?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “That’s why I have the Star of David on one collar and the cross on the other. Same God, last time I checked in.”

Marsh handed the rabbi over to the supply officer and went to catch up with the new skipper. As the exec, his job was to coordinate the turnover process and the actual change of command ceremony. It all went pretty well over the next week, with only a few custody signature items such as binoculars having to be “surveyed” because no one could find them. After it was all over, and Captain Warren had been highlined off to begin his own long journey back to the States, Commander Hughes called Marsh into his cabin for the customary here’s-how-I’m-going-to-run-it conversation. He was not especially friendly, but Marsh sensed that was more his professional demeanor than any antipathy toward him.

“Everybody gets one mulligan,” Hughes said. “After that, when someone screws up he’s going to hear from me. I will not tolerate incompetence or slack behavior.”

Marsh nodded. There really wasn’t any response he could make to that, other than perhaps to point out that, in the main, the Evans was sailing with a crew made up of last year’s high school class and a wardroom of ninety-day-wonder reservists. It wasn’t so much that they were incompetent as it was that they were necessarily ignorant of how everything was supposed to work.

“This is a good, solid crew, Captain,” Marsh told him. “They’re willing, but they’re still green. If they screw up, it’s usually because they don’t know any better.”

“Then we need to beef up the training program,” Hughes said. “You can’t be doing OJT when the Japs come calling.”

On-the-job training, however, was precisely how much of the U.S. Navy had trained during 1942, as Marsh knew firsthand. The heavy casualties in that year and the next reflected that. He’d been sent into an exec’s job with absolutely no training, other than having watched his own exec in Winston. It also didn’t help that there was a great deal of turnover among warship captains. About the time the rest of the ship’s company had gotten used to a new skipper, another one seemed to show up to take his place, as there were many commanders eager to get the command-at-sea box checked off.

“Give me your appraisal of the individual officers, please,” the captain said. “Start with the department heads.”

In Winston, there had been a four-striper as captain, a three-striper as exec, and five lieutenant commanders as department heads. Every officer on board except the doctor, the supply officer, and the chaplain had been regular officers and academy graduates. By 1944, things were very different: The skipper and Marsh were academy professionals. Every other officer on board was a reservist, with the most experienced department head having not quite three years of sea duty under his belt. The captain nodded when Marsh finished going through the list.

“I’m an impatient man, XO,” he said. “I’ve never learned to coddle people. I tell them what I want and I expect them to deliver, whether it’s chasing rust out on deck or keeping a spotless engineering space. If they don’t measure up, I tend to yell. Don’t take it personally. It’s just how I do things. You may find yourself mending fences for me with the wardroom and the crew from time to time.”

Marsh almost laughed, given what Captain Warren had told him. At least Hughes was being honest about himself, he thought. A screamer who could admit he’s a screamer was better than one who didn’t see anything wrong with acting that way.

Marsh hadn’t counted, however, on just how explosive his temper was. It happened at the end of one of their refueling evolutions. The ship would come alongside the carrier every third day and receive and hook up span-wires, down which a thick black hose would roll. Once the hose was plugged into an on-deck refueling connection, the carrier would start pumping, and the engineers would open and close valves down below to distribute the fuel oil to the various tanks lining the ship’s bottom.

On this particular occasion, the snipes managed to overfill one of the forward fuel tanks. When that happens, the fuel oil comes spurting out of tank vents all along the main deck, covering men, the deck, and the sides in a viscous film of heavy black oil. Since it’s the receiving ship’s job to tell the providing ship when to stop pumping as her tanks get close to full, there’s never a question as to who screwed up. To make matters worse, there’s always a gallery of senior officers lining the carrier’s island catwalks watching to see how well the tin can is being handled alongside. It was hugely embarrassing for Evans to blow black oil all over herself.

Captain Hughes said not a word, but after the Evans broke away from the carrier to regain her assigned station in the screen, he summoned the chief engineer, the main propulsion assistant, and the oil king, who was a senior boiler-tender chief petty officer. Then he proceeded to detonate. Marsh stood behind the captain, studying the steel deck beneath his feet, while Hughes went on and on, practically foaming at the mouth. Marsh was pretty sure the rest of the crew could hear it all over the ship; the bridge watch team certainly got an earful. The oil spill had been embarrassing. Marsh thought this temper tantrum was downright humiliating.

Afterward, the captain sat back in his bridge chair and asked him what was on tap for the day. One moment ago he had been almost purple in the face. Now he was calmly asking about the day’s schedule of events, as if he had some kind of off-on switch for his temper. After Marsh recited the evolutions planned for the day, the captain instructed him to conduct an informal investigation into how the engineers had managed to foul up the refueling so badly this morning.

“I’m guessing an inexperienced fireman misread a tank sounding,” Marsh said. “Or we got a bubble.”

“Don’t guess, XO. I need to know precisely what happened, and thereby where we need additional training.”

Marsh got together with the chief engineer and the main propulsion assistant, Lt. JG “Swede” Bolser, after lunch. It was as he had “guessed.” During refueling, a fireman apprentice was stationed at every tank’s sounding tube on the deck above to periodically measure the level of fuel oil in the tank with a steel tape. A fireman named McWhenny had put the tape in upside down. It was as simple as that.

Marsh told the chief engineer to put something on all the tapes that would make it impossible to put the wrong end in the tube and then to hold a training session for all the junior firemen assigned to sounding duties.

“Is he going to take McWhenny to mast?” Lieutenant “Kit” Carson, the chief engineer, asked.

“I hope not,” Marsh said. “The kid made a mistake, that’s all.”

“Based on the captain’s reaction, I thought we were going to be taken out to a yardarm somewhere.”

“He’ll get over it,” Marsh said. “It’s embarrassing to foul up in front of all those airedales.”

“Well, Swede and I are going to be spending a lot of time down in main control this week,” he said. “I don’t ever want to be screamed at like that again.”

“Then don’t screw up,” Marsh said. “Because that’s what he’ll do.”

“It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the Japs come. He starts screaming like that, people are gonna get rattled, and then we’ll have a real problem.”

