Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  Flanagan followed the chaplain around the ship looking for an inspirational story for the next edition of The Hawthorn. He did not find one. In compartment after compartment, the sailors told Bushnell to get lost. They were all enraged at discovering this new variety of death at their throats. They seemed to hold the chaplain responsible. Jerome Wilkinson was particularly vicious. "We ain't interested in prayers, Chaplain," he said. "Go get us some extra life preservers."

  As usual, Bushnell saw it as a personal failure. Flanagan tried to console him as he reeled back to his office. "They've been out here too long."

  Ahead of them in the dim passageway, lit only by the glow of the battle lamps, Flanagan saw a shadowy figure. The ship rolled violently to starboard and threw him against the bulkhead. When he got to his feet, he found the chaplain clutching the wheel of a fire hose, staring into the dimness, terrified.

  "What's wrong?" Flanagan asked.

  "I saw him. Captain Kemble."

  Flanagan peered down the passageway. The figure had vanished.

  Only in F Division was the panicky rage held to a minimum. Homewood assured them Captain McKay had made the best choice. "You watch," he said. "We'll get knocked around some but we'll ride it out. She'll find her own way now. Them engines were just gettin' us into trouble, tryin' to fight a hundred-knot wind."

  "Are you just bullshitting us, Boats?" Flanagan asked. Homewood shook his head. "We're gonna find out this old lady's a ship, not just a hunk of floatin' machinery."

  For the next two hours, the Jefferson City lay hove to, while gigantic pyramid-shaped waves whirled and crashed in frenzy around her. Again and again from the bridge they looked up at moving mountains of water on all sides. The cruiser slid up and down these foaming slopes and rolled violently in the troughs between them. But she was no longer fighting the typhoon. She was surrendering to the storm's power like a confident woman yielding to an angry lover. The strain on the engines and bow vanished. Her essential shipness, the buoyancy her designers had created in the complex spaces of her hull, sustained her in the chaos of wind and water.

  Their escape from the typhoon was so sudden it seemed miraculous. It was like emerging from a thundercloud in a plane. One minute they were in a soup of wind and spray, the next they were drifting on a sea with a half mile visibility and only a mild swell.

  On the bridge, George Tombs ordered the engines ahead one third. He regarded Captain McKay with something close to awe. "I thought we were finished for a while, Art. Without you, I think we might have been."

  "Just trying to earn my salary, George," McKay said.

  Mail Call

  When the Jefferson City pulled into Ulithi Atoll, the Navy's forward base in the western Pacific, Admiral Spruance and his staff came aboard. Bull Halsey had gone home for a rest, and the J.C. became a flagship again.

  Byron Maher, Spruance's chief of staff, handed Captain McKay a letter. The return address was in Hawaii. Above the street number was written: "Kemble." In his cabin, McKay opened it and a piece of blue paper fell out. He picked it up and recognized Win's handwriting.

  "It is a long way to go," said Yuan Chen. "There are rivers too swift for any boat, Mountains that no chariot can cross. What am I to do?"

  “Humility shall be your boat,” said Po Chu-i. “Pliancy shall be your chariot.”

  "It is a long way to go," said Yuan Chen.

  "The lands are not inhabited. There are no villages where I can buy provisions. I should die before I reached my journey's end."

  “Lessen your wants, husband your powers

  And you will have no need to buy provisions on your way.”

  “You will cross many rivers and come at last to a sea So wide you cannot see the further shore.”

  “Yet you will go on, without knowing whether it will ever end. Here all that came with you will turn back. But you will still have far to go.”

  “He who needs others is forever shackled.”

  He who is needed by others is forever sad.

  I would have you drop these shackles, Put away your sadness And wander with me in the kingdom of the Great Void.

  In The Middle Of The Darkness

  "The Marines asked for a ten-day bombardment. Kelly Turner gave them three. As usual, Spruance is letting the son of a bitch do it his way."

  Byron Maher's voice was weary. He had been working eighteen hours a day on the plans for Iwo Jima for two months. He leaned back in his chair, his big round face sagging.

  "What do you think?" Arthur McKay said.

