by Peter Albano
He thought of Donald Colburn. He must be dead. Number two turret was gone. And the young ensigns Jordan and Stolz could never have survived in the director. No one could.
Something was wrong with his right eye and his head throbbed. Gingerly, he touched his forehead. His hand came away covered with blood. “A fuck up Purple Heart,” he said to himself.
“It’s your blood, sir,” Bollenbach said. “You have a gash over your eye.” He ripped off his black kerchief and handed it to Rodney. Gingerly, the lieutenant wiped the blood from his eye and wrapped the kerchief around his head. Then he spit blood again and carefully ran his tongue around his mouth. He found torn tissue where he had bitten himself.
He looked at the seaman. His whites were discolored with soot and coagulated blood, face tight with shock, eyes blank and uncomprehending like balls of glass. He was staring at Rodney as if the lieutenant were a god who could snatch him from this hell. He appeared unhurt despite the blood. The blood must have belonged to others. Rodney shook his head, took some deep breaths, and treaded from one foot to the other as the heat grew under his feet. Strangely, he felt his nerves calm and resoluteness course through his veins as if fear had gone beyond fear in a full circle back to courage. Maybe it was the responsibility he felt for the safety of someone beside himself that did it.
“You okay?”
“Yes, sir”
Rodney’s voice was as calm as a man ordering lunch, “Let’s haul ass, Bollenbach.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Rodney started for the ladder, but staggered in the grip of dizziness like a drunk. Bollenbach grabbed him and steadied him. “Okay, sir?”
“Yeah. Yeah,” Rodney said, gritting his teeth and setting his jaw. His head seemed to clear and he felt strength begin to seep back into his muscles. Stepping over wreckage and pieces of bodies, he led the seaman to the port ladder. Looking down, he could see the ship had sunk below its main deck forward and was rapidly settling by the stem. He noticed a new odor; the sickening sweet smell of burning meat. Looking toward the bow, he could see two five-inch gun tubs with flames curling up around them. Bodies were piled around the guns. The tubs had become cooking pots, slowly cremating the corpses of their crews.
But a tub almost beneath the ladder showed movement. Bollenbach shouted, “Look, Mr. Higgins. Some of the guys are alive!”
Descending the ladder ahead of the seaman, Rodney was unable to hear the roar of engines. “They’re gone,” he said hopefully as he stepped onto the main deck.
Marvin Bollenbach waved skyward. “No, sir. They’re still there.” Rodney shaded his eyes and saw them. A cloud of specks high in the sky, circling. He cursed.
The five members of the gun crew walked toward Rodney with the dazed looks of zombies. They were as helpless as conscious men could be. All were blackened by smoke and soot, appeared in shock, but unwounded. Higgins recognized three of the men. The oldest was Chief Gunner’s Mate Bill Farris, a middle-aged, twenty-year man. The other four were very young. Only one was rated, Storekeeper Third Class Fred Bagsby. The remaining three were seamen. The lieutenant knew one. Seaman First Class Kenneth Nemhart. The last two, lagging behind the others and side by side, were fresh out of boot camp. Both were short, appearing fair despite the soot covering them. Children, Rodney said to himself. Nothing but children.
Marvin Bollenbach turned with the gun crew and stared at Rodney like supplicants at a deity. They were alive and they were looking to him for leadership. He felt strong again. Someone had to survive Arizona. Colburn, Stolz, Jordan, and hundreds of others were gone, but he would save these men. It would be his only victory over the cowardly Japs.
“Lay aft!” he shouted, gesturing to the liberty launch ladder that was afloat, flush with the main deck.
“But there ain’t no launch,” the chief said.
“Then we’ll swim.”
“I think my arm’s broken, sir,” Bagsby said matter-of-factly, holding his right elbow with his left hand.
“Then, goddamn it! I’ll tow you,” Rodney said. “Now haul ass, on the double, before we’re all fried.” Pushing his way through the group, the lieutenant led the way to the gunwale.
