Pacific Glory

FOURTEEN

For the past ten days Mick and the other pilots in VC-Eleven had done some training missions, followed by the first softening-up raids behind the two main target beachheads on Leyte. They encountered no aerial resistance, and only sporadic flak from the Japanese army, which seemed to be melting into the jungles and leaving the beaches wide open for the anticipated landings.

Mick had just about gotten used to landing on the half-carrier deck. As Max had pointed out, the landing area was really no smaller than a fleet carrier’s; it just ended at the bow instead of halfway up as it did on the big ones. A fleet carrier gave you the illusion that you had some margin for error, Max pointed out. The jeep made it clear you better know what you’re doing. So far, the weather had been flat and calm. Mick wasn’t looking forward to trying any of this in a real seaway.

In the wardroom that night there was lots of talk about a series of strikes carried out that day by the fast carrier striking forces up north of Leyte. Apparently the Japs had sortied from Borneo with some of their battleships but had been badly battered in the Sibuyan Sea west of Leyte. According to the radio scuttlebutt, the Helldivers had managed to sink the biggest battleship they’d ever seen. Now the big-decks were hauling ass up north chasing reports that the Nips’ carrier fleet had come out to fight again. Halsey was apparently ready to make up for Spruance’s much talked-about “failure” to get all the Jap carriers during the Philippine Sea battle. The pilots were all talking about it over coffee in the small wardroom.

“Seems to me,” Max said, “if Spruance shot down all their carrier aircraft at the Turkey Shoot, who cares about their carriers?”

“What if they reloaded?” one of the other bomber guys asked.

“With what?” commented a fighter pilot. “More teenagers? Last Zero I went up against, the pilot looked twelve years old.”

“You saw the pilot?”

“I T-boned his ass,” the fighter jock said. “Saw his face just as his tail broke off. Looking at me in total shock. Then I killed him.”

“There you go,” Max said. “That’s the important part.”

“Halsey take the whole fleet with him?”

“Supposedly left the battleships behind, in case the Japs decided to make another try at Leyte.”

The fighter pilot seemed surprised to hear that. “I was hanging on a CAP station this morning, northwest of here, up by Bernardino Strait? I didn’t see any battleships.”

“Probably out east, refueling. It makes sense that the Bull would leave them behind — battlewagons aren’t much use when you’re going after carriers.”

“Hate to see one of theirs coming over the horizon,” Mick said. “I’ve been on the receiving end of that shit. Really noisy.”

They all laughed, then drifted off to their cabins. They would launch for the 0545 dawn GQ, then come back aboard for breakfast before heading over to the amphibious objective area gulf and their daily Army missions.

The next morning Mick went up to the flight deck from the wardroom for a cup of coffee and a cigarette topside after breakfast. The day was already warming up, with calm seas and scattered line squalls sweeping in toward distant Samar Island. There were five jeep carriers in their formation, scattered haphazardly with about five miles distance between ships to allow for unrestricted air traffic. Three destroyers and a lone destroyer escort were prowling around their stations outside of the carrier formation. The other thirteen escort carriers were out of sight to the southeast somewhere. Madison Bay’s group, known as Taffy Three, had the frontline support mission for the day. Taffy One and Two were offline, for the morning, anyway, but supposedly ready to launch whatever support might be needed ashore, be it fighters or bombers.

The Army had advanced inland from Leyte Gulf and finally run into real opposition in the hills behind the beaches. Mick anticipated a long day of dropping relatively small bombs on bunkers, while Madison Bay’s fighter guys would be loading up with rockets for essentially the same mission. The other CVEs would have already put up the CAP stations between the amphibious area and the main island of Luzon, from which land-based Jap air had been coming out in dribs and drabs to harass the invasion shipping.

