Stop, Flanagan told himself. Stop before the shit starts running down your legs. He had told Jack Peterson about the shark and Jack said he had done the right thing. Nothing in the regulations said you had to die trying to rescue a stranger, a guy who was not even a shipmate. Flanagan did not mention his theological worries; he was afraid Jack would think he was turning into a whiner like Daley.
On the bridge, Captain McKay was also watching the Hornet's planes take off. She and the Enterprise were the only two American carriers left in the Pacific. That Nimitz was risking them was proof, if any was needed, that the situation on Guadalcanal was desperate. COMINCH had ordered CINCPAC to throw everything in their pockets onto the table.
A breathless messenger from Radio Central handed him a flimsy: FROM COMSOPAC TO COMFORS 16 AND 17. ATTACK — REPEAT ATTACK.
Down in Noumea, they had another aggressive gambler, Admiral Bill Halsey, in command. COMINCH had replaced the discouraged boxer Ghormley with a slugger.
From Lieutenant Mullenoe in Air Defense: "Captain, radar reports fifty, maybe sixty bogeys approaching bearing one three zero true."
McKay looked to port at the Hornet, with her huge flight deck protruding over her delicate cruiser's bow. There was no armor worth mentioning between the flight deck and the keel. Inside there were thousands of gallons of inflammable aviation gasoline and tons of explodable bombs. It was the job of the Jefferson City and the other cruisers and destroyers steaming in close formation around her to keep that fragile, ungainly lady afloat. The hooligan navy was running the show.
For Old Navy men, there was a personal dimension to their task. Dozens of the J.C.'s crew had classmates or friends aboard the Hornet. Robert Mullenoe's brother was the carrier's engineering officer. Navigator Marse Lee's Annapolis roommate was the first lieutenant.
"Jesus Christ. Here they come," Parker said. "There must be a hundred of them."
McKay had decided to keep his executive officer with him on the bridge. If one of those Jap bombs had McKay written on it, he wanted Parker in parenthesis. He would have far more confidence in his classmate George Tombs, the ship's first lieutenant, as the Jefferson City's commander. He was not the brightest officer in the Navy, but he was steady.
The Japanese planes were visible now, darting silver specks high in the sky to the northwest. "Where's the goddamn Combat Air Patrol?" Parker asked.
"Just hold your position, Commander," McKay said. "Remember that carrier is going to start zigzagging. She can do us a lot more damage than the whole Jap Air Force if she hits us."
He stepped out on the port wing of the bridge and watched the Japanese attack shaping up. It was beautifully coordinated. High above them, the dive bombers were playing hide and seek in some fat cumulus clouds. Low on the horizon the torpedo planes were forming a wide semicircle to begin their runs. On the outer rim of the task force, the destroyers were already banging away. Now, as both groups of planes came within range, every gun on every ship opened up.
At his forty-millimeter director, Frank Flanagan reeled in the blasts of the five-inch guns and began tracking a dark green Kate as it came toward them, jinking from side to side. Now! He poured shells across two miles of water at him. But it was impossible to tell if he connected. His vision was confused by a half hundred shell bursts between him and his target. Even worse were the violent changes of course being executed by the Jefferson City. Again and again, these zigzags left Flanagan and other fire controlmen staring at chunks of open sea or sky.
"All mounts select targets at random," said their air defense commander, Lieutenant Mullenoe. He was acknowledging the situation was totally fouled up.
Flanagan spun his mount so violently he almost threw the loaders off it into the sea. Finally he got another plane in his director on the opposite quarter.
He had that one! He could see the tracers in the stream of shells he was pouring at the Jap, a burning line that was connected to the center of the weaving green plane. Flames leaped from Kate's fuselage. The wings tilted radically to the right. Had pieces of those exploding shells torn into that Jap's heart? Flanagan hoped so. Since the morning the dive bombers had strafed the motor whaleboat and rafts of survivors, Flanagan had begun hating Japs. Father Callow would not approve but it made him feel better.
The dying Japanese pilot had a reply to Flanagan's deadly aim. As his plane swerved off course and the flames gushed around him, he plunged toward an American destroyer. He hit the ship head on just below the bridge and his torpedo exploded, engulfing everything from the forward turret to the stack in orange flames. Insanity!