Which is exactly what happened two days later after the carriers had made a strike on Guam. The Japs launched a retaliatory raid against the task group, a few dozen Kate bombers accompanied by just enough fighter escorts to keep the carriers’ own fighters fully occupied. The Kates went after the three big carriers, but most were driven off or shot down. One, however, came after Evans. He’d been hit trying to get at a carrier and was now trailing a lot of smoke. Having overshot his target, he was flying at about one thousand feet but losing altitude. Marsh suspected the pilot knew he was never going to make it back to his base and had decided to take at least a destroyer with him, because he put his damaged plane into a shallow dive and headed right for Evans.

The ship was shooting with everything she had — the five-inchers, the forty-millimeters, even the short-range twenty-millimeters. Since he was coming straight in, there wasn’t much of a fire-control problem. Marsh saw pieces of the plane come off as shells and bullets whacked into it. His general quarters station for an air raid was back on the secondary conning station, which was behind the after stack. That way, if the ship got hit on the bridge, the second in command would still be alive to take over, but for now Marsh had nothing to do but to watch. The gun noise was incredible, but even with every gun blasting away, he could hear Captain Hughes from a hundred fifty feet away screaming at the weapons officer to get that bastard. Marsh thought the captain should have been conning the ship in evasive maneuvers, but instead the Evans was going straight as a die at twenty-seven knots, making it easier for the pilot to set up his aim point. He released three bombs just as one of their five-inchers put one right into his belly tank. The Kate exploded in a ball of burning aviation gasoline, but those three bombs kept right on coming, and Marsh and his two phone talkers instinctively ducked behind a splinter shield.

The first bomb landed in the water about a hundred yards away and went off in a tremendous explosion that Marsh thought must have scared the absolute hell out of the snipes down below. The middle one hit the back of the signal bridge, behind and above the pilothouse, bounced off with a loud clanging noise, and went cartwheeling into the water without going off. The third went over the forward stack and detonated two hundred yards away. Bits of the bomber landed in the water all around the ship, and its tail assembly went skipping across the sea like a flat rock before finally sinking out of sight.

The relief was as dramatic as the sudden pressure drop when all the guns ceased firing. The only sound that Marsh could hear in those few moments of stunned silence was Captain Hughes, still screaming at the weapons officer for having let that Kate get so close. Marsh thought it surreal, and then the normal noises of a destroyer going full bore through a light chop intruded and everybody went back to scanning the skies for more Kates. Five minutes later Marsh was summoned to the bridge, even though they were still at GQ and some of the screening destroyers nearby were blasting away at unseen enemy planes.

The captain was visibly furious. He pointed to the forward five-inch guns with a shaking finger and commenced a tirade about mount fifty-one not even firing on the incoming bomber, while mount fifty-two had put several rounds right into the water. At that moment, mount fifty-one, the forward-most five-incher, let go with one round to starboard, away from the formation. The sudden bang startled everybody, especially the captain, who had his back to the bridge windows. He jumped, and his steel helmet went sideways on his face, making him look ridiculous.

“I’ll find out what happened,” Marsh said quickly, not wanting him to see any snickering on the faces of the bridge crew. “I’m guessing—”

“I told you,” he yelled. “No guessing! Facts. I want to know facts. That bastard almost got us, and two of my five guns weren’t even in the goddamned game! Go find out now, right now!”

“Shall we secure from GQ, Captain?” the officer of the deck inquired. “Combat says the raid is over.”

“No!” he replied. “Keep everyone on station until I know what happened with those two guns.”

The gunnery officer, Lieutenant “Killer” Keller, was at his station up on Sky One, the forward and highest gun director on the ship, two levels above the bridge. Once again, Marsh was pretty sure he knew what had happened: Mount fifty-one had had a hang-fire, and fifty-two had probably lost elevation synchronization with gun plot. He climbed the ladders to the director, and Killer confirmed his suspicions.

Mount fifty-one had gotten off thirty rounds before the thirty-first failed to fire. Since it was technically a hot gun, the rule was that they trained the gun at the enemy or in a safe direction and waited ten minutes before dropping the breechblock, extracting the defective shell, and inserting a clearing charge. If a hot gun experienced a hang-fire and the crew opened the breech immediately, the defective powder round could cook off from the heat of the previous thirty rounds and blow the gun mount right off the ship. Hence the prescribed ten-minute wait.

“And fifty-two?”

“They lost electrical power,” Killer said. “Went to manual control. New kid on the pointer seat. Forgot to point in all the excitement.”

“Wonderful,” Marsh said. “The captain is not pleased.”

“So we heard,” Keller said with a rueful grin. “Japs probably heard it too. But looky here: We got us a souvenir.”

One of the signalmen, a third-class petty officer, was holding up the badly bent tail-fin structure from the Jap bomb that had failed to go off when it bounced off the signal bridge. Both of the officers noted the wet stain on the front of the signalman’s dungarees.

“Give you a little skeer there, sigs?” Keller called down over the wind.

The kid grinned back at him. “You should see what Pettybone did,” he called back. “Had to throw his dungaree trou over the side.”

This was more like it, Marsh thought. Guy pissing his pants and then laughing about it. I’d have probably pissed mine, too, he thought, but this was the way it was supposed to be in the tin can Navy — up close and personal. What had happened was hardly unusual: Lots of things went off the tracks, especially on a relatively new ship. The power loss to mount fifty-two was probably caused by the vibration of all the guns firing at once tripping a breaker somewhere. The new kid getting the naval version of buck fever as he watched his first real live Jap bomber come at him was by no means without precedent. Somehow, Marsh thought, he had to find a way to make the captain understand these facts of life and relax a little bit. He’d come from a staff assignment, where perfection was achieved on a typewriter. He was in the real, frontline, down and dirty Navy now, and he had to realize that perfection out here did not exist.

That’s not how it went. The captain wanted the new gunner’s mate moved to a different GQ station. He wanted the chief engineer to personally check every circuit breaker in the gunnery electrical system to verify operability. He kept the entire ship at GQ while these orders were carried out, even as Combat sent out recommendations to steer Evans back into her assigned antisubmarine station out behind the carrier. As for the hang-fire, the captain declared that those were peacetime rules, and in the heat of battle they were to clear a hang-fire immediately and get that gun back on the line.

