Space

by James A. Michener

  Looking aloft at the empty sky, Grant shouted, “Where in hell are the planes?”

  “Sir,” Penzoss whispered. “The men.”

  Grant cleared his head, but kept hold of Savage until Penzoss whispered in his high voice, “Sir, we better bury him.”

  “You mean, throw him overboard?”

  “We must. We may have to spend another night.” Reluctantly, Grant surrendered the body to Penzoss and Finnerty, who with some difficulty raised it onto the slippery edge of the raft, then dumped it overboard. Before it had disappeared, the raft moved toward a cluster of men who had kept themselves alive for more than twenty-four hours without the aid of any life raft. They were waterlogged and near death.

  Captain Grant was first to dive overboard to rescue them, but soon he was joined by two other good swimmers, and with their help he hefted the tired survivors into the raft, but when sixteen had been added in this manner, Penzoss called down quietly, “Sir, we mustn’t overload.”

  “And we mustn’t leave these men.”

  “Then we’ll all go down.”

  “Then we’ll all go.” And he threw aboard the last of the swimmers.

  They were from the baby carrier Chesapeake Bay and they had wild tales to share with the men from the Dean: “Yep, we took four eighteen-inch shells from the Yamato, probably, right through the ship without exploding. It was miraculous.”

  “But the holes did sink you?”

  “No! No! We floated just as good as ever.”

  “What did sink you?”

  “This Jap airplane. Flew right into midships. Intentionally. Blew us to hell.”

  So crews from the first two ships to have been sunk by kamikazes, a word none of the men yet knew, met on the swells of Leyte Gulf, a chance encounter which Finnerty noted.

  [38] “What are you writing there?” Captain Grant asked, and when Finnerty would not answer, Grant took the notebook and read:

  From 0700 till 1007 when the Lucas Dean broke apart, Captain Grant fought his ship with a gallantry that had no equal. Against odds that would have terrified the ordinary captain, he took his DE right at the heart of the Jap battleships and cruisers, and even when he had no torpedoes or ammo he maintained position in order to confuse the enemy, even though they could do twenty-seven knots and the Lucas Dean three because of lost power. In the life raft his courage manifested itself through two hot days and one cold night ...

  Grant tore the page from the book. “There were no heroes in this fight,” he said. “The crew was the hero. And especially Savage.” His voice came close to breaking.

  Then came the sharks. The survivors from the Chesapeake Bay spotted one of their mates clinging to a floating chair of some kind, and they shouted reassurance, but as the raft drifted slowly toward the downed man, everyone saw with horror that two sharks were about to attack him.

  “Shoot them!” somebody called, but before those with guns could act, the lethal fish tore at the man, ripped off his legs, then returned to shred the torso.

  In the late afternoon, as the raft moved through the waters where other American ships had sunk, the men saw a score of corpses, arms and legs missing, and some watchers became so violently ill that they vomited, even though the raft was by now fairly stable.

  “They could all have been saved,” Grant said, and this was the beginning of his great rage. How many of the incredibly brave men who in their little ships had withstood the might of the Japanese navy, how many of them were to die because some imbecile at headquarters had forgotten to dispatch rescue missions?

  “Where are they?” he raged at the merciless sky and at the cruel waters. And then the stars came out, distant beacons shining impartially upon the remnants of the Japanese fleet, driven forever from the seas, and upon the victorious Americans drifting forgotten in the tropic waters.

  [39] “If you have good eyes,” the navigation officer said, “you can see differences in the color. Saturn is whitish. Jupiter is red.”

  “For Christ sake, shut up,” an enlisted man shouted.

  “I’m sorry,” the officer said. He and the lad from Minnesota huddled together, and soon they were joined by the young man from New York. Through the long night they would console themselves with the stars, to keep from thinking about their comrades who would die before dawn.

  Penzoss, endeavoring to recall what his Great Lakes instructor had taught about sharks, told the other men, “Sometimes they let a man drift right past without touching him, especially if he’s moving his arms and legs a lot. But like we saw, they can also attack with terrifying power. One thing we know for sure, let them smell blood from a wounded man or fish, they go crazy and tear him apart.”

