Trial by Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  Great, he thought; we’re now trapped in a thirty-foot-long steel tube, with a smoke-filled fireroom beneath us and a big-assed fire above. The thump of explosions way up above continued unabated, each one rattling the ladder on which they were hanging. It was clear to everybody that every damned bomb, rocket, and gun magazine on the flight deck was going to have its day in the sun before this was over. The men on the ladder had the same expression on their faces now: we’re well and truly screwed and we’re gonna die.

  Gary took a moment to think. There was breathable air in the escape trunk. It was warm air, but not lung-searing hot air, and there was no smoke. He wondered if maybe, just maybe, when the fireroom ventilation system finally lost power, the smoke from whatever the hell was going on topside stopped being drawn down into the engineering spaces. In which case, they might be able to re-man the space. Hell, maybe even get a boiler lit off. Besides, there was clearly no going up. So down it was.

  “All right, people, listen up,” he called down to the string of pale faces looking up at him. “We can’t get out by going up, so we’re gonna have to go back down. There’s no smoke here in the escape trunk. It’s possible the fireroom can be re-manned, okay? We’re gonna go back down and see what we got on the other side of that bottom hatch. If the smoke has dissipated in the fireroom, we’ll re-man the space. We’ll be about as far away from all those fires topside as we can get. Maybe we can even light off a boiler and get some damned steam up.”

  “What if it ain’t?” one of the younger men asked. “What if it’s just like we left it?”

  Gary frowned but then saw that the man intended no insubordination. He was merely asking the only question that mattered.

  “Figure that out when we get there, Fireman. One step at a time. Start down, people. First man down, feel the hatch; sound off and tell me what you got.”

  They began to climb down the ladder until the first man to reach the bottom stopped and raised his hand to test the dogs.

  “Hot,” he said. “But not very.”

  “Okay,” Gary said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in the confined escape trunk. “Now listen up. That fireroom may be filled with explosive gases, just waiting for some oxygen. So we’re gonna crack that hatch—but not open it, not until we know, okay? Undog all dogs except one, and then we’ll ease that puppy open. Get extra hands on the hatch to hold it back. Ready?”

  There were murmurs from below him. The man at the hatch looked up at him. Gary nodded. The man loosened and removed all the dogs but one and then barely released that one. Everyone in the escape trunk felt their ears pop as the pressures equalized, but there was no other sign that an explosion was imminent. Then a big boom from up above startled all of them. The chief, sensing panic, started down the ladder, passing each man below him by swinging around to one side of the ladder. When he got to the bottom, he cracked that hatch, looked inside, and then closed it.

  “Smoke,” he said. “Lots’a smoke. Full’a smoke. Couldn’t see shit.”

  Goddammit, Gary thought. Now what. Then he had an idea. “Chief?” he called. “I’m gonna go back up and crack the top hatch. When I do that, you crack open the hatch down there. Maybe what’s going on topside will suck all that smoke outa there.”

  The chief gave him a thumbs-up. Gary climbed wearily back up the ladder to the passageway hatch. He gingerly felt the scuttle-wheel. Warm, but no longer burn-you hot. He took a deep breath and then spun the wheel. When the dogs retracted, the scuttle bounced up a little, indicating lower pressure in the passageway than in the trunk.

  “Open the hatch,” he called down. The chief did.

  Immediately a thick cloud of black oil smoke came boiling up the escape trunk, so fast that it nearly dislodged the men hanging on the ladder. Everyone stuck his face into his armpit in an effort to breathe, but the smoke quickly thinned out and then was gone, replaced by a rising column of hot air, stinking of fuel oil and steam. Gary closed the scuttle.

  “Okay, get down there before this shit changes its mind,” he yelled. The men didn’t hesitate, and, one minute later, they were all back in the fireroom. As they gathered on the lower level, bent over, trying for a breath of good air, a cascade of water began to thunder down the trunk from up above. There was so much of it that it took the chief and three men to get the escape hatch closed again. At that rate, Gary thought, the escape trunk would fill in about two minutes, so here, in the fireroom, they would stay, one way or another.

  He sat down on the deckplates with the others and looked around. It was dark, with only a few battle lanterns showing. The air was extremely humid; the space had become something of a steam bath. But—there was breathable air, no fire, and no serious smoke. The rumble of disaster four decks up was no longer so loud, either. Plus, there were no fireballs chasing them anymore.

  “Okay,” he announced. “We’re back where we belong. Go through the space, see what we’ve got. Chief, see if you can find power, anywhere.”

  The chief nodded and then took three men up the ladder to the upper level. Gary took a moment to gather his wits and assess their situation. This beats being on the flight deck right about now, he thought. We’re hot and dark, but there’s no major flooding and no visible damage. If the air holds, we can start being snipes again.

  Another serious explosion vibrated all the metal and machines around him. Great God, he thought. What happened to us? And how much more of this can the ship take before she just rolls over and goes down?

