by Peter Albano
As he reached the port ladder, he glanced astern at “Battleship Row.” In pairs he saw battleships West Virginia and Tennessee, Oklahoma and Maryland. Then cruiser Honolulu, and close to Ford Island battleship California. He felt a thrill of pride as he viewed the massed power; sixteen-inch and fourteen-inch main batteries pointed fore and aft, dozens of snouts of five-inch guns pointed at the sky like stubby gray logs. Senior and junior partners in a corporation of death and the first line of defense of his nation.
He descended the ladder and walked to his station at the quarterdeck, which was actually a small platform at the head of the accommodation ladder. Here, a lieutenant j.g. named Martin Lebow waited impatiently with two enlisted men. Dressed in service whites matching the uniform worn by Rodney, Lebow was a short pudgy young man with a keen sense of humor and a rainbow of a laugh. Rodney had taken an immediate liking to him. The two officers exchanged salutes while the pair of enlisted men stood at attention next to a small table with a log, a telephone, and a stack of pamphlets. The enlisted men looked at the hatch to the mess deck anxiously for their own reliefs.
At that moment, there was the thud of shoes on steel and two enlisted men in undress whites and wearing duty belts emerged from a ladder leading up from the mess hall. Rodney recognized petty officer of the watch Quartermaster First Class Jay Mendel who had been aboard Arizona for a decade. Close on his heels and almost running was a young seaman second class named Marvin Bollenbach. Mendel had the typical look of the “old salt”; squared and “winged” white hat, tailored uniform, face darkened to the color of tobacco by years of salt spray and sun. Even the oiled brown hair slicked back from his temples had reddish silver streaks as if it, too, had been burned by the sun. Rodney had heard Mendel had an enormous bouquet of roses tattooed on his chest with “Mother” inscribed beneath it. In fact, the men joked that the whores on Hotel Street referred to him as “Rosie.”
Fresh out of boot camp, Bollenbach had only been aboard for four weeks. With a severe acne problem, he had the timorous look of a high school junior looking for his first date. Both enlisted men saluted the officers and chorused, “We relieve the watch, sir.”
“Very well,” Martin Lebow said. He turned to his men, “You’re relieved, boys. Chow down.” The two men saluted and hurried to the hatch to the mess hall. Immediately Mendel and Bollenbach replaced them.
“Orders?” Rodney asked.
Lebow smiled and handed Rodney a small pamphlet. “Here are your standing orders, Mr. Higgins.”
“I’m familiar with them.”
Lebow spoke in a businesslike monotone, “Here are your orders of the day. The commander of Batdiv One (Battleship Division One), Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, is aboard. Captain Van Valkenburg (Arizona’s captain) is on board and is in his cabin. The executive officer is the duty officer. Bridge manned by communications personnel only, all weapons secured, boilers and main engines secured, we’re on auxiliary engine number two. Boilers three and ten are down for descaling. The ship is at condition five. Mooring lines and draft reading just checked and okay. Damage Control Center reports all secure except for a leak in a saltwater line in number one engine room. Should have it shipshape in an hour or two.” He pointed to a large board mounted on the bulkhead just forward of number three turret. It contained three rows of switches and a telephone and a microphone, which hung on hooks beneath it. “Your Com-One. You can communicate with the exec, radio shack, any department, or all stations. The switches are marked.”
Rodney nodded understanding. He was bored but knew the ritual had to be repeated regardless of the number of times he had heard it. “Very well,” Rodney said. “I relieve you.”
“I am relieved,” Lebow said, unsnapping his duty belt and handing it to Rodney. A bolstered Colt .45 hung from the belt.
“Armed to the teeth,” Rodney said, grinning. He gestured at Mendel. “The petty officer of the watch usually wears this,” he said.
Martin Lebow shrugged. “Captain’s orders.” He smiled wryly. “Keep in mind. Lieutenant, you have the only loaded weapon on board this great floating fortress.”
Strapping the belt to his waist and patting the automatic, Rodney quipped back, “Rest assured, Mr. Lebow, if the Nips try to board us, I’ll fight to the death.”
They both laughed and Rodney could hear the enlisted men chuckle. Then, quickly, salutes were exchanged. Lebow signed the log and vanished forward.
Rodney walked to the rail and stared down at the platform at the foot of the accommodation ladder. It seemed to be down by the head. It definitely was out of trim. He turned to Quartermaster Mendel but before he could say anything, young Marvin Bollenbach said, “They’ve two-blocked Blue Peter, sir.”
