Sentinels of Fire

SIX

The following morning dawned clear and surprisingly cool, which, unfortunately, made for really good flying weather. I did stars, and then we went to dawn GQ as usual. The doc checked on the skipper, who was still asleep. Doc suggested that we station a trusted petty officer outside his inport cabin in case we had to rouse him for his safety. I told him to get Chief Lamont to take care of that.

We held morning quarters for the first time in two weeks, at which I had the division officers read an announcement to all hands paraded in their divisional spaces that I had assumed temporary command of the ship until the captain could receive medical treatment. Marty asked me what they should call me now. I told them XO. This was a temporary situation until either the skipper came back to us or a new one came onboard. Either way, I’d remain the exec, assuming someone didn’t court-martial me. So XO it was to be.

We picked up one lone bogey late in the morning, way out there at seventy miles, which meant it had to be a fairly large plane, probably a multiengine bomber of some kind. He came within fifty miles of the picket line and then loitered out there. Two other picket destroyers picked him up, too. He did not come any closer, however, and when the nearest picket sent some CAP after him, he withdrew to the northwest in the direction of Formosa and went off our screens. Once he left, I summoned the chief corpsman, and he reported that the captain was still asleep, looking unusually peaceful. I was glad we hadn’t gone to GQ over the lone snooper, but I was a little worried about what might be coming next.

At noon Radio called me down to Radio Central to receive a personal-for from our squadron commander. He acknowledged my message and then indicated he would be coming north on a destroyer to embark temporarily in Malloy sometime today, as a function of the tactical situation.

I felt a spark of professional alarm. The commodore was the captain’s boss. All of the radar picket destroyers reported to him. He had spent some time up here when the picket line was established, but a destroyer simply didn’t give him and his staff enough command and control facilities to run the show. As the captain had pointed out the night before, there hadn’t been much running to do: in each case where a suicider attacked a picket destroyer, the fight turned into a mano-a-mano deal. The targeted ship either got the kami or the kami got them. The commodore would have been a spectator, and since we’d lost four picket destroyers sunk outright over the past three weeks, probably a dead one. So he’d set up shop on the destroyer tender at Kerama Retto, where he could be helpful — tending to logistics, such as fuel, food, and ammo, repairs, replacement ships when needed, search and rescue assets, and medical assistance, like our recently departed LSMR. The fleet anchorage itself was subject to frequent kamikaze attacks, so he wasn’t living safely behind the lines but simply staging himself and his staff where he could do the most good for the guys up in Injun Country. My personal-for message had been the exception: He simply had to come up to the line and deal with this problem personally.

We steamed around our picket station for the remainder of the afternoon. Replacement CAP showed up at 1400 from a new carrier. Our usual carrier had been hit and was headed east for repairs. I had Doc check on the CO every two hours, but he was still down and out. We got a second lurker out at fifty miles late that afternoon, followed by a third. Each time somebody sicced CAP on them, and each time they retired out of radar range. Jimmy Enright wondered how they knew CAP was coming for them. The sly bastards were planning something new, and we were all speculating on what was coming next.

What came next was a high-speed surface contact, which turned out to be a Fletcher-class destroyer called the Cogswell. The Fletchers had been the mainstay of the Navy’s destroyer force from the beginning of the war. They were fast and agile, armed with five single-barrel five-inch mounts and ten above-deck antiship torpedo tubes. The Gearing class, of which Malloy was one, were longer and heavier, a bit slower but more heavily armed, trading forty-millimeter AA mounts for those ten torpedo tubes, and had much more modern command and control facilities. If you wanted to get somewhere in a hurry, though, a Fletcher class with a clean hull and four boilers on the line could do 36 knots all day.

We checked the radar screens to make damned sure there was nothing else coming, then set up an alongside transfer by personnel highline. Four bells rang out over the topside speakers, followed by “DesRon Five-Oh, arriving.”

