Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  INTRODUCTION

  To Alice, for so many things.

  There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence's doubt (the common doom) then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again: and are infants, boys and man and Ifs eternally.

  -HERMAN MELVILLE

  Yet Melville was never without hope. . . . There remained the "saving remnant," a "band of brothers" whose "lavish hearts" might enable them to see the truth and set the example that would restore the promise of an America in which fraternity would open the gates to man's pilgrim quest.

  -WILSON CAREY MCWILLIAMS

  Sea Change

  The historian stared at the July sun glinting on the white-capped Pacific. He saw distant islands sweltering in this merciless glare, burning planes plummeting out of the empty sky, a continent at the bottom of the world where smiling women taught men to forget their loneliness. He saw murderous machines and ravenous fish moving silently through the blue-black depths. He saw a ship in the dimness of a thousand fathoms, her hull gashed by awful wounds, her guns jutting aimlessly.

  Pain throbbed in the historian's eyes. Forty years ago they had been injured by that cruel sun. Lately there were whole days when he could see nothing but shadows. He drew the Venetian blinds, obliterating sun, sky, ocean.

  The pain wound like a corkscrew down the historian's temple into his jaw. He turned on the radio. A newscaster was analyzing America's defeat in Vietnam, ten years after the surrender. The historian listened to the smooth voice, the vacuous rationalism. Click. He was alone again with his pain.

  It was not Vietnam that was bothering him. Today was the anniversary of a disaster in another war. For his peace of mind and soul, he should be far away from the Pacific Ocean.

  That insight did not explain this house with its magnificent view of Catalina Sound. It did not explain the yawl, that the historian kept in a harbor a few miles away; the gleaming white and black craft on which he and his wife had cruised to Hawaii and beyond during more than one unforgettable summer. It did not explain the prize-winning history of the Union Navy in the Civil War, the biographies of Admirals George Dewey, Raymond Spruance, Ernest King, on the shelf behind his desk. But the historian had stopped trying to explain everything.

  His books had won him plaudits from critics and readers; Time magazine had dubbed him the greatest living naval historian, a backhanded compliment that implied the deceased Samuel Eliot Morison was better. But they conceded (grudgingly of course — the historian had not graduated from Yale or Harvard) that no one could match his grasp of the inner pathos of high command, his depiction of the intimate side of his heroes' lives.

  Still lunchless in the middle of the afternoon — he often skipped meals when he was in what his wife called his anchorite mood — the historian put on dark sunglasses and descended the spidery wooden steps that led down the face of the cliff to the narrow beach. He walked and walked, while the huge combers rose and rumbled toward him. When the cold water began swirling around his feet, the historian knew he should turn back. The moon would be full tonight and the high tide would wash out the beach. He would have to swim to his ladder.

  The hell with it. The historian kept walking.

  Should he, could he, finally write the whole story? Reveal to his readers and academic colleagues the raw boy of forty years ago? Mingle victory with defeat and loss, pain and humiliation? Was that what Americans wanted to hear?

  Of course not. Americans did not like bad news. His books had sold well because they celebrated the winners, the tough-jawed commanders who stood on bridges or quarterdecks and snapped orders that drove ships and men past obstacles and perils to victory.

  On and on the historian walked, until he was too tired to take another step. He slumped to the sand and tried to think coherently about the book that was tormenting him.

  It was all up there in the filing cabinets. Drawers full of notes, interviews, biographical data. He knew the individual stories, with their illogical blend of laughter and tears; he had talked to parents, brothers, friends, above all to the women who grieved. He had persuaded them to expose their broken hearts and drowned dreams. He had interviewed admirals and captains, he had consumed hundreds of pages of after-action reports, diaries, testimony at courts of inquiry. Still he had been unable to write a word.

  The combers rumbled toward him, ghostly now in the descending darkness. Suddenly the surging walls of water were no longer white; they had turned blood-red. They rose up with the grinning gums of memory to swallow him. The historian trembled. The pain throbbed behind his eyes. It was impossible. Yet it had to be done. Tears poured down his face. It had to be done, but how?

