Trial by Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  Well, hell, George thought after he hung up the buzzer phone. Repaint the admiral’s cabin. Nothing else to do.

  14

  One day out from the big join-up with Task Force 58, Gary and the rest of the engineering department officers and chiefs assembled in one corner of the forward officers’ wardroom for a meeting with the chief engineer. There was a definite stir of anticipation in the air, especially after three light cruisers had appeared this morning to beef up Franklin’s AA escorts. Word was out that they’d begin launching strikes the day after tomorrow, and, for the first time, serious American naval air would be hitting mainland Japan.

  “Okay, everybody, listen up,” Lieutenant Commander Forrest announced. The chatter around the table subsided. Everyone realized this must be important because the cheng was not known for holding many all-officers-and-chiefs meetings. Gary sat next to his buddy, J.R. McCauley. The two had become friends after joining forces to figure out some of the schematic discrepancies. They were both surface ship officers in an aviator’s world, so there was a natural bond.

  “Tomorrow we’ll join Task Force 58, Admiral Raymond Spruance commanding,” Forrest began. “We’ll be part of a two-carrier division, designated Task Group 58.1, one of three big-deck CarDiv’s. The admiral who embarked in Guam will command our division. His name is Rear Admiral Ralph E. Davison; his chief of staff is Captain James E. Russell. As snipes, I suspect none of us will ever lay eyes on either one of them. Unless of course they need their rooms painted.”

  Everyone laughed. The story about the “emergency” paint job had certainly made the rounds.

  “Once we’re on station we’ll be in range of Jap air again. Those of you who were with us in the Philippines last fall know what that means. To the new guys: welcome to the Big Time.”

  He paused for a few seconds, as if gathering his thoughts. “Word is that the Japs are licked,” he said. “In a strategic sense, that’s probably true—they can’t ‘win’ this thing. Task Force 58 stretches across fifty miles when it’s assembled in a transit formation. The problem is, somebody forgot to tell the Japs, and that’s a problem because the Japs who’re left are the survivors—the battle-hardened survivors of all those island campaigns from the last three years—who figure they’ve got nothing to lose in terms of doing crazy stuff. The craziest tactic of them all is the kamikaze, and the only thing they exist for is to hit our carriers.”

  “This probably isn’t news, I know, but I want you to consider this: in terms of what we snipes do every day and night, which is mainly keeping our machinery turning and burning, it won’t be any different from what we’ve routinely been doing since we joined the Big Blue Fleet. The Heroes topside, well, they’re looking at the real McCoy now—actual dogfighting, high-level bombing runs, and strafing runs in the face of real AA fire. Up to now their major challenge has been landing and taking off without crashing. All those dramatics will fade into the background noise compared to actual combat. My point is, we snipes won’t see much of anything different down in the main holes. The pilots, the flight deck guys, and especially our air-defense gunnery folks absolutely will.

  “Unless: one of those lunatic Japs gets through the screen and crashes aboard or drills a coupl’a bombs or torpedoes into us. The old hands can tell you all about what happens next. If that does happen, we snipes acquire a second mission besides keeping the steam coming: damage control, and especially firefighting. Major firefighting. So: I want all the khaki in this department to spend every minute of training time on damage control procedures and, principally, firefighting. The khaki needs to know where the DC gear is in your general quarters space and the spaces next to you. You need to know how to put on, light off, and do stuff while wearing an OBA. Where the extra cannisters are stored, and how to change one out during a fire. And then you need to make sure every man jack in your division knows as much as you do.

  “You need to know how to rig casualty power cables between the main holes. You need to know how to line up and bring an eductor on the line if we’re flooding. How to start up a P-500 or a P-250 gasoline-driven fire pump. How to get gasoline to that pump—through a fire. How to do immediate-action first aid. How to rig a sound-powered phone circuit between watertight compartments. You get the idea.