The commodore, Captain Van Arnhem, came over first, followed by his medical officer, Dr. Atkinson. I stood amidships to greet him. The commodore was built like a fullback, with piercing blue eyes, a Moses nose, and John L. Louis — sized bushy eyebrows. He’d begun the war as a lieutenant commander stuck supervising ship repairs in the Boston Navy Yard, then escaped to sea in early 1942 in one of the new antiaircraft light cruisers as chief engineer. From there he had commissioned a new Fletcher-class destroyer in 1943 and had been in the thick of it ever since. I met him on the main deck, saluted, and told him who I was.

“Wardroom,” he answered as he shucked his life jacket. “Summon your chief corpsman.”

As soon as the squadron medical officer was hauled aboard, the highline rig was broken down and the other destroyer cleared away to set up station two miles distant. It felt good to have five more guns in the neighborhood. This all-day quiet was beginning to spook people.

I gathered up the commodore and his doctor, and we headed for the wardroom. When we arrived, we got a surprise: The captain greeted us at the wardroom door, looking fit as a fiddle after his extended nap.

“Commodore,” he said. “Welcome aboard, sir. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

The commodore grunted and gave him a phony fish-eye. No destroyer captain ever wanted to have the commodore embarked and constantly looking over his shoulder. “Pudge,” he said. “You’re looking suspiciously well.”

The captain sat down in his seat at the head of the table. The commodore, not known for being a protocol stickler, took a seat halfway down the table. The squadron doctor and our chief corpsman, Doc Walker, went to the junior end of the table.

“Well, sir,” the captain said. “Are you embarking? Tired of all the peace and quiet down off Okinawa?”

“I think it might actually be better up here on the picket line, Pudge. The AOA and the fleet are catching hell. We’re losing a ship and a half a day, statistically, and I mean losing. It’s not going so well ashore, either. This island is a whole different kettle of fish, as we’re all finding out.”

He turned to me. “So,” he said. “XO?”

I looked right at the captain. “Sir, I made a log entry last night relieving you of command due to … medical problems. Do you remember our discussing this matter?”

“Nope,” the captain said. There was a longish moment of silence. “What specific medical problems?”

I was more than a little surprised. I also would have thought he’d have reacted with at least some signs of shock: You did what? But he was as normal as normal could be, and obviously much refreshed after his long sleep. I felt both relieved and alarmed. Relieved that he was “back,” if that was the right term. Alarmed because it was going to look like a major misstep on my part, if not outright mutiny. I plunged ahead. “The fact that you could no longer—”

“Wait one,” the commodore interrupted. “Chief Walker, you may be excused now.”

“But, sir—”

“Now, if you please, Chief. Thank you.”

Doc got up, looked to me for guidance, then left the wardroom, smashing his chief’s hat down on his head angrily.

“Go ahead, Commander,” the commodore said to me. Commander, I thought. The formal title used to address the executive officer, even if he was still a lieutenant commander. The temperature in the wardroom was cooling by the second. I did notice that the squadron doctor was watching Captain Tallmadge closely, though.

I set forth the circumstances leading to my actions, and the captain started shaking his head about halfway through my tale. “No,” he muttered. “Never.”

When I’d finished, the commodore turned to the captain. “Pudge,” he said. “This is all, what — made up?”

“Never happened, sir. Never. I would never—”

At that moment, the GQ alarm sounded. No announcement of inbound bogeys, no unexpected gunfire, just that bong-bong-bong that produced a rush of sea boots outside in the wardroom passageway and a clanging of hatches going down. No announcement meant we’d been surprised, and I expected to hear the roar of the guns at any second. My immediate instinct was to get to the bridge, or even Combat. This fiasco in the wardroom would have to wait. I pushed back my chair but then stopped. A familiar look was coming over the captain’s face.

“Commodore,” he was saying, “I must get to the bridge. You’ll understand, of course. I must. I can’t, um, stay here.”

“Yes, of course, Captain,” the commodore said, remaining in his seat. “Go right ahead. This can wait.”