Mick was settling into the routine and beginning to like his job again. The composite squadron was a mixed bag of nuggets and experienced fleet pilots who, for a variety of mostly unspoken reasons, had been eased out of their squadrons. Max, the skipper, called the gang the Untouchables, but that was a bit of an exaggeration. Everyone pretty much knew that the glory days with the big-decks were coming to a close; after Midway, the long, grinding, Solomons campaign, and then the recent Marianas Turkey Shoot, the big-decks were running out of worthy opponents. The real job from here on out was what Mick’s squadron was doing, close air support of Army and Marine divisions ashore as they chewed up the islands in search of prospective long-range bomber bases close enough to start working over the Japanese homeland. For that, they needed numbers, and the shipyards at home had quit building big-decks and were now churning out dozens of the little carriers. As the crew said, the letters CVE stood for combustible, vulnerable, and expendable, but in a war of attrition, numbers counted.

Mick’s plane was being refueled and armed up for the day’s work. It was second in line for the lone catapult, and he watched as the shirts humped the small bombs onto their racks and fed shiny belts of fifty-cal into the wing guns. The rear gunner seat had been taken out to trade weight for ammo. His hand was throbbing a little this morning, and he’d already removed the glove to give it the ghoulish smell test. He’d taken to wearing the glove constantly to conceal the dark red skin; everyone knew about the problem, but no one said anything. As long as he could grab the stick and fly the plane, it was an entirely private matter. This morning the Hand, as he’d begun to call it in his mind, felt swollen, and the skin was tighter than usual. Some of the other pilots had some physical problems as well, and strangely, that seemed to cement the bonds within the Untouchables. One thing was obvious: There was none of the hypersensitivity to screwups that he had experienced on the big-decks. These little carriers were more like the tin can Navy.

Skinny Graham walked up, his face practically obscured by a big fat cigar.

“’Nother fine Navy day,” he commented.

“Yeah, buddy,” Mick said. Skinny was overweight, which was hard to do on wartime chow. He had a big round face and a pleasantly hearty outlook on life. His fighter, an early model Hellcat, was the plane on the cat in front of Mick’s barge.

“Ain’t much wind,” he noted. “Gonna shoot and droop this morning. Hear about the big fight down south last night?”

“Heard some guys talking in the wardroom about the Japs running into a buzz saw,” Mick said. “What’d you hear?”

“Battleship fight,” Skinny said. “Japs lost big.”

“So our battleships are around,” Mick said.

“These weren’t Halsey’s,” Skinny said. “These were the old guard ships, the ones who got hit in Pearl. They raised some of ’em and put ’em back in service as shore-bomb platforms. They’re too slow to run with the big-decks, but good enough to set up an ambush. It must have been a truly satisfying night’s work.”

“Isn’t that something,” Mick said. “I used to watch newsreels of the so-called battle line. Looked like a parade of dinosaurs. I guess Pearl was the end of an era for those things.”

“You know what really hurt?” Skinny said. “The Japs used modified battleship shells to bomb those guys. Put fins on fourteen- and sixteen-inch armor-piercing shells, because that’s what it took to get through their armor. In a way, they got sunk by their own kind.”

Mick watched the red and white Fox flag travel halfway up the signal halyards atop the island, signaling that the ship was preparing to launch airplanes. The shirts had most of the planes’ wings down and locked. The plane captains were walking around their grimy charges, making last-minute checks and wiping oil off the engine cowls, pulling tags, and cleaning windscreens. Madison Bay hadn’t turned into what little wind there was yet, so Mick and Skinny walked over to one of the catwalk piss-tubes and anointed the deep blue sea one last time before strapping in for a three-hour close air support mission.

“What the hell’s that?” Skinny asked as he was zipping up his flight suit.

Mick heard it, too, his brain telling him he’d heard that sound before but not yet being able to place it. In the next instant, three smallish splashes rose off the carrier’s port side, which then turned into thundering eruptions of smoke and water, the edges of which were bright yellow.

“Holy shit!” Skinny said, as they stared at the enormous columns of water that were cascading back down to the surface a mere five hundred yards away. Mick was dimly aware that the ship’s engines were turning up, and then the call for pilots to man their planes blasted over the topside speakers, followed by the GQ alarm. All pilots. On the double. Emergency launch.