Marsh dutifully carried out his orders, although later that evening he brought the captain the operating procedures manual from the Bureau of Ordnance for the 5"/38 naval gun, which specifically stated that hang-fire rules were to be followed regardless of the operational situation, since a cook-off with the breech open could lead to a magazine explosion and the loss of the ship. The captain read it, closed the book, and gave Marsh a sour look.

“It’s my ship, goddammit, and I will make the decision on what to do with a hang-fire. Assuming, of course, that I know about it. Tell me this: Why didn’t they report that they had a hang-fire?”

He had Marsh with that question. Marsh had assumed they had made a report. “I’ll have to find that out,” he said. “That’s standard procedure, too.”

“XO, let me tell you something. To use your favorite expression, I’m guessing you assumed they had. You guessed they’d lost power or had this problem or that problem. You have to stop that. Assuming and guessing is unprofessional: You have to know. You have to know. I have to know.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll work on that.”

“What’s the chain of communications from the gun mount to me on the bridge?”

Marsh described the sound-powered communications links for control of the gun systems.

“So if they have a hang-fire, the gun reports to main battery plot, plot reports to Sky One, who reports to Combat, who reports to me on the bridge?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you are not in that loop?”

“I have a barrel switch back at my secondary conn station, so I can listen to any sound-powered phone circuit I want to. My phone talker is tied to the command circuit, the 1JV, so that I can take over if something happens to the bridge.”

“Like a bomb hitting the signal bridge because two of our guns didn’t work.”

“Yes, sir, just like that.” Marsh hadn’t mentioned the “souvenir.” Somehow it didn’t seem like the best moment.

“You know, that’s pretty cumbersome. I think that the best place for the XO would be in Combat, where he would have the tactical picture right in front of him, instead of being back behind number two stack with his shirtsleeves in the breeze.”

His voice was calm now, and he was thinking aloud. Marsh suddenly realized there was a big brain in there, and maybe all the shouting had to do with frustration rather than anger.

“But if we take a hit up there, say right between Combat and the bridge, the two most senior officers in the ship could be lost at the same time.”

“You’re in there for an antisubmarine action.”

“A torpedo isn’t going to hit the bridge,” Marsh pointed out. “Remember the San Francisco, off Guadalcanal? They took a hit on the bridge that killed the admiral, the captain of the ship, the admiral’s staff, and all the ship’s bridge officers except one. The communications officer ended up taking over not only the ship but effectively the whole task group until the shooting stopped.”

“I know,” he said. “Let’s do this: I want to have a meeting in the wardroom tomorrow with the gun boss and the chief snipe, assuming we’re not dealing with Jap bombers again. I want to sort out our internal communications so that something like a hang-fire doesn’t have to go through four separate phone talkers before I know about it.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Marsh said.

And so it went from that day forward. Anytime something went wrong, Captain Hughes would scream and yell, embarrassing himself as much as the officers he was mad at. This would be followed by an uncomfortable discussion between Marsh and the captain, where he would be as calm and in control then as he had been out of control earlier. In each case Marsh learned something valuable, he realized, while striving to protect the department heads and even the junior officers from the captain’s wrath.

The ship’s company, interestingly, did not hate the man as Marsh half expected them to. After a while, they came to expect and endure the temper tantrums, because he would inevitably explain why he got so mad, what had to be fixed, and why it was important in the context of a warship in the battle zone. There was little arguing with his rationale. Marsh just wished he wouldn’t make it so unpleasant, but that was his nature, and he was, after all was said and done, the captain. Chief Marty Gorman, promoted twice now since Winston, offered Marsh the lower-decks view: Captains are issued from above just like spare parts for the engine rooms. Some are noisier than others, but they all serve a purpose.

Sometimes Captain Hughes would personally take a hand to show everyone how something was supposed to be done. On one occasion, Evans had had to shut down one of her four boilers for maintenance, and, upon relighting it, the snipes managed to lay down a cloud of black smoke that was very visible within the carrier formation. It got so bad the flag officer over on the carrier sent Evans a flashing-light message telling them to knock it off. The captain treated the engineers to his usual verbal fireworks and then went below to the forward fireroom and personally lit off the boiler, while making all the boiler-tenders watch him go through the procedure. Marsh had to admit: There was very little black smoke when he did it, and he also demonstrated to the snipes that he knew how to line up the fuel pumps, the blowers, and the burners to get a proper light-off with no smoke.

One of the five-inch gun mount crews managed to break a powder case in the process of loading a round during gunnery practice, spilling macaroni-sized powder grains all over the hot amplidyne motors and the interior of the gun mount. Once again, there was lots of noise on the bridge, followed by a visit from the CO to the offending mount, where he personally ran them through their paces on how to properly load, ram, and close the breech. He actually operated the loading control panel, demonstrating that he knew both how and when to cycle the appropriate machinery and that, if he knew how to do it, then by God they ought to know how to do it without risking a flash explosion in the mount. It took them two hours to clean up all the spilled powder, during which he kept the entire ship closed up at general quarters. Marsh thought he was punishing the crew for the mistakes of just one battle station and finally said so. The captain reminded him that a mount explosion was still possible until all the powder had been cleaned up and said that was why he kept the ship at GQ, not to punish anyone but in order to be ready to deal with such an event.

Marsh realized then that Captain Hughes was thinking differently than he was. The captain was always mindful of the bigger picture, even while diving in and getting his hands dirty in a fireroom or a gun mount to make his point. He had seven years seniority on Marsh, and it seemed to him that those seven years made Hughes a hell of a lot more qualified to be the CO than Marsh would ever be. Except that three weeks later Marsh became the captain when Captain Hughes killed himself.