“Yes, right, this can wait. I can’t imagine, XO, what provoked you to, um, ah, I have to get to the bridge.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Right behind you, sir.”

“Yes, right behind me. Of course. Yes. I, ah…”

He opened his mouth and then stopped talking. He started looking around, his hands gripping the edge of the table with visibly white knuckles. The ship began to accelerate, the forced-draft blowers from the forward fire room clearly audible as they spooled up. The forty-millimeter mount that was right on top of the wardroom area began to train out. Still the captain didn’t move. He looked like a man tied to the railroad tracks who’s just seen the approaching headlight. His face was beginning to dissolve. I felt terrible and turned my head away. I didn’t want to see this.

“XO,” the commodore said gently. “Take charge up on the bridge, if you please.”

The doctor was getting up and coming around the table to get to the captain, who was beginning to keen in an unearthly voice, so obviously terrified that he was frozen to his chair. I practically bolted out of the wardroom and hurried topside. I went into Combat and asked them what was coming.

“Nothing that we know about, XO,” Jimmy said. “Do you know?”

I didn’t answer him. Instead I hurried out to the bridge. Everyone was scanning the skies for little black dots. Everyone except Doc Walker.

Then I figured out what had happened. Doc had come up to the bridge and, while no one was looking, had fired off the GQ alarm. Once it sounded, everyone in the whole ship went into automatic, including our terrorized skipper.

“That do it?” he asked quietly.

“Sure did, and I thank you very much. Even so, I hated to see it.”

“Had to be done, XO. They get pretty good at deception, some of them. Still, I’ll hate to lose him.”

Then the bitch-box lit up. “Bogeys, bogeys, inbound, two five zero, range two-oh, triple-oh.”

Well, son of a bitch! I jumped to the captain’s chair and hit the bitch-box. “Combat, Bridge. Alert the Cogswell.”

“They got ’em, too, XO, and now those Jap bastards are gonna get a big surprise.”

And so they did. Two Vals, Jap navy dive bombers, came in, ducking and weaving, expecting a lone radar picket, and then discovering that they faced eleven five-inch, twenty-four forties, and a dozen or more twenties. They were both flamed out of the sky in less than a minute. There was such a display of fireworks it almost looked like overkill. Almost. The sudden silence was broken by some muted cheers from the guntubs.

I told the GQ team to remain on station until darkness and then went below to find the commodore. As I expected, he was in the captain’s inport cabin. The captain had been sedated again, this time by the squadron doctor. The commodore gave me the high sign, and we left the cabin and went out to what had been the forward torpedo deck, now packed with forty-millimeter mounts.

“Okay,” he said, quietly. The forty-millimeter crews were still pretty jazzed up, but they were also busy picking up brass. “You made the right call. For a moment there…”

“He’s done that before, too,” I said. I described the burial-at-sea ceremony. “Commodore, he’s been one of the best skippers I’ve ever had. Caring, knowledgeable, always one step ahead of everything I’ve done as XO. I did not want to bring this to a head. I—”

“You did what you had to do,” he said, stopping my protests, “and you did the right thing. If it’s any consolation, my doctor told me before we got here that he might present as totally normal until imminent danger arrived. Sadly he’s not the first, either. So, tell me: He still do the hat trick?”

“Yes, sir, but not so very much once we got up here. Every day here is, well, scary beyond words. These bastards want to die. We don’t.”

“Yep, that’s the crux of it. We’ve never faced anything like this before, certainly not on this scale. I always imagined the days when machines would act like this, you know, pilotless aircraft, aimed at a ship with no risk to anybody but the target ship. This kamikaze business is truly awful, and we’re just going to have to kill them all before it’s done.”

I saw a chance to plug my pet theory about multiship picket stations. “Sir, today? Two tin cans were here when the Japs expected one. It was over pretty quick. Can’t we make that the standard picket station configuration?”