  “For you main-hole snipes: you need to make sure every man in your space knows how to light off a boiler, in the dark, surrounded by steam leaks, smoke, oily water up to your knees, electrical arcs, and horribly burned shipmates. For you auxiliary guys: you need to think about and talk about how to rig work-arounds in cabling, potable water, compressed air, sewage, and low-voltage electrical service systems.”

  He took a deep breath and then let it out. “Look: the point I’m trying to make is that you can’t afford to be a specialist when it comes to save-the-ship-scale damage control. I don’t expect a machinist mate to know how to parallel a ship’s service turbo-generator with the ship’s load, but I want every machinist mate to be shown how to do it at least once so, if nothing else, he can help an injured electrician’s mate do it. Stuff like that. Make time for doing that—it’s called cross-rate training. Do it while we’re waiting for the Heroes to get back from kicking ass over Japan.

  “For the officers: Look around your GQ station and figure out what you don’t know how to do with whatever machinery or equipment is in that space, and then get yourselves trained up. If all the people assigned to that GQ station are down or out of action, you may be the only one left to save the day.” He paused. “Even if you’re an ensign.”

  He paused again to let the chuckles subside and then smiled. “Sorry if it seems like I came up here to scare you. Truth is, war at sea is real hell, because, unlike the Army or the Marines, we can’t retreat to safer ground. Either you sink the other guy or he sinks you and then you swim with the sharks. That’s just the nature of our business.”

  He looked around at the faces of the fifty officers and chief petty officers staring back at him with expressions that ranged from bleak resignation from the chiefs to wide-eyed alarm from the junior officers.

  “That’s right, friends and neighbors, the bogeyman is inbound. On the plus side, consider yourselves lucky to be snipes: we live and work under the armor belt, which is the hangar deck. Everybody else lives and works on or under that layer of Douglas fir they call the flight deck. They get to be outside in the fresh air, and see sunup and sundown on a regular basis. They also get a chance to go face-to-face with a Jap suicide plane coming at them at four hundred miles an hour and sporting a big-ass bomb.”

  He paused again. He even closed his eyes. Gary wondered if he was recalling the horror of the kamikaze attack last October. The burning airplane, dropping bits and pieces of wings and fuselage as it descended through a veritable curtain of anti-aircraft fire to crash on board at 400 miles per hour. He, himself, hadn’t seen it, but one of the cameramen up on vultures’ row had filmed it right up until the resulting fireball burned him to a crisp. The camera had survived; everyone who eventually saw the film wished it hadn’t.

  Forrest looked up and took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough, I think. Chins up. Pay close attention to what you’re doing and what’s going on around you. And otherwise, turn to and resume ship’s work.”

  Gary and J.R. scored some somewhat sludgy coffee from the wardroom pantry afterward and then started up to the hangar deck. They’d felt the ship coming up to full power while the cheng had been talking, so flight ops were probably in the offing. J.R. had told Gary all about the conflagration station in the hangar bay and Gary wanted to see it. His appreciation for firefighting usually involved a fuel leak at a boiler-front. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to fight a big fire within the confines of the hangar.

  They stepped out into the forwardmost bay and then jumped back into the hatch. The hangar was full of airplanes in motion, with their attendant yellow-gear tractors roaring here and there in what seemed like a demolition derby. They appreciated that what
they were seeing was actually a carefully choreographed operation aimed at getting each individual plane to an elevator and thence to the flight deck just in time to be pushed into its “spot” position for the upcoming launch. Some of the planes were already fully fueled and armed. Their wings literally sagged under the weight of bombs and rockets. There was an enlisted plane captain in each cockpit and a wing-walker guarding either wingtip. No engines were turning, because propellers spinning in that pulsing traffic jam would have had fatal consequences.

  The hangar’s announcing system was also going full blast, inviting individual aircraft by their side numbers to one of the three elevators, where the yellow-gear would push or pull the plane onto a steel square suspended from sixteen large cables. Four-foot-high steel stanchions threaded with cables to make a temporary fence would then be inserted into the elevator’s deck, and then the elevator would rise the fifty feet to the actual flight deck, admitting an all-too-short blast of fresh air into the hangar. The plane would be moved off, and then the elevator would descend to a chorus of Klaxon warning horns, ready to pick up the next warbird.

