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."
"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 th
ey 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 ships 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."
McKay knew, instantly. The admiral's words were superfluous. The hard mouth moved in the grave face. "I just got some very bad news, Art. Your son was killed by a sniper this afternoon while they were trying to reorganize one of the forward battalions."
Loneliness, Captain McKay thought as Spruance sat down on the edge of a chair beneath the portrait of the solitary Chinese traveler. The picture seemed to speak to him. Now you will find out what loneliness really means.
Spruance wrung his slim weathered hands. "I know how you feel, Art. I've had my only boy on a sub since this thing started. I've braced myself for this kind of news a hundred times."
What would the admiral say if he cursed and reviled him for killing his son? Would a ten-day bombardment have made any difference? Would hurling the full weight of the fleet at Iwo, instead of a handful of old battleships, have changed anything? Arthur McKay found it impossible to make such a claim. This earnest, silent man was part of a system, a process, that only deserved one name: history. The pain he felt now was history, part of the pain of a million other American fathers in this war and other wars.
The thought did not lessen the pain. But it made it more bearable.
"I'd like to go see him."
"Of course. I'll radio the general to meet you at the beach." Horace Aquino was weeping. "Oh, Captain," he said, "he was such a fine boy."
"Thank you, Horace."
In ten minutes he was in his gig, riding toward the beach. Around him the war went on The big guns boomed on the battleships and cruisers, the shells hurtled in burning arcs over his head. Ashore the star shells drifted down in glowing clusters on the living and the dead. As they drew close to the shore, the hammer of distant machine guns, the bark of rifles could be heard.
The Marine general was waiting on the beach. They had met somewhere. At a War College lecture? He gripped McKay's hand. "I feel like I just lost one of my own kids," he said.
They rode in silence through the landscape of war—past wrecked tanks and artillery pieces, overturned jeeps. At the hospital, a collection of dilapidated tents, the general's senior aide, a husky major named Price, mashed his hand. McKay said goodbye to the general, and Major Price led him through the rows of Marines waiting for medical treatment, many obviously dying, to a room in the rear, where forty or fifty bodies lay wrapped in ponchos.
The major turned on an overhead bulb and led him to a table. Uncovering the poncho, he stared down at Sammy's body. "I only knew him for a couple of months, Captain. But he was ... the best."
"Thanks."
"I'll wait outside."
"You better go back to work. I'm going to stay here for a while."
"Sir, I've got orders. I'll wait."
The bullet had struck Sammy in the heart. His shirt was stained with blood. But his face was unblemished, undistorted. He had had time to compose himself, to face death with a soldier's stoicism. He looked at peace.
Captain McKay thought of the good times. The years in Hawaii, when they had swum and sailed and fished together. The year Sammy had starred at halfback for the high school in Newport. He had been tremendously disappointed to find he was not heavy enough to make the team at Annapolis. But he had turned out to be a good baseball player.
That brought back another memory. Throwing the ball around. Something they did in a casual way, within a day or two of his return from sea duty. What do you say we throw the ball around, Dad? Sammy would ask. They would go out on the lawn or into the backyard and throw a baseball back and forth for a half hour. It was a ritual. They never said much. They just threw the ball. As the years passed, and the ball smacked harder and harder in the center of his glove, Sammy let him know he was becoming a man.
Did he regret the sea duty years, the awful gaps when he came back to face a stranger son? For a reason he did not understand, he no longer felt cut off from Sammy by those inescapable necessities of Navy life, or by the vagrant emotions that floated through a family. They had never had many man-to-man talks, it was true. But he was not sure the young wanted to reveal their souls to the old. He had shunned it when his mother had tried to make herself his confidante.
There was never any doubt they loved each other. That was the only thing that mattered now Arthur McKay did not know how long he sat there in the tent of death while the war exploded relentlessly outside. When he emerged, the major was waiting for him. They rode back to the beach in the star shells' unreal light. The coxswain of his gig was idling offshore, beyond the surf. He gunned the motor and charged through the waves. In five minutes they were on their way back to the Jefferson City.
As the captain came up the accommodation ladder, he noticed clumps of men along the rails from the stern to the forecastle. On the quarterdeck, George Tombs held out his hand. "Art," he said, "on behalf of the officers and crew, I want to extend my deepest sympathy."
"Thank you."
"I'd like to give you this message. It's a spontaneous thing. Signed by every member of the crew. They stayed up most of the night putting it together."
He handed McKay a thick envelope. In his cabin, he opened it. The message, scrawled in ink by a bold hand, read:
Dear Captain McKay:
The crew of the Jefferson City want you to know how bad they feel about your son's death. We will try to help you bear your sorrow the only way we can — by continuing to try to make this the best ship in the fleet. If there is anything else we can do, just ask us.
Beneath this,
the signatures began. Over 1,300 of them in long columns. Homewood, Flanagan, Roth, Mazerowski, Bradford, Bourne. Name after name of men who had faced almost three years of danger and death with him.
Arthur McKay pondered the painting of the lonely traveler. He thought of Win Kemble's poem. He who needs others is forever shackled. He who is needed by others is forever sad. He would accept his shackles. He would accept his sadness.
Even if the way led nowhere but to the Great Void.
The Sky Is Falling
"Raid one. Bogeys closing from northwest, fifty miles north of Bolo. This is Delegate. Out."
On the bridge, Captain McKay listened to the central fighter director in the command ship Eldorado. Bolo was the code name for a peninsula on the island of Okinawa, 845 miles south of Tokyo. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, 120,000 Marines and Army troops had landed there to begin another savage struggle against entrenched Japanese.
The war went on. Sammy slept in the Third Marine Division's cemetery at the foot of Mount Suribachi. Rita maintained a dark silence in Washington, D.C., ignoring his letters. Lucy Kemble was equally silent in Hawaii. His daughter, Barbara, was his only consolation. She had written him a ten-page letter full of grief and pride and devotion. McKay carried it with him like a talisman. Sentences from it floated through his weary mind. I was afraid I might hate you or Mother if Sammy died. That terrified me almost as much as him dying. But it hasn't happened. It tore me open and suddenly love was there, impossible to deny or fear or be ashamed of, ever again.
"How many planes did he estimate?" asked George Tombs.
"I think he's given up counting them," McKay said.
Day and night for a week the Japanese had flung hundreds of kamikazes at the fleet. Over thirty ships had been sunk or damaged. The crew of the Jefferson City was groggy with exhaustion. Dr. Cadwallader reported a half dozen nervous collapses. Chaplain Bushnell told him four more men had seen the ghost of Win Kemble stalking the passageways.
Time and Tide Page 71