He heard a bell. And then again a bell coming out of the smoke. “A whaleboat,” Chief Farris shouted. Everyone cheered as a gray motor launch charged out of the smoke obscuring Ford Island and headed for Arizona. In a moment a member of its three-man crew threw a painter to Nemhart who secured it to a bent stanchion while the coxswain clanged his commands to the engineer by ringing a small bell attached to his conning platform. Another line was put over and the two young seamen began pulling the stem of the boat to the battleship.
Then they heard the clanging. It sounded like sledgehammers striking the very deck under their feet. At first, Rodney thought he was hearing the sounds of the ship breaking up. But the sounds were rhythmic, controlled by intelligence. Three short and three long over and over. “SOS,” Farris said in a heavy voice. “Some of our guys are dawn there! They’re dying by inches.”
Bollenbach dropped to his knees and began to scream and pound on the deck with his fists. Grabbing the seaman’s arms, Chief Farris pulled him to his feet. “I’m okay. I’m okay,” Bollenbach pleaded.
“If you do that again, I’ll punch your fuckin’ teeth out!” the chief spat.
“Let him go,” Rodney said. Sobbing, Bollenbach turned away. “We can’t get them out,” Rodney continued. “We’ll need acetylene.”
Chief Farris showed new enthusiasm. “That’s it, sir. Maybe we can get torches on Ford Island.”
But there was no chance and Rodney knew it and he was sure the chief knew it, too. It was all an act. The battleship’s great strength in deck and side armor made rescue impossible. The men in their steel-sealed tombs would never be saved. They would die the most horrible deaths; suffocation or slow drowning in boiling oily water as the ship flooded. But Rodney tried to put on a mask of enthusiasm as he ordered the men to board the whaleboat that was now secured alongside. He fooled no one.
“Our ship’s a graveyard!” Nemhart screamed, tears washing white tracks down his cheeks. The two teenagers began to sob.
“Shut up! You’re supposed to be men, not babies. Now get your asses in that boat before I kick ‘em in,” Rodney shouted.
Followed by the clanging dirge played by their doomed shipmates, the seven survivors tumbled into the whaleboat. With a ringing of bells, the boat charged toward Ford Island. A sudden gust of wind turned the greasy columns of black smoke to the south. Every man in the boat had a view of Battleship Row. They saw a cataclysm. Nevada, low in the water, had abandoned her attempt to put to sea and was beached on Waipio Point. West Virginia had sunk and was burning, her flames spreading to Tennessee. A hose-equipped garbage lighter was spraying seawater into West Virginia’s flames. California was sinking and her ruptured fuel tanks were adding to the flames spreading across the harbor. Maryland, too, was aflame and Oklahoma had vanished. All around the ships, men were in the water, clinging to wreckage, desperately trying to swim away from the burning oil. Everywhere, whaleboats and small boats darted into the inferno, pulling men from the water and taking crewmen off of the dying ships.
One of the seamen shouted, “The Okie’s rolled over!” He pointed at the long red bottom of Oklahoma sticking out of the water like a great dead creature. Men could be seen on her overturned hull. Then the scream, “They’re killing ‘em.” Transfixed beyond horror, the men stared as first one graceful white fighter and then another made leisurely strafing runs the length of the hull. Brown smoke trailed as their guns flamed cherry-red and men were shot from the hull like tenpins. The men screamed, waved fists.
“We’ll remember this!” Rodney shouted. The men quieted and stared at the lieutenant. “It’ll be settled someday!”
Abruptly the sky seemed almost empty of aircraft, only a pair of bombers circling high and to t
he north. Rodney glanced at his watch. It was 0840 hours. He shook his head. All this damage had been done in only three quarters of an hour.
He felt a bump as the boat came alongside the wharf at Ford Island. At a run, he led the men through the shrubs and onto the airfield. The place was a flaming madhouse. Every hangar was shattered. Wrecked aircraft were scattered in flaming heaps. Dead marines and sailors were lying in heaps and in rigid solitude. Wounded were screaming, frantic corpsmen bending over some and rushing to others with their big kits slung over their shoulders. Groups of smoke-blackened marines were stacking sandbags, wreckage, and crates furiously, building antiaircraft platforms for machine guns. Others crouched with their Springfields at the ready.