  Gary looked at J.R. There was no way they could cross the actual hangar deck to get to the other side where the conflagration station was, so they gave up. They headed aft to a ladder well under the island, which could take them up through the island to vultures’ row. This was going to be the first actual carrier strike against the Japanese homeland, and while the thought of bombing Japan, proper, was somehow savagely satisfying, few had any illusions about what would happen next.

  They made their way up to vultures’ row in time to watch the first of the Corsairs lumber down the flight deck to the bow, where it appeared to drop off the front of the ship. The loaded planes would literally sink out of sight for a few seconds before reappearing, those enormous props carving visible condensation circles in the cold, wet air, and then slowly gain altitude until they were a half mile out in front of the carrier. Then they would bank carefully to the right to clear the pattern and head for their join-up position with the rest of their squadron. Gary was amazed they could even fly with all that ordnance hanging off their wings.

  Three more got off in good order, but the fifth plane to launch suddenly was enveloped in a cone of yellow-white spray emanating from that elongated engine as its engine oil blew out from a ruptured shaft seal. They stared in horror as the plane’s propeller shuddered to a stop; nose-heavy, especially with ordnance, the Corsair flipped its tail up and disappeared out of sight under the forward edge of the flight deck. The crash alarms blared out on the flight deck as men ran to both sides of the ship to see where the plane was. The carrier, ploughing through the sea at thirty knots, didn’t have time to maneuver to avoid the ditched bird. Flight deck crewmen on both sides were throwing up their hands, unable to catch a glimpse of the plane. Gary knew what that meant: the carrier had run right over the top of it and was about to chew it to bits with those four enormous screws turning at full power. A destroyer darted out of its escort station and headed toward the carrier’s broad wake, its two stacks pumping smoke and then a cloud of steam as she backed down hard in an effort to stop right in the carrier’s track.

  Gary and J.R. just stood there, utterly shocked at what had happened. Franklin had lost planes before, but this was the first time either of them, being snipes, had actually witnessed it. Even more shocking was the fact that the next plane in line for launch revved up to full power and then trundled down the deck as if nothing had happened. The plane after that quickly took position at the front of the line and began spooling up its engine to full power.

  “Goddamn!” J.R. exclaimed, with a sick expression on his face. Behind the carrier the destroyer’s mast was still stopped in Franklin’s wake, but the carrier was going so fast that it was now impossible to see what was going on back there. Gary decided he’d had enough of watching flight ops and headed for the hatch. J.R was right behind him, equally eager to get back inside. Below them yet another Corsair howled off the flight deck, its engine battering the morning air with a determined roar. Gary now understood why the snipes called the pilots Heroes.

  Gone. That guy had to be just—gone. He’d seen those propellers in drydock. As they stumbled down the interior ladder toward the gallery deck, they encountered a disturbing scene in the vestibule. A plane captain was squatted down in a corner of the vestibule, his hands on his head and bawling like a baby. Crouching next to him was Father Joseph T. O’Callahan, the ship’s Catholic chaplain. Father Joe was probably the most popular officer in the ship. Anytime someone needed him he always seemed to have known about it already. If there was a flight deck accident with injuries, he’d be there with the emergency crew, humping a fire hose if they needed help. He was a Jesuit priest with several graduate degrees who’d joined up in 1940 and served in the North African campaigns aboard a carrier. Everyone in the crew felt that he was their friend, especially when he stood up to the new and unpopular captain. This time he was comforting the plane captain of the Corsair that had just gone in. The plane captain apparently thought the engine failure had somehow been his fault. It hadn’t, but that was the nature of plane captains.