It was another one of those situations where a small group of sailors managed to screw up what should have been a simple evolution. One of the lifeboat davits had turned up a cracked davit arm. The shipfitters went out to weld it back together, but first all the metal had to be cleaned. Once they got the davit arm cleaned up and ready for a weld, they discovered that three of the four bolts holding the frame of the arm to the main deck were broken. They sent a fireman apprentice to go get a power drill, and then one of them proceeded to punch several holes in the frame trying to drill out the broken bolts. A chief came by, saw the mess in progress, and, unfortunately, imitating his captain, started yelling at them.

The captain, who happened to be one deck above, looked over to see what the fuss was about. He then came down to the davits, saw the hash the fireman had made out of what should have been a simple job, and grabbed the big drill to show him how to attack a recalcitrant bolt. He then proceeded to drill perfectly through the bolt head, through the shaft, and then right into a 440 volt cable running underneath the davit arm base. There was a sickening humming noise, a purple-white flash that seemed to envelop the captain, and then a sudden stink of cooked meat. A breaker popped in main control, and a moment later the sound-powered phone in Marsh’s cabin squealed at him in a manner that told him it was serious.

By the time he got to the main deck, horrified sailors had managed to get the captain unstuck from the steel of the main deck, but it was obvious that there was nothing that could be done for him. His mouth was open and contorted in a snarl worthy of a feral animal, and the whites of his glaring eyes were literally cooked. Two of the younger sailors were feeding the fishes over the side, and Marsh, too, felt a moment of extreme nausea when he looked at the scorched body. The ship’s pharmacist’s mate came running with his black bag, took one look, and shook his head. He didn’t have to say anything. He sent two men to sick bay to bring up a body bag.

Rabbi Morgenstern showed up right after he heard the pharmacist’s mate called away to the port boat davits. He knelt down next to Commander Hughes’s rigid body and tried unsuccessfully to close his eyelids. Then he put on a narrow shawl and began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. The sailors standing around took off their hats, as did Marsh. The rabbi got up from the deck and told Marsh he’d make the arrangements for a burial at sea. “That’s usually my job,” Marsh told him.

“Not anymore,” the rabbi said. “You’re the captain now, right?”

Marsh was taken aback. The rabbi, of course, was correct. Marsh went up to the bridge and called for a signalman to bring down a message blank. The ship was within visual range of the carrier, and Marsh didn’t think that this news was appropriate for the TBS voice radio circuit, to which all ships in the group listened. Lieutenant John Hennessy, the navigation department head, looked over his shoulder as Marsh wrote up a terse report. When he was finished, Hennessy told Marsh that he’d forgotten something.

“What?”

“Sir, you have to say that you’ve assumed command.”

“They’ll know that, for Chrissakes.”

“No, sir, that’s not what I mean,” Hennessy said. “You have to make a log entry, and then you have to inform the task group commander who, by name, rank, and serial number, is now in command.”

“Oh,” Marsh said. “You’re right.”

For Marsh it was a more than interesting moment. Before this awful day, he had been the de facto leader of the wardroom, with the subtext being that he was one of them against, or at least afraid of, the captain and his rages. Following the advice of Captain Warren, Marsh had been shepherding the wardroom, while being very careful not to say or do anything that they could interpret as insubordination. Now that he was the captain, if only in an “acting” capacity, John Hennessy was going to be the acting executive officer. The change in Hennessy’s tone and body language, and the “sir” when he spoke to Marsh, were tacit recognition that everything had changed.

“All right,” Marsh said. “You’re the next senior in line. That makes you acting XO, so you write the message and make sure it has all the right stuff in it, okay?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” John said. Before this moment, he would have said, “Got it, XO.” That invisible but tangible gulf between the ship’s company and the captain was already opening, and it made Marsh more than a little uneasy.

They jointly made the requisite log entry, and Marsh formally assumed temporary command of USS Evans. A flashing-light signal went out to the Evans’s squadron commodore, embarked on one of the other destroyers, five minutes later. The commodore came right back with instructions to initiate a JAG-manual investigation into the circumstances and saying that Marsh’s temporary assumption of command had been duly noted. An hour later the Japs sent a large raid of land-based bombers against the task group, and Evans went back to the work at hand, blasting away at the big black planes whenever they came in range. This time all the guns worked just fine, almost as if to give Captain Hughes a proper send-off. After securing from general quarters, Evans went alongside another destroyer and transferred their doctor over so he could conduct a postmortem exam. That evening, the ship’s company, led by the rabbi, conducted a formal burial at sea, after which Marsh took a mug of coffee up to the bridge and sat in the captain’s chair for the very first time in his life. It hadn’t seemed appropriate until they’d committed Captain Hughes to the deep. It still didn’t, and he wondered if he was doing the right thing.

Remembering what Commander Wilson, Winston’s XO, had done, Marsh had removed Commander Hughes’s academy ring before the burial and put it in his safe. He wasn’t sure at that juncture who was supposed to write the condolence letter, himself or the commodore, so that night he crafted a letter to the captain’s widow expressing his profound sympathy for the loss of Commander Hughes in an operational accident at sea. He enclosed Hughes’s academy ring, bundled the package into an official Navy correspondence pouch, and addressed it to Hughes’s wife back in Washington, in care of the commodore. He knew that the Navy’s casualty notification telegram would reach her long before this package did. He’d briefly explained what had happened and then expressed how much he, as the exec, had learned from Hughes and how everyone in the ship had respected and admired his professional expertise. The last bit was a stretch, of course, but one made with the best of intentions. It was Marsh’s first command decision.

The next morning he expected a message from the task group commander announcing that they’d found a three-striper on the admiral’s staff to send over to take command. Instead, the commodore sent them a message directing Evans to proceed in accordance with previous orders, namely, to detach from the Enterprise task group, proceed to a place called Leyte Gulf, and join Admiral Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet invasion forces there for duties as assigned. First they were told to go alongside the Big E and pick up an aviator who was being sent to one of the escort carriers. They dutifully made the transfer, with Marsh’s letter going over and one lonely aviator coming back.