Mick dropped his coffee mug into the catwalk and ran up three steps to the actual flight deck, sprinting for his Dauntless. The all-hands pipe was blaring again over the topside speakers, followed by the announcement that this was no drill. As Mick reached his plane, six more huge shell splashes erupted, this time in front of the little carrier, blasting red-dyed water a hundred feet into the air, close enough that Mick could feel the explosions through the wooden flight deck. Definitely no damned drill.

Skinny lumbered by him and was helped into his cockpit by three shirts. The carrier leaned over to starboard as she turned southeast into the prevailing wind, and Skinny, cussing a blue streak, almost tumbled out the other side of his cockpit.

By this time Mick was strapping in and starting up the engine. His brain had finally classified what he was seeing: battleship rounds. He’d done a quick horizon scan as the engine was turning up but could see nothing except distant rainsqualls. Then he remembered that the battleships could shoot from nearly eighteen miles away, and the visible horizon from a ship was only about eleven or twelve. He looked ahead as Skinny’s fighter turned up, blowing clouds of blue and white smoke down the flight deck. Other planes behind him were also cranking up, and the carrier’s slanted smokestacks were beginning to pour out thick coils of black smoke. The Fox flag snapped up into the two-block position, and the carrier leveled up as she came onto flight course. She was shaking. Mick realized he was, too.

Then Skinny was launching, accelerating in a ribbon of hydraulic mist down the cat track, disappearing for a few moments below the bow and then angling off to starboard at max power, his prop cutting visible spirals of moisture in the heavy tropical air. Just then three more shells came in. Two hit close aboard the port side, raising more of the towering shell splashes. Mick felt a double-thump through the landing gear. He looked over his shoulder and saw a commotion back on the flight deck. There was smoke starting to rise from the starboard side, but it was dirty brown, not oily black like the stuff coiling out of the stacks. He saw the flight deck medic crew racing aft, pushing their wheeled litters in front of them through the cluster of spinning propellers. Then the shirts were waving at him to mount the cat. He released the brakes and gunned the engine to move the Dauntless into position.

Battleships. Jap battleships. Right here?

Where in the hell had they come from? And where the hell were our battleships? Or, for that matter, Halsey’s? If the jeeps were being chased by Jap battleships, there was going to be a real slaughter out here.

He snapped his chin strap and pulled the radio mike in front of his lips as the shirts hooked him up. There was already pandemonium on the land-launch circuit. Jap battleships approaching from the northwest. A line of Jap cruisers closing in from the northeast. The escorting tin cans had been ordered to make smoke and attack with torpedoes. The jeeps were getting rid of all their aircraft as fast they could, armed or not.

He checked in with PriFly. The air boss told him to switch to Tactical Four as soon as he’d launched, gaggle up with the rest of the squadron once they got off, and then go out there and get those bastards. Sounds like a worried man, Mick thought. With good reason. Madison Bay was in the back of the pack, along with Gambier Bay. More shell splashes erupted out of the flat gray sea, clawing ever closer to the fleeing carriers.

The cat officer was signaling him to run it up. He checked his straps, did a quick scan of the gauges, made sure his flaps were set, pressed hard on the brakes, and ran the mill up to full power. Another gauge scan, everything at twelve o’clock. He grabbed the stick, sending an unusual lance of pain up his right wrist. He cycled the stick, looking left and right to confirm that the control surfaces were responding, then centered it. He looked right to the cat officer, saluted him, grabbed the stick again, took a deep breath, and held it. An instant later he was hurtling over the bow at just over a hundred knots. His head and body jerked forward in the harness as the g’s came off, and then he nursed the Dauntless into a gentle climb after his airspeed built up.

Go get the bastards? With what, two hundred-pound bombs and fifty-cal? He switched to Tactical Four and found Skinny already up.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“Three one zero,” Skinny said. “There’s a whole shitpot full of ’em, too, and one of ’em’s a real monster. Form on me until Max gets up. Angels eight.”