He stared at me for a moment and then smiled. “We’d have at least three on each station, if we had them, Connie. We don’t. And, just for the record, carriers trump tin cans. By the way, Halsey has taken over the fleet, and the first thing he did was double the AA screens around the carriers. Even so, we’re still sending carriers back to the States so badly hurt they’ll probably never come back out here. I hear you. There are simply not enough destroyers.”

“How about the LantFleet ships? That’s a land war now.”

“This is still a world war,” he said patiently, “and there are still U-boats out there in the Atlantic sinking merchies. The Brits killed two U-boats near Singapore last month, for Chrissakes. Now, admittedly, the Germans are almost done. Any day now, if you believe the Army. Once they quit, then yes, we’ll have more destroyers. But first they have to get here — that’ll take six weeks just to make the trip. Then they’ll have to be trained to PacFleet procedures. They’ve been hunting subs and doing convoy duty almost exclusively. What’s happening now at Okinawa is way beyond anything the LantFleet ships have ever seen.”

“Well, then,” I said, “can we have some fuel?”

The commodore laughed. “That we can do,” he said. “I’ll leave Cogswell here on your station, and Malloy can run me back to KR.”

“And the captain?”

“That would be you, now, XO,” he said. “I’ve countersigned the log. You own it, for the time being, anyway. By the way, who’s your senior department head?”

“Jimmy Enright, the navigation officer. Solid.”

“Well, he has to take over as acting XO. You can’t be both. And one more thing — it’ll be your responsibility to take care of you. By that I mean eating and sleeping. Take naps if you have to, but insist that when you’re flat exhausted, you get some sleep time. No one else will do that for you when you’re in command. Now, get me a signalman.”

Once the commodore had given the good news to the Cogswell, we set the modified GQ condition watch and steamed southeast to Kerama Retto anchorage. Due to an anomaly in the atmosphere, our air-search radar was able to pick up the large carrier formations to the west of Okinawa at almost sixty miles distance. Sunset was approaching, so I had the ship set general quarters for the last hour of the approach to Kerama Retto. There were no air contacts other than the ever-present CAP, and that was worrisome. The kamis had been coming pretty much nonstop every day for the past month. We wondered if those Jap bombers lurking at the outer ring of the fleet’s defenses presaged night attacks, with kamis being vectored under radar control from bombers who stayed out of the fight.

“What’s the moon?” I asked the quartermaster.

“Waxing, three-quarters,” he said promptly.

That meant good night visibility for night pilots, of both persuasions. The picket line might be a very dangerous place tonight. I hoped Cogswell was up to the task; as ever, dusk and dawn were prime attack windows.

We entered the anchorage and went alongside the tender USS Dixie, a different ship from the one we’d tied up to before. The Piedmont had gone around to another anchorage on the eastern side of Okinawa. We were the outboard ship in a nest of three destroyers, two of which were in pretty bad shape. With our makeshift forward stack and a few dozen twenty-millimeter “portholes” stuffed with rags and monkey shit, we fit right in. The engineers were summoned topside to hump two long black fuel hoses from the tender across the two other ships to Malloy’s hungry fuel risers. An ammo barge came alongside during the refueling evolution, and the gun crews spent another hour lifting pallets of five-inch and forty-millimeter projectiles up from the barge, while other teams sent cargo nets full of empty brass cartridges to the barge for return to ammo dumps stateside, where they’d be reloaded. It was almost 2000 before the logistics effort ended.

The captain had been carried off on a stretcher by hospital orderlies from the tender’s sick bay, his face concealed by a carefully arranged bedsheet. The commodore had gone with him, after telling me to get Malloy back on station as soon as we had our supplies on board. Cogswell has an older and less effective radar than Malloy, he told me; she was to return to her patrol station outside Kerama Retto upon our arrival on station. I saluted, and he left the ship, without any bell ringing this time. Everyone was too busy moving food, oil, and ammo. All the ship’s officers were out and about, acting as safety observers. The crewmen humping the heavy ammo were tired, and this was no time for someone to drop a five-inch shell.

