"What's wrong? I can't believe you didn't drill and drill hard under Captain Kemble."
"Not after Savo Island, sir. All the way back to California we didn't have a single drill. The ship just... slid out of his control, sir."
Captain McKay glowered at a saltcellar. "We'll change that as soon as we leave Pearl. We're going to spend nine hours a day firing those guns."
"What about Commander Tombs's work schedule?"
"The bright work and rust spots will have to wait," McKay said, avoiding the disappointment in Tombs's eyes. "But he can have everyone he wants from the black gang to work on damage control problems.”
That produced a glare but no protest from Oz Bradley. He was used to losing arguments with deck officers. Edwin Moss took a deep breath. He felt a need to say something positive, something idealistic to Arthur McKay. "I—I want you to know I'm on your side, Captain."
Moss recoiled from the astonishment on Tombs's face. The first lieutenant did not know what the gunnery officer was talking about. Oz Bradley knew, and he was scowling, his eyes full of contempt. But Moss was even more dismayed by the ferocity in Captain McKay's eyes.
"Is there another side to be on?" he said.
"I hope not, sir. I hope it doesn't come to that. But if you want someone to testify, I'd have a good deal to say. I'd take the risk. For the Navy's sake."
"I don't want you or anyone else to testify, Commander. I want you to fight!"
Pearl
At first, Hawaii was only a blur on the horizon. Then something took shape, a huge chocolate-colored mountain shattered and gashed by explosions more stupendous than anything mere humans could foment. "Koko Head Crater," Jack Peterson said, in bored old-salt style. "Extinct volcano.”
The Pacific rapidly turned a cobalt blue. Soon convoluted green hills were visible above pink beaches crowded by groves of palm trees. A lazy white surf lapped at the sand. "Hey, I think I just saw Dorothy Lamour in her sarong," Frank Flanagan said.
"There's Diamond Head," Peterson said.
Flanagan had seen pictures of this huge chunk of volcanic rock overlooking Waikiki. But the real thing had an aura no camera could capture, especially when Peterson let him study its serrated ugliness through the range finder. There was something malevolent about the way it crouched there like an immense prehistoric beast thrusting its scarred ancient snout into the sea. It summoned thoughts of savage gods and blood sacrifices in its shadow.
Flanagan wondered if his reaction to Hawaii's favorite symbol was influenced by the mood of the Jefferson City. The ship was practically vibrating with tension about what might or might not happen in Pearl Harbor. The scuttlebutt admirals were sure they were going to be spectators at the court-martial of the century. Rumors of this officer and that chief petty officer confessing or accusing everyone from the exec to the gunnery officer to the engineering officer of cowardice and incompetence at Savo Island swept through the crew's mess at every meal.
Maybe there was another reason for his gloom, Flanagan thought as Peterson began pointing out the hotels along Waikiki Beach, in particular the coral-pink Royal Hawaiian, which looked as if it had been transplanted from a movie about the Arabian Nights. Maybe he was more bothered by what he had seen of the Jefferson City's rackets than he was ready to admit. Growing up in the Bronx, with his father and uncle part of Boss Flynn's machine, he was not surprised to find some Americans were corrupt. But he did not like it any more than he liked the snide remarks the Jesuits at Fordham Prep made about the morals of machine politicians. Flanagan was only beginning to acquire an adult's introspection, but he was, like most Americans, an idealist by birth.
"That's Honolulu?" Leo Daley asked. Even to someone from Hartford, the fabled capital of Hawaii looked dinky. It reminded Flanagan of a half dozen small Midwestern cities he had glimpsed from the train window on his trip west. "Take a good look," Peterson said. "It'll get a lot worse close up." He had been telling the new recruits that Honolulu was the worst liberty town in the world. Flanagan was inclined to think he was trying to console himself for being confined to the ship.
The boatswain's pipe shrilled. "Now hear this. All hands to quarters," boomed the PA system.
"Here comes Pearl," Peterson said.
Wearing dress whites, they assembled by divisions in their assigned places on the main deck. Even Peterson was interested now. It was the first time the Jefferson City had visited Pearl Harbor since the Japanese attack ten months ago. Mustered beside turret one, F Division had a good view of their approach as they slid between the red and white buoys marking the channel into the harbor. Once past the choppy mouth, the ship turned sharply to starboard, then to port in the narrow twisting neck of the anchorage.
