Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  The people in the street were peering up into the sky apprehensively, but this didn’t sound like the one of the big bomber formations. A moment later two U.S. Navy carrier planes came overhead at about 1,000 feet. Gar was pretty sure they were Corsairs. They weren’t carrying any external weapons, and one pilot had his canopy rolled back. They flew over the town and the coal yards, circled back, and came down lower, over the POW camp. The civilians outside stayed right where they were, displaying amazing self-discipline. The lead fighter waggled his wings at the POW group as he came over at 500 feet, and all of them cheered reflexively. He’d obviously seen the letters on the roof, and Gar thought they might be safer now that the Japs outside had also seen the fighters. Then they both flew up and over the ridge, dropping out of sight as they headed toward downtown Hiroshima City on the other side. The good news was that there weren’t any Jap planes pursuing them.

  Once their engine noise subsided, they could hear the solemn music again. After a few minutes, it changed tone to something more like a fanfare, and then a different announcer came on. He spoke for a few minutes, then said something that made all the civilians outside come to attention and then bow their heads. Gar watched parents admonish their children to follow suit. The crowd went utterly quiet, so quiet that they could again hear those two fighters growling around beyond the ridge. Then a voice began intoning something in a high, singsong stream of Japanese. Everyone in the crowd bowed even lower, and most of them had their eyes shut. The POWs wondered what they were being told; whatever it was had to be pretty serious news, based on the way the people were reacting. When the weird singing voice finally stopped, the civilians straightened back up and began to disperse into their homes and shops. Everyone on the streets was visibly upset, with many people openly weeping.

  The prisoners looked at each other with disbelief. Could it be? Could it possibly be? Was this goddamned war finally, finally, over?

  Part III

  THE SILENT SERVICE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Pearl Harbor, ComSubPac Headquarters, September 1945

  The chief of staff, now Rear Admiral Mike Forrester, welcomed Gar into the SubPac headquarters conference room. An aide Gar hadn’t met before brought coffee and then withdrew.

  “Well, Gar, how are you?” Forrester asked after they’d fixed their coffees.

  Gar was hard-pressed to answer that as he stirred his coffee. His hands still shook a little, but that was getting better. He’d been driven over that morning to Pearl in a staff car. The top floors of the Pink Palace were still in the hands of ComSubPac, but Gar was currently the only resident. The marine guards and the concertina wire barriers were all gone, and the hotel was making preparations to close for a year’s worth of major renovations, after which it would reopen as a true luxury resort. Gar had arrived back in Pearl on an army transport ship from Guam only three days ago, and even after all the downtime aboard the transport and the medical attention in Guam, he was still very tired. He knew he was one of the lucky ones, actually. Too many of the men who’d been POWs for as long as three years had not survived liberation, ground down by tropical diseases, slave labor in dank coal and copper mines, constant brutality at the hands of Japanese guards and officers, unending starvation, and the sheer hopelessness of their situation. One of the last things Gar had done at the coal mine camp was to collect all those tin medallions from the tree next to the camp crematorium.

  He’d learned that the Japanese army general staff had indeed issued standing orders to kill all the prisoners throughout Japan at the first sign of an invasion on the part of the Americans and their allies. When the atom bombs forced them to surrender, they didn’t know what to do, so they simply abandoned the camps and let the prisoners fend for themselves. Allied planes tried to supply the camps via parachuted food and medical supplies for the first two weeks until ships could arrive, but much of that material ended up strewn over surrounding countryside, where starving civilians naturally helped themselves. Even after nearly eight months of captivity, Gar was one of the stronger ones, although he’d lost 35 pounds and three of his teeth were in questionable shape.

  The following thirty days became a blur—liberation from the camp, the first triage stations, then truck transport to a safe harbor, a voyage to Guam followed by medical treatment, SubPac debriefings, the restoration of service records, ID card, pay account, basic uniforms, and all of that, followed by passage back to Pearl. Gar was sure that most of them had gone back into the POW endure-mode until the navy finally declared them relatively fit for limited duty.

