Sentinels of Fire

EIGHT

The next morning our squad dog acknowledged our damage report, and we were ordered to depart station and proceed down to the tender Dixie at Kerama Retto. The big-deck carrier formations were almost back in the area, so we had CAP during the transit. We’d learned that Murray had been hit by three Vals in waterline strikes almost simultaneously. She’d rolled over and sunk a minute later with the loss of all but thirteen souls. One other picket had been badly damaged by a similar night-strike and was being towed to Kerama Retto. Two other pickets had been attacked but had managed to fight off the suiciders with little damage. There were no air contacts as we started down, so I retired to the captain’s inport cabin and began to write the letters to the families of the men lost when mount fifty-one was blown over the side. We’d searched the area of our picket station at dawn, while still at sunrise GQ, in the scant hope that someone might have made it out of the sinking gun mount, but found absolutely nothing. We’d now lost enough people that the empty seats on the messdecks were becoming alarmingly noticeable.

I ground out the letters over a two-hour period as we wove our way south and east. There was a basic format, and then, with the help of the men’s division chiefs, I interjected personal details wherever I could so that the families wouldn’t think we’d mimeographed their letter of condolence. In each case, I was careful to use language suggesting that their loved one had been killed instantly and suffered a minimum of mortal anguish. The truth was, of course, quite different. That plane had hit the mount broadside with enough energy to lift it from its roller path and smash it sideways right over the side in the blink of an eye. The mount would have been buttoned up for GQ, which meant there was no way out for any of them. Some of the men would have been killed outright at the moment of impact. Some of them, however, would have discovered that they had no chance whatsoever only when the remains of the gun mount passed through the first few hundred feet of depth on the way to the dark oblivion of the Pacific Ocean bottom and imploded.

If this keeps up, I told myself, we all might soon join them. It would come down to how many kamikaze pilots and planes the Japs had left, and apparently that number was a lot bigger than all the king’s intel officers had known. For the first time in my naval career, I experienced the helplessness that any individual feels in the face of the sheer, overwhelming power of war at sea in the face of strong odds. The radar picket destroyers needed some protection, but Halsey wasn’t going to bring the picket line back into the protection of the fleet formation. We had become the equivalent of a seaborne tripwire.

I felt like one of those tethered goats the Indian Raj princes used to put out in the jungle so that their royal hunting guests could get an easier shot at a tiger. I didn’t much like that analogy and wondered if other people in the ship were having similar feelings. Everyone supposedly loved Bull Halsey’s bombast toward the Japs, but not for the first time I thought of inviting him to come up to the Okinawa picket line for a little overnight campout.

The phone squeaked. “KR in sight; we’ve been signaled to go alongside the Dixie.”

“I’ll be right up,” I said.

We moored alongside another badly battered destroyer, the Billingham, which had been smashed from one end to the other during an attack on the carrier formation just before they left for that two-day strike mission up north. No part of her waterline was visible, and her main deck was only about three feet from the water. We could actually smell her as we nosed in alongside, a horrible reek that combined burned flesh, leaking fuel oil, spent high explosives, and saltwater-soaked debris. Our guys stared with horror at the sight of her. Chief Dougherty suddenly ordered five of our people to jump our mooring lines over to Billingham’s deck, because those zombies standing there didn’t seem to know what to do with the heaving lines we’d thrown over.

From my perch on the bridge wing I looked up to the bridge of the tender and saw the commodore. I saluted him, and he saluted back, shook his head, and stepped back into the tender’s pilothouse. I could just imagine what he was thinking: Left the XO in charge and look what happened. Wait till he found out about our leaving station to kill the controller aircraft, I thought. Oh, well, what was the worst he could do: Send me back to the picket line?

Once we got tied up to Billingham I went below to change into clean khakis for my arrival call on the commodore. I had the casualty lists from last night and a summary of our battle damage, which, beyond the loss of a third of our main battery, wasn’t all that bad. I’d told the snipes to scrounge some fuel, and Marty to see if there was some more VT frag to be had, one way or another.

“They gonna send us back like this?” Marty had asked.

“Absolutely,” I told him. “The radar works, and we can move. Unlike this wreck we’re tied up to.”

I’d known the exec in Billingham and wondered if he was still alive. Her bridge and CIC area were mangled and burned beyond recognition. A small crowd of Dixie’s repair department engineers was gathered amidships around five massive, gasoline-engine-driven water pumps. Oily black seawater was pulsing over the side from five hoses that snaked up out of the flooded main machinery spaces below.

The commodore met me at the gangway, which was unusual. We exchanged salutes again, and then he offered his hand.

“You survived a very bad night, Connie,” he said. “Well done. We’ve lost Murray, along with two ships that were with Halsey up north. That doesn’t include Billingham here, and she’s probably going to be a strike. I want to know what you did and how you did it.”