As he gained altitude he could begin to see the big picture. Below him the little carriers were running for their lives, spitting off airplanes as fast as they could while dodging salvos from the distant battleships. His own carrier was leaving two trails of smoke, one on purpose, to obscure themselves from distant range finders, and one that indicated she’d been hit. As he watched Madison Bay weaving through the white circles of previous shell splashes, nine shells erupted around her, two close enough to obscure the flight deck in cascading sheets of water. She turned slightly in the direction of the center of the pattern, desperately trying to avoid the next salvo.

From a mile and a half in the air, he could clearly make out two groups of enemy ships. One line of several medium-sized warships was steaming to the east by southeast, as if trying to get ahead of the fleeing Kaiser Coffins and box them in. They were all leaving broad white wakes behind them and firing their forward turrets as they came. If those were heavy cruisers, Mick thought, they’d catch the jeeps in about twenty, maybe thirty minutes, close in to point-blank range, and tear them apart with eight-inch.

Some distance behind the cruiser line there were two, no, three very large ships, whose features were indistinguishable in the hazy air. Then he saw what looked like a few dozen destroyers trailing behind them. Those had to be battleships, Mick thought, as he saw the red winks of their muzzle blasts envelop them in smoke. He also saw the American escorting destroyers, each streaming heavy smoke to further obscure the jeeps, heading in all directions but mostly northerly, running at high speed. Mick shook his head in wonder: What were they going to do when they got there?

The skipper finally came up on Tactical Four.

“Okay, you guys, we can’t wait for the whole gang. Forget the battlewagons — we can’t hurt them with these popcorn bombs. We might be able to give those cruisers a bloody nose, though. Any more bombers up?”

Two more Dauntless pilots checked in. Max, who was flying a fighter armed with rockets, told Mick to take charge of the bombers and to roll in on the lead cruiser. He’d take the fighters to the rear of the cruiser column and make a rocket attack.

“Drop your whole load, guys, and then make one more pass with fifties. Aim for those pagoda structures. Kill the bridge officers, maybe we can slow ’em up.”

“Roger that, Skipper,” Mick said. “But these little bombs aren’t going to do shit.”

“We’re buyin’ time here, Mick. They don’t know you’ve got little bombs.”

“Wilco,” Mick said and then shifted his three-pack of Dauntless dive bombers onto Tactical Two. He gave a quick briefing for the two nuggets who were flying against the Jap varsity for the very first time.

“They’ve covered their topside decks with twenty-five-millimeter guns for AA work,” he told them. “That’s like a fifty-cal times two. We’ll roll in from ahead. Try to pull out directly on top — don’t get out on either side, because that’s where the teeth are.”

“Pickle when?”

“Angels three,” Mick said. “If your guns bear, shoot while you’re pulling out. It keeps the AA crews occupied. Arm your toys.”

Four minutes later they arrived within gun range of the lead heavy cruiser, whose forward turrets were firing perfectly timed salvos at the distant CVE formation. They knew they were in AA gun range because tracers began reaching for them through the patchy clouds below. As they circled into attack position, Mick switched back to Tactical Four and told Max they were rolling in on the lead cruiser.

“Roger that,” Max called. “Boss says they’ve been hit three times and are losing way. She may not be there when we get back, so we may have to go find Taffy Two.”

“You got pigeons?”

“Boss says pigeons to Taffy Two are one three zero for forty miles,” Max said. “He thinks, anyway. We’re right behind you, going for tail-end Charlie.”

“Roger, roger, here we go,” Mick said and switched back to Tactical Two. “Okay, Breakfast Clubbers, on your backs, on your bellies, aiming for the anchors.”

Mick rolled inverted and began pulling on the stick as the horizon spun in his windshield. Sky-sea horizon line, then all sea, then black dashes with white wakes, each dash getting bigger as the altimeter unwound. When his nose was settled on the bow of the lead ship, now easily defined as a heavy cruiser busy shooting at his carrier, he split his flaps to steady the dive and concentrated on the pointy end. No circling carriers here, just a sleek-looking cruiser focused on carrier-killing while sending streams of hot red and white tracers up in his direction.