  It was in Guam where he finally learned the fate of Dragonfish. She’d made it out of the Inland Sea and back to Guam, where she’d received a hero’s welcome, both for the penetration of Japan’s inner waters and the damage done to Shinano. Joe Enright and his Archer-fish claimed the kill, and with that one sinking, Enright became the third-highest-tonnage scorer of the Pacific War. What Dragonfish had managed to do at Kure had slowed her down on the run to Yokosuka, and that allowed Enright, whose persistence was legendary, to finally torpedo her. That was the good news. The bad news was that on the next patrol out to empire waters, Dragonfish had disappeared.

  There was simply no information on what had happened. Gar was saddened beyond belief to hear it, while at the same time relieved that his getting caught on the bridge in a crash dive hadn’t been the proximate cause of her loss. Then he felt guilty about feeling that way. The senior submarine captain who debriefed him in Guam, one of the division commanders, set him straight. “You didn’t lose your ship, Gar. Your exec, Russ West, who took over as captain, lost his ship. What you did by closing that hatch while you were still topside was a heroic thing, and you’re up for a Navy Cross for that and a second one for the attack on Kure. Other than that, it’s fortunes of war, Gar. Fortunes of war. Think about it any other way, you’ll go nuts.”

  Now, home, sort of. Home had changed a lot since V-J Day. The Palace was practically empty. The submarine piers sported two, count ’em, two submarines. The pack of carriers, cruisers, battlewagons, and destroyers that used to crowd the 10-10 pier across the way was gone. The troop transports were all at sea, bringing GIs back from hellholes such as Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Saipan, Tinian, even Guadalcanal. The base streets were no longer humming with truck traffic, or any traffic, really. The shipyard across the lagoon was down to one shift. The O-club had closed for major renovations. All gone. Everybody had gone home. Except him, it seemed.

  “Gar?”

  “Sorry, Chief of Staff,” Gar said. “How am I? I’m very, very tired, and I’m mostly sad, I think.”

  “Dragon?”

  Gar nodded. “And what I went through as a POW. I knew war was a titanic waste of human life and material, but I saw things that beggared the imagination. Even so, I had it easier than a lot of other people, especially the Brits.”

  “I understand you were at a camp near Hiroshima? A coal mine?”

  “Yes, sir. There was a ridge between the camp and the city, maybe two thousand feet high. That’s the only reason we didn’t have all our skin fried off, too.”

  “I’ve seen a picture,” Forrester said. “The one the B-29 took.”

  “Didn’t do it justice,” Gar said. “That thing boiled up from behind that ridge and all we could think about was the end of the world, and here came Satan. When the liberation teams finally reached us, they took us to a ship anchored out in Hiroshima Bay. We went through the city in open trucks.”

  “How’d you get through all the debris?”

  “There wasn’t any. Just bare earth, bare streets, a couple of concrete buildings that looked like broken teeth, and no people. No birds, no dogs, nothing living down there, for as far as the eye could see. It was quiet as the tomb. There’s a river that goes through the city. It was filled to the banks with the wreckage of cars, bridges, telephone poles, and probably under all that ten or twenty thousand people, based on the smell.”

  “Japs are claiming they lost sixty t
o seventy thousand people in one instant at Hiroshima.”

  Gar nodded. “We saw some of them going up. Nothing came back down. Nothing.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Well, I went through the war saying ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ every time I killed a ship. I guess they’ll remember it now.”

  “You’re not alone in that sentiment,” Forrester said. “We’re still toting up our own butcher’s bill, but it looks right now like we lost fifty-two boats in this goddamned war. That’s three thousand five hundred people—one out of every five guys in the submarine force, killed.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Gar said. “I guess nobody wanted to tote it up while it was still going on.”

