The Commodore

by P. T. Deutermann

  And now, Sluff thought, we’re finally here, the ship patrolling two miles off bloody Guadalcanal, where the sounds of desultory artillery fire were audible over the noise of the ship’s vent fans. They’d pulled in at 0130, having safely escorted four transports from the port of Nouméa in New Caledonia up to Guadalcanal to bring desperately needed supplies to the Marines, who were apparently clinging to their dusty airfield by their tobacco-stained fingernails. The transports had gone to their anchorages and begun unloading in the dark, trying to get as much stuff as possible off-loaded before Jap torpedo bombers showed up at midmorning. A second tin can prowled the coastline, shooting back at the occasional Jap shore battery trying its luck in the transport anchorage area. J. B. King had set up a patrol box to the south of the transports, guarding against Jap subs sneaking in from the Sealark Channel.

  During the early hours of the morning he’d received voice radio reports that the American cruiser force was returning to Lunga Point, right off Henderson Field. Between the rainsqualls and the overcast, it had been so dark that none of King’s people could make out what kind of shape the cruisers were in, but the radar had shown at least four big ships entering the area. That meant they were still afloat, which was an improvement over the first engagement with the Tokyo Express.

  Emerging from the head after his badly needed shower, he found his steward, a gray-headed black man whom the entire crew called Old Mose, laying out a clean uniform. There was a tiny silver tray on his desk with a mug of fresh coffee and a sweet roll nestled in a white linen napkin. Mose knew his captain’s fondness for fresh-baked cinnamon rolls.

  “Mornin’ Cap’n,” Mose intoned with a bright smile. Nothing fazed Old Mose. Not yet, anyway. Not for the first time Sluff reflected that the ship and her eager but green crew had not yet “faced the elephant,” as they used to say during the Civil War. And neither have I, he had to admit.

  “Mose, how are you?” he said, as if nothing was bothering him, either. “What’s the weather topside?”

  “Hit gonna rain, sure as anythin’,” Mose said, nodding wisely. “Already done did. Like a damn cow pissin’ on a flat rock, too. Man alive, it was pone down.”

  Sluff told Mose that he expected to be summoned to the flagship sometime that morning, assuming there was no air raid.

  “Lemme give them dress shoes a lick and a polish, then,” Mose said, handing over a clean and pressed khaki shirt and trousers, the shirt sporting two bright silver oak leaves on the collars. Still getting used to being a three-striper, Sluff gave them a proud glance. Then the sound-powered phone squeaked again.

  “Captain.”

  “We’re getting a flashing light from the Helena, Captain,” Ensign Belay reported.

  “What are they saying, Mister Belay?” Sluff asked. Mose, eavesdropping as always, grinned. Everyone knew that there wasn’t an ensign in the entire fleet who could read flashing light.

  “I’ll find out, sir,” Belay answered promptly. “Oh, and we’ve also IDed Atlanta and Juneau in the area.”

  “How do they look?”

  “Juneau, well, XO says she’s sagging amidships. He thinks her keel’s broken. And Atlanta has a big port list on her and she’s black from stem to stern. She looks pretty bad, Cap’n. XO thinks he can see Mike boats alongside, like maybe they’re taking people off.”

  Oh, shit, not again, Sluff thought as a chill gripped his bowels. “Very well,” he sighed. “What’s the air picture look like?”

  “Combat reports nothing on our air search, but Cactus says they’ll be launching strikes at first light. They’re going after a Jap convoy northwest of Savo Island. Also, there’s radio scuttlebutt that there’s a Jap battlewagon still out there, just north of Savo.”

  Savo Island wasn’t that far away, Sluff thought. If there was a wounded Jap battleship out there, nobody here was safe. “Lemme talk to XO,” he said.

  Lieutenant Commander Bob Frey, his executive officer and second-in-command, picked up. A Steady Eddy if there ever was one, he’d been three years behind Sluff at Annapolis.

  “Another bloodletting, XO?”

  “Sure looks like it, Cap’n. One of the signalmen’s been shooting the breeze with Frisco, and they’re saying there were two Jap battlewagons out there, and that both of our admirals were killed. Skipper of Helena has assumed command.”