As they broke away from the carrier and headed south, Marsh was surprised to see whom they’d taken aboard. Mick McCarty, of all people. An image of a ravished Glory Hawthorne flashed through his mind, but he quickly smothered that and greeted Mick with as much civility as he could manage. Mick handed over a courier pouch containing the basic elements of the Leyte invasion operations order. They talked for a little while, and then Marsh turned him over to Lieutenant Hennessy to find him a bunk for the transit. Then Marsh retired to the captain’s sea cabin to read the op order. He’d decided to use that smaller cabin for steaming operations and keep his XO’s stateroom as his office until a new CO was ordered aboard. That left the captain’s in-port cabin empty, a visible reminder for the crew that he was only the acting, or temporary, captain.

Two other destroyers were detached with Evans, and they officially became what was known in Navy jargon as a task element. The senior skipper of the three, which was most certainly not Marsh, took command of the three-ship unit and formed them up in a column for a twenty-knot dash to Leyte Gulf. The invasion fleet was some two hundred miles to the southwest of where the big-deck carrier groups were operating. Once they’d settled into transit formation, Marsh got on the ship’s announcing system and formally declared to the crew that he had taken temporary command. He also laid out the details of what had happened to Captain Hughes, because he knew there had to be all sorts of rumors spreading below decks. He told them that they would be operating in support of a task group of escort carriers, who were in turn supporting General MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippine Islands, beginning with Leyte Island. Based on some of the things he’d read in the op order, he also briefed them on what to expect.

“Once American forces land on Leyte, the Japs are going to hit back and hit back hard,” he said, pausing between sentences to let the echoes of his voice die down on the topside speakers. “If they lose the Philippines, we will be sitting on all their supply routes from Southeast Asia. That’s where their oil comes from. If we can cut that off, they’ll be finished. They have dozens of airfields and a large army on Luzon Island, and we’re going to be hearing from them on a daily basis. They might even send out their battle fleet. The Philippines are that important.” He finished up by announcing that they’d be refueling and rearming as soon as they joined the invasion task force.

The next morning they did just that, refueling from a fleet oiler and then going alongside an ammunition ship. It took most of the day to get their supplies topped up, and Marsh spent all of it on the bridge in the captain’s chair or supervising the young officers who were conning alongside. They were still a hundred miles away from Leyte Gulf itself, which was probably why the Japs didn’t come out to play. Yet. It would have been a tempting target, though — escort carriers, fleet oilers, transports, supply ships, some seven hundred ships in all, headed for Leyte Gulf, a narrow body of water between the Philippine islands of Leyte and Samar. Halsey’s Third Fleet, back from a week of air strikes on Formosa, was operating to the north, conducting daily air raids on Jap air bases on Luzon and the primitive Jap airstrips on Leyte itself. That pressure may have accounted for the relative peace and quiet in the assembling invasion fleet.

The escort carriers were odd-looking ships. Some of them were converted merchant ships. The Navy designated these as CVLs, light carriers. The rest had been purpose-built and were designated as CVEs, escort carriers. They carried about two dozen aircraft, as compared with the ninety-plus carried aboard the much bigger Essex-class fleet carriers. They were unarmored and just about unarmed — one open five-inch mount on the stern was typical. They displaced eight to ten thousand tons, as compared with the thirty-six thousand tons of the fleet carriers. They made up for their light capabilities by their sheer numbers, though, and they’d been assigned to provide air support for the landing forces so that the soldiers didn’t have to defend airfields ashore as they’d had to in Guadalcanal.

Evans was assigned to protect one of the three task units into which MacArthur’s group of sixteen small carriers had been divided. The task unit into which Evans had been assigned was to be stationed closest to the actual invasion ships and the landing areas, and consisted of six of the small carriers and their escorting destroyers. The other two task units were to operate farther offshore as an air-support general reserve until the invasion revealed how much opposition was waiting for the landing forces. The task group’s radio collective call sign was Taffy, and the three task units were Taffy One, Two, and Three. Everyone thought that it was a ridiculous call sign, but call signs were deliberately chosen so as not to suggest to a listening enemy what kind of ships were talking. By evening the three destroyers took up their assigned escort stations and began to settle in while getting used to the new, much smaller carriers. Evans’s first assignment was to transfer Mick McCarty to the USS Madison Bay.

The Madison Bay was not much of an aircraft carrier, Mick thought, as Evans sat astern, waiting to come alongside for the highline transfer. He’d read up on the class before he’d left the Enterprise. The Madison Bay was not quite five hundred feet long and barely displaced eight thousand tons. She carried a mixed bag of twenty-four aircraft, fighters and bombers, in a single so-called composite squadron. She had one catapult, and the island structure was almost all the way forward. Her smokestacks stuck out the side of the flight deck at an ungainly forty-five-degree angle to keep boiler exhaust gas turbulence away from landing planes. On a good day and going downhill, she could make a maximum speed of eighteen knots and still look pretty ugly doing it.

His departure from the Big E had been a quiet business. He’d said good-bye to his few friends in the ready room the morning of his departure. He’d actually gone to find Georgie until he remembered that he had not been recovered. The skipper had been “busy,” but the exec had caught up with him in the passageway and wished him good luck. He’d stopped by sick bay and procured some more skin cream for his bad hand. Then he’d gone down to the hangar deck to the starboard side midships sponson for his transfer to Evans. He’d highlined over only to discover that his classmate was now the captain. After their quarrel back in Pearl almost nine months ago, Mick wasn’t sure how he’d be received, but Marsh was courteous and reasonably friendly. By unspoken mutual agreement, neither of them mentioned Glory Lewis.

Now, one week later, they were bouncing around in a moderate sea behind his prospective new home, this ugly duckling of a carrier. He stood next to Marsh on the bridge, wedged between the captain’s chair and the centerline pelorus station.

“So,” Marsh asked. “Whaddaya think?”

“I think I’ve been well and truly shit-canned,” Mick said. “Look at that thing. She’s bouncing around as much as this tin can is.”

“Yeah, but they see action damned near every day,” Marsh said. “The Big Blue Fleet does the grand-scale stuff once in a while, but these guys are smokin’ Japs on a daily basis. There’ll be sixteen of ’em out there when MacArthur’s boys finally go ashore.”