Careful what you ask for, Commodore, I thought. We walked forward along the port side of the tender toward the series of ladders that led up to the staff offices. I was just about to step up onto the first ladder rung when what sounded like a gunshot cracked the morning air. I spun around just in time to see a second manila mooring line, made up between Billingham and the tender, tighten up like an overstrung guitar string and then part with a punishing noise, its bitter end slashing back against the side of the tender hard enough to make a dent. Then a third, and a fourth. Men everywhere on the weather decks of the tender and down on Billingham’s main deck were taking cover as line after line parted, the ruptured ends whipping back, tearing down stanchions and lifelines, bowling over at least two deckhands, and even thrashing the ship’s motor-whaleboat. Oil- and water-soaked figures began to swarm topside from below decks, pursued by a boiling foam of fuel oil, seawater, and other debris erupting from Billingham’s wrecked main machinery spaces.

Then I figured it out: Billingham was sinking, and then I remembered that Malloy was moored to Billingham.

Our Chief Dougherty figured it out just about the same time as I did. I saw him grab a fire ax off the forward superstructure bulkhead and begin whaling on the nearest mooring line. Several other of Malloy’s deckhands followed suit, chopping frantically at the brown manila lines with fire axes and even their personal bosun knives when the lines tightened up and began to pull Malloy over into a starboard list as Billingham began to settle.

The commodore swore, but there wasn’t a single thing either of us could do but watch. Malloy’s mast began to lean in at an alarming angle as Billingham, like some decorous and much-abused old lady who’d lost control of her plumbing, simply went down alongside the tender. Our people got the last of our mooring lines cut away just as Billingham’s decks came awash. Malloy righted herself with a jerk and then, with no mooring lines, began to drift away from Billingham and the destroyer tender. The gangway between the tender and Billingham rolled off the camels and into the water, and then, with a great whooshing sound from the remains of her stacks and all those gaping holes in her main deck, great sprays of dirty seawater geysered up into the morning air as Billingham sank out of sight alongside the tender into two hundred fifty feet of water.

Just like that, she was gone.

I looked across to Malloy, which was definitely drifting astern now. Our main engines had been secured when we moored, but the boilers were still producing steam for the electrical generators, so I knew she’d be able to get back alongside. Someone on Malloy’s bridge ordered the bosun to let go the starboard anchor, which he did with a single sledgehammer blow to its pelican hook. The six-hundred-foot chain ran out in a great cloud of rusty dust and then jerked to a stop when the anchor hit bottom. Malloy continued to drift astern as the anchor chain rose again and then stopped with a visible jerk. At that depth, almost the whole chain had roused out of the chain locker.

One deck below where we were standing, people from the tender were throwing life jackets and life rings down into the water for the few, too few, men paddling around where Billingham had been a minute earlier. Then fuel oil began to erupt like the mudpots at Yellowstone, burping gouts of black oil into the survivors’ faces and eyes even as they struggled to grab onto life rings and kapok jackets bobbing nearby. Within seconds, most of the men in the water were blinded by the oil, unable to see the life jackets three feet away from them. Some men from the tender went over the side and dropped the twenty feet into the water to help the struggling survivors. It was awful.

Well done, I thought, until I remembered Billingham’s depth charges. Great God, I thought. In all the shock and confusion following the battle damage, had anyone remembered to safe their depth charges?

No, they had not. The tender rocked as the first of the depth charges went off, practically alongside but, fortunately, at depth. Still, they produced the all too familiar mountainous eruptions right alongside, blowing seawater, fuel oil, and the ragged remains of Billingham’s survivors and their rescuers into the air again and again until all twenty of her depth charges had gone off and there wasn’t a single survivor down there in the sea. The water between the tender and Malloy glimmered with a thousand dead fish and, tragically, many other things too horrible to mention.

Then it got really quiet. I felt literally sick to my stomach. I looked over at the commodore, whose mouth was open and whose face was ashen. I didn’t know what to say or do. Neither did he.

They were all dead. Everyone who’d survived Billingham’s bloody thrashing up on her picket station was now either entombed in her carcass or bobbing around down there alongside the tender, pulverized by her own depth charges and so coated in fuel oil as to be indistinguishable from the other bits of buoyant wreckage still popping up onto the surface. Then the tender’s GQ alarm sounded, followed by that all too familiar warning: Many bogeys, inbound, man all gunnery stations.

“I need to get to my ship,” I said to the commodore.

“And do what?” he asked. His expression was unfathomable.

I grunted at him. He had a good point.

“We’ve got more guns than the tender,” I said. “Or we did, anyway.”

“Go to it, young man,” he said. “I’m going to lay up to my cabin and cry.”