At five thousand feet he dropped the nose sharply and then at three thousand pickled his load of baby bombs. He had to pull hard to avoid driving his Dauntless through their bridge windows. As the g’s built up he struggled to keep his injured hand tight on the stick, and then he felt a popping under his glove and a sensation of wetness that hadn’t been there when he started down. For a brief instant the pagoda bridge structure had been visible, and he’d fired a burst from his fifties for as long as he could see it. His eyeballs were dragging under the g-load, so he couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything.

He pulled out no more than five hundred feet over the cruiser. He couldn’t see what if any effect his bombs had had, but it hardly mattered. Even if he had hit her, they’d mostly bounce off, with maybe a few topside AA gunners out of action if one dropped directly on a gun tub. He flew a jinking pattern straight out the cruiser’s wake and then realized he was headed right for the next one. He saw a fighter drop out of the sky and unleash a barrage of five-inch rockets at the back of the cruiser line before pulling left out of his dive and right into the cruiser’s full starboard-side AA barrage. An instant later he went into the sea in a ball of fire.

Mick had one split second to decide: Strafe number two or pull out? He jinked right and pulled up, not knowing whether or not there were more fighters rolling in on the column. One of the nuggets came up on Tac Four.

“You hit him and I hit him, Mick,” he said, “but he’s still crankin’.”

“Follow me back up,” Mick said. “Angels eight. Where’s Benny?”

“Right here, Mick. You guys started a fire, but she’s still bangin’ away down there. We gonna hit her again?”

“You bet,” Mick said. “Same deal — come in from dead ahead, strafe her ass down the whole length. Then we’ll go find us some real bombs.”

They regrouped at eight thousand feet, out of range of most of the twenty-five-millimeter AA that was still streaming off the two cruisers. The lead cruiser had a fire going amidships, but it didn’t look too serious. The second cruiser had fallen out of line for some reason and was no longer firing at the jeeps, but the next three in the line were blazing away. Mick could still see those much larger ships in the distance to the northwest, black blobs that flashed yellow and red once a minute like some lethal clockwork.

It took three minutes to get back into position to reattack the lead cruiser. Mick examined his right hand. There was watery-looking blood leaking out of his glove and down his right forearm. He considered taking the glove off but then thought better of it. Strangely, now it didn’t hurt very much.

“Okay, boys,” he said. “Roll in, steady up as soon as you can, and start shooting at three thousand feet. Short bursts until you’re on target, then give it to ’em. Pull out on the deck and fly a snake dance straight down the wake. Gaggle-up at angels eight.”

Mick put his right hand back on the stick. It felt spongy now, but at least it gripped the stick when he told it to. He slipped his oxygen mask aside for a moment and took a sniff. For the first time, he detected the odor of rot. He’d never smelled gangrene before, but, as in one’s first encounter with a rattlesnake, he recognized it when he smelled it.

That’s not good, he thought, but then had to start jinking hard to avoid a barrage of banging AA shells.

He went back on the mask and rolled in again. It seemed a little easier this time, and from ahead, anyway, there also seemed to be less AA fire. He could see smoke arising from amidships on his target, but it was white, not black. Something combustible but not vital. Or maybe steam?

He took it down to two thousand instead of three. He’d told the nuggets to start shooting at three to give them time to get their lineup right. He had done this before. He waited until he was about a mile and a half in front of the cruiser and then opened up full throttle, walking the short-burst shell splashes from his fifties from the water directly in front of her bow and then across her foredeck and into that weird, castle-like structure of her forward superstructure. He held the stream of tracers for a dangerous few seconds right at the level of the bridge windows, watching the rounds pummel the glass and seeing ricochets flashing out the bridge wings from inside. At the last possible moment he flipped the Dauntless on her side and flew past the bridge of the ship in a full left-ninety bank to avoid collision. He blasted out from behind the cruiser and then dropped down to the deck, jinking hard right and then left to avoid the sudden stream of AA tracers. He heard a couple of pings on the hull of the aircraft and actually felt something hit the armored seat back, but then he was clear and climbing back for altitude.

