Trial by Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  Then the coffee began to take hold. There was everything to be seen to. They needed to get a muster to see how many of the crew were still aboard. How much of the air group was still aboard? They needed food and fresh water. They needed to comb through the interior to see how many people were still trapped in the steel honeycomb of compartments below the hangar deck. Hundreds, he hoped. They had to continue the task of clearing the flight deck of debris, including human debris. He wondered how far Father Joe had gotten with his crew of sweepers. There were undoubtedly some small, stubborn fires still lurking along the hangar deck and on the deck immediately below.

  Communications, he thought. First and foremost, I need to re-establish internal communications. Rebuild fire-parties. Establish a new sick bay. Get a galley back in operation. Wait a minute, I already—

  “XO.” The captain was on the bridge.

  “Sir,” George said. He wanted to say, good morning, sir, but it didn’t seem appropriate. It was most definitely not going to be a very good morning.

  “First thing, XO, after we ditch the tow: a muster. I want to know how many people are left aboard, and how many of those are effectives.”

  “Yessir,” George said. “We need to get the sound-powered phone system back up so we can call around the entire ship. I think that’s the fastest way to find out.”

  “Do what you have to do, XO,” the captain said, dismissively. “But quickly, please. Got it?”

  “Yessir,” George replied automatically.

  “Because I am determined to find out who stayed at his post and who deserted his post,” the captain said.

  What’s that got to do with getting the ship to come alive again? George wondered, but then he saw the captain’s clenched jaw and that baleful glare in his eyes. Great God, he thought. He’s serious. He tried not to make eye contact with any of the bridge watch standers.

  Once the tow was broken, Pittsburgh would speed off to the northwest to rejoin the remainder of Spruance’s fleet, which was also withdrawing. As soon as Franklin could reliably make fifteen knots, they could gradually get out of range of the Jap suicide bombers. Ulithi Atoll was a thousand miles to the southeast. At fifteen knots it would take them almost three days to get there. He knew that the next twenty-four hours would be crucial—the Japs had long-range bombers and fighters who would pursue this seagoing ambulance train to the limits of their endurance.

  Now, for a muster: he realized the telephones would take too long. He called down to the number one engine room and asked the chief engineer if he could reactivate the 1MC. Thirty minutes later, the cheng said it should be back up, except where wiring or speakers had been destroyed. George checked the control box at the back of the bridge. The red light was indeed shining. He told the bosun mate of the watch to pipe “all-hands” on his call over the 1MC. The shrill piping notes seemed unusually loud after being silent for so long. George pressed the all-circuits button and then addressed whomever was left alive in the ship.

  “This is the XO speaking. The ship is back under her own power. We’re heading for the Ulithi anchorage. We need to find out how many people are still on board because many of our crew had to go into the sea to stay alive. If you’re trapped by wreckage, smoke, or fire, try hard to make noise. We’re organizing search parties to find everyone still alive after what happened yesterday. The engineers are restoring power and water, but that’s going to take a while because we don’t have a full crew. We’ll get a galley going as soon as we can to feed everybody. We’re almost out of range of any more Jap attacks, and we have escorts if they do come. For the next twenty-four hours, we’ll be combing the ship for survivors, wounded, or trapped personnel. We are not sinking. Anyone still alive even in the most damaged part of the ship will be rescued. But the first order of business is to reconstitute the crew, so if you can hear this, it’s relatively safe to come out. As soon as we can organize rescue teams, we will search every compartment, so if you’re hurt and can’t help with your own rescue, or there’s no air, we will find you. All department heads assemble on the bridge. That is all.”