Glancing at the foremast, Rodney saw the large blue signal flag with the white square center fluttering high at the ship’s yardarm. Immediately a boatswain’s pipe skirled “To the Colors.” It was 0755 hours and men on every vessel in the harbor were readying ensigns to be hoisted at the bows and sterns. “Stand by for colors,” the lieutenant said. The pipe fell silent and across the harbor he could hear church bells in Honolulu calling worshippers to eight o’clock services.
“I hear engines, sir,” Bollenbach said suddenly.
“Yeah,” Mendel affirmed. “Lots of engines.”
Rodney heard the rumble. It seemed to be coming from all points of the compass. Shading his eyes he stared up at the sky. Then he found scores of aircraft streaming toward Pearl Harbor over the Koolau Range. “Must be the air groups from the Enterprise and Lexington.”
“Air groups?” Bollenbach said.
“Our carriers usually send in their air groups before they stand in,” Mendel explained.
Rodney squinted. Something was wrong. He pointed at two streams of at least twenty planes that were wheeling slowly toward the harbor. “Some of those planes have fixed landing gear.”
“Doesn’t make sense unless some of ‘em are army, sir,” Mendel offered.
“Look! They’re making practice dives on Ford Island,” Bollenbach shouted excitedly, stabbing a finger into the sky.
“Those assholes are showing off,” Mendel said.
A mottled green aircraft with fixed landing gear hurtled down on the island. It was followed by a stream of other planes.
Suddenly a PBY vanished in a great ball of flame and black smoke.
“My God,” Mendel groaned. “That goddamned ‘flat hatter’ dropped his bomb by mistake.”
“Bull shit!” Rodney screamed. “That’s a Jap! See the meatballs on him?”
Mendel and Bollenbach stood paralyzed with disbelief as bomber after bomber released its bomb and pulled out of its dive, some roaring mast high over Arizona.
Rodney snatched the microphone from its cradle and shouted, “All stations! All stations! Air raid! Air raid! Sound the general alarm.” And then the phrase that was to become the most quoted of the day, “This is no drill!”
Only a few minutes were required for the destruction of the Ford Island strip. Within seconds, the line of four Brewster and six Grumman fighters had been blown to pieces, and two hangars had been blasted with the flames of burning gasoline leaping high into the sky. Even the tarmac seemed to be burning, fueled by burning gasoline. Then graceful white fighters with black cowlings swept over the field, machine-gunning anything that moved. One pulled out so low it almost scraped the runway with its belly. Engine barking at full throttle, it banked just a few feet over Rodney’s head. The canopy was open and the lieutenant could see the pilot quite clearly. Wrapped around his head, he wore a white band with a red dot on the front. He actually waved and smiled.
Rodney punched the bulkhead. “What the fuck’s going on,” he screamed. “Wake up! The whole fuckin’ world’s gone crazy.”
Finally, after an eternity, Arizona’s PA system came to life. “Now hear this! All hands man your battle stations. This is no drill. Se
t Condition Zed.” The short staccato blasts of Klaxons filled the air and reverberated throughout the ship’s 608-foot length. Through the bedlam, Rodney could hear the clang of watertight doors slamming shut the length of the warship. Then, somewhere, deep in the vessel’s bowels, an electrician’s mate threw a switch, stopping every blower.
“Get to your battle stations!” Rodney shouted at Mendel and Bollenbach. Both men raced forward as the lieutenant ran for the ladder to the boat deck and his battle station in the aft director. Taking the rungs two at a time, he bounded to the boat deck. Here he was stopped in his tracks by the spectacle of Pearl Harbor under attack.
There were hundreds of aircraft circling overhead like buzzards about to pounce on carrion. To the south great clouds of black smoke billowed skyward from the fighter strip at Hickam Army Air Base where dozens of P-40s and P-36s had been parked in neat rows. He could see the same mottled green bombers with fixed landing gear and the white fighters swooping over the stricken field, blasting the crowded fighters to burning junk and strafing. To the south at least forty large monoplanes wearing green-brown camouflage were turning toward Battleship Row and lining up their runs on Merry’s Point and Southeast Loch. Fearsome torpedoes hung from their crutches. “Why? Why?” Rodney screamed, waving a fist. “You have no right.”