Sixteen? Mick thought. He did the math. Given the usual hangar queens, that was still more planes than they’d had at Midway. Too bad all they’d be dropping on was a bunch of pillboxes and trenched emplacements. The fighter guys might have some fun when the Japs came out in force from Luzon, but Halsey’s big-deck carriers had been pasting their airfields for two weeks now. After the Philippine Sea, which the world of naval aviation was starting to call the Marianas Turkey Shoot, they couldn’t have that many experienced pilots left. War birds without pilots weren’t war birds.

Marsh had his binoculars up to his face. “There goes Roger,” he called out. “Let’s go.”

The officer of the deck called the signal bridge and told them to two-block Evans’s R flag, indicating that the destroyer was commencing her approach. Mick said good-bye to Marsh and offered his left hand. Marsh took it absently, but he was already engrossed in supervising the dangerous maneuver coming up as Evans increased speed to twenty-two knots and aimed for a spot no more than a hundred feet off the carrier’s starboard side.

Mick felt a bit dejected as he waited for the highline rig to go across. Ever since Midway he’d been bouncing around the Pacific from ship to ship, station to station. He was still a lieutenant, permanently so in all probability, while his classmate and roommate Marsh Vincent was a lieutenant commander with a destroyer command, however strangely he had come by it. The brass must think highly of him or they would have sent someone else aboard immediately.

Then there was Glory. That night in Pearl had not been about love and romance. His argument afterward with Marsh had probably damaged their friendship irretrievably, no matter how polite Marsh had been for the past week. Mick had brought up the argument only once since coming aboard. He’d apologized for calling Marsh a coward. Marsh had waved the whole incident away, citing the destructive power of too much booze in a hot climate.

“Lieutenant?” one of the sailors said. “We’re ready if you are.”

Mick tightened the strings on his kapok and climbed into the flimsy-looking highline chair. A minute later he was bobbing his way between the two ships, suspended in the chair from a rolling block on a two-inch-diameter manila line, getting splashed by the waves erupting between the steel sides of the ships and hoping like hell they didn’t dunk him. Tin can sailors were known to enjoy giving the occasional flyboy a real scare with the chair. Finally he came bouncing over the folded-down lifelines of the CVE, where six strong hands grabbed the chair and invited him out. His damp seabag was already sitting on one corner of the after sponson platform. As he got out of his life jacket, a large officer in an oil-stained flight suit came across the deck to greet him.

“Beast McCarty, as I live and breathe,” he said. “Welcome to the Untouchables.”

Mick recognized him at once. He’d been the offensive fullback for Navy when Mick had played his first season as a youngster back at Annapolis. His name was Maximo Campofino, and he’d been two classes ahead of Mick. He was wearing a lieutenant commander’s oak leaves.

“Mad Max, how the hell are you? You the skipper here?”

“For my sins. What’d you do — punch out the admiral’s aide or something? C’mon, get your bag, and let’s get inside the house before these deck-apes start throwing bananas at us.”

Mick expected to step through the sponson hatch into the hangar bay, but instead it was just a passageway. Max took him to the ready room and introduced him as the latest exile from the big-deck Navy. Everyone seemed friendly enough, and they even had a flight suit already hanging for him.

“Where the hell’s the hangar bay?” Mick asked after he’d shifted into more familiar working attire.

“We only have half a hangar on this boat,” Max said. “Half an island, half a flight deck, one slingshot, two ’vators, and thass it, partner. Supposed to have twenty-four planes, but usually we have eighteen, nineteen, and maybe twelve of those reporting full up on any given day. The doughboys love us just the same, though.”

“Missions?”

“We launch, we loiter, get a call from a FAC, go down to treetop level, and shoot the place up. Great fun, most of the time.”

“I did some of that on the ’Canal,” Mick said. “It wasn’t like Midway, but you’re right. The guys on the ground loved our asses.”

“They still do, man. You were at Midway? Bag anything big?”

Mick told them of his experiences and then described the Philippine Sea engagement. He kept it fairly low-key, not wanting to sound like too much of a braggart his first day. The pilots around him were pretty junior, though, and several looked like downright nuggets.

“Are you an ace?” one of them asked.

“I’m a bomber guy, but I have shot down some Jap aircraft. That whole ace business is more of a fighter thing, you know?”

“Well, we’re by God happy to have you with us,” Max said. “C’mon, lemme show you around the boat. Won’t take five minutes, actually.”

Mick found that it took longer, but not much longer. Max explained that the CVEs were being mass-produced as cheaply and quickly as possible. “They’re not very capable, but there’s lots of them. All together this formation can put up an aluminum overcast if we have to. It ain’t glorious, but it’s ordnance in the air that counts with the ground-pounders. So: What’s with the glove on your right hand?”

Mick hadn’t been aware that he was favoring his hand again, but it did hurt, and the color sometimes went very dark, especially at night. He explained how he’d been injured and that the choice had been to go back to the States to see a specialist or quit flying.

“Good choice,” Max said. “Let our flight surgeon take a look-see. He’s pretty good.”

“This thing rates a flight surgeon?”

“Yeah, there’s one for every three jeeps. This one happens to be embarked here for the moment, but they rotate ’em. Lemme show you the planes.”

Max took him through the hangar bay and then up to the flight deck to see all the planes. Mick noticed that some of them had distinctive decorations — teeth on the nose, funny names on the cockpit side panels, or decorative decals. He asked if he could put his white horse emblem on one of the barges. Max told him to talk to one of the aviation bosuns, who did all the artwork. Mick noticed that Max didn’t bother to ask about the significance of the white horse. Mick told himself that it was as much for Jimmy Sykes as for his own fleet reputation.

After the noon meal, Mick went to sick bay and met with the flight surgeon, a weary-looking, middle-aged lieutenant commander with really thick glasses named Lowenstein. Mick explained how his hand had been damaged.

“Wow,” the doc said. “I’da been out of my ever-lovin’ mind, buried like that.”

“I was getting there. So, what do you think?”

“You’re gonna lose it, is what I think. Not right away, but the circulation system has been badly compromised. One fine day you’ll have to have it amputated. I’m surprised you can grip a stick.”

“You shitting me?”