They passed a stubby little ship that Peterson identified as the net tender; she opened and closed the anti-submarine net stretched across the channel. Another ninety-degree turn and they saw the whole inner harbor, the four estuaries or lochs as they were called, crowded with ships of all shapes and sizes. The channel divided around a low flat chunk of land in the center of the harbor, Ford Island, the Naval Air Station. Most of the havoc wrought by Japanese bombs on hangars and planes and runways had long since been repaired. But two of the biggest victims of the murderous attack still lay in grisly postures of death off the southeast side of the island—the USS Oklahoma, which had capsized after being struck by Japanese torpedoes, and the shattered hulk of the USS Arizona, which had exploded when a bomb detonated her forward powder magazine.
The upturned hull of the Oklahoma looked like an immense whale that had died in some obscure agony. The huge flame-blackened tripod mainmast of the Arizona, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle to the dark oily water, reminded Flanagan of a photograph he had seen in one of his father's books about World War I — an infantryman shot dead, slumped against the barbed wire in no-man's-land. "That used to be Battleship Row," Peterson whispered out of the corner of his mouth. "Now it's Battleship Graveyard."
"Silence in the ranks," snapped Ensign Kruger.
On the bridge, Captain McKay listened to his executive officer cursing under his breath as the Oklahoma and Arizona appeared ahead of them off the port bow. "Fucking sons of bitches, goddamn bastards," Parker muttered. Was he trying to demonstrate his fighting spirit? McKay wondered. He doubted it. The commander's rage seemed involuntary.
"I guess we all lost some good friends on those ships," he said.
"You can say that again," Parker growled. "We know why too.
"What do you mean?"
"From everything I hear, Roosevelt knew the Japs were coming. He kept the information in Washington because he wanted something like this to happen."
"I somehow doubt that story," McKay said.
If this was the sort of information the executive officer was spreading through the Jefferson City, no wonder morale was so bad. McKay decided not to lecture him on the bridge in front of the pilot they had taken aboard at the mouth of the harbor. He was a salty character who had been guiding ships into Pearl for at least twenty years. McKay knew him from his tour out here as a destroyer captain.
"I don't doubt it at all," the pilot said. "How in Christ do you explain why the net tender left the harbor wide open for submarines for five hours before the attack? At least a half dozen of the torpedoes that hit those battleships came from subs. Why was that allowed to happen? If I wanted to find out the truth about this thing, I'd put thumbscrews to the captain of that net tender. I bet you'd find out he's a goddamn secret agent from ONI."
ONI was the Office of Naval Intelligence. The idea that the Navy had conspired to help the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor was so bizarre, McKay was temporarily speechless.
"Where were you on December seventh, Captain?" Commander Parker said.
"I was preparing a lecture on the battle of Trafalgar that I was supposed to give the next day at the Naval War College," he said. "I never gave it. My class evaporated and in a couple of days so did I."
Daniel Parker's lip curled. H
e had never been invited to attend the Naval War College at Newport. There was no doubt that men like him, who had entered the officer corps without an Annapolis ring, had some reason to cry discrimination. Since Annapolis began turning out graduates in 1847, no man without a ring had become an admiral.
"A hell of a lot of good the battle of Trafalgar did us here on December seventh," Parker said.
"I don't know. No one ever surprised Nelson's fleet anywhere, anytime. He did the surprising. 'Incessant vigilance' was one of his favorite phrases."
Commander Parker's lip only curled more derisively. McKay saw he had supplied him with a new way to talk down the captain. He wasn't a real sailor. He was a bookworm.
"You're slotted for Berth Seventeen," the pilot said. "Either one of you fellows want to take her in?"
"I'll do it," McKay said.
Five years ago, spurred by his wife, McKay had won a reputation as a destroyer captain who handled his ship with the savoir faire of a New York cabbie in these tricky waters. But a cruiser was five times bigger than the old four-stacker he had commanded in 1937. He stayed well below the eight-knot speed limit as they turned to starboard and eased the Jefferson City into the Southeast Loch, a narrow passage where the channel dwindled to thirty-seven feet.