“My God,” Nemhart said. “They’ve had it.”
“But this island can’t sink,” Chief Farris said.
A roar and then a whine high in the sky turned seven pairs of fearful eyes upward. Hundreds of aircraft were hurtling down on the harbor from the north. Another wave plunging into new, intense antiaircraft fire. Scores of guns were firing, stitching the sky with tracers and the brown pox of exploding shells. A half-dozen fighters banked toward Ford Island. “Here they come!” Rodney shouted. He waved at an undamaged maintenance building where an old SOC-3 (Curtis Seagull) amphibious biplane was parked. “Take cover!”
With the chief leading, six figures raced for the shelter. But Rodney was frozen to the concrete, staring upward at the glistening white fighters. The leader did a graceful half roll and plunged into a dive. The other five followed. As the planes screamed downward and steepened their dives, they separated, pointing for different targets like a handful of lightning bolts hurled by a vengeful god. The leader headed directly for Lieutenant Rodney Higgins.
Staring upward, a wild animal took possession of Rodney. Fear, logic, and reason were gone, only a primal hunger for revenge remaining. He had been a frightened, hunted animal, groveling, crying, praying. He would hide no more. Run no more. Lips drawn back in a rictus of determination, he un-bolstered his Colt, pulled the action back, and chambered a round. Raising the pistol with both hands, he planted his feet and growled, “Come on you yellow son of a bitch.”
“For Christ’s sake, take cover, Lieutenant!” a marine sergeant with a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) braced on a pile of sandbags shouted. “You can’t do anything with that peashooter!”
Rodney ignored him. Brought the plane into the V of his sights. It seemed that time slowed and his senses concentrated his vision to brilliant clarity. The fighter grew in his sights, black cowling, radial engine, knifelike edge of the wings; canopy, and the pilot, hunched behind his range finder. Marine BARs, rifles, and machine guns began firing all around from behind wreckage, vehicles, pits on the edge of the runway. Flame spurted from the wings and cowling of the fighter, shells exploding to Rodney’s left and marching through a weapons carrier, exploding its gas tank and killing a pair of marines firing from its bed.
Rodney got off two rounds and the thunder of the fighter’s engine changed to a staccato blast as it whipped past, banking into an astonishingly fast turn, almost scraping the runway with a wingtip. The noise of the engine drowned out all other sounds, the plane passing so close, Rodney could feel its backwash. Whipping around with it, Rodney got off two more quick shots. The canopy was open, the helmeted and goggled pilot staring at him. The same white band with the red dot he had seen on the other pilot was wrapped around the man’s head. Pulling back on the stick, he rocketed out of range.
Low on the runway, another fighter flashed past at the same time to Rodney’s right. Lining up on the old SOC-3 parked in front of the maintenance building, it blew the observation plane to pieces with one long burst that shot out the front of the building, too. Banking, the fighter climbed with the same incredible speed of his leader.
Rodney noticed heaps of bloody white cloth scattered in front of the building. Screaming “No! No!” he ran to the building and the burning SOC-3. At a full run, he tripped over a chest, bloody and with ribs protruding, falling head-on to the tarmac, slick with thick black blood and entrails like cooked spaghetti. They were all around him; Bollenbach, Farris, Bagsby, Nemhart, the two young seamen. Torn and ripped by twenty-millimeter shells and bullets. They had been dismembered, butchered like cattle. All dead. Rodney pounded the cement, screaming “No! I’ve lost them. I’ve lost everything.”
The marine sergeant and a private grabbed his arms and pulled him to his feet. They dragged the protesting officer from the bodies. Rodney could only moan, “Why this? Why? Why?”
“Easy, sir,” the sergeant said. “Your men are dead. That’s all there is. A lot of good men have died this day—a lot of mine.”
A shout of “We got one of the fuckers!” turned every head.