  “Are they still out there, followin’ us?” a farm boy asked.

  “They come, they go. They could be a dozen miles from us right now.”

  “I’m gonna say a prayer on that.”

  “You people there?” It was a voice from the sea.

  One of the flashlights probed the darkness: “There’s a nigger out there.”

  The raft was maneuvered to where a big black man swam without the assistance of any spar or floating chair. He was less than fifteen feet from rescue when flashlights showed that the water about him was being churned by huge dark shapes, and several men shouted, “Sharks! Sharks!”

  Penzoss, remembering a tactic his instructor had advised, cried, “Shoot the bastards! Draw blood!” And the three riflemen blazed away.

  The stratagem worked, because when one of the sharks took three heavy bullets he began to spurt blood, which sent the other sharks insane. With great slashing swipes of their furrowed teeth, they tore the wounded one apart.

  Amidst the fury the black man swam closer to the raft, but when he reached it, the sides were so slippery and he so exhausted that he simply could not hoist himself aboard, so Captain Grant leaped into the dark water while Penzoss screamed, “Use anything. Scare the sharks away if they start to move in.”

  As Grant started to slip his right arm about the [40] swimmer’s torso to give an upward thrust, a stray shark, inflamed by the melee in which the others were attacking a second bleeder, swept toward the raft, smelled the black man’s right foot, and snapped it off in one swift motion. Blood gushed over Grant’s face as he hoisted the wounded man into the raft, but he ignored it as his men reached down to pull him to safety just before two wildly thrashing sharks swept in, then veered away, their mighty jaws empty.

  “What happened to you?” Penzoss asked the black man as he applied a tourniquet.

  “Chesapeake Bay went down ... I was cook’s helper ... I swam.”

  “Jesus! You were in the water all that time? And the sharks waited till the last minute?”

  “Am I going to lose my foot?”

  “You already lost it,” Penzoss said.

  “Oh, oh! A colored man with no leg. A cripple. A beggar.”

  “You didn’t lose your leg. And the Navy takes care of heroes like you.”

  The man made no reply, for in the moonlight he saw Captain Grant’s insignia. “You a lieutenant commander?”

  “He’s captain of the ship,” Penzoss explained.

  “And you jumped in to rescue me? Among the sharks?” He dropped his head into his hands and wept.

  To distract his attention, Finnerty asked, “What’s your name? I got to record it.”

  “Gawain Butler.”

  “That’s a hell of a name.”

  “My mother read Tennyson.”

  Penzoss looked up. “I didn’t know that niggers read poetry.”

  “We did,” Gawain said.

  At midnight, when darkness engulfed the castaways, and the stars shone with terrible brilliance in a sky untouched by soot or the lights of civilization, the men of the Lucas Dean heard voices in the night, and they came upon other swimming sailors from the Chesapeake Bay, and a harsh decision had to be made. “This raft can’t hold no more,” a bo’s’n said firmly, and Captain Grant had to agree.

  Bu
t the swimming men, survivors through sheer courage for forty hours, had to be saved, so Captain Grant dived into the water, swam to the men, and led them to the raft. [41] Before he hefted them aboard he said, “Four volunteers re-quested to swim down here with me till morning.” Finnerty volunteered and three other seamen. Through the long night they would hold on to ropes that rimmed the raft, relieving it of their weight.

  In the dark waters, Finnerty clutched Captain Grant’s right arm and said, “When we’re rescued, I’m going to write all I wrote before, and a hell of a lot more.”

  Grant said nothing. He was torn apart with fury that his men had been required to exhibit such bravery in their DE, and now were drifting, abandoned, after the fight. His guts were fiery with disgust, and only the fact that he was in charge of this pitiful bobbing craft kept him from screaming at the gods who had treated his men so shabbily. The rampaging sharks had moved well away to inspect other groups of survivors, and mercifully they did not return.