  They took great pride in tending to their aircraft. They were important enough that their names were stenciled on the fuselage right beneath the pilot’s name. From the moment a plane landed and the pilot climbed out, it was the plane captain who climbed into the cockpit and rode the plane down the elevator to its tie-down spot on the hangar deck, where he then would begin a multipoint inspection of the entire aircraft. If the pilot had mentioned a gripe he was the one who called the maintenance guys over and made sure the problem got into the maintenance planning system, and, if they were slow getting to it, he was the guy who would bird-dog the gripe until it was cleared or the aircraft was officially downed for repairs. And finally, the plane captain was the guy who handed the plane over to its pilot saying she was ready to fly. Gary knew that those words were now tearing this poor guy’s heart out.

  15

  George had been out on the port bridgewing when the Corsair went in, and he slumped when the plane just disappeared without a trace under the bow in the early morning light. No explosion, no splash, no indication whatsoever that a 12,000-pound aircraft had just dropped into the sea right in front of a 36,000-ton ship.

  “That one of the Marines?” the captain asked from inside the pilothouse. He was standing on the port side, where he could watch what was happening down on the flight deck.

  “Corsair,” George said. “Probably Marine.”

  The captain shook his head. “Can’t land, and now they can’t take off, either.”

  George thought the comment was unduly harsh. That yellow cloud streaming out of the engine cowling had to have been the result of a sudden massive oil leak, not pilot error. On the other hand, the captain’s distaste for the Marine squadrons embarked was well known. George had often wondered what was behind that. Perhaps some conflict during an earlier tour of duty. He tried to ignore the frowns on the bridge crew’s faces when the captain made his nasty remark.

  “Quartermaster,” the captain called. “How far are we from Japan?”

  The quartermaster, one of the ship’s navigator’s team, consulted the chart and applied a pair of dividers. “One hundred twenty miles to Kagoshima, Captain. That’s on the island of Kyushu.”

  A message came up from PriFly that the launch was complete and that the flight deck was being respotted for the eventual return of the strike aircraft. George had attended the morning briefing for Rear Admiral Davison down in flag plot, along with the captain and Commander Phil Gardner, the carrier’s embarked air group commander, or CAG. This morning’s strike was aimed at a collection of airfields around the city of Kagoshima. The intel briefer, a lieutenant commander from Naval Intelligence, had told them that Admiral Spruance was still making up his mind about the size of the strikes on the home islands. One plan had all of his carriers attacking one target area in successive waves for sever
al hours; the other had two-carrier divisions attacking geographically separated target areas. Today’s strike was one of the former, the theory being that waves of attacks would slowly but surely grind down the target’s defensive capabilities to the point where the final wave ought to have free rein in the target area.

  “What’s the expected Jap reaction?” the admiral had asked.

  “Fill the skies with kamikazes and fly out here to return the favor,” the briefer had replied. “They have snoopers in the area between us and Kagoshima, so they’ll know when we launch. They’ll try to get as many planes into the air as possible before our guys arrive over their fields, so midmorning attacks can be expected.”

  “I was told in Guam that the Japs have lost so many planes that they can’t keep that up,” the admiral said. “That still the official position?”

  The briefer hesitated. “Well, Admiral, personally I think that remains to be seen. Photo recon shows they’ve dispersed their planes all over the countryside. Any paved street or road can be used to launch a fighter or a Navy carrier bomber, and any barn can hide one. I think it’ll become clearer after the third day of strikes—if the same number of kamikazes come out on day three as came out on day one, today, we might have to revise our estimates.”

  “After-the-fact estimates,” the admiral grumped. “Those are the accurate ones, right?”

  There’d been chuckles in the room, but George knew that the admiral’s question had been uppermost in just about everyone’s mind. The Japs had lost almost all their operational carriers, either by sinking or by the fact that they’d run out of both fuel and trained carrier pilots. But now they had unsinkable aircraft carriers—the home islands, themselves. If they had stashed thousands of planes instead of hundreds, life was going to get rough and everybody on the operational side knew it. He’d seen the cruisers, battleships, and destroyers closing in around Franklin and her division partner, USS Hancock (CV-19), at first light just before flight ops had started.