Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  Arthur McKay's detestation was softened by the anguish in Clinch's eyes. Clinch was afraid that God or Destiny or whatever presided over this life was about to exact his favorite son as a penalty for his sins. Arthur McKay, with a son about to graduate from Annapolis, sympathized. Clinch's love for his son was the first honest emotion McKay had seen him display in a decade.

  "I'll switch Dick to an eight-inch turret. That's got more armor on it than anything else aboard the ship. He'll think it's a promotion for the good job he's done in mount one."

  "Okay," Clinch said. "I really appreciate—"

  "Tell Win I'll do what I can, if he needs help. I'll be in a better position to judge how much I can do after we've been in action."

  Battle would either heal the wound Savo Island had inflicted on the Jefferson City's soul or reveal its brutal origin. Which did her captain want? At the moment, Arthur McKay would have had to flip a coin to decide. Either way, his opinion was irrelevant. The spinning coin was in the hands of the god of war.

  History Spoken Here

  Day after day, the Jefferson City steamed into the immense blank of the western Pacific on the curving sea trail blazed by broad-beamed Yankee whalers and long lean clipper ships with their clouds of sails. "Forever advancing we seemed forever in the same place," whaleman Herman Melville had written, almost exactly a hundred years before. That was how it seemed to the Jefferson City's sailors. But on the bridge, the captain and the navigator, Commander Robert E. Lee, knew that their twenty-five-knot pace was slicing 600 miles off the 3,500-mile trek from Hawaii every twenty-four hours.

  "Every day was the former lived over again," complained whaleman Melville. The Jefferson City's sailors had a similar complaint. But their days were boring in a drastically different way from the monotony Melville disliked. Every day the men of the Jefferson City prepared for battle.

  From an hour after sunrise until dusk, the cruiser's eight-inch and five-inch and forty- and twenty-millimeter guns blasted at targets on the water and in the air. Standing in the open at his gun director, at the end of each day, Frank Flanagan felt as if his head and body had been pounded by a maniacal heavyweight boxer.

  When they were not firing, the men in the turrets and mounts and handling rooms rehearsed the exhausting ritual of passing the shells and powder bags and ramming them home in the guns. The goal was creation of bodies that performed even if their brains were a muddle of terror and confusion.

  Over and over, lookouts were drilled in giving ranges and bearings using the escorting destroyers and the Jefferson City's scout planes. Bearings were trickiest for the new men. They came in two varieties, true and relative. True bearings were computed clockwise from the North Pole and were seldom used, except on the navigating bridge. Relative bearings were the important ones. They were computed clockwise from the bow to the stern and around to the bow again. To get the bearing you multiplied the hour hand of the clock by thirty degrees. A ship or plane off the starboard beam, at three o'clock, was reported as bearing nine zero. Something off the port bow, at ten o’clock, was at three zero zero. After the four-hundredth time, the computation became as automatic as telling time, even for mathematical morons like Flanagan.

  Overlapping and intertwined with this training were the watches — four hours on, four hours off, night and day. This was Condition Two, the standard schedule of a ship at sea in a war zone. By night, the sections not on watch studied outlines of Japanese ships and planes flashed on screens in the crew's mess compartment. They spent more hours on watch understanding and acquiring night vision. Human eyes use cones, to see by day and rods by night. It took a half hour for the rods to begin seeing in the darkness. Thereafter, a man's eyes could not come in contact with any light, even the flare of a match, without losing his night vision for another half hour.

  In the wardroom, Captain McKay sat with the deck and engineering officers, throwing situations at them, asking them what they would do.

  "Lieutenant Mullenoe, you get reports of torpedo wakes to both port and starboard, bearing zero four five to starboard, two one five to port. What do you do?"

  Mullenoe thought for a moment, imagining these two killer fish racing toward his bow and stern and decided he would alter course twenty degrees to port, getting both ends of the ship out of harm's way. Montgomery West said he would call for flank speed and outrun them.