  A hand touched his hunched shoulder. He looked up at his anxious wife, her black hair streaming in the windblown spray.

  "The tide—"

  "I know."

  She wrapped her long arms around him. "I saw it coming, yesterday. We should have gone to Tahoe."

  Ah yes. Safe gleaming Lake Tahoe. That unreal slice of American beauty. It was hard to drown in Lake Tahoe. It would desecrate an ideal, violate a myth. Whereas this maw of the western ocean, this yawning omnipotence, seemed to demand victims. To accuse with its blind eyes those mortals who dared to survive it.

  As usual, his wife knew what he was thinking. She always knew. It was how she had healed his memories, how she had defeated his dread of the sea, especially of the depths. They had swum down into the sunless shadows together, fishy fins on their feet, oxygen on their backs, and listened to the whispering voices of the dead.

  "I think it's time you wrote it," she said.

  The historian looked into her somber green eyes, her mournful mouth. After forty years, he could read her thoughts too. He saw that she also feared the ghosts, the memories.

  They would face them together.

  "Yes," the historian said. "It's time."

  Voyage

  Out of the night into the dawn the big gray ship steams boldly, unaware that she is a ghost. Behind her trails a mile of phosphorescence churned out of the living sea. More of this spectral whiteness flecks the foam around the proud bow, the water leaping from her strakes.

  She is not a ghost! She is real. Oil blazes beneath her boilers, superheated steam surges in her turbines. Living men walk her decks. She is heading toward green fields, soaring mountains, shining cities. Toward women's welcoming arms, children's laughter, a California of mythic contentment. Toward the oldest dream in the American heart, happiness no longer pursued but possessed.

  Out of the night of memory, which will endure as long as a single man or woman survives the voyage, the ship sails into the present. Not yet history, even though decades of darkness have rolled over her, because no one has rescued her from the blankness of the past. History does not live in memory, it lives in words.

  As the USS Jefferson City churns toward us, the first word leaps in the historian's mind: cruiser.

  The word, the name, combines two things that have always fascinated Americans — speed and power. A salvo from the nine eight-inch guns in her main battery can hurl a ton of murderous metal over the horizon. Her turbines can send the strength of 95,000 horses pounding into her four propellers. She is 608 feet, four inches long — the equivalent of two football fields — and only sixty-one feet, seven inches wide. She has none of the squat ugliness of those floating gun platforms called battleships. Never did you see her perform a battleship's pachydermatous wallow. Her bow has a racing curve, a harp's bend, that bespeaks grace as well as power, beauty as well as brutality. She was born to battle a ri
sing sea as fiercely as an enemy fleet.

  At first glance the USS Jefferson City was alone on the vast western ocean. But no ship is ever really alone, even on a sea as immense as the Pacific. At the very least, the sailor believes — or at least hopes — his ship is a dot in the eye of God. That is a comforting thought, even if the nature of that God is in doubt in every honest sailor's heart and mind. If the Divinity is mirrored by the ocean over which He presides, then He is both cruel and kind, both capricious and exact. He takes infinite pains to fashion the anemone's petals — and the shark's jaw. For reasons a sailor cannot understand but has learned to accept, God sometimes turns His face away from a ship. Above others He extends a sheltering hand.

  For a U.S. Navy ship at sea in 1942, there were other gods besides the Supreme Being who presided over the stupendous dome of the world. They spoke an equally incomprehensible language, their scrambled words hurtling across night and day from Hawaii, where a god named CINCPAC reigned, and from Washington, D.C., where the most awesome god of all, COMINCH, held in his mind all the warships flying the American flag on all the oceans.