I took off down the port side of the tender’s main deck, looking for a way to get over to Malloy. There wasn’t one, and, besides, there was no time left. I heard the thump of distant five-inch guns from other ships in the anchorage, followed by the screaming of airplane engines being overdriven to certain mechanical destruction in their power dives, followed by the blasts of even more five-inch, everywhere throughout the anchorage. They were joined by massed antiaircraft guns up on the surrounding hills. Smoke generators on the beach lit off, blowing huge, billowing clouds of white smoke to obscure the ships in the anchorage.

I stopped running. There was nothing I could do but watch. The kamikazes fell out of the sky like so many demons, dropping straight down like the German Stukas had done in those newsreels from back in 1939 over Warsaw, engines howling as they hit their red lines and beyond, five-inch flak bursting all around them, sometimes near them, then in them, through them, converting the kiting planes into bright fireballs, and then a sudden slash of green water, followed by a dirty explosion as their underslung bombs went off.

Malloy, anchored, was spouting flame from one end to the other, five-inch, forties, twenties, and probably even some potatoes. The rate of fire was so heavy that the ship literally disappeared from view.

I felt the tender take a hit, forward somewhere, lurching heavily, not like a destroyer but with a soggy response to the nasty insult of a five-thousand-pound kami crashing into a seventeen-thousand-ton ship.

I sat down on a set of bitts, my face in my hands. The world had gone berserk. I was beyond being scared. I was just … there. The sound and the fury all around me, guns blasting, planes crashing, the sea erupting on every side, things flying through the air all around me, spattering the decks and whining through the air like hot steel hornets, and I just sat there.

It was quite a show, I’m sure, but I think I missed it. And then it was over.

I dimly heard the tender’s 1MC summoning damage control parties to the forecastle, and then the dismaying urgent calls for medics. I looked over at Malloy, still anchored right where I’d last seen her. She’d stopped shooting. I could see Marty up on Sky One, talking frantically into his sound-powered phones. There were people out on deck, calmly policing brass. I waved at them. They did not see me.

I’m going mad, I thought.

Just like the captain?

Oh, shit, I thought.

No. No. No. It was just an air raid, and apparently it’s over. My ship would gather herself, light off her main engines, and come back alongside as if nothing had happened. If she was still there, well, then, nothing had happened.

Me? I still owed the commodore my arrival call.

As the tender’s GQ repair parties swept past me, headed for the forecastle to deal with whatever had happened up there, I stood up, pulled myself together, and went to find the commodore. I hoped he had some coffee, or maybe even some whisky.

Captain Tallmadge had admired the commodore. He’d told me that Captain Van Arnhem was married to a Southern lady who had inherited a large plantation in central Georgia. They’d met at a midshipmen’s ball in Savannah, fallen in love, and married as soon as he had met the statutory two-year wait following graduation, during which new ensigns were forbidden by law to take a wife. They apparently had an arrangement: She would live on the plantation while he pursued his naval career. She would raise their two daughters there, and he was free to come home as often as he could. She would travel occasionally to see him, but she’d made it clear from the outset that her primary duty was to the preservation of their thousand-acre farm. I remembered thinking at the time that this was an odd setup for a marriage, but Captain Tallmadge had informed me that it was not that uncommon, especially once the Depression set in with a vengeance. Naval officers were hanging on to their jobs by their teeth, enduring pay cuts just to stay on active duty, dodging “hump” boards, where the Navy convened committees to decide who had to go so that the Navy stayed within dwindling force-level limits, and generally keeping their heads down. The farm must have been a pleasant refuge from all of that whenever the Van Arnhems could manage time together there. I knew from personal experience in four wardrooms that married middle-grade officers in the Navy had a tough time. Van Arnhem seemed to have found a practical way of handling it. I was looking forward to getting to know him better.

“You left station?” the commodore asked.

“I did,” I said. “I wasn’t just going to sit there and wait for that bastard to collect a new set of kamis and send them at us. Think of it this way, Commodore: The kamis are coming out of Kyushu in southern Japan and Formosa. That’s a long trip, especially at night. They get there, with just enough gas to do their one-way mission, expecting to check in with a controller. He’s not there. Now what? Turn south in the darkness and hope to find something? More likely they ran out of fuel and died in the ocean. Besides, there was no fleet formation to warn. Just us targets. We went balls-to-the-wall for ninety minutes, lit off the radar, found that bastard, killed him, then hustled back to station.”

He gave me a long, authoritative look, which then wilted. “Right,” he said. “This will stay between us Injuns. But explain something: Why didn’t he see you coming?”

“I don’t think they have an active radar,” I said. “I think they’ve been homing in on our air-search radar beams. They just listen, do a direction-find on our emissions, and establish a bearing. They don’t need a range — they know we’re forty, fifty miles above Okinawa. So they tell the kamis to fly that bearing and look out the window. We turned all our electronics off and then ran up the last known bearing of the controller aircraft. When we lit off again, there he was, fat, dumb, and happy until we killed his ass. After that, no more problems in our sector.”