  That brought on an intense discussion with the engineers about the ship's limitations. The deck men heard what a year of wartime steaming had done to her eight-year-old boilers, and how little the yardbirds had done at Terminal Island to refit them. Flank speed, the thirty-two knots a cruiser could hit, could not be achieved without giving the engine room a chance to get ready for it. "Otherwise," Oz Bradley said, "you're going to see pieces of the boiler going up the goddamn stack and coming down on the main deck."

  When they were not on watch or training for battle or sleeping, the crew chipped paint. In the interior of the superstructure and below decks, the sound of chippers filled the ship. With it came the almost lethal odor of paint remover. Several men collapsed and were carried to sick bay, dizzy and vomiting. Commander Parker thought the whole idea was idiotic and tried to keep the chippers out of Officers' Country. Captain McKay countermanded his order, he had them do his cabin first. Parker enlisted Dr. Cadwallader, who warned McKay the fumes might be affecting the health — and were certainly affecting the morale — of the crew. The chaplain chimed in with an even more lugubrious monody on the fragility of their morale.

  "It'll be a lot more fragile if we get hit and the ship turns into a funeral pyre," McKay said.

  Captain McKay dined alone most of the time. The only guests who broke his solitude were the navigator, Commander Robert E. "Marse" (his inevitable Annapolis nickname) Lee, and the first lieutenant, George Washington Tombs. Neither had been aboard the ship at Savo Island. McKay did not want to hear any more confidential confessions, clues to the Jefferson City's disgrace.

  Four years behind McKay and Tombs at Annapolis, Marse Lee (who happened to be from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania) had spent a year on the China Station. Inevitably, their conversation veered in that direction. The captain was relieved to discover Lee was a matter-of-fact man. He had not acquired what they used to call the Asiatic stare. He remained unaffected by the sheer scope and density of the Orient's masses, their appalling misery, their awful disregard for liberty, and equality and the pursuit of happiness as Americans understood them.

  George Tombs had never gotten to China. Throughout his career George had endured a steady diet of junk assignments —naval attaché in Peru, commander of the Reina Mercedes, the prison ship at Annapolis. He listened to McKay and Lee reminiscing about their Shanghai days with a patina of sadness in his eyes.

  Lee began talking about his adventures as executive officer of the gunboat Monocacy in 1927. Win Kemble had been captain that year.

  "Didn't you have a problem out there, when you were captain of the Monocacy, Art?" Tombs asked.

  For a moment, McKay wondered if Tombs was involved in the rumors and fears swirling around the ship. The question spun him back to the conversation with Clinch Meade in Hawaii. But honest George Tombs was incapable of duplicity. "All the captains of the Monocacy had problems, George," McKay said.

  "What happened?"

  "Off Wu-Han, the local warlord decided to use us for target practice. I ignored him. Some American businessman wrote a letter home accusing me of letting bandits fire on the flag. The Hearst newspapers raised a stink and the Navy decided to hold a court of inquiry to shut them up. I was exonerated — which didn't exactly surprise me. We had orders to ignore that sort of gunfire unless it endangered the ship or the crew."

  Marse Lee's eyes were opaque during this dry summation. He made no attempt to recall for Tombs the incredible tangle of frustration and insubordination that had raged among the officers and men on the China Station during the years 1925-28. American missionaries had used their influence in Washington to muzzle t
he Navy's gunboats. Most of the junior officers and the crews had despised the policy and violated it every time the Chinese gave them a chance. In 1927, off Hankow, when Win Kemble had commanded the Monocacy, a Chinese machine gun in a pagoda had opened fire on the ship. Win had blown the pagoda apart with a four-inch shell.

  Did Lee know the rest of the story? Probably not. The details of courts of inquiry were secret. McKay was even more certain he did not know the deeper background — the violent disagreement between Art McKay and Win Kemble about the role America was playing in China. To Win's astonishment and outrage, McKay agreed with the missionaries, that the United States should stop playing stooge to British colonialism and get its gunboats and Marines out of China. He agreed with the policy of not firing back at provocative shells and bullets along the Yangtze and proved it by refusing to steam the Monocacy into a gunnery duel off Wu-Han.