On the bridge, Captain McKay watched the Aichi 99-1 dive bombers come down through hundreds of black bursts of five-inch shells, each spewing deadly fragments around them. Plane after plane disintegrated into shreds of orange and yellow flame, but others kept coming, miraculously penetrating the showers of steel. Soon the air was thick with the roar of motors as the Aichis pulled out of their dives. Moments later, huge crashes split the sky, immense fountains of water leaped between the Jefferson City and the Hornet.
The Hornet zigged and zagged while signal flags raced up her halyards to announce her changes in course. The signals usually arrived after the fact. There was no time to follow standard task force routines. From the signal bridge, just aft the navigating bridge, the Jefferson City's signalmen shouted the changes and Commander Parker translated them into orders to the helmsman. "Right rudder twenty degrees. Left fifteen degrees," he roared, sweat streaming down his porcine cheeks. The Jefferson City careened to port and starboard like a wingman flying in formation with a fighter plane, maintaining the six hundred yards between her and the swerving forty-thousand-ton carrier.
A wild mixture of pride and tension surged through Captain McKay as his ship performed this deadly dance. One message misheard, one wrong pull on the wheel by the helmsman, one failure of the rudder to respond down in the steering room deep in the stern of the ship, where a half dozen black gang sailors were feverishly checking the complex gears and shafts that connected the rudder to the wheel five hundred feet away, and that carrier would smash them into a sinking tangle of twisted steel and exploding oil tanks. This was a battle that tested everything — men, machinery, training.
"Hornet is hit!" shouted the lookout on the port wing of the bridge.
For a moment McKay could not believe it. He had been so absorbed by their magnificent performance, he had forgotten there was an enemy above them, ready to match them, courage for courage, skill for skill.
A five-hundred-pound bomb had struck the starboard side of the carrier's flight deck, aft. Smoke and debris leaped high in the air. A moment later, two near misses almost obscured her with cascades of green water. Both would wreak havoc on her unarmored hull. Almost simultaneously, a flaming Japanese plane hit the stack and burst through the flight deck, exploding in the heart of the ship. Then came four more bombs, terrific smashes that annihilated what was left of the flight deck.
Arthur McKay felt those bombs as if they were tearing apart his own body. They had allowed the Japs to maul their ungainly lady.
"Captain, torpedoes—" the talker said.
He did not have time to finish the sentence. Two tremendous explosions erupted below the Hornet's waterline amidships. With a sickening lurch to starboard, she slewed to a stop, dead in the water. A moment later, a burning torpedo plane headed for the bow. "Get, that Kate, Bob,” McKay said to Mullenoe.
Every gun that could be brought to bear blasted at the dying Jap. Frank Flanagan had him in the center of his sight and could have sworn he hit him with a dozen shells. But the Jap flew through the blizzard of metal and smashed into the Hornet's bow, causing another fiery explosion. Flanagan saw men in the forward gun gallery leap into the sea, their clothes on fire. The stricken carrier listed even more radically to starboard. She was engulfed by thick black smoke through which tongues of flame darted. Her cruiser and destroyer protectors circled mournfully around her. In his earphones, Flanagan could hear
Jack Peterson cursing. "Jesus Christ. Can't we do anything right?"
"Round two," Captain McKay said as the Jefferson City steamed into the task force around the USS Enterprise, the last American carrier still afloat in the Pacific. A signal from the admiral in command of Task Force 17, glimpsed through the smoke shrouding the Hornet, had sent them pounding across the ten miles of sea that separated the two task forces. They lined up behind the battleship South Dakota and the anti-aircraft cruiser San Juan as a Combat Air Patrol leaped from the Big E's deck.
The J.C.'s communications officer, Buzz Jamieson, reported that the American pilots claimed to have sunk or badly damaged two Japanese carriers. But patrol planes earlier in the day had sighted four enemy carriers. That meant two were still in business and they would throw every plane on their decks at them to knock out the Enterprise. If they succeeded, it would be Midway in reverse. The American Navy would have to flee the Solomons, leaving the Marines to their fate.