  24

  George and the captain watched Santa Fe come alongside and basically bounce off the much larger carrier with an ugly screech of rending metal that was audible even over the rumbling booms coming from back aft. George could see that the captain of the cruiser was personally conning the ship alongside, trying hard to keep the afterpart of his ship splayed out at an angle to avoid the cataracts of flaming gasoline spilling over the carrier’s deck edges. Franklin now had a substantial list to starboard, meaning that everything up on the flight deck that could roll, slide, or fall—burnt-out aircraft carcasses, fuming bombs and torpedoes, push-tractors, and even bodies—was starting to drop into the water between the two ships. George gasped when he saw a four-pack of 500-pound bombs on a deck-dolly come rolling off the deck edge from just behind the island, but then exhaled when he spotted that their nose and tail safety cables were still attached just before they disappeared into the sea.

  Santa Fe backed away and then made a second approach. This time her skipper forced the cruiser’s port bow up against the carrier’s tilting hull and held it there with engines and rudder. Franklin was by now dead in the water, but there was a seaway that was working against his efforts. The noise of the two ships rubbing against each other was excruciating, a gigantic version of chalk going the wrong way across a blackboard, but the cruiser held her place, and there were now highline messenger ropes being shot across from Franklin’s forward flight deck down to Santa Fe’s number two six-inch gun turret and her midships replenishment station. George couldn’t see who was in charge down there until he once again spotted Father Joe, who seemed to be everywhere at once, exhorting shocked men to bear a hand, rigging the highlines, then tending to the wounded, then giving last rites to the dead or clearly dying, before once again wading into the chaos on the flight deck. George could see other officers down there but they seemed to be just huddled with their people, probably still in shock at what they’d witnessed out on the flight deck. Within minutes, the first stretcher-baskets were riding the highline trolley down to the cruiser’s deck, where Santa Fe’s docs removed the wounded and hustled them below. Other Franklin crewmen were escaping down long steel ladders hanging from the starboard side gun-tubs and dangling over Santa Fe’s number two six-inch gun turret. George winced when he saw men dropping onto the armored steel top of the turret and then tumbling out of control down onto her armored main deck, breaking God knows what.

  He looked at his watch. It had been three hours since the first explosions. H
e thought that the noise was beginning to subside, as there could not have been much left to burn or blow up back there. Then he heard other noises and looked up. The skies around them were filled with black puffs of AA fire and the occasional flaming plane tumbling out of the sky. The noise from the flight deck had been so overwhelming that he hadn’t been aware there’d been a major air attack in progress for the last thirty minutes. He realized that the Japs, smelling Franklin’s blood, were desperately trying to finish the job. Ships all around the task force formation were heavily engaged in driving off Jap planes. There were now twice the number of destroyers arrayed around Franklin as there had been, every one of them blasting away with their five-inch guns.

  “How far are we from Japan?” the captain asked, eyeing all that flak. George thought he sounded really frightened.

  “Fifty-five miles, sir,” one of the quartermasters called out.

  “Too close, much too close,” the captain muttered. “XO, get on the horn, see if they can send us a tow.”

  George headed aft into the island structure to the radar plotting room behind the bridge. It was a miniature version of the Combat Information Center down below, but that had been burned out in the first hour of the conflagration. He put a radio call into the task force commander’s flagship and requested a tow. One minute later the USS Pittsburgh, a heavy cruiser, was detached from her task group and ordered to take Franklin in tow. George went back out onto the bridge, reported this news to the captain, and then had a talker alert the forward deck division to prepare to receive a towing hawser. They would do that all the way forward, using one of the ship’s anchor chains.

  The anchor handling machinery was located on an open deck below the forward edge of the flight deck, so they should be safe from whatever rockets might be left. Pittsburgh would maneuver to a position directly in front of Franklin and then shoot a messenger line attached to an eight-inch Manila hawser over to the open deck where Franklin’s anchor windlasses were. Franklin’s crew would have to pull the messenger line and then the end of the actual hawser through the carrier’s bullnose, break one of the ship’s anchor chains, and then attach that chain to the Manila hawser. They would then signal Pittsburgh to begin retrieving their hawser, which would rouse the anchor chain up out of Franklin’s chain locker and out into the open sea between Franklin’s bow and Pittsburgh’s stern. Once four hundred feet of chain had come up from the chain locker, Pittsburgh would go ahead at bare steerageway to begin pulling Franklin east, away from all those air bases in Japan.

  George went back to the starboard bridgewing once he was confident the forecastle crew were ready to receive the towing hawser. There were two highlines between the ships in full operation now. Men from that battered crowd huddling way up at the front end of the flight deck were still gently placing the wounded, covered in red and white bandages, into wire-mesh stretchers, hooking them to the highline trolley, and then signaling for the cruiser’s highline crew to haul away. George was amazed that they’d managed to get two highlines going, but there were still an awful lot of stretchers laid out on Franklin’s flight deck and the carrier’s starboard list was making it even more difficult to work the highlines. Father Joe was still ramrodding the entire operation.

  He saw a surprisingly large number of men down in the water between the two ships. Many were struggling to reach the sides of the Santa Fe, whose crew had streamed dozens of Manila lines over her sides. But a disturbing number were just floating, held up by their life jackets. Then he saw what had happened: the men who were just floating all had their helmets still strapped on. George swore. If you jumped from a big ship with a life jacket and your helmet strapped on, the impact with the sea would break your neck. Those men who were just floating were probably already dead.