  Captain McKay did not sleep well that night. At 3 A.M. he was pacing his cabin, hearing Clinch Meade say, Win stuck by you in China. He was back on the Yangtze in the fog and rain of that November day in 1928, with shells bursting off his port and starboard beams, maneuvering the ancient Monocacy to make it a difficult target, while his executive officer angrily demanded permission to fire back. He sat before the court of inquiry while the presiding officer read into the record a letter from Win Kemble defending Lieutenant McKay's decision.

  The friend of his life. The letter was an extravagant eulogy of Arthur McKay as a man incapable of dishonor or cowardice and a passionate defense of a captain's prerogatives. McKay could still remember patches of Win's grandiloquence. No one, least of all a civilian, has the right to challenge Lieutenant McKay's command of the USS Monocacy. Neither his executive officer (who had testified he thought the ship was in danger and the artillery fire should have been returned) nor, at the risk of seeming presumptuous, the admiral in command of the Yangtze Patrol, can or should question a captain's ultimate authority. He and he alone can decide what is best for his ship.

  The friend of his life. Even when disagreement was as profound, as acrimonious as their difference about China, friendship remained paramount. Even when Win despised what his friend had done, he had been ready to defend unto insubordination his right to do it.

  Captain McKay got out Rita's letter and reread it. He had not answered it. Once more, he told himself his decision to ignore it was rooted in reality. Nimitz had warned him the Jefferson City might be slugging it out with a Japanese fleet within a day of arriving in the Solomons. As dawn began streaking the blank gray face of the Pacific with livid red, Captain McKay had to admit to himself that he was also using that reality for his own intricate purpose.

  What would the epigrammist say about him? The man who had to choose between his wife and his friend had better be brave as well as wise.

  Not bad. But Arthur McKay wondered if he was either.

  "Hey, Flan, you got an education. Write me a letter," Jack Peterson said as they left the crew's mess after staring for an hour at an awesome array of Japanese ships and planes.

  “Who to?"

  Flanagan's head ached, his ears were still ringing from another day of firing. He was still wrestling with remorse over the vicious letter he had mailed to Teresa Brownlow from Pearl Harbor.

  "Martha Johnson. I want to teach that broad a lesson. She just wrote me another snotty letter, tellin' me all about how she made out with one of my best friends from the Pennsylvania."

  Two of a kind, Flanagan thought. He and Martha Johnson. That seemed to legitimize teaching her a lesson.

  "What do you want to do?"

  "Make her feel guilty as hell. Write me a letter tellin' her how I can't sleep, I can't eat, thinkin' about her. How I didn't even take a liberty at Pearl and I've given up cards and dice. Then I get this rotten letter from her. Pull out all the emotional stops, you know? She's ruined my life. I'm goin' back to all my old vices with no hope now."

  "I got you. Give me an hour."

  While Flanagan toiled as a hypocritical ghostwriter, another sailor mailed a totally sincere letter at the ship's post office.

  Dear Mother:

  I got your letter. I don't want anything for Christmas but a discharge. I hate the Navy! This ship is the most awful place I've ever been in my life. I have a boatswain's mate who beats me up and makes me commit sins that are worse than anything you ever read about in a book. He wants me to sin with him now, but I won't let him touch me.

  The ship has a captain who's the best friend of the captain who's just left and he was a coward who let a lot of men drown on it before we got here. We're going out to the Solomon Islands to fight the Japs and I know we're going to get sunk out there. We deserve it. This ship is full of evil men who laugh at God and Jesus. I went to see the chaplain and told him all this and he said I shouldn't say things like that unless I could prove them. How can I prove them when everyone else is almost as bad as the boatswain? They all laugh at me and punch me and kick me whenever they feel like it. If you don't help me I'm going to do something awful.

  Love, Harold

  "There are times when a sailor has to look deep in his heart and ask himself if anything matters. He has to face the fact that he has wasted his affectionate feelings, which don't come easy for him, considering the miserable life he lives, on a woman who simply doesn't care about him, unless he agrees to grovel and beg for her love:"

  Expressions of awe and admiration circled main forward.

  "How's that for classy bullshit?" Jack Peterson said. "She'll use up four handkerchiefs readin' this."