While he waited for the nuggets, he switched frequencies and called Max. There was no answer. He tried the other fighters, but they weren’t up, either. He checked the radio dial to make sure he’d picked the right freq and then went back to his nuggets. They were still with him.

“I can’t raise the skipper,” Mick said. “So let’s go back to mother and see if she’s still floating. If not, we’ll go find Taffy Two and rearm.”

They rogered as they formed up on him. Both declared that they were out of gun ammo. Down below the first cruiser was still going, but her guns had, for now anyway, fallen silent. The tail-end cruiser, which Max and his fighters had rocketed, was headed northeast, apparently out of the fight for the moment. Mick couldn’t see any smoke or fires, but she was definitely leaving the party. He looked for the Madison Bay up ahead but was unable to pick her out among the jeeps, who were still going as fast as they could to the east-southeast, pursued by shell splashes and clouds of funnel smoke. Mick switched to Madison Bay’s land-launch and called the tower.

Nothing.

Then he saw her, way behind the other CVEs. She was aflame from one end to the other and rolling over on her beam ends. He could see her hull number, emblazoned on the flight deck, through all the smoke. Two cruisers had closed into close range and were sportingly firing into the hulk as little black dots dropped into the sea from her side. He looked for Gambier Bay, the other jeep at the back of the formation, but couldn’t find her.

The three other carriers were still steaming south of east, out of the wind now, trying to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the wolves pursuing them. Mick realized there’d be no landing on any of them, and he still didn’t know exactly where the other Taffys were, or if they even knew what was going on back near Leyte Gulf. If he and his two nuggets took off on an Easter egg hunt, they could be out of the game for more than an hour.

“You guys know how to get to Tacloban?” Mick asked. They both rogered in the affirmative. The Army had captured that airfield a day after the initial landings. It was tiny, but they could get fuel and fifty-cal there, if nothing else.

“I’ve still got plenty of guns left. You guys head to Tacloban, get what you can, and get back out here.”

“Where you goin’?” Benny asked.

“Back down to break some more windows.”

Mick bent the Dauntless back down toward the Jap ships. His two wingmen rolled southwest to head for the Army airfield, which was actually inside Leyte Gulf. Mick saw the lead Jap cruisers leave Madison Bay to her fate and train their guns on the next nearest CVE, which was already making smoke from places other than her stacks. To the northwest he saw the battleships coming on through the line of squalls, getting bigger and bigger. Seeing that no one was shooting at him, Mick began a slow climb to get some more diving room and to take another look at his right hand.

Holding his stick with his knees as the Dauntless went up, he gingerly removed the sopping wet leather glove and sighed. The skin on the back of his hand had split like an overripe tomato, with deep cracks running all the way out to his knuckles. He could actually see tendons and the big vein that snaked across the back. Strangely, he felt no pain other than a general soreness, but then he saw what looked like a jagged red tattoo running up the underside of his forearm. He cracked his mask and then slid it right back on his face. No doubt about it — the gangrene monster had him by the arm, and that red snake progressing up his arm was not his friend.

He tried to get the glove back on, but that was hopeless. He scanned the instruments. Fuel, good enough. All the other dials were still standing at twelve o’clock, indicating ops normal. He knew the plane had been hit, but the nuggets hadn’t warned him of a fuel or oil stream, so he didn’t think he was leaking anything volatile, and the controls still worked. He had himself, probably one-third of his fifty-cal left, a working barge, and the world’s supply of fat targets.

What more could I want? he asked himself with a grin. Pick one, go get it.

Piece’a cake, he thought, remembering the major. He would have loved this shit. His right hand felt like a warm sponge. He decided to ignore it.