"Port engine back one third," Captain McKay said as they approached Berth Seventeen.
The engine telegrapher repeated the command and shoved the annunciator handle into position.
"Starboard engine ahead two thirds," McKay said.
The big ship slowly turned on her heel until her bow was pointed toward Berth Seventeen. "All engines ahead one third," McKay said. "Steady as you go."
"Captain, she's not answering!" the helmsman cried.
"They've lost power in the engine room," the telegrapher said.
At low speeds, when a ship was docking or getting under way, this could easily happen in a badly trained or badly maintained engine room. But a veteran ship like the Jefferson City was not supposed to have such deficiencies. Was this Oz Bradley's way of saying he was unhappy with his reduced share of the crew's time?
The ship began drifting toward the berth, broadside.
"Let go the starboard anchor," McKay said.
With an enormous rattle, the anchor dropped. McKay got on the telephone to the engine room. "What the hell's going on, Oz?" he asked.
"We lost steam pressure," Bradley said. "That number one boiler isn't worth what they'd get for it in a junkyard."
"Why the hell are we using it at a time like this?"
"Because number two isn't all that much better."
Did Bradley think he was the sort of jerk deck officer who did not know the ship had four boilers?
"What about the other two?"
"We shut them down to do some maintenance work on them."
"Get me some power fast, Oz."
"We're ready now on number two."
It took another ten minutes of backing and alternating between port and starboard engines to enter Berth Seventeen. It had to be the worst docking performance in the history of Pearl Harbor. Arthur McKay's brain was a muddle of rage and humiliation. He glanced at his executive officer and saw a sneer in his eyes. Had he arranged this fiasco?
McKay turned his back on Parker and went out on the wing of the bridge to look down on the dock, where scurrying sailors were making the lines fast. A figure in a rumpled khaki uniform stood with his hands on his hips watching the operation. He was alone, and there were no insignia visible anywhere on his uniform except for a thick layer of gold braid on the visor of his hat. He waved to Arthur McKay. The captain of the Jefferson City waved back, although his arm felt detached from his body.
It was Admiral Chester Nimitz, Cincpac himself.
"Come on. Have a drink," Flanagan said. "A real sailor doesn't drink Coke."
"I promised my mother I wouldn't drink," Leo Daley said. "Jesus Christ," Flanagan said. "Your mother isn't going to find out about it. I won't tell her."
"All right," Daley said. He waved to the barmaid, a pudgy Japanese woman. "I'll have a boilermaker."
"Hey, now you're talking."
Flanagan was in a vile mood. He was disgusted with life aboard the USS Jefferson City. He had come within ten minutes of winning the anchor pool. The screw up at the dock had enabled one of Wilkinson's deck apes to win. Fireman Marty Roth had confirmed everything Boats Homewood had predicted about a rigged game. Roth told Flanagan that one of Wilkinson's black-gang pals had cut off the steam to the forward engine room at the crucial moment and tried to blame Amos Cartwright for the failure. Flanagan and a lot of other sailors in F Division had demanded their money back. Wilkinson had laughed in their faces.
Honolulu had been equally disillusioning. Flanagan's liberty section had waited for an hour in the broiling sun for a bus into the city. Most of them decided to settle for cabs, which charged them a dollar a head to deposit them on seedy Hotel Street, opposite the larger than life-sized statue of Karnehameha the Great, erstwhile King of the islands. The King had one hand out in a gesture of welcome. In the other he held a long spear. "He's like everyone else in this fucking capitalist paradise," Jim Booth muttered as they got out of the cab. "One hand out for your wallet, the other ready to give you the shaft."
Flanagan soon decided that for once the Radical was not exaggerating. Sailors were not welcome anywhere in Honolulu except on a few honky-tonk alleys around Hotel Street. There was nothing to do but go to the YMCA for a hamburger and some uplift or drink cheap whiskey at twenty-five cents a shot and get laid. Flanagan curtly declined the YMCA, and Daley, fearful of Protestant contamination, had followed him to this smelly bar.