  The chief of staff sighed aloud. “I wept when the news came that they’d surrendered. Wept for joy, and then wept for all those ghost ships still on patrol, known but to God where or even why they went down. Uncle Charlie feels even worse than I do about it, and we were on the winning side!”

  “Once we learned how, we hurt them, though, didn’t we. Hurt ’em bad.”

  “That’s absolutely correct,” Forrester said. “We bled them white. The submarines more than anyone else destroyed their ability to wage war. We shortened the duration of the war. No one doubts that for a minute. But it cost us three and a half thousand of the best people the Fleet had to offer, officers, chiefs, and enlisted. Like you said, what a colossal waste.”

  Gar remembered thinking the same thing when he watched Shinano go down. “When’s Admiral Lockwood getting back from Guam?” he asked.

  “Early next week, assuming he can get a flight. Believe it or not, the logistics problem right now is bigger than it was during the actual hostilities. Thousands of people headed back stateside, most of the fleet boats headed for decom, commands and staffs being dissolved left and right. And of course, Emperor Doug MacArthur demanding everything and everyone so he can get set up as the regent in Tokyo. Washington’s yelling at everybody, and we’re jumping through our asses here.”

  Gar thought that the chief of staff’s lament was just a bit surreal. These were all real problems, of course, involving real people. He himself was one of the problems. Still, compared to what the whole world had just gone through, starting with Hitler going into Poland way back in 1939? This was more a case of the big brass not knowing how to shut it down for a while. If they wanted to keep feeling important, than everything had to be a crisis. As for himself, the future was unclear. He’d eventually be assigned to some ship or station, but probably not in submarines, for the simple reason that almost all the fleet boats were going to be razor blades within the next two years. Only the newest boats would be kept, and not many of them. He voiced these observations to Forrester.

  “You’ll be assigned here temporarily,” Forrester said. “BuPers is going crazy trying to deal with the demobilization while every naval officer who thinks he’s got a career ahead of him is jockeying for this and that job. Three of our COs were sent to commands back in the States that no longer existed when they got there. What do you think you want to do?”

  That last question slipped in casually, but Gar knew it was an important one. He was, in more than one sense, homeless. No family other than his aged mother, back in Pennsylvania, whose mind had seeped away just before the war. No wife, no family, and absolutely no desire to ever go back to sea in a submarine. He had five more years to go before he could retire on twenty years at half-pay and start a second career, doing—what? Coal mining, perhaps?

  “Am I promotable?” Gar asked.

  “Oh, hell yes, I’d expect you to make captain on the next list,” Forrester said. “Your war patrols were successful, and your last mission was—extraordinary, to say the least. The real question is, what then? War College. Washington. An attaché job? Unless of course you want to stay with submarines?”

  Gar shook his head.

  “Right, I didn’t think so. In a way our COs are hoist on their own petards here. The acme of a submariner’s career is wartime command of a boat. After that, what compares?”

  After what he had been through, Gar wanted to say, anything else compared most favorably. He’d achieved that bright shining zenith Forrester was talking about, with the net result that all his people were now asleep in the deep somewhere out in that vast Pacific Ocean. More ghosts.

  The aide came back in, apologizing for disturbing their meeting. “This concerns Commander Hammond, Chief of Staff,” he said. He handed Forrester a piece of official correspondence, glanced at Gar, and then left the office. Forrester fished out his reading glasses, perused it, and frowned.

  “Well, isn’t this is a fine kettle of fish,” he said. He looked over at Gar. “This is from the CincPacFleet JAG’s office. It says an army air force major who was a POW has accused you by name of collaborating with the Japanese, and that a court of inquiry will be convened to examine the merits of this accusation.”

  Gar was stunned, until he remembered his discussion in the boxcar with—what was his name? Something Franklin.

  “Collaborated? What the hell does that mean?”

  “I guess we’re going to find out, Gar. Know any lawyers?”