  He hung up the microphone and looked over at the captain, who was nodding his approval. Then the moment was interrupted by gunfire, as all the destroyers around them opened fire on a two-plane formation of Bettys, the dreaded Jap torpedo bombers, that was coming in low from the starboard side. The captain erupted into a string of curses, jumped out of his chair, and ordered right standard rudder. To George’s amazement, the forwardmost five-inch turret swung slowly, agonizingly slowly, out to starboard and began firing. Then the one above it did the same. Between the two of them the sky around the low-flying Bettys turned black with airbursts, until one and then the other were sent cartwheeling into the sea in clouds of flame, pursued all the way down by both Franklin’s and the destroyers’ gunfire. George knew that the five-inch fire-control directors above the bridge had been damaged by the big radar antenna when it came down, so those gun crews had knocked those two bastards down in local control, meaning the pointer and the trainer had had to muscle their control yokes to get the guns on target. And with no power to the mounts, they had hand-cranked the hydraulic pumps in those turrets. He felt a sudden burst of pride. He looked over at the captain, who was now standing at the center pelorus. Even he was nodding his approval, a rare enough sight in itself.

  “XO,” a talker called.

  George took a deep breath, but this one came with a ray of hope. “XO, aye?”

  37

  Gary was proud of his guys. They had two boilers going and a third one building pressure back aft. In Main Control, directly behind them, the chief engineer and his crew of admin yeomen had managed to roll both a turbo-generator and—after a few more hours of cleaning, draining oil sumps of any water, checking and rechecking valve lineups—first one and then two main engines. But right now, he had another problem: his boiler room’s reserves of pure, uncontaminated feedwater were getting perilously low. They’d had to pump two feed bottoms’ worth of water over the side because of contamination. They would have to get the ship’s evaporators going soon or they’d run out of makeup feedwater, especially when they began filling other boilers.

  The only good thing was that the list was just about gone. The chief engineer had been supervising the gradual filling of the counterflooding tanks over on the port side with seawater. Normally this would have been controlled from DC Central, where the DCA would be sending orders down to the main holes to line up special pumps and send water from the open sea over to the dozen or so voids to bring the ship back into trim. The extra water would also have the effect of improving the ship’s stability by adding tons of weight right where it was needed—way down below. The inclinometer in Main Control was now reading three degrees to starboard, which made even the most basic tasks much easier to do than with a thirteen-degree list.

  There were two seawater evaporators all the way forward in the chain of main spaces, in what was called “forward auxiliary.” That meant they’d have to cross-connect auxiliary steam from number two fireroom, through the still-unexplored number one fireroom, and on into forward auxiliary. He’d already taken the up-and-over route through seared passageways to join the chief engineer in Main Control. He wasn’t sure he could even get to forward auxiliary because of all the damage to the uptake plenums, and he was really in the dark about conditions in the number one fireroom. To make things even hairier, the cheng now wanted Gary to send all but two of his boilertenders to Main Control, because they needed more people to go aft into the next fireroom.

  The lack of qualified engineering personnel was beginning to really squeeze. Gary had sent his pitifully small head count to the bridge after the XO’s announcement. Main Control had more people, but only two, the chief engineer and the main propulsion assistant, were fully qualified main engineering snipes. In one sense, Gary’s two boilers were stable; as long as things stayed that way, two guys could manage, especially since the ship wasn’t maneuvering or ordering up a lot of bi
g bells. But if anything went wrong, about the only thing two BTs could do would be to pull fires and call for help. He’d told the cheng that they also would not be able to get more boilers on the line until he got his full crew back. Cheng told him the captain was yelling for more steam. Gary had had to remind him that, without feedwater, they would shortly have neither.

  “You’re the boilers officer,” Cheng had said. “You tell him that.”

  “You’re the department head, sir; dealing with screaming captains is way above my miserable pay grade.” Gary grinned as he hung up to the sounds of swearing.

  The interior of the ship was like a ghost town as he headed forward toward number one fireroom, reminding him again of how many people were gone. There’d been 3,000 men aboard twenty-four hours ago, counting the air group. Surely there’d be pockets of survivors in the hundreds and hundreds of compartments throughout the ship. But then he had to remind himself that the stiff breeze blowing down the passageway meant that the two operating boilers were getting most of their air from inside the ship. They’d better find those pockets of survivors pretty quick because, inevitably, those big forced-draft blowers would come seeking air from compartments and not just passageways. The hot draft coming through the locked-back hatch for number two fireroom had almost taken his shirt off.