  “I don't think we should go near the goddamn place. We're only doing it because the Army Air Force tells us they can't hit anything over Japan at thirty thousand feet, and they're afraid to come lower because their fucking B-29s might get shot down. We killed five thousand kids to take Saipan, Guam and Tinian for these wonderful planes. So far as I know, they haven't hit a single target selected for them. Especially the aircraft factories. We put them at the top of the list. The Japs are still turning out thousands of planes for these kamikaze maniacs to fly into our ships."

  That night Captain McKay, dreamt he was aboard a ship under sail. Great white clouds of canvas loomed above him. He was wearing a strange uniform. It was dark blue, with two rows of parallel gold buttons down the front of the jacket and four gold stripes on the sleeves. On his head was a short-brimmed blue hat, with no braid on it. The ship was a man-of-war. Old-fashioned cannon lined the decks, and they boomed furiously at a fort in the distance. The fort fired back and splashes rose near the ship. But he was more interested in what was happening around the fort. Men in blue uniforms rushed toward it and were driven back by the furious fire of the defenders.

  "Rapid fire, rapid fire," the captain shouted at the men working the cannon on his ship.

  But it did no good. The men attacking the fort were driven back again. Hundreds of bodies were sprawled in front of the walls.

  "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" the captain cried.

  Captain McKay awoke bathed in sweat. He went out on the wing of the bridge and lit a cigarette. The ghostly shapes of over a thousand warships and transports filled the fifty square miles of Ulithi Lagoon. About half the invasion fleet for Iwo Jima, including his son's Third Marine Division, had arrived the previous day.

  That dream had surfaced from his research for his unwritten book on the Union Navy in the Civil War. It was the attack on Battery Wagner at the mouth of Charleston Harbor on July 10, 1863. The assault, a harebrained scheme of the Army general in command of the expedition, had been repulsed with heavy Union losses. One of the dead was the son of the captain of one of the Union ships. The captain had gone ashore and spent the night sitting beside his son's body in an Army hospital.

  "We have lost a son on earth but gained a friend in heaven," he had written to his wife the next day. "At the moment I am more sad than proud. But when we have sufficiently mingled our tears, I hope that condition can be reversed."

  Did he really mean it? Arthur McKay wondered. How did he reconcile himself to stupidity and incompetence and arrogance, which had killed his son almost as certainly as Confederate bullets? There was not a word of reproach in the letter — not a trace of hatred for the Southern slaveocracy that had started the needless war.

  He had tried to find out more about the captain. But he had dwindled to a name in the national archives. Only this one letter, reprinted in a New York newspaper, had survived.

  The Marine first lieutenant who mounted the accommodation ladder of the Jefferson City had the gold braided loop of a general's aide on his shoulder. The junior officer of the deck assumed he had a message for Admiral Spruance and offered to call his flag lieutenant.

  The Marine shook his head. "I want to see Captain McKay. I'm his son."

  In the captain's cabin, the lieutenant pointed to his fourragere and said, "Did you have anything to do with this?"

  "I know nothing about it."

  "On the level?"

  "On the level."

&
nbsp; "Why the hell would I get derricked into this nothing job? They've handed my men to some guy who's so green he must be part Christmas tree. It doesn't make any sense."

  Arthur McKay suspected Rita was responsible. But he decided it was better to play dumb. "It may have something to do with getting that DSC. Generals like aides with decorations."

  "That wouldn't surprise me in the Army. But in the Marines? I thought fighting was our business — not running messages."

  "That's how a general fights. With messages. You know that as well as I do. Calm down, Sammy. This is an honor. Don't be so touchy about avoiding favors that you can't accept one you deserve."

  Sam's anger vanished. A mournful light filled his eyes. "I'm not touchy. It's just that I feel I ought to stick with my men. The ones who are left. I know the score now, Dad. I know what we're likely to be up against."

  "Your men know how to take care of themselves. And your replacement in the bargain, probably."

  The lieutenant allowed himself to be persuaded to stay for dinner. The mournful light remained in his eyes. He began telling Arthur McKay about Saipan and Tinian and Eniwetok. Especially Saipan. "We did things that bother me, Dad. They bother me a hell of a lot."