  I used to know one, he said to himself.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  At 1500 that afternoon he was sitting in the waiting room of the judge advocate general’s offices at Pacific Fleet headquarters. The headquarters building was a leftover from the scary days right after Pearl Harbor—three stories of ugly, bare concrete, a bombproof bunker underneath, and most of its corridors on the outside of the building masquerading as lanai walkways. It was built on the edge of the dormant crater called Makalapa. Gar had never been in the headquarters building—lowly three-stripers serving in the fleet ordinarily did not have any business even visiting the five-star’s head-shed.

  “Commander?” the yeoman said. “Captain White can see you now. Right through there.”

  Gar went into the PacFleet JAG’s office. Captain White was a severe looking four-striper with gray hair and piercing eyes behind steel-rimmed eyeglasses. Before the war every navy captain Gar had ever seen looked like that. Now most four-stripers were in their early forties, so this captain had probably been here since before the war. White pointed unceremoniously toward a chair in front of his desk.

  “Commander Hammond,” he said. “Let me set the stage here before you say anything at all. You have been designated as an interested party to a court of inquiry, to be convened here in Pearl Harbor, in order to determine if certain accusations made by another officer regarding your conduct as a POW are true. Is this what you’ve been told?”

  “More or less,” Gar said.

  “Okay. I see here you’ve requested Lieutenant Commander DeVeers to represent you at a court of inquiry. Short answer: That will not be possible, and frankly, not advisable. She has been assigned to a long-term project while she waits for her discharge.”

  “Discharge?”

  “All the WAVE officers were temporary commissions in the Reserves. They will now all be discharged and returned to civilian life.”

  “Why’d you say ‘not advisable’?”

  White looked down at the pile of papers on his desk for a moment. “Lieutenant Commander DeVeers has a problem, Commander. A problem that, in my opinion, has affected her performance of duty. I would not want her as my defense counsel, and neither would you. If she were to have anything to do with this court, it would be in the capacity as counsel for the court. But like I said—she’s simply not available. In fact, I may have to do it myself.”

  “Counsel for the court—the prosecution, in other words?”

  Captain White leaned back in his chair. “No. This isn’t a court-martial. It’s a court of inquiry. Two very different things. A court of inquiry means a board of three line officers—captains, in all probability, since you’re a commander—chaired by the senior officer of the three. For admin purposes, the court will be convened by the 14th Naval District commandant. It’s a temporary entity—it’
s convened for a specific case and then disbands once findings are made. The statute provides for a lawyer to be assigned to the court as counsel, since the members are all line officers. His job is to keep the court within bounds of proper legal procedure. To keep it fair, the ‘interested party’ gets one, too, assuming you want one. The whole point of a court of inquiry is to determine what further action, if any, needs to be taken in the matter.”

  “And that further action could involve a court-martial?”

  “Indeed it could.”

  “So I do want a lawyer, right?”

  “As I said, the court will have one, so I certainly would advise you to have one, and we will appoint one if you so request. You have rights in these proceedings. You get to confront your accuser, examine and cross-examine witnesses, if any, and introduce evidence. What you can’t have is Sharon DeVeers.”

  Already have, Gar thought irreverently.

  * * *

  On the way out of the JAG’s office he asked the yeoman for a staff directory and found Sharon’s phone number. Once down at the front entrance he used an internal phone to call her. Her yeoman said she was busy, so he left a message asking her to meet him at the Pink Palace that evening, if possible. Being an orphan at the moment, he didn’t have a phone number, other than the front desk of the hotel. He told the yeoman he’d check back and said to tell Lieutenant Commander DeVeers that this was a business, not a personal, call. Then he took a shuttle bus back to the sub base. He needed to find more permanent digs at the BOQ now that the Pink Palace was shutting down. SubPac was releasing the requisitioned rooms in ten days, as most of the force’s submarines were already on their way to West Coast shipyards for demobilization. When it came to actual submarines, the sub base was becoming a ghost town.