We cast off from the destroyer nest and stood out to sea at 2200. The Chop had broken off some of the cooks from the store-handling party and told them to get some chow going, which allowed us to feed the crew before we got back on station two hours later. Cogswell was positively delighted to see us return and left station with all the speed the Fletcher class was capable of, disappearing over the horizon in thirty minutes flat. I envied them.

The radar picture that night remained foreboding. Once every two hours a single blip could be seen way out on the defensive perimeter. Our air-search radar could not determine height, but the Freddies figured that a contact detected out at sixty or seventy miles had to be a high-flier, and also a pretty good-sized plane. Other picket ships were reporting the same thing, a distant shadow contact. None of the pickets had CAP assigned now that it was dark, but at least one carrier down in the task force operating area had night-fighters on Alert Fifteen. We watched and we waited for something to happen.

I met with the department heads after we’d settled in on our picket station. They briefed me on the stores, ammo, and fuel loadout, and I told them I would remain in temporary command of Malloy until such time as a new CO was ordered in.

“That going to happen sooner or later, XO?” Jimmy asked.

“Gosh, you trying to hurt my feelings already?”

There were tired grins all around, but I understood the awkwardness of the situation. Temporary command arrangements were always unsettling. If I was “in command,” then why weren’t they supposed to call me Captain? The term “chain of command” implies clarity and rigidity. A temporary CO was neither fish nor fowl, not that anyone was going to challenge my orders.

“They can always send a three-striper in from one of the staffs out in the carrier task force,” I said, “but that would mean yet another temporary assignment. I’m guessing they’ll get a seasoned commander from one of the ships that was either lost or disposed of due to battle damage.”

“I can just see it,” Marty said. “Morning staff meeting on Halsey’s flagship. Need a three-striper to volunteer to take command of a destroyer up on the radar picket line. Don’t everyone raise your hands all at once.”

“Prime duty assignment,” the snipe said, continuing the farce. “Destroyer command, lots of gunnery action, tremendous potential to gain major experience in damage control, and maybe even a swim call in the bargain. Anybody?”

“And glory,” Jimmy chimed in. “Don’t forget glory. As in, glory to God in the highest, and a really good chance to meet Him, too.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. Dark as the humor was, it was actually a good sign that they could talk that way. Part of it was that we were closer in age and experience to one another than any of us had been to the captain. That’s when I realized that I might be “in command,” but I was not “the captain.” As it should be, I thought.

“Jimmy, you’re now acting XO,” I said.

Jimmy stared at me. “Wow,” he said. “Didn’t see that coming.”

“Chop, get a steward to change out the linens in the sea cabin.”

“Yes, sir, and how ’bout the inport cabin?”

“Collect the captain’s things, do an inventory, pack everything up for shipment back to the States. Then make it ready for whoever shows up to take over. And if you can find time, paint it. The new CO might not be a smoker.”

The phone squeaked under the wardroom table.

“Yes?” I answered. It was the CIC watch officer.

“Three other pickets are reporting that they can each see a separate snooper, as if the Japs were putting one at the extreme limits of each of our sectors. CTF 58 has ordered the night-fighters to come up as CAP.”

“Thank you, I’ll be up.”

I told the department heads what was being reported. “Get with your division officers and chiefs, sort out any rumors as to why the captain had to leave us, and tell them we can expect a new CO shortly. Remind them that that means a change of command, even up here on the picket line. That means materiel inspections of all four departments, an admin inspection, surveys of custodial gear that’s missing, the whole nine yards.”

“Between raids?” Marty asked.

“Navy Regs, guys. Read chapter eight. It doesn’t say ‘except during wartime.’ Let’s get going; hopefully the Japs aren’t getting ready to initiate night attacks.”

“Why not,” Mario said on a sigh. “Nothing else to do around here.”