  "For instance."

  "The day after we landed, when we moved inland we found thirteen Catholic nuns stretched out on a hillside with their habits pulled up around their waists. They'd all been raped and their throats cut.

  "After that we stopped taking prisoners. Contrary to what you may have heard, a fair number of Japs tried to surrender. We just shot them. Toward the end, we found about fifty Jap soldiers in a cave with a lot of geisha girls. They were smoking marijuana and having a farewell party. They said they'd surrender. We told them to come out and the captain ordered my thirty-cal machine gunner, a kid from North Carolina, to gun them down. I didn't say a word."

  The fog of war? Spruance's phrase was much too antiseptic for the Marines' ordeal. On Sammy talked, the mourning in his eyes seeping into his voice. He told of losing his sergeant, his two corporals, and thirty percent of his men. Not all of them died from Japanese bullets. A dismaying number were killed when Navy ships and Marine artillery fire fell on their positions.

  “We couldn't do anything about the ships except curse them over the radio. But the fourteenth Marine Artillery was within reach. After they shelled us for the fourth night in a row, my captain sent me down there with ten men and some satchel charges. We blew up their fucking guns and killed some of them — I hope."

  Sam McKay, his son, was gone. He had vanished in front of Arthur McKay's eyes. Confronting him was a gray-lipped killer. Even Sammy seemed to sense his loss of self. He struggled to emerge from the nightmare memories of Saipan.

  "I hope this doesn't shock you, Dad. You fight like gentlemen, compared to what we do."

  "There's nothing gentlemanly about a kamikaze," he said. "We're fighting people with different ideas about life and death. But I don't believe all of them buy this Bushido, the warrior code. That's a lot of hot air cooked up by their militarists."

  Sammy nodded. He was barely listening. "The general says Iwo's going to be tougher than Tarawa. He's furious with you guys for refusing to bombard it more than three days."

  "I'm only a spear carrier in this thing. Don't blame me."

  "I guess there's a good reason. There's always a good reason, isn't there?"

  "If there isn't, we make one up."

  Sammy frowned. "Listen, Dad. If anything happens, I don't want you or Mom to feel—well—any regrets."

  "I don't think you can tell us what to feel, Sammy."

  "I mean about raising me in a military family. Pointing me toward the Academy. I made the big choices on my own. Including what we did on Saipan."

  Son, son, Arthur McKay wanted to cry. You're not the only American who has failed to be always noble, wise, fair. Instead he squeezed his hand and said, "I don't give a damn what you did on Saipan. I just wish we could give you that ten-day bombardment."

  Rita's defiant smile curled on Sammy's lips. "We'll do okay in spite of you fucked-up sailors."

  It was the Siberia Patrol all over again, as far as the crew of the Jefferson City could see. Snow mixed with rain lashed their faces and chilled their bones as the cruiser plowed through icy heaving seas only a hundred miles off the coast of Japan. In the distance, planes roared down the rain-soaked decks of the big carriers to disappear into the low-hanging clouds. Task Force 58 was attacking the home islands of the empire.

  Byron Maher showed Captain McKay a message they had received from Admiral Marc Mitscher, the carriers' commander, predicting "the greatest air victory of the war for carrier aviation." Like his chief, Maher was a battleship man, with minimum enthusiasm for the aviators. "They shouldn't even be flying and Spruance knows it," Maher said. "The weather over Tokyo is worse than we've got here. They're not going to be able to see a damn thing."

  Maher did not have to elaborate. This attack was part of the ongoing war the Navy was fighting with the Army Air Force. Spruance was naturally on the Navy's side. He wanted to prove that carrier planes could accomplish what the vaunted B-29s had failed to do. Having come this far, he could not bring himself to restrain the aviators, even though he knew the chance of hitting their targets was close to zero.

  "We should be back there pounding the bejesus out of Iwo Jima," Maher said, looking eastward across the wind-lashed sea.

  A cool dawn breeze riffled the Pacific as the Jefferson City took her bombardment position several thousand yards off the landing beaches. A red sun rose in a clear sky. The gray island, covered with volcanic ash, loomed like a medieval fortress in the rosy light. The ugly cone of an extinct volcano, Mount Suribachi, dominated the barren flatlands where the Marines would come ashore.