  Sluff felt another cold shock. Admirals didn’t get killed. Did they? Please God, not again, he thought. We don’t have any more heavy cruisers.

  “And what’s this about a Jap BB still out there?”

  “That’s what Combat’s hearing over the Cactus control nets. Some of their strikes are going after a troop convoy up the Slot; others are going to finish off a Jap battlewagon who’s out there going in circles.”

  “All right,” Sluff said. “I think we better get to GQ, then. All those Japs on Guadalcanal will see and report the cripples, and then Rabaul’s gonna send a bunch of Bettys down here to finish it.”

  “If I may suggest, I recommend sounding reveille first,” Frey said. “Then tell everyone what’s going on. Give ’em fifteen minutes to hit the head and get some coffee, then go to GQ. We should be safe as long as there’s no bogeys actually inbound.”

  “Make it so,” Sluff said. “I’ll be right up.”

  He reflected that this was one of his exec’s strengths: consideration for the crew. It wasn’t as if they weren’t trained. Sound GQ, they’d all be on station with the ship buttoned up in under three minutes. If an attack was actually inbound, that’s what they’d be doing. But this way the crew would be able to wake up, learn what was going on, have time to do their morning necessaries, and then hustle to their GQ stations.

  The radio messenger knocked and came in, bearing a sheaf of naval messages bound onto a steel medical clipboard. Outside, the announcing-system speaker in the wardroom passageway cut loose with the shrill whistle of the bosun’s call, sounding reveille. This was followed by the exec, explaining what was going on and urging all hands to be ready to answer the GQ alarm in fifteen minutes.

  “Anything hot, Rogers?” Sluff asked, still trying to digest what the exec had told him. It was then that he noticed that Radioman Third Class Rogers looked positively pale as he handed over the clipboard. “The op report from last night, sir,” he said, shaking his head. “They got creamed, sir. They ran into fuc—uh, battleships.”

  Rogers left the cabin without another word. That was unusual. The crew depended on gossip from the radio gang to find out what was going on. The radio messengers would usually linger in the captain’s cabin to find out what the ship was going to do next. As if the captain knew, Sluff thought. Destroyers were the workhorses of the fleet, and any given day’s plans usually changed hourly as admirals or commodores made snap decisions. A day on a destroyer where everything went by the plan for that day usually meant that the ship had missed a message.

  He finished dressing, sat down at his desk, and opened the metal clipboard, while Mose perched on the couch and gave Sluff’s uniform shoes a quick polish. His heart sank as he read the short but sad report, sent out by the skipper of the Helena. While John B. King had been making the milk run from the U.S. base at Nouméa, six hundred miles away, the cruiser force had gone out into the waters north of Guadalcanal looking for trouble. Trouble, in the form of a Jap surface-action task group containing not one but two battleships, had more than obliged. For some odd reason there had been two admirals in the task group last night, Rear Admiral Dan Callaghan, embarked in heavy cruiser San Francisco, in charge, and Rear Admiral Norman Scott, embarked in light cruiser Atlanta, apparently just along for the ride. The report confirmed that both flag officers had been killed in the ensuing gunfight.

  That was stark enough news. The senior officer left alive in San Francisco, the flagship, was a lieutenant commander. Four American destroyers had been sunk outright. The other two, although damaged, were out there now searching for survivors. The antiaircraft light cruiser Atlanta, anchored now somewhere
nearby and barely afloat, was so badly damaged that the Marines were indeed shuttling landing craft out to her to take her crew to safety ashore. Given the Marines’ situation, surrounded by Jap army units, “safety” was a relative term, so Atlanta must be in imminent danger of sinking.

  The antiaircraft light cruiser Juneau had been torpedoed and was also barely afloat, apparently with a broken keel. The heavy cruiser Portland was going around in circles out in the sound after being torpedoed in the stern. The skipper of the heavy cruiser Helena, which had also been damaged, had assumed command of what was left of the cruiser force. Amazingly, the report was claiming that one of the Japanese battleships had been knocked out of the fight. Who the hell managed that, Sluff wondered.