“Not a pound, Lieutenant. How bad’s it hurt?”

“Sometimes it’s really painful, especially when it goes dark on me. Other times it just aches.”

“Well, if we were back stateside, I’d have to med-down you right here and now. But we’re not. The invasion starts sometime in the next ten days, and as long as you can grip the stick and fly your barge, I’ll clear you. But be prepared, young man.”

“Jesus.”

“Not like you did this in a bar fight, Lieutenant. You’ve been wounded, like a million other guys in this goddamned war. How’s the rest of you?”

The doc gave him a quick physical and then put him on a light aspirin regimen. He gave him some massage techniques to use on his hand and told him to sleep with it elevated as much as he could.

“How will I know when it’s time to, uh—”

“You’ll smell it.”

Mick blinked at that. “Terrific,” he said.

“You asked, Lieutenant. Like I said, they should have downed you right there on the island.”

“They were busy, Doc. You have no idea what a horror show the ’Canal was.”

The doctor gave him a lopsided grin and then raised his shirt, displaying two deeply dimpled bullet wound scars on his chest. “Yeah, I do, Lieutenant. I went in with the Breed in August ’forty-two. I was doing surgery in a bomb crater, water up to my knees, body parts floating around, when a sniper got me. Shot me right through my red cross, the little fuck.”

“A flight surgeon, sent to Guadalcanal?”

“I was just a journeyman cutter then. Did aeromedical cert while recuperating in Oakland. The regular ones are all out on the big-decks. Oh, almost forgot. How’s about you drop your skivs and we’ll do the finger-wave, shall we?”

A-day was scheduled for October 20, with preliminary landings to be conducted by Army Rangers to sanitize some vital islands on the flanks of the entrance to Leyte Gulf. Evans had arrived on the twelfth, and Marsh and all the other officers were immediately immersed in reviewing new operation orders, because the original invasion target had been Mindanao, not Leyte Island.

They also ground through the paperwork of the JAG-manual investigation into Captain Hughes’s death. The facts, of course, were pretty straightforward. The background leading up to the incident was a more delicate matter, and Marsh took that part of it for action. They sent the package off via one of the jeeps to their distant commodore, who was still out there in the Philippine Sea with Halsey and the big-deck carriers. If it was anything like every other JAG-manual investigation report, it would come back with questions, procedural corrections, and directions to change wording, etc. Such an investigation would have been done regardless of who or how senior the person was who managed to kill himself accidentally. Since it was the CO in this case, the nuances of the wording would receive much more attention from the senior officers reviewing it. Marsh was just glad to have it off his back for a while.

One day he received a personal-for message from the commodore, informing him that a commander by the name of L. J. Benson, from CincPacFleet’s staff, was making his way across the Pacific logistics chain to take command of Evans. Marsh felt a momentary pang of disappointment, but then reality reasserted itself. He was a junior lieutenant commander. Even in wartime, he was probably two, maybe three years from a command of his own, assuming that the Navy Department wanted him in command at all. The message, however, set in motion preparations for yet another change of command. This time the poor navigation officer, John Hennessy, became the stuckee who had to honcho the paperwork, with Marsh’s help, of course.

Marsh found it interesting to watch the crew try to decide what to call him — XO or Captain. With Commander Benson officially designated as the next commanding officer, he told them all to keep calling him XO. Some of them managed it, some of them did not. Anyone who approached him with business when he was sitting in the captain’s chair called him Captain. If he was just walking about deck, they called him XO.

The Evans spent two days before A-day supporting the frogmen units that were doing clearance operations along the two main objective beaches. Jap snipers harassed the UDT boats but were quickly driven off by Evans’s five-inch gunfire. They couldn’t actually see the snipers, so they simply clear-cut the jungle. They also had some fun blowing up mines that had been swept from the entrance to Leyte Gulf itself. They were large round black casings complete with contact horns, and their thousand pounds of explosives made for some spectacular explosions and pictures. They had help spotting the mines from the jeeps’ aircraft, and one day an SBD with a rearing white horse painted on the side came by for a low pass. The canopy was back, and the bomber came down close and bridge-wing low. Marsh saw that it was Beast, waving casually as the noisy barge grumbled by. His goggles were up on the back of his head, and he had a big cigar sticking out of the side of his mouth. The crew loved it. Beast in his element at last, Marsh thought.

The actual A-day invasion was somewhat anticlimactic. It began with a thunderous predawn bombardment by a line of elderly battleships, a few of which had been raised from the ignominious mud of Pearl Harbor. It was satisfying to see them hurling their fourteen- and sixteen-inch shells into the jungles near and then beyond the beaches, although a bit unnerving when said shells came rumbling over Evans’s gunfire support position further inshore. The sixteen-inchers in particular, weighing nearly three thousand pounds each, made a deep wa-wa-wa sound as they sailed overhead in search of Jap pillboxes, spider holes, and hardened gun emplacements. Once the troops swept ashore, they encountered very light and disorganized resistance. Apparently the Japs had withdrawn their main army forces, estimated at twenty thousand, from the likely invasion beach areas up into a long, densely forested ridgeline that defined the geographical spine of Leyte Island. The inshore fire support destroyers were jumped by a few Jap planes that appeared out of nowhere. They were driven off by the ships’ AA fire and the quick response of some fighters from the Taffy carriers offshore. Marsh recalled Mick’s comments about the Turkey Shoot: These Japs weren’t very aggressive.

On the twenty-fourth, all the gunline battleships and most of the destroyers assigned to the invasion turned south, heading down the east coast of Leyte for the Surigao Strait, a passage of water between Leyte and the next big island, Mindanao. Initially none of the other ships were told why, but later in the evening they learned from listening to the TBS radio that a Jap battleship force was headed their way to attack the invasion logistics shipping. Obviously no one wanted that, although by that time, and probably unknown to the Japanese, almost all the supplies had been landed ashore and most of the invasion transports were sitting there empty. Three other tin cans and Evans were left behind to protect the close-in Taffy Three escort carriers. Marsh suspected Evans was chosen to stay behind because she had an acting CO. Listening to the tactical radios as the hastily formed battle force went over the horizon, it sounded more like a hunting party than any kind of emergency to the south. As usual, they were mostly in the dark about the tactical situation beyond their own line of sight.