  Nerk Nerk Nerk

  The powergods spoke in Radio Central on the second deck. Red bulbs glowed on the big transmitters. Radiomen, with the lightning flash of divinity on their sleeves, leaned back in their chairs while the codes swirled through the headphones on their weary ears. The morning watch, from 0400 to 0800 hours (4 A.M. to 8 A.M. landlubbers' time), was the worst of their many ordeals. Slurping gallons of stale coffee, they tuned their frequencies and listened to the bizarre alphabetical tangle designed to baffle other listeners in Berlin and Tokyo.

  From the cleaving bow of the Jefferson City to the drumming stern other sailors struggled to keep their eyes open as night dwindled into day. These surface lookouts ceaselessly scanned specific sections of the sea out to the horizon, 2.8 miles away. Other lookouts in the superstructure scrutinized the placid surface with binoculars, five degrees of a 360-degree circle at a time, out to another horizon, 12.3 miles away. For the men of the Jefferson City, this peaceful sea was rife with menace. In the depths swam yellow men in submarines hoping to fire a torpedo into the cruiser's guts. It was the lookouts' job to spot the white wake of this engine of death before it struck home.

  On the bridge, a broad platform encased in steel and glass overlooking the two forward turrets, a lesser god, the officer of the deck, presided over the ship. The OOD was surrounded by men sworn to obey him and by scientific instruments designed to perfect his commands. A quartermaster supplied him with charts that informed him of the currents, the prevailing winds, the contour of the ocean bottom, the depth of the sea and the hazards of the coast that the ship was approaching. A boatswain's mate stood ready to relay his commands over the public address system, first seizing everyone's attention with a shrill blast on his ancient pipe, which had been piercing the skulls of sailors since the Crusades. A helmsman kept the ship on course, constantly checking the gyrocompass, a guide whose needle, thanks to an inner wheel whirring at eight thousand revolutions a minute, pointed to true north. Nearby was the magnetic compass in its binnacle and a radio direction finder, both of which could also guide the ship across the trackless ocean.

  To the left of the helmsman stood the engine telegrapher, ready to signal with a shove of the handle on his annunciator any change in speed ordered by the OOD An identical machine stood on the deckplates far below them in the forward engine room. Facing it was a burly throttleman who instantly obeyed its commands. A telephone talker gave the OOD verbal communication with the engine room and the lookouts. A messenger, a seaman second class in the uniform of the day, stood a few feet behind him, ready to rush to any section of the ship not reachable by telephone. At arm's length was a panel of switches for operating lights and alarms.

  Everything that the great gods of COMINCH and CINCPAC could devise to ward off disaster at sea was at the service of the OOD. But these gods, awesome as they were, had only haphazard control over the courage and intelligence of the men who wore the insignia of rank and possessed the power of command, which was the power of life and death, over the crew of the Jefferson City. That was why a sailor trusted in God or destiny or luck, depending on whether the man was a believer, a fatalist or a gambler.

  Nerk Nerk Nerk

  Every message that chattered through Radio Central was repeated twice. The powergods obviously had less than total confidence in the efficiency of their listeners. Only when a message was preceded by the call letters of the Jefferson City did it have to be transcribed.

  Suddenly the warning letters were sputtering in the earphones, dit-dit-dah-dah, coming over NPG from San Francisco on 386 kc, a frequency that meant important even before the message was decoded. Paper was hastily rolled into a type-writer and the scrambled words were copied by a radioman first class at amazing speed. The gobbledygook was rushed to a nearby compartment with TOP SECRET AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY on the door. There, an officer translated it and another officer rushed it to the OOD, who read it and immediately ordered his messenger to deliver it to the greatest god aboard the USS Jefferson City, the captain.

  At 0510, the OOD sent his messenger to awaken the boatswain's mates and other petty officers of the divisions into which the 1,300 men aboard the USS Jefferson City were separated. Precisely at 0530, as the first red streaks of sunrise began to brighten the eastern horizon, the boatswain's mate of the watch stepped to the PA system and blew All Hands. He took three long deep breaths and held each for ten seconds at the top of the shrill, then clinched the pipe to produce a soft falloff. He repeated the call a second time and translated it into words: "All hands turn to. Execute morning orders."