He started for the ladder leading to his station in the director when a shriek overhead stopped him and he craned his head back and stared skyward. Dive-bombers. A half-dozen dive-bombers were plunging directly down on him, Lieutenant Rodney Higgins. Each had a huge bomb slung under its fuselage. Fear, a deep-rooted dread, wrenched the bottom from his stomach and he began to tremble, his whole body turning cold as if he had been caught naked in a snowstorm. Frantically he leapt over the last rung and huddled under a ventilator in a fetal position. A nightmare. A nightmare, he told himself. I’ll wake up in a minute. This can’t be happening.
The sounds of the engines reached a crescendo, then a shriek, a blast that shook the ship, raining water. Another blast. Tons of water poured down on the entire aft part of the ship. Near misses. A series of explosions followed by a shattering detonation that shook every frame and plate in the ship, clanging, ripping sounds of metal blasted and tortured by high explosives. This was no near miss. This time metal rained; clattering on the deck, bouncing from the ventilator. Bits of plating, chunks of armor, tubing, and sheeting, and soft pulpy debris bounced and splattered.
Gagging on the nitro-acid stench of high explosives, Rodney crawled to his feet. The after director was askew with a huge hole blown in its side. The Kingfisher had been blasted from its catapult and hung by a single line over the port side, nose down into the water. Littering the deck around him were shards of metal, pieces of range finders, glass, electronics gear, and pieces of men. Half a skull, brains, arms, legs, teeth. The largest piece was the lower half of a torso with its entrails stretched for at least two yards across the boat deck. Rodney felt his gorge rise and scald the back of his throat. His battle station had been destroyed along with the crew. This was how it must have been on Bismarck. The wheel had turned full circle. “No! No!” he screamed. He ran to the starboard rail.
Clutching the rail, he stared hypnotized at Southeast Loch. Swarming low, the torpedo planes stretched in a column miles long all the way to Diamond Head. They were starting their runs, their big radial engines pointed at him. The leaders were close on the water and less than a mile away.
Shouts turned his head. Beneath him in the gun galleries he could see Arizona’s frantic gun crews cranking their five-inch guns down. They were screaming for ammunition. It was locked below in the magazines The ship’s eight fifty-caliber guns were still silent, too. Rodney pounded the rail in an agony of frustration.
The first half-dozen torpedo bombers released their glistening steel cylinders and roared over Battleship Row, one banking sharply and barely clearing Arizona’s stack. They were big planes and he could see their three-man crews staring down curiously. The steel, cylinders dropped into the water with small splashes. Immediately six more planes bore in for the kill. The narrow waters of the loch were like a bowling alley and the Japs were rolling their torpedoes into the stationary pins of Battleship Row. Horror-stricken, he watched the pencil lines of tracks race for their helpless, immobile targets. Not an American gun had fired. Not an American fighter was in the air.
There were detonations all up and down the row and water shot into the sky. Oklahoma staggered and rocked as the first torpedo struck her amidships. Immediately she listed. In quick succession, California, West Virginia, and Nevada were hit. Oil hemorrhaged from the stricken warships, flames spread across the water—black, oily smoke billowing into the pristine blue sky. The sulphurous stench was suffocating.
Then it was the turn of Arizona. Two of the white tracks headed straight as doom for her starboard side. They passed by Vestal, which had drifted away after her panicked crew had chopped her free, and struck Arizona. It was a one-two punch that rocked the 31,400-ton ship like a surprised fighter slugged against the ropes. Two great columns of dirty water soared into the air and the ship twisted and convulsed like a mortally wounded whale. Rodney was ripped from the rail and hurled to his back. Stunned, he came to his hands and knees. He heard stuttering, sharp barks. AA guns were firing at last. The sky was pockmarked with drifting bursts. Tracers streamed and arched. Coming to his feet, he saw a torpedo plane lose its wing and cartwheel across the harbor, disintegrating in a huge spray of water. But more came on, boring in relentlessly.
Oklahoma’s list had increased, starboard rail almost underwater. California and West Virginia were settling in a sea of flames. Nevada, down by the head, was moving out into the stream, guns blazing, hounded by swarms of bombers. Flames were everywhere, spread by the flaming oil. He was in an inferno, the bowels of hell itself. The sounds of engines, blasts of gunfire, and booms of exploding bombs and torpedoes were like the crash of a storm surf on a rocky shore, the wild beat of a demented drummer, the fevered pulse of a sick, mad world. A stifling cloud of acrid smoke swept over the boat deck and he retched and vomited up doughnuts and sour coffee. A breeze swept it away and engines overhead turned his eyes skyward. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve.