  He knelt down to feel the scuttle on the main hatch to number one fireroom. Just warm. Good. He began to work the scuttle’s operating wheel, carefully watching the dogs as they retracted until they were just on the edge of coming off their wedges. The breeze moving through the passageway made it difficult to hear any sounds coming from the hatch or the compartment down below. He got down on the deck and put his ear to the round edge of the scuttle. A tiny whistling sound got his attention. Pressure difference, but which way? He looked around the dim passageway and spotted a six-foot-long fire hose applicator, mounted on the bulkhead. It was basically a one-and-a-half-inch pipe that connected at one end to a fire-hose nozzle and had a spray nozzle on the other end, allowing a firefighter to stand back from the flames while he worked the fire.

  He dismounted the applicator and wedged it against the base of the scuttle’s operating wheel, and then turned the wheel the final few degrees before jumping back. The scuttle popped up forcefully, opening about an inch before the applicator stopped it. A jet of dense, hot black smoke came boiling out. It would have filled the vestibule instantly if not for the fact that the boilers in number two fireroom were drawing air from this passageway. Even so, Gary had to blink furiously to clear his eyes from the acidic vapors in the smoke and deliberately exhale to get the sudden sting out of his throat. He tentatively pushed down on the scuttle but the pressure from below was too strong. Finally, he just stood on it, which allowed him to spin the operating handle to close it back up and discard the applicator.

  Now what? he thought. I’ve got to get into One Firehouse. Then he had an idea. He went in to search for the escape trunk hatch for number one fireroom, which should be behind him. When he found it, he opened it as quickly as he could. That same river of black smoke rose up out of the escape trunk like a chemical cobra, but then began streaming aft toward number two’s main hatch. Sorry, guys, he thought. The sudden appearance of that black incubus would scare the hell out of those two guys. Then he trotted back to number one’s hatch, spun the wheel to fully open the hatch, and now air in the passageway was being pulled down into number one fireroom. All he had to do now was to wait for the airstream to pull all that crap out of the fireroom and replace it with breathable air. He knew the two guys left in number two fireroom would be aghast and were probably cowering in the bilges, but the blowers would quickly suck it into the combustion airstream. He didn’t think the boilers would care about some more damned smoke.

  He waited for five minutes until he thought all the pressure down below had been equalized and then cautiously went down the ladder into number one fireroom. Once again, a few battle lanterns were still glowing valiantly in the gloom as he landed on the upper-level deck gratings. None of the machinery appeared to have suffered any damage; the space had been abandoned when the power dropped and heavy smoke completely filled the space.

  Before leaving number two fireroom, directly behind this space, Gary had opened the cross-connect valve for the 150-psi steam piping that led forward into number one fireroom. All he had to do now was go to the forward bulkhead of this space, open the 150-psi valve that would feed forward auxiliary, and then go forward, find the hatch down into forward auxiliary, hope that it, too, wasn’t full of smoke, and get an evap or two on the line.

  He suddenly felt the ship begin to turn, and then, to his amazement, he thought he heard gunfire. Five-inch gunfire. He knew that the cheng had managed to get one SSTG on the line, so that might be Franklin’s guns firing. The gunfire stopped and the ship began turning again with an awkward motion because of the starboard list. He tried not to think of all those burnt cable ends, dangling from blackened and deformed bulkheads, which now might have 440 volts in them, just waiting for some poor unsuspecting soul to brush up against them. He banished the thought and went to complete the valve lineup. He still had to get forward and light off a couple of evaporators. And then figure out how to get the distilled water they produced back into the firerooms for the boilers. Eventually, all eight of them, he realized.

  Jeez.