  Struggling up from sleep, from the private world of dreams and hope and wish, the crew of the Jefferson City assumed the selves assigned to them by the gods who presided over their destinies. As far as they could see, none of these beings was particularly interested in their happiness. Efficiency, duty, obedience, cleanliness, safety, these were the watchwords of all of them, from Cominch to the division officers to the petty officers who made grimly certain that their clothes were clean, their sleeping compartments and work stations were scrubbed daily.

  Not all of them viewed their fates as cynically as the deck apes, the men who manned the great guns and were responsible for holystoning the teakwood main deck of the Jefferson City until the captain could, if he chose, use it as a mirror in which to shave his aristocratic jaw. In other divisions, where expertise was more important than muscle, many refused to let this steel world, this regime of commands and routines repeated endlessly until hands performed no matter what the mind was thinking, extinguish their individual selves. There was pride as well as resentment on the lower decks of the Jefferson City.

  On the second deck lived some sixty-five lesser gods in a place called Officers' Country. They gathered in the wardroom to dine three times a day on good china. Their food was served by smiling black steward's mates, who also made their beds and shined their shoes and pressed their uniforms. Their privileges were justified by that awesome word command. Each of these gods was responsible for seeing that the 1,300 sailors of the crew carried out the various tasks assigned to them in the Plan of the Day, promulgated each morning by the ship's executive officer.

  Yet all of them, officers and petty officers and seamen and firemen first and second class, shared a common bond, summed up in another word: shipmate. They were married to this floating steel creature and to each other. The ship was their home, with everything aboard her that was needed to survive the sea and the enemy who sought to destroy them from the sky above, from the surface beyond the horizon and from the depths beneath them. Her kitchens fed them, her desalting boilers extracted fresh water for them to drink, to wash, her sick bay healed them when they fell ill. Her chaplain besought God's blessing on them.

  At the risk of his reputation, the historian talks of women sharing, surviving, the voyage of the USS Jefferson City. It is simply the truth. Although
only a handful of them ever actually walked her decks, they were there in the minds and hearts of officers and crew, whispering words only women can speak, promising a future that made life in the steel shell of the ship worth the boredom, the drudgery, the risk.

  There was another dimension in which the Jefferson City sailed. A dimension in which risk blended into courage and courage ventured into the uncharted darkness of death. The men of the Jefferson City shared this bond too. Their ship's fate was their fate.

  This is the story that the historian wants to tell you about his ship. This struggle to find the meaning of certain words in the heart and mind and to keep alive in these private places a second self that still believed in that most perplexing of all American words, happiness. A private struggle that counterpointed the public struggle, the steel necessities of survival in a world at war.

  Nerk Nerk Nerk

  The powergods continued to squawk and splutter in Radio Central. In the crew's mess and in the wardroom, the information in the top-secret telegram was traveling from mouth to mouth.

  "They're yankin' him. We're gettin' a new skipper."

  "Praise the Lord."

  "Let's hope we get one with some guts."

  "Whatya want to be, a hero?"

  "Now for the bad news. We're not going to Long Beach. We're heading for Portland."

  "What the hell can you do on liberty in Portland? There isn't even an officers' club."

  "Chop trees."

  "Chop them hell. I'll pull them up by their roots."

  "Maybe they plan to smuggle our cowardly leader off the ship."

  In a spacious cabin below the bridge, the captain stared at the crumpled message on his bunk. Silently, bitterly, a broken god began to weep.

  Able Seamen

  The USS Jefferson City loomed above them, her gray superstructure gleaming dully in the rainy Oregon night. She was so big they could not see the bow or the stern. Cannon jutted from shadowy turrets, smaller guns poked snouts from open mounts. But there was not a sign of life on the long wet deck. Only one small bulb glowed above the gangway. Behind the 150 seamen second class who mustered on the dock, the city of Portland seemed almost as dark and deserted. It was September 7, 1942, exactly nine months after Pearl Harbor, and blackout regulations were strictly enforced.