The signal bridge reported a blinker message from the Enterprise: WHO ORDERED YOU TO JOIN THIS TASK FORCE?
"Reply, 'Signal from Hornet,' - McKay said.
There was no more time to talk. Out of the clouds whirled another snaking silver line of Japanese dive bombers. The black bursts of the five-inch guns filled the sky, and their blasts shook the deck and bulkheads of the bridge on the Jefferson City.
"My God, is the San Juan blowing up?" Commander Parker cried.
Ahead of them the anti-aircraft cruiser looked as if it was wreathed in flames. "I think it's just her guns on rapid fire," McKay said. It was the first time they had seen one of these ships, with fifteen five-inch guns, in action.
"Bombs coming down," the talker said.
A hit exploded on the bow of the Enterprise. Pieces of the flight deck flew high in the air. "Jesus, can't we stop these bastards?" Parker cried.
Another bomb exploded only a few feet off the stern of the San Juan. The cruiser lurched to starboard and went lunging through the rest of the task force. Her siren whooped and a black breakdown flag leaped to her masthead. "Her rudder's jammed," McKay said. "I hope to God everybody gets out of her way."
Two bombs exploded in the water that the San Juan had just vacated. "Close up. Take her position," McKay said.
"Who gave us the order to do that?" Parker said.
"I did," McKay said. "If you question one more order I give on this bridge, I'm going to put you under arrest."
Parker ordered flank speed and they were soon abeam of the Enterprise. Above them, the dive bombers were still coming down through the steel canopy of the five-inch shell bursts, pressing home their attack with the same ferocity that had smashed the Hornet. Another bomb exploded forward of the Big E's island where the captain and the admiral operated. Smoke and flames from both hits leaped into the air. It looked more and more like a replay of the Hornet.
But the guns fell silent as the last of the dive bombers fled into the nearest cumulus clouds. Something had gone wrong with the Japs' timing. Almost twenty minutes elapsed before the talker said: "Captain, torpedo planes bearing one five zero, one five five, one two five, one one six ..." Before he finished he had practically boxed the compass.
On came the green planes through hundreds of shell bursts and livid streams of forty- and twenty-millimeter shells. "My God, they've got guts," McKay said.
The shooting looked marvelous, but the hits were few. At least eleven Kates launched torpedoes. Enterprise signals right full rudder," the talker said.
"Right full rudder," Parker shouted.
"Three torpedoes to starboard bearing one five zero, range a thousand yards and closing," the talker said.
Out on the port wing, Captain McKay could see what the Enterprise was trying to avoid. Three more torpedoes were slashing toward her starboard bow. At the angle at which they were sailing beside her, if the Jefferson City executed the same turn, it would expose the thin middle skin of the carrier to these other torpedoes, approaching at the opposite angle. These computations of speed and course flashed through Arthur McKay's mind like an intuition. Twenty-five years of fleet maneuvers and drills had given him a seaman's eye.
"Belay that. Steady as you go," he said. "We'll have to take those torpedoes."
"You're out of your fucking mind!" Parker screamed. "Orderly," McKay said, "I'm placing Commander Parker under arrest. Escort him to his cabin."
"There isn't going to be a fucking cabin in another sixty seconds," Parker shouted. "Helmsman, right full rudder if you want to stay alive."
"Steady as you go," McKay said. "That's an order from your captain."
He carefully avoided raising his voice. "Aye, aye, Captain," the helmsman said, holding the wheel steady.
"You fuckin'—"
Parker tried to shove the helmsman aside and seize the wheel. The sailor resisted him. With a tremendous thud the three torpedoes hit the Jefferson City.
Out on deck, above his forty-millimeter mount, Frank Flanagan had watched the torpedoes racing toward them. One was going to hit the ship just below his mount. "Get off it," he shouted to his gun crew. "Get the hell out of there."
They had seen the torpedoes too and scrambled for the other side of the ship. Flanagan was too frightened—or too fascinated — to move. He was seeing his own death. In exactly ten seconds he would be blown through the air to land in the water, his body shredded by flying steel, his legs, perhaps his arms gone. I'm sorry, he prayed. I'm sorry I hurt Teresa.