  He went back over to the port bridgewing and looked aft. To his dismay, the fires appeared to be getting even bigger. On the inboard edge of the flight deck, closest to the island structure, the wooden flight deck was burning with a flame front advancing like a grass fire. As he watched, two rockets came out of the towering clouds of flame and smoke, skipping along the flight deck in a shower of sparks and crumpling fins before breaking up abaft the island and then showering the highline crews with fragments and flaming chunks of smoking warhead explosive. Everyone on the flight deck reflexively flattened themselves but then Father Joe got them back up, exhorting them to re-establish the highlines. George could see that the rows of white-bandaged stretchers had not diminished very much, and now there would be even more wounded to get off.

  He looked for the captain but couldn’t immediately see him on the bridge. He stumbled as he headed back across the bridge and actually had to catch himself on the helm console. He looked at the inclinometer. Thirteen degrees? What the hell was causing that, he wondered. And then he understood: all that firefighting water being played on the flight deck, the hangar deck, and the sponsons was going down, into the ship. He grabbed a sound-powered phone, called DC Central, and ordered counterflooding to reduce the list. The chief engineer got on the phone.

  “We can’t counterflood because there’s no power,” he said. “We, ourselves, are trapped here in the Log Room. Both passageways outside are full of burning fuel.”

  Shit, George thought. He was pretty sure that the ship’s hull hadn’t been penetrated below the waterline, at least not to his knowledge, but if they didn’t do something about this list she could capsize. Franklin’s stability margins had been slim to begin. They’d become even slimmer with all those new guns added along the flight deck. How had he missed the fact that she was heeling thirteen degrees, he asked himself. And where the hell was the captain?

  One of the bridge-talkers got his attention and reported that a destroyer following Franklin from directly astern was reporting she had over 400 of Franklin’s crew on board, all men who’d either been blown overboard or who had jumped into the sea to escape immolation. Well, that was something, George thought. He asked the cheng if there was power available anywhere on the ship.

  “The after emergency generator should be running, if it survived what’s going on above it,” Forrest said. “Don’t know about forward. Does the bridge have power?”

  “No,” George said, but then remembered they still had radios, which meant that Radio Central must have power. He told Forrest.

  “The after diesel is set up to power command and control spaces,” Forrest said. “Forward diesel normally supplies the main holes. They can swap loads if the right cables are intact and the spaces are manned. Otherwise…”

  “Okay,” George said. “We’ll try to get someone into forward diesel.”

  “The access is through the hangar deck, XO,” Forrest said. “Not possible.”

  “The whole thing?” George asked.

  Forrest confirmed that at least half of the gallery deck, which housed several of the air group’s ready rooms, had been destroyed by that first titanic gasoline-vapor explosion in the hangar deck. The blast had pushed the deck of the gallery deck up against the bottom of the flight deck. George experienced a wave of nausea at the thought of that calamity. An unknown number of pilots, sitting in their ready rooms, waiting to man their planes, suddenly squashed like bugs against the steel ceiling. He fought back tears at the enormity of that loss. A coffee mug crashed against the pilothouse deck, reminding George that the ship might be getting ready to roll over. They had to get power from somewhere, but first he had to locate the captain.

  25

  J.R. told the chief to get a head count—how many men were actually down here on the messdecks. The chief nodded, turned around, and bellowed in a surprisingly loud voice for the men to pipe down and count off. Training took over; there was a sudden silence. Then the man nearest the chief shouted “One.” The man next to him: “Two.” When they were done the number came to 310. Then J.R. spotted one of his two system-tracing ensigns, Bill Sauer, in the crowd. He gestured for the young officer to join him out in the vestibule. As he did so there was a cla
tter of falling pots and pans in the hotline pantry, which is when J.R. realized that the ship was indeed listing to starboard. Based on all the wide eyes out there among the tables, he was probably the only one who hadn’t noticed that it was getting worse. He felt a pang of alarm—his shipboard damage control courses had told him more than he wanted to know about his carrier’s vulnerability to flooding, especially a carrier whose stability margins weren’t wonderful to begin with. If she capsized now, nobody would get out.

  “Okay, Mister Sauer,” he said. “I think I know a way out of here, but we’re gonna have to do it in bunches. Disciplined bunches. I’m gonna go back out through the hatch nearest the scullery. If my memory serves me, I can find a way out to a deck sponson, assuming there’s no fire. Once I confirm that, I’ll come back and get the first group. The passageway I’m thinking about can hold no more than a hundred men, so it’ll require three trips. You put the word out as to what I’m doing, especially the part about my coming back, and that not everybody can get out in the first trip. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sauer said.

  “If there are walking wounded in this mob, they come out first.”

  “Yes, sir, absolutely. Got it.”

  J.R. closed his eyes and resurrected the damage control diagram for this part of the ship. What he had in mind wouldn’t be a straight shot. In fact, it would be pretty convoluted, but he really had no choice—two side passageways and the overhead of the messdecks had fire on the other side. Between the growing heat and the rapidly diminishing oxygen, they had to get out, one way or another.