  Never was the Sun hotter than when it rose on the morning of 27 October 1944, and as soon as it was high, seven moderately injured men succumbed, and only when their bodies were tossed overboard did Captain Grant consider the raft sufficiently lightened to warrant his climbing back aboard. He lay exhausted in the awful heat, but his mind was churning, and it was in these three dreadful hours of morning that he saw with wonderful clarity the course he must take if he survived.

  He had been reared in the small city of Clay in the state of Fremont. He’d attended the state university in his hometown and the University of Chicago law school. He’d married Elinor in 1940 and had attended a crash course for prospective naval officers at Dartmouth College in the cold winter of 1943. Never brilliant, he had received in all his schools what professors called Plodders’ A’s, and some had recognized him as a better prospect than those who received such marks through their sheer brilliance.

  His father was a merchant, and his wife’s father a farmer, so he had no inheritance to look forward to. From 1939, when he acquired his law degree, to 1942, when he volunteered for the Navy, he had earned only a meager living in Clay as a general lawyer handling routine cases, but in his last year he had been approached by the Republican party to run for the state legislature, and he had given serious thought to that possibility.

  [42] Now he remembered the words of Yeoman Finnerty as they swam together in the shark-threatened waters: “You’re the greatest hero I ever heard of, Mr. Grant, and I’m going to say so.” He had told Finnerty to shut up, but now the words echoed, and he thought: In the world that exists after this war, men who are known as heroes will be valued. Look at Colin Kelly, who sank the Haruna, or thought he did. What a fuss they made over him. The state of Fremont can find a place for me. In his near-mania he gritted his teeth and muttered, “It damned well better.”

  “What’s that, sir?” Finnerty asked, his own head reeling from the heat.

  “Finnerty, what you said in the water … What I tore out of your book … You saw things better than I did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  And Captain Norman Grant; USNR, formulated his philosophy: “Finnerty, the world is a shitty place. Leaving us to die out here. If we get back ...”

  “We’ll get back.”

  “You and I are going to take the world by the balls and squeeze till it screams.”

  “A partnership?”

  “Till death.”

  “I think it’s a plane, sir.” And it was. After forty-eight hours in the raft, with the Negro Gawain Butler sloshing his right stump with salt water to prevent infection, the survivors of the Lucas Dean and the Chesapeake Bay were rescued. They were flown to Manus, where skilled doctors and considerate nurses performed the saving operations which had been denied the many who died.

  Captain Grant spent his first two days at Manus casting up accounts, and to the best of his knowledge, supported by what data Finnerty and Penzoss could supply, the facts were these: Lucas Dean known complement, 329; killed while aboard ship, 49; died while on rafts, 57; died floating in the sea, 92; known survivors, 131. When he looked at the deaths, many so needless, his rage returned.

  But then he commandeered shore-based officers to help assemble the figures for the three-part battle, and its magnitude staggered him: Total number of Japanese warships, 69, including 13 under an Admiral Shima who trailed along behind; total number of American warships, 144; [43] total Japanese ships lost, 28; total American ships lost, 5, to which should probably be added the DD Albert W. Grant, which was almost sunk not by Japanese guns but by American warships firing in the dark. Total number of Japanese sailors who died that day, probably 10,000. Of course, the Americans also lost numerous planes, the Japanese almost none-except the suicides. But at this time all the figures had to be tentative.

  As the officers worked on this report, they heard rumors of the extraordinary heroism of Norman Grant and his Lucas Dean, and questions were asked among the survivors, with three enlisted men volunteering amazing reports: Finnerty the yeoman; Penzoss the medic; Gawain Butler, the black cook’s helper from the Chesapeake Bay. So on a November day at the Manus field hospital, a cordon of war correspondents and photographers surrounded the bed in which Butler lay, ostensibly to watch him receive a medal for swimming alone for nearly thirty hours and losing his right foot to a shark at the last moment.

  “It was quite a feat,” one of the newsmen whispered to “ his photographer. “But why summon all of us?”