Staring skyward, Rodney felt a surge of joy as one of the fighters plunged downward, trailing smoke. Frantically, the pilot tried to pull up, but the plane streaked down onto the strip from west to east, hitting perhaps two-hundred-yards from Rodney. It disintegrated into thrashing, tumbling pieces of burning, smoking wreckage that flew high into the air, whirled, and rolled toward the lieutenant like a flaming cyclone. Its engine tore loose and spinning like a great sparkling pinwheel rolled across the strip and crashed into a burning PBY. There were choruses of hoarse cheers. Something smoking, flopping loosely, and leaving a red trail tumbled toward the lieutenant. It stopped rolling only a few feet from Rodney. It was the pilot in brown, fur-lined flight clothes. The clothes were ripped and smoking. Rodney, the sergeant, and a private ran to the body.
Both legs had been ripped off at the trunk and most of one arm was missing. But the face was remarkably untouched, goggles up, helmet, and the same white band with the red dot wrapped around the head. Ideograms were brushed on the cloth with black ink. Two narrow brown eyes stared up at Rodney with the crystal-hard, unblinking stare of the dead that had become so familiar this day. The thin lips were pulled back from fire-blackened teeth in a ghastly, mocking grin.
Rodney stepped over the body, straddling its chest. He pointed the automatic at the cadaver’s head.
“Sir! No!” the private shouted.
“At ease, Private,” the sergeant said grimly. “He has something he must do. Leave him be.”
Rodney pulled the trigger. The weapon fired three big 230-grain bullets, shattering teeth, blowing out an eye, and the third punched out the red dot, splattering pieces of bone and the yellow-gray contents of the skull on the concrete. Then the .45 fell silent, clip empty. “Now grin, you fuckin’ butcher,” Rodney hissed.
The sounds of engines began to fade and wordlessly the men looked skyward. “It’s over,” the sergeant said.
Rodney stared at his immolated ship and then at his dead men. The anguished voice came from a tortured soul, “It’ll never be over. Never!”
The next week was an extension of the nightmare. Rodney was taken to an emergency hospital set up in a warehouse just back of the graving dock and shipyard. Part of his head was shaved, scalp wound closed with twenty-two stitches, and he was assigned to a bunk in an improvised BOQ in a Quonset hut next door to the warehouse. The hut was filled with survivors from the battleships. Donald Colburn, Dick Jordan, Paul Stolz, Jay Mendel, and Martin Lebow were missing. In fact, over a thousand members of Arizona’s crew were dead or missing. Rodney knew they were all dead. He saw only one other officer from Arizona—an ensign from communications named Norman Marcky. Because telephone communications with the mainland were prohibited, he sent a heavily censored telegram to his mother assuring her he was well. He followed the telegram with a letter that was also censored.
The entire area stank of disaster. To the north, the burned-out hulks of destroyers Cassins and Downs sat in the graving dock with the almost untouched battleship Pennsylvania. Just to the south at Hickam Field, the wreckage-of scores of fighters and hangars reeked with the smell of burned gasoline, oil, solvents, and explosives
. And a new odor began to seep in from the harbor. Rotting meat. Despite the efforts of a fleet of small boats, bodies and parts of bodies still drifted in the harbor. And more bodies popped up from the depths each day as the dead always do, filling with gases and finally breaking free from the mud of the bottom.
Everyone felt a Japanese invasion was imminent. Concertinas of barbed wire were unrolled at the beaches, mines laid, artillery sited, and marines and army troops dug in to repel the enemy. Boeing B-17 bombers and PBYs were flown in from the mainland and constant patrols were maintained, covering every sector. It was rumored hundreds of fighters and thousands of troops were outbound from the mainland. Carriers Enterprise and Lexington were out hunting the Japs and Saratoga was on her way. But the spirit was that of despair. The battle line was shattered—shattered so easily its destruction had almost been casual. Every man was crushed by the knowledge his enemy possessed lethal power that could kill with speed and near impunity. Across the harbor the specters of Battleship Row were there to haunt them.