The three torpedoes hit the ship simultaneously. By all the laws of science and probability, those fuses in their ugly snouts should have instantly ignited a half ton of TNT that would have broken the Jefferson City in two. Their impact alone was enough to send a shudder through the entire ship.
But there was no explosion. All three torpedoes were duds. Their murderous charges drifted down into the three-mile deep to which their fellows had sent the Hornet.
He was still alive. Frank Flanagan did not know why or how, but he was still alive. Should he thank God or that wandering albatross?
Down in the forward fire room, the thud of the torpedoes had spun Marty Roth around to stare openmouthed at death. All morning he had been tuning his valves to Cartwright's orders in the 130-degree beat, while the fire room talker gave them terrifying glimpses of the chaos raging above them. Now Roth listened, frozen with horror, as one of the torpedoes, caught in the current the ship created as it cut through the sea at flank speed, bumped against the hull. One two three four five six bump-bump-bumps, any one of which could mean death in a cascade of water from the Pacific's blue-black depths.
"Was that what I thought it was?" Roth said, his voice trembling.
"The Lord has been watchin' over us," Cartwright said in his deep calm voice.
"I asked you a goddamn question. Was that a torpedo?"
"It wasn't no porpoise," Cartwright said. "I ain't never heard a porpoise or even a whale make that kind of noise against a ship." Slowly, carefully, like a doctor examining a wound, he ran his hand over the hull where the torpedoes had hit. "I knew we had a good captain," he said. "But I didn't know he was this good."
On the bridge, Commander Daniel Boone Parker stared numbly at Captain McKay. The executive officer was literally trembling from head to foot. Saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. In his eyes McKay saw a raw animal fear that revealed the essence of the man more nakedly than any imaginable words.
In a shaky voice McKay's Marine orderly asked, "Captain, do you still want me to put Commander Parker under arrest?"
A sickening mixture of pity and disgust suffused Arthur McKay's soul. "No," he said.
In the harbor of Espiritu Santo, Captain McKay boarded the heavy cruiser USS Pensacola and was escorted to the admiral's cabin by the junior officer of the deck, a slim blond ensign who reminded him of his son. "Did you take any hits, Captain?" he asked.
"Not a scratch."
"We're about the same. Only a ruptured steam pipe from
a near miss.
The commander of Task Force 17, Rear Admiral Carl Hoffer, had transferred his flag to the Pensacola when the Hornet went down. Only since they returned to Santo did McKay learn that the task force had struggled most of the day to save the burning carrier. But another wave of torpedo planes and dive bombers had administered the coup de grace.
Admiral Hoffer was in the Tomlinson-King-Turner tradition. He fixed Arthur McKay with glaring eyes as he stepped into the cabin. "Captain," he said, "who gave you permission to leave my task force and transfer to the defense of the Enterprise?"
"I got a signal from the Hornet's bridge, Admiral, ordering me to go."
"No such signal was ever sent. I ordered all ships to execute a circular maneuver until we could get the Hornet under way again. We finally got a tow line on her, but the second Japanese attack was too heavy for us to handle without your guns. I consider you responsible for the loss of that carrier!"
"That's a pretty strong statement, Admiral."
"I don't give a goddamn what you think it is. I'm putting it in my after-action report. I'm letting you know it so you can defend yourself. If you can."
"I'll do my best, Admiral. Thanks for your courtesy."
Hoffer was furious because he had lost his carrier while Task Force 16 had managed to keep the Enterprise afloat. She had limped back to Noumea, where shipfitters and machinists were repairing her bomb damage. In the King tradition of the admiral-as-son-of-a-bitch, Hoffer believed that when something went seriously wrong, someone had to be blamed. It could never be an admiral, because that would make the Navy look bad. The citizens of the republic could tolerate the idea that the Navy had faulty captains or commanders or lieutenants. A faulty admiral suggested there might be something wrong with the system itself.
Why are you surprised? Arthur McKay asked himself, as his gig approached the Jefferson City. You knew this. You have known it for a long time.
Time and Tide Page 31
