by Brett Ashton
Vengeance: Hatred and Honor
Brett Ashton
This is an action filled World War Two historical fiction novel about Jacob Scott Williams, the assistant gun director on the battleship Oklahoma when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
The story begins with a news reporter for a radio station getting the assignment to interview a retired Navy admiral who is celebrating his one hundredth birthday. The conversation rapidly turns to the memories of William’s participation in WW2, when he accepted the surrender of a Japanese submarine at the end of the war. From there he continues to relate the major events in his experience which led him to that point.
The action starts with LCDR Williams having a meeting with the junior officers under his command in the officer’s wardroom on the morning of December 7th, when the first torpedo strikes the ship. Ten minutes later he is swimming for his life in Pearl Harbor as the battleship Arizona blows up and his own ship rolls over and dies.
Consumed by thoughts of revenge, his deepest desire is to kill as many Japanese as he can before the war is over. He accepts a transfer to the battleship North Carolina taking the position as the Air Defense Officer. Several years after that he receives command of a light cruiser called the Buffalo. During his tours of duty on each of these ships he witnesses several torpedo attacks, air attacks, a submarine attack and one of the first organized Kamikaze attacks of the war. Each battle he faces he loses more of his shipmates and several times faces the possibility of his own death.
But his one-on-one confrontation with the deadliest of his enemies proves more shocking and life-changing than all his battles and tragedies combined. This man’s journey from hatred to honor is one that will strike directly at the heart of any human being.
Brett Ashton
VENGEANCE
Hatred and Honor
Because I Can
Introduction
After writing the original manuscript and passing it out to various friends and family for their opinions, some things came to my attention that I thought I needed to address.
The first is that the main character uses some very harsh language in describing the Japanese. You must keep in mind that this story takes place during World War II, and that kind of talk was to be expected at the time. This