At least forty high-flying bombers. Stretched in a long single line. Making a run on the anchorage. Glistening in the sunlight like icicles breaking from spring eaves, the bombs began to fall. They dropped slowly in perfect parabolas, shrieking through the din like banshees gone berserk. Mouth agape, frozen by this new horror, Rodney stared upward still disbelieving. The first three missed. Two struck off Nevada’s starboard side simultaneously, shooting towers of water a hundred feet into the air. The third hit fifty feet from Arizona’s bow. The fourth did not miss. It plunged into Arizona’s forecastle, into Arizona’s heart.
Arizona did not die in a millisecond flash. Her death began with a convulsive vibration and deep rumble like a volcano preparing to erupt. Then the sound like a force-twelve wind and the entire forward part of the ship detonated with a retina-searing flash of a newborn sun and a roar that shattered eardrums. The great battleship surged from the water, pulling her moorings loose and hurling debris in a half-mile radius. Incandescent fireballs boiled from her forecastle followed by flame-lashed clouds of brown and black smoke. The concussion was so mighty, many crewmen drowned in the blood of their ruptured lungs. Others were crushed when catapulted against bulkheads, while others hurled from the decks died screaming in the burning sea. Even automobile engines on Ford Island were snuffed out.
The shock hurled Rodney upward and then he crashed down on the deck, rolling under a whaleboat that had been partially knocked from its davits. His brain burst into bright colors and stabbing lights. He tasted his own blood, thick and metallic. The blackpowder. The magazine, broke through his dazed mind.
He tried to dig his fingernails into the steel deck as the great warship crashed downward, pitched, wallowed from side to
side, settled quickly with most of her bottom forward of amidships blown out. Peering out from his shelter, Rodney could see giant fireballs rolling skyward hundreds of feet like a desert sunrise. The foremast tilted forward and everything forward of the mast was obscured by boiling flames and black smoke that churned furiously into the sky. A huge strake of armor plate smashed down, bouncing and scraping across the deck, ripped out the lifeline and a half-dozen stanchions and flew over the port side, splashing into the harbor. Fearfully, Rodney scurried farther under the boat. More ringing, clattering sounds as wreckage rained down onto the deck and bounced off the boat. Then there was an enormous crashing, ripping sound and something crushed the boat and black curtains were drawn on the world of Lieutenant Rodney Higgins.
Rodney Higgins hated summer nights in New York City. He could never sleep well in the oppressive heat. Why was Travers shaking him and calling his name? The butler never shook him. It didn’t make sense. And it was so hot. The nightmare began and the butler kept on calling and shaking him. He was dead and hell was a burning ship. No! The nightmare was reality and New York the dream. The voice belonged to Seaman Second Class Marvin Bollenbach.
“Mr. Higgins. Mr. Higgins. Please, sir. Don’t die, too,”
Rodney opened his eyes. He saw the distraught, blood-splattered face of the young seaman above him.
“Thank God. You’re alive,” Bollenbach said. He helped Rodney to his feet. “They’re all dead—everyone’s dead,” the young seaman said, voice quivering on the edge of hysteria.
Rodney gripped his head, which was a ganglia of screeching, spastic nerves. Then he shook it, spit blood, and looked around, not believing what he saw. The whaleboat had been crushed by the entire side of a cabin, complete with porthole, which was still dogged shut and unbroken. It was a miracle he had not been crushed with the boat. He had been saved by the crane that had taken the brunt of the impact and had been crushed down over the whaleboat like a giant spring. Looking forward, he saw the entire foremast had sagged even farther forward in the intense heat of the still-raging fire. An inferno of yellow-orange flames stormed upward from the forecastle, sending smoke rolling in black thunder clouds thousands of feet into the sky, blotting out the sun and bringing darkness in the morning. Even the sea seemed to be burning, blazing oil slicks drifting out into the harbor in huge pools. The air was heavy with the sulphurous stench of burning oil and the smell of cordite. And the blast-furnace roar of the flames, rumble of engines, and bark of gunfire were ear numbing. But it was real. He was here. In Pearl Harbor and the ship had been sunk. And the deck was hot. Very hot.