  Climbing down into forward auxiliary was a repeat of accessing the number one fireroom, but in reverse. Instead of encountering a pressurized space, he found he couldn’t budge the hatch. Either it had deformed and was jammed, or the space was under negative pressure. He undid all the dogs on the hatch and then bent down to listen. Sure enough, he could hear the hiss of air bleeding from the passageway down into the auxiliary machinery room, but at this rate it might take an hour for the pressures to equalize. They might never equalize if number three fireroom brought a third boiler fully on the line, thus sucking even more air out of the ship’s interior. Then he had an idea. He took the dogging wrench and tried it on the scuttle wheel’s hub nut. It fit. He had to use the base of a nearby CO2 fire extinguisher to start the nut turning. Once it came off, he lifted the wheel off the scuttle mechanism. He then picked up the fire extinguisher and pounded on the threaded operating spindle until he punched it through the gearing under the scuttle.

  Immediately he felt his ears pop as a jet of air from the vestibule was sucked down into the space below, making a screeching sound. Two minutes later, once the noise stopped, he was able to pop the hatch as if nothing had happened. Two overhead lights were broken but still on when he got down to the space; he quickly wished that they weren’t because down in the bilges, beneath the deck gratings, he saw eight bodies, partially submerged in oily water, and all clustered around a small air vent as if they’d been taking turns getting air. It was pretty clear that they’d all eventually suffocated. He sat down on a short stool and began to weep.

  38

  It was fully dark by the time J.R. made it up to the bridge and reported in to the XO. The sea around them was as dark as only the sea can be when there’s a low overcast and a new moon. J.R. was pretty sure that there were destroyers all around them, but they, like the carrier, were running at total darken-ship and were thus invisible. The XO finished checking the quartermaster’s latest fix and then called the captain in his sea cabin to report their progress toward Ulithi. When he was done, he turned to J.R.

  “I’m hearing you did some great stuff today, Lieutenant,” he said. “Like rescue three hundred people from the messdecks and bring them out of the fires.”

  J.R. didn’t know what to say. He could still see that thrashing school of terrified sailors trying to get over to the Santa Fe as massive steel hulls closed in on them. “I’m glad I could help them, XO,” was all he could manage. “It’s a real mess belowdecks.”

  “So I’m finding out,” the exec said. “I had a ringside seat for what happened on the flight deck, but below…?”

  J.R. could only shake
his head, recalling the sights—and the smells—from the interior, especially his brief glimpses of the hangar deck, where he watched sailors being turned into blackened, liquid pools by the red-hot steel.

  “You okay, son?” the XO asked in a quieter voice. “You need to lie down somewhere?”

  “I’m hungry,” J.R. said, surprising himself. “Wait. I’m sorry. But I can’t—I can’t—”

  “I know, I know,” the XO said. “Everybody who’s still here, who’s still alive, can’t get over what’s happened. But—our duty right now is to save this ship, and I think we can, thanks to guys like you. And Lieutenant Peck, who got us some steam. But now we need warm bodies to—”

  The exec stopped when he saw the almost stunned look in J.R.’s eyes. Warm bodies?

  “Oh, Goddammit,” he blurted. “That’s not what I—You know that’s not…”

  Then J.R. closed his eyes and started laughing hysterically; the exec followed. The two of them stood there in one corner of the pilothouse, face-to-face, their eyes closed, each trying to control himself, which did not help one bit. The rest of the bridge crew could only stare at them.

  Finally, the both of them caught their breath, sniffed, and wiped their eyes on their sleeves. The XO took a second deep breath and tried again. “What we need most is to recover anyone who might be trapped belowdecks, especially main-hole snipes. I need someone who’s been down there to organize a deck-by-deck, compartment-by-compartment search for anyone who survived the fires and the smoke but had to hole up to stay alive. We need people, or we’ll never make it to Ulithi.”

  J.R. by then had regained his composure; he’d never experienced hysteria before and it had scared him. But, of all the words …

  “Yessir,” he said. “I can do that. But I’ll need some helpers. Runners, guys who can get to the nearest sound-powered phone and get more helpers to lead guys out to clean air.”