  They were sprawled on the deck waiting for gunnery practice to begin. Peterson was reading aloud portions of Flanagan's love letter to Martha Johnson. Everybody agreed it was a masterpiece and Flanagan had malarkey coming out his ears. Camutti begged him to write similar epistles to three different girls he planned to seduce when he got back to Philadelphia.

  Flanagan accepted the praise but he did not find it very satisfying. He already had one rotten letter to a woman on his conscience. Maybe that was why he was having second thoughts about this one. If Martha Johnson fooled around with other men, Jack Peterson had it coming to him. In the week they had double-dated, Flanagan had never heard Jack say anything even faintly romantic to her after the first date. But Flanagan had concluded Teresa was right, Martha was in love with Jack in some strange deep way that left Flanagan baffled. It did not seem to go with her independence, her tough, cool honesty.

  Whatever the reason, it was none of his business. Martha had never hurt him. In fact, she had talked to him as if he were Jack's equal — a real sailor and not a green kid who was in the Navy only because Uncle Sam said join up or else. As the call to General Quarters blasted over the PA system and they headed for their battle stations, Flanagan caught Peterson's arm. "Jack," he said, "I don't think you ought to send that letter."

  "Hey, it's my business. Concentrate on savin' Daley's soul. Or some other twerp's if you gotta be a seagoin' Jesuit."

  WHAM WHAM WHAM. The five-inch guns began knocking compassion out of Flanagan's head. The hell with it, he thought. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe nothing mattered.

  "Lieutenant MacComber, would you mind taking a look at this?"

  Ensign Richard Meade stood just inside the door and handed Harold Semple's letter to Lieutenant Wilson Selvage MacComber. Wearing a maroon silk bathrobe and little else, MacComber was reading a book of poems with a weird title, The Wasteland, by someone named T. S. Eliot. Meade had made the mistake of passing an obvious Navy joke about the initials the last time he visited the stateroom. MacComber had frozen him with a look that made him feel as if he was back in plebe year at the Naval Academy.

  As second in command of Deck Division One, Dick Meade had the unwelcome task of censoring the men's mail. Weary from ten hours in the tiny officer's command booth at the back of turret one, Meade skimmed most of the letters, making sure no place names, particularly the words Solomon Islands, appeared in them. But Semple's letter involved something mor
e important than a breach of security. He felt MacComber, the division officer, should see it.

  "Oh, dear, it sounds like Wilkinson's on the prowl again," MacComber said. Mullenoe, who had been in his class at Annapolis, called him Pussy. To confuse Meade completely, MacComber had a wife and child, about whom he often talked in sentimental terms.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Oh, he has a weakness for pretty little boys. Is this fellow one?"

  "Shouldn't we do something about it?"

  "Ensign Meade, this has been going on in the Navy since the Phoenicians. Let nature take its course."

  "Nature?"

  "Do you want to confront the executive officer with the misbehavior of his favorite bosun? If so, you have my permission."

  MacComber handed the letter back to Meade and resumed reading The Wasteland.

  "Isn't it dangerous to the men's ... morale?"

  "Au contraire," MacComber said. "The rest of them can relax now. They know Wilkinson won't be after them. They will have a scapegoat on whom they can discharge their peasant rage and frustration."

  Meade was appalled by Lieutenant MacComber's attitude toward the enlisted men. He regarded them as appurtenances to the ship's machinery. His opinion of ensigns was almost as snide. In fact, there were few officers in the Navy who won MacComber's admiration. He was fond of saying that the average Annapolis man was a robot with a brain containing only a handful of standard phrases, such as "Yes, sir" and "Right away, sir.

  Mullenoe claimed MacComber's contempt for anyone he considered beneath him proved that the Civil War had been a necessity. Meade had enjoyed his first seven months on the Jefferson City, when he had been assistant officer of Mullenoe's Deck Division Two. Since he had been transferred to MacComber's domain, he had begun to wonder if his father was right when he predicted that in five years he would change his mind about making the Navy a career.

  Meade had grown more and more dismayed watching MacComber in action. Or, to put it more exactly, in inaction. He let Wilkinson run the division. MacComber spent most of his time playing bridge with Dr. Cadwallader, Chaplain Bushnell and anyone they could inviegle into making a fourth.