  He downed his coffee and then decided he’d better get topside right now. As dawn broke, there’d almost certainly be Jap air raids from the airfields up in the Shortlands, or even Rabaul itself. As he opened his cabin door he almost collided with the chief signalman, Chief Hawkins, who had a visual signal pad on a clipboard, which he handed to the captain. The chief had that “stand by, everything’s changed again” expression on his face.

  “What now, Chief?” Sluff asked as he scanned the brief message, knowing that the chief would have read it on his way down from the signal bridge. Like the radio gang, the signalmen were a prime source for the hot scoop.

  “Gonna go find the Washington and the South Dakota and report for duty,” Hawkins answered crisply. He was a short but muscular man, mid-thirties, with a permanently sun- and wind-burned face and startling white eyebrows, the product of hours spent topside supervising the guys who worked the signal lights and the flag bags.

  “Right,” Sluff said, initialing the message form. “Take this to XO on the bridge and tell him I said to get the navi-guesser to lay out a track. Make sure they see this in Combat, too.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the chief said, and took the ladder up to the bridge two steps at a time. Sluff followed, trying to ignore the growing pit in his stomach. Last night our cruiser force got mauled by Jap battleships. Apparently Admiral Halsey, in command of everything but back in Nouméa, had decided to up the ante.

  You wanted to see some action, he told himself. Here it comes.

  TWO

  Guadalcanal

  A chorus of “Captain’s on the bridge” greeted him as he stepped through the pilothouse door. He refilled his coffee mug from the chart-table coffeepot and then went over to his captain’s chair on the starboard side of the bridge. Outside, it had begun to rain again, a heavy South Pacific squall that drummed on the overhead and made conversation pointless and visibility impossible. The only benefit was that these heavy showers washed the paint-eating salt and boiler soot off the weather decks. Sunrise was a half hour away, but the tropical dawn made the ship plenty visible should Jap torpedo bombers appear out of the rain clouds.

  “Where’s XO?” he asked.

  “Gone down to Combat,” the officer of the deck, Lieutenant Junior Grade Heimbach, replied.

  He reread the visual signal: J. B. King detached first light. Proceed RDVU with TF 64, est. posit. 80 miles west of Cape Esperance. Report for screening duty NLT 1800K. Maintain strict radio silence. Advise CTF 64 fuel and ammo status en route. Hoover sends. Acknowledge.

  Sluff didn’t know the complete composition of Task Force 64, so he called down to Combat on the bitch-box and asked them to look it up. Then he called the chief engineer to get a fuel report. They’d topped off before leaving Nouméa, and the transit to Cactus had been done at a relatively slow twelve knots to accommodate the transports, so they should be at 80-something percent. The engineer, Lieutenant Cliff Harper, called back and reported 80 percent on the nose.

  Sluff considered that number. They were ten miles south and east of Cape Esperance, so a ninety-mile transit to the rendezvous, assuming the big guys showed up on time. That meant they would join up at something less than 80 percent. On the other hand, there were fuel barges only about twelve miles away in the harbor of Tulagi. J. B. King didn’t have to make the rendezvous until 1800, so they basically had all day. He decided to divert into Tulagi, top off the fuel, and then take off for the rendezvous. At twenty knots, it should only take five and a half hours.

  The XO called back up to the bridge and reported that Task Force 64 was composed of the fast battleships Washington and South Dakota, accompanied by just two destroyers, the Calhoun and the Morgan. Rear Admiral W. A. “Ching” Lee was the task force commander. Sluff told the XO that they would first divert to Tulagi to scrounge more fuel, and then head for the rendezvous. The exec acknowledged and said they’d send up a course recommendation for the drive over to Tulagi, which was an excellent harbor on Florida Island, visible across the sound.