Flanagan had no idea what he was unleashing in Daley when he persuaded him to start drinking. By the time Daley finished his second boilermaker, he was confiding the story of his life. His father was a mailman and the biggest drunk in Hartford. "Son of a bitch comes home on Friday night on his fucking hands and knees. So help me. With the whole block laughing at him. On his fucking hands and knees. Your old man ever do anything like that?"
"No," Flanagan said.
He was not paying much attention to Daley. His normally strong sympathy for the unfortunates of this world had short-circuited. He kept thinking about Teresa Brownlow and her ridiculous, indestructible Jesus-guaranteed sinlessness. How could anyone believe such a bizarre creed? The more he drank, the angrier he got. He finally turned to Daley and said, "You know what I think we need to do? Commit some real sins.
"Hey, lizen," Daley said, so drunk from his third boilermaker he could barely stay on his barstool. "Lizen. You crazy? What if we get killed? Moil sin on soul. Hell for eternity."
"I want to commit some real sins and write to someone about it," Flanagan said. "I want her to find out what she's done to me.”
He left Daley clutching the bar in bewilderment and headed down Hotel Street to River Street, which got its name from a slimy-looking little stream called the Nuuanu. Jack Peterson had given him an address on River Street where he would be guaranteed a good reception if he felt like getting laid. Aboard ship, Flanagan had rebuffed this idea. He still had no intention of turning into Jack Peterson's kind of sailor. Now after four hours in Honolulu, he was inclined to think Jack had the right idea.
No respectable woman in Hawaii would speak to a sailor. Atavastic memories stirred in Flanagan, stories heard at family parties, when his father and uncle discussed the vicious discrimination the Irish had encountered when they arrived in New York. If his fellow Americans treated him as an outcast, he would act like one!
His brain a primordial stew, Flanagan found himself mounting a flight of odoriferous stairs to a second floor apartment. Someone peered through a keyhole until he muttered Jack Peterson's name. The door swung open and Flanagan had his hand mashed by a three-hundred-pound Hawaiian who looked like he ate people for breakfast. "Jack owes us about fifty bucks," he said. "But he sends us business, so what the hell."
Flanagan weaved his way into
a room that reminded him of the ladies' section of various bars in the Bronx. There was a lot of chrome, and imitation red leather chairs and couches. A jukebox played "It's Only a Paper Moon," and several women in gauzy dresses were dancing with sailors. The madam, a battle axe of about fifty with a face like the Queen of Spades, confronted him. "You're a friend of Jack's?" she said in a voice as flat and toneless as a train announcer's. "Got any money with you?"
"Sure."
"How come he didn't get it first?" she said.
"He's confined to the ship," Flanagan said.
"So what else is new."
"Is Sally here?"
"She was, the last time I looked. Sal?"
A sullen-looking girl with taffy hair and a bulky body made her way through the dancers.
"A friend of your friend Jack," she said. "Don't loan him any money.
Sally's sullen look did not vanish, but it diminished. "How's Jack? I heard he got killed in the Solomons."
"He's okay," Flanagan said. "Confined to the ship."
"Who'd he slug this time?"
"About twenty guys off a destroyer."
"Let's dance."
Somebody switched the record to "Chattanooga Choo Choo." Flanagan found himself remembering the drunken, dopey lindy he had done with Teresa. Christ. Was Sally thinking about doing the same steps with Jack? As she danced, her dress fell open — it was only fastened by a single hook around her waist — and Flanagan saw she was wearing nothing under it.
"In the mood, sailor?" she said as the song ended.
"Sure," Flanagan said. He found himself savoring the utter meaninglessness of the experience. Sally clearly did not give a damn about him and he did not give a damn about her.
"You're quite a dancer," she said as they went down a dim hall. She led him into a room that was not much bigger than the back seat of his Uncle Barney's seven-passenger Cadillac, and a lot tawdrier. The sheets on the single bed were almost black. Sally unhooked her dress and lay down, while Flanagan unlaced his shoes and pulled off his pants. He wondered if he should keep his wallet in his hand. Sally seemed to read his mind. "Don't worry about the wallet," she said. "This is a straight place. You don't have to worry about your money or VD. We get inspected every week."
Time and Tide Page 21