  Then the admiral in charge of the ceremony said. “Seaman Butler has asked permission to say a few words,” and in the precise English his mother had taught him, Gawain said, “When I had lost hope, this man here, Captain Grant of the Dean, swam to rescue me, even though he knew sharks were about. And when he lifted me into his raft, he realized it was too loaded, so he swam all night, outside.” It hadn’t happened just that way; Grant had got back into the water to provide room for other seamen from the Chesapeake, but that was the way the legend was recorded.

  Then Finnerty spoke, telling of the wild-man way in which Captain Grant had fought his little destroyer escort. “You mean,” he was asked, “he said he was going to cross the T of the whole Japanese fleet?”

  “That’s what he said,” Finnerty replied. “And he did it.” From his waterlogged notes he read out the quotation that was flashed across the wire services, properly edited:

  YEOMAN FINNERTY: Do you intend to take on their whole fleet?

  CAPTAIN GRANT: I do.

  [44] When the questions were finished, and the photographs snapped showing Grant at the bedside of Cook’s Helper Butler, with Yeoman Finnerty and Pharmacist’s Mate Penzoss at his side, Grant stayed with his men from the Dean. “I didn’t want this. Finnerty here can tell you I didn’t want it. But it’s happened, and by damn, we’re going to use it for good purposes.” And then his resolve, so carefully nurtured since the battle began, vanished, and he broke into wild tears.

  “The dead! The dead in the water!” He looked at his men and said, “There isn’t a man here who could equal Tom Savage. His death is on our hands, and we can never discharge it.” But with grim force, totally concentrated, he would try.

  At the precise moment when Lieutenant Commander Grant was preparing to throw his DE at the oncoming Japanese fleet, the football players of his hometown of Clay in the northern part of the state of Fremont were preparing for the second half of their game against arch-rival Benton High School from the much bigger city which served as state capital.

  Because of the war, the game could not be played at night, and because travel was limited, no one had expected a large crowd, especially since the game would be taking place on a Tuesday, when the playing field was not being used by the local university for its ROTC drill. However, since entertainment and sporting events had been cut to the minimum, townspeople had flocked to watch the hometown team.

  Since Benton was almost twice as large as Clay, sports fans always assumed that it would win, and it usually did. B
ut this year word had circulated through the state that Clay had a wizard, “as good a halfback as Norman Grant was at his best, back in 1932.” The young halfback was good, and men at the store lamented: “Danged shame we aren’t playing a regular season, against these good teams from Kansas, so that John Pope could show his stuff against the best.” No one ever called him Johnny, because from his earliest days he cultivated a serious mien, as if he already knew he was intended for important duties.

  He was seventeen that autumn, not tall, not heavy, but handsomely constructed for American games as they were [45] then played. In basketball his lack of height was only a minor handicap, because once the whistle blew, his speed, his body control and his deftness made him a premier player. Of course, in later years, when players customarily resembled skyscrapers, men of his build would be at a severe disadvantage and might not even make the squad, let alone a team.

  In football it was the same. He weighed only a hundred and fifty-one, and would never weigh much more, but again his extraordinary control and his ability to change speed and retain his balance when it appeared that he had been knocked down made him a high-school phenomenon, so that even when the players from Benton seemed gigantic, the Clay supporters could whisper sagely, “Don’t worry. John Pope will tie them in knots.”

  And that was what he did. When Benton had the football in the first half they moved it pretty much as they wished and scored heavily, but occasionally on their march down the field they would make a mistake and Clay would recover the ball on a fumble or fluke, depriving them of yet another score. Even so, by the end of the third period the husky Benton Capitals had scored twenty-five points, with every prospect of adding to that total in the final period.

  However, John Pope was having an exceptional day, for on those lucky times when his team obtained possession, he did as he was supposed to and ran deftly through the big Benton line, twisting and turning to great effect. At the end of the third period he had scored all of Clay’s points, twenty, a feat he had performed several times before.