  A battleship force, Sluff thought. The situation after last night’s engagement was bad enough that Halsey had cut loose two battleships from the Enterprise carrier group to come up to Guadalcanal to revisit last night’s debacle? It frustrated him that he didn’t know what was planned for tonight, but that was life in the fleet. The big bosses often left their destroyers completely in the dark as to what the immediate plan was, relying instead on voice radio orders telling them to go there or to do this as the tactical situation dictated. The destroyers’ principal mission was to “screen” the heavies. If they were in transit from point A to B, look and listen for lurking Jap subs. If an air raid developed, close the big guys and shoot down attacking torpedo bombers while trying not to get run over by the capital ships as they twisted and turned to get away from approaching ordnance. The good news was that the bosses rarely told the destroyermen how to do their jobs. The bad news was that the tin can sailors never quite knew what the hell was going on until it landed on them.

  The rain stopped suddenly, as it usually did. One minute, a deluge. The next, a steam bath as the hot steel decks evaporated all that moisture. Sluff looked out the porthole nearest his chair, which gave him a view of the dirt-strip Marine air base known as Cactus, which was the field’s radio call sign. He saw a veritable parade of aircraft taking off, one after another, with their landing lights flickering through the palm trees as the pilots tried to see through the clouds of dust each time one left, their massed engines sounding like a disturbed hornets’ nest in the light of dawn.

  The bosun’s mate of the watch opened the side doors that led out to the bridge wings, so Sluff got out of his chair, grabbed his binocs, and went out to take a look. Behind them was the San Francisco, not anchored, but not moving either. Helena, who’d sent them the flashing light message earlier, was not in sight. Two miles behind the Frisco was what looked like the Juneau. She and Atlanta were the same class, designated as antiaircraft light cruisers, mounting eight twin-barreled five-inch mounts, six in line, three forward, three aft, and two more on the hip. He was pretty sure he was looking at Juneau because he could see the sag the exec had been talking about. There was a hundred-foot-long black smudge along her port side where the torpedo had gone off. He realized that, if he could see that sag in her hull from here, she was not likely to make the trip back to safety at Nouméa, some six hundred sea miles away.

  He looked around for the Atlanta, but couldn’t find her. Then he saw a small swarm of boats congregating in an area closer to shore, where there seemed to be a cloud of steam, light smoke, and disturbed water, about one mile inshore of Juneau. Good grief, he thought, has she gone down? He looked hard to see what they were doing over there, but the lenses were so badly fogged he couldn’t make out anything. He stepped back in and called the signal bridge on the bitch-box.

  “Where’s Atlanta?” he demanded.

  “She went down about five minutes ago, Cap’n,” Chief Hawkins replied. “Just before that squall came in on us. Turned turtle, and then disappeared. They’d been taking people off for an hour, so…”

  “Damn,” he said. “Okay, so is Helena still within flashing-light range?”

  There was a moment’s pause, and then the chief said yes, although she w
as hull-down on the southeastern horizon.

  “Wilco his last visual signal to us, if you can raise her.”

  The chief acknowledged. “Wilco” was short for “I will comply,” which was a message that only a ship’s captain could send. “Wilco” told the boss that the captain had seen and understood the order, and that his ship was able to carry it out.

  Combat came up with a course for Tulagi Harbor, and the ship turned northeast to go find some fuel oil. As they came out from under the lee of Lunga Point, they saw the Cactus dive-bombers working over something large just beyond Savo Island. Whatever their target was, she was still capable of shooting back, as the sky filled with black puffs of AA smoke. It was good to know that the Japs had some cripples out there, too.

  The exec came up to the bridge from the Combat Information Center, two decks below. The ship was still at general quarters, and Sluff intended to keep the ship at GQ until they made it into Tulagi Harbor. It was only twelve miles from Guadalcanal’s Lunga Point to Tulagi, but he felt pretty exposed out there in the sound. The Jap air forces could come in at any time after sunrise, looking for the cripples, and he did not want to get caught napping if they did. General quarters meant the bridge was crowded with extra people: GQ phone-talkers, the officer of the deck and the junior officer of the deck, all the quartermasters, extra lookouts, with everyone dressed out in a steel helmet, a kapok life jacket, and personal battle-dressing medical kits. There wasn’t much noise as there wasn’t anything happening, yet, and he’d clamped down on unnecessary chitchat on the sound-powered phone circuits that spread throughout the ship like nerve bundles.

  “Officer of the deck, increase speed to twenty-seven knots,” Sluff ordered. “Broad weave.”