“How’d you get the first three?”

“We assumed they were coming directly from the controller aircraft, so I had the five-inch open a hit-the-notch barrage fire on that bearing, pretty close to the surface. Had no idea there would be four aircraft, but they flew right into it. All but one.”

The commodore looked at me. “Pretty damn good,” he said. “You’ve been around guns, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I gave him a quick synopsis of my naval career. “And now I need a five-inch mount.”

“Fresh out of those,” he said. “Had one, actually, but it just sank. Besides, there’s no way we could do an installation and a battery alignment out here, swinging on the hook. But I think we can get you a quad forty. They’re self-contained mounts and all they need is 440 volts. Better than nothing.”

I nodded. One could never have too many quad forties. “We are going back, then?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “We’re down to three radar pickets, not including Malloy. I think last night convinced even the fleet staff that they need to beef up the CAP protection, especially with this radar-controlled tactic.”

“How’s it going ashore?”

“Backward,” he said matter-of-factly. “Three days ago the casualties outnumbered the total number of reserves on the island. That’s not sustainable.”

“We have to win it, eventually. Their forces aren’t getting any bigger.”

He sat back and lit up a cigarette. “We will take Okinawa,” he said. “Like you said, we can resupply, they can only hunker down and die. If it were me, I’d stabilize the front lines and starve them out.”

“So why aren’t we doing that?”

“There’s a timetable for the invasion of the main islands. We need the Okinawa airfields so that fighters can go all the way with the bombers coming out of other bases. They’re already flying some missions from the northern part of the island, but we need the whole thing.”

I thought about that. “If Okinawa is this hard, what’s Japan itself going to be like?”

“This, times ten,” he said. “God, it’s been a lousy day. I need a drink. Fancy a whisky?”

I very much did. He broke out a bottle from his desk safe and poured a generous measure. We then went through some of the admin details of getting replacements for my losses and the tender’s plan for craning over a quad-forty mount the next day.

Finally I mustered up the courage to ask him about the captain.

He sighed. “Pudge is on the way back to the States, and that’s going to take a while. My doctor saw him before he went ashore, to be lifted back to Guam.”

“And?”

“Gone,” he said. “No one home. Sits there with a bemused expression on his face, but there’s no one home. Doc says he might come out of it, maybe when he’s back with his wife and family, stateside. But…”

Now I wanted another drink. Hell, I wanted the whole bottle.

“Someone coming in to replace him?” I asked.

“Ready to be relieved, XO?”

“God, yes, sir.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, young man. In fact—” He got up and went to his desk. He picked up a piece of paper and a small black cardboard box. He stood in front of me and gestured for me to stand.

“I have here your promotion to full commander, date of rank from the day you assumed command of Malloy, signed by Bull Halsey himself. Take those collar devices off.”

In a bit of a daze, I reached up and unpinned the gold-colored lieutenant-commander oak leaves from my shirt collar points. He pinned on the silver oak leaves of a full commander. He shook my hand and then went into the bedroom area of his cabin, returning with an officer’s cap with scrambled eggs.

“This is my spare,” he said. “You can replace it when, and if, we both survive this ungodly mess. In the meantime, you are now the commanding officer of USS Malloy. In other words, there’s no one coming to replace Pudge.”

“Couldn’t find any volunteers?” I asked with as straight a face as I could.

He glared and then laughed. We both laughed. It was all we could do. I told him about the little parody around the wardroom table.

“Will I get an exec?” I asked.

“We’ll try,” he said. Then we both felt a bump as something came alongside the tender with perhaps a little more force than necessary. Malloy was back alongside.

“That would be Marty Randolph,” I said. “He will never make a ship handler.”

“Then go train him some more,” he said. “Captain.”

I blew out a long breath. Captain.

“And for God’s sake, stay alive, please. I’m supposed to be a destroyer squadron commodore, but at this rate, I’m down to a division minus.”

“We have a unit commander’s cabin in Malloy,” I said. “This Injun right here wouldn’t mind a little adult supervision.”

“And I’d be honored to come aboard, Connie, but Halsey has other ideas. The theory is that I can do more good down here than I can do floating around up there. Okinawa isn’t just an Army-Marine versus dug-in Japs slog anymore. It’s mostly about logistics: fuel, bullets, bombs, and beans. The Japs are down to what they had stashed in their tunnels when we got here. We, on the other hand, can keep bringing more stuff to the fight. That’s probably not evident to the soldier in his foxhole, but it’s certainly evident to Imperial Army HQ back in Tokyo. Beans, bullets, and replacements are what’s going to win this thing. That tells me that the kamikaze war is going to intensify.”

“Someone needs to tell the Army to win it soon,” I said. “We’re fresh out of foxholes up there on the picket line.”