That night they secured from evening general quarters and prepared to go alongside one of the jeeps for fuel. At the last minute the refueling was canceled because of a steering problem aboard the escort carrier. That made Marsh a little bit nervous. One thing every destroyer captain monitors constantly is his ship’s fuel state. The twenty-two-hundred-tonners were not exactly fuel efficient, which was not helped by the fact that their commanders expected them to execute every signal at top speed with as much seagoing verve and dash as they could muster. Evans was approaching the magic number of 50 percent, below which it was mandatory fleet policy that the ship refuel. The escort carrier, USS Gambier Bay, told them to come back tomorrow. They sheered off and headed back to their fire support station off a tiny village called Palo, where the army was encountering stiffening resistance as they moved inland.

Once on station in their fire support area, Marsh took a cup of coffee up to the signal bridge, where there was a little bit of a breeze on an otherwise stultifying evening. The rabbi joined him. Morgenstern had become a welcome addition to the ship’s company. He made friends easily, liked people, and was always willing to lend a hand with paperwork or other admin matters if an officer needed some relief. He told corny jokes constantly, and the men always listened and laughed dutifully even if they’d heard it a hundred times. He also managed to find his way to the captain once a day to report on the pulse of the crew and any problems that had become ensnared in the chain of command.

“Rabbi, how’s it going today?” Marsh asked, glad to see him.

“Suspiciously well,” Morgenstern said, stirring his coffee with a pocketknife. “Seems quiet for a major invasion.”

“We’ll get some fire missions tonight,” Marsh said. “The army likes us to shoot some H and I rounds at night forward of the front lines.”

“H and I?”

“Harassment and interdiction. We shoot randomly into the jungle in a specified area. Japs never know where it’s gonna land, so they worry and dig all night while our guys get some shut-eye.”

“Lovely. Where’d the battlewagons all go?”

“Southwest. There’s a rumor the Jap fleet is coming through Surigao Strait, and there’s gonna be an ambush.”

They talked about a few personnel issues, but tonight the rabbi had no major brushfires from belowdecks. They mostly watched the sun set behind the ridges and pretended that it wasn’t all that hot.

“How are you enjoying command?” Morgenstern asked.

“Enjoying is not the right word, I’m afraid,” Marsh said.

Morgenstern smiled. “I watch all these guys on the make struggling to get command,” he said, “and then I watch them all turn gray over the next six months.”

“I’ve spent my entire career thinking about how I would do everything differently. Not be so afraid to try something new. Now I’m just like all my bosses before me — very careful.”

“Because your decisions affect us all, and if you screw up, we face calamity.”

“Exactly. That was a personal surprise.”

“At least you’re aware of it,” Morgenstern said. “I’ve seen some who haven’t the sense to recognize the dangers of command at sea.”

“Well, I’m trying. We have a real CO inbound, and as each day goes by, I’m getting increasingly anxious for him to get here.”

“For what it’s worth, I think the crew would be happy for you to keep her,” the chaplain said.

“That’s nice to hear,” Marsh said. “Let’s see what they say if we have to really get into it one day. The Japs will send their first team out to keep the Philippines, and I’ve met those boys.”

At close to midnight they were released from naval gunfire support duties and ordered back out into Leyte Gulf to rejoin the gaggle of Taffys. The senior destroyer captain became the antisubmarine screen commander and sent Evans to a station on the northwest side of the escort carriers’ circular formation. Three other tin cans rounded out the screen formation, which was a compromise between the best antisubmarine defense and the best antiair setup. When there were more “heavies” than escorts, neither formation offered very much defense at all. The other two escort carrier groups were even farther out, beyond Evans’s radar range to the southeast.

It was October, typhoon season, and the night air was heavy, hot, and very humid, with frequent squall lines sweeping across the outer edges of Leyte Gulf toward the island of Samar to their north. From time to time they would maneuver the ship into one of those rainsquall lines just to get the caked-on salt washed off the topside areas. If it looked substantial enough they’d pass the word and the off-watch crewmen would rush topside, wrapped in towels, and grab an impromptu freshwater shower.

At around one in the morning Marsh was called by the CIC watch officer. It seemed that the atmosphere was heavy enough that they could listen in to the radio transmissions coming from what sounded like a major sea battle going on to the south. TBS was usually good for talk only out as far as the visible horizon, but on this night the signals were being ducted by the atmosphere and thus reaching out over a hundred miles. Marsh couldn’t sleep because of the intense heat, so he went to CIC and then out to the bridge, where they patched the southern battle force’s tactical frequency into one of the bridge speakers. The rabbi showed up to listen in, and Marsh explained to him what they were hearing over the radio.

It was axiomatic in the Navy that the smaller the unit, the more it tended to talk on the radio. What was going on in Surigao Strait that night was no exception. The PT boats were apparently the first to attack, and they gabbed away nearly as much as pilots do, with excited claims about direct hits followed by high-pitched warnings to avoid collision in the pandemonium they had created. They were followed by the destroyer squadrons, which roared down the flanks of the strait firing swarms of torpedoes into a Japanese battleship and cruiser formation. Waiting patiently at the top, or northeastern, exit from the strait were the six old American battleships. Because they had been doing shore bombardment, they were not loaded with their full allowance of the armor-piercing ammunition needed for a battleship fight, so they held fire and waited for the Japanese to run the lethal torpedo gauntlet. Once the Japanese capital ships got within eleven to twelve miles, they opened up with a sixteen- and fourteen-inch gun version of Remember Pearl Harbor.

Sometimes the signals would fade away into static and garble but then return with such clarity and volume that men on the bridge jumped to answer the radio. It was exciting stuff, and pretty obvious that the Japs were taking a pasting few would survive. Around three or so, Marsh fell asleep in the captain’s chair. Tomorrow would be another day, he remembered thinking, and then realized that tomorrow was already here. Dawn GQ, sunrise, breakfast, and then back to the gunline to tear up some more jungle.