  Once more the big guns spoke. Battleships, cruisers, destroyers poured high explosives on the fortress. Swarms of planes from Task Force 58 added their bombs. For three days, while Task Force 58 was returning from its fruitless raids on Japan, a squadron of ancient battleships had bombarded the island with dismayingly poor results. The admiral in command of the battleships admitted he had hit almost nothing of importance. Nevertheless Kelly Turner decreed that the landings would proceed on schedule.

  It was infinitely worse than Tarawa or Saipan. As men from the Fourth and Fifth Marine divisions hit the beach, the Japanese unmasked pillboxes and artillery positions on both flanks, undetected and unharmed by the bombarding ships. Tanks and landing craft exploded, mortar shells poured down on knots of men huddling in the gray sand, sending up mushrooms of smoke and dust. Bodies drifted in the backwash of the four-foot surf.

  Captain McKay watched from his bridge, numbly grateful that Sammy's Third Division was in reserve. But there was no doubt they would have to be committed to the battle. On the port side of the forecastle of the Jefferson City, Admiral Spruance paced up and down, ignoring the thunder of the eight-inch guns booming to starboard only a few feet away from him. His hawkish, raw-boned face was preoccupied. If he had any regrets about refusing the Marines the ten days of bombardment they had pleaded for, he did not reveal them.

  Five days later, Task Force 58 sortied for another raid on Japan. It was a repeat performance of the first disaster. The weather was atrocious. Forty-foot waves damaged several of the destroyers. Clouds and murk shrouded the aircraft factories Spruance desperately wanted to hit. Weather reports from Siberia, on which they depended for planning the operation, turned out to be worthless. Byron Maher cursed the Russians and the aviators.

  They returned to Iwo Jima to find the battle still raging. The action off the beaches had been almost as bloody. The carrier Saratoga had been ravaged by kamikazes and was limping back to Pearl Harbor. The escort carrier Bismarck Sea had been sunk. A half dozen other ships left behind to give fire support for the Marines had also been scorched by the suicide bombers. Accidents revealed how badly ships and men were wearing out. The old battleship New York lost her propellers to metal fatigue. Other sh
ips had collided or run aground.

  The Jefferson City was swiftly assigned a bombardment slot. All day beneath lowering gray clouds, ideal for concealing kamikazes, she steamed slowly back and forth responding to requests from Marine and Navy officers on Iwo Jima to hurl shells at a pillbox or cave or trenchline from which the Japanese continued to spew bullets. It required exact aim, a painstaking study of maps and coordinates.

  Late in the afternoon, Captain McKay looked over the splinter shield on the open bridge and saw Byron Maher on the flag bridge below him. "Has the Third Division gone ashore?" he asked.

  Maher nodded. "They've had to use everything they've got. The casualties are horrendous."

  Later in the afternoon, kamikazes sent the fleet to General Quarters. But the Combat Air Patrol shot them down before they got close to the Jefferson City. The main battery continued to bombard. McKay worried about the men in the turrets. By the time darkness fell, they had been on duty for ten hours. When Admiral Turner informed him that the Jefferson City would fire star shells to illuminate Iwo against a possible banzai charge and if necessary bombard throughout the night, McKay ordered Mullenoe to rotate rest periods between the three turrets.

  Horace Aquino telephoned to ask the captain when he would like his supper served. "Whenever it's ready," he said.

  He stayed on the bridge, watching the star shells turn Iwo Jima into a ghastly glowing spectacle. Bursts of orange gunfire flared in their crepuscular light. The shells of the big guns exploded against the grisly slopes of Mount Suribachi, trying to reach an underground warren of tunnels in which the Japanese had burrowed. Aquino told him supper was ready and he went down to his cabin. They talked about MacArthur's progress in the Philippines, the collapse of Nazi resistance in Germany. Horace worried about the safety of his family in Manila, which the Japanese were defending house to house.

  His Marine orderly knocked on the door. "Admiral Spruance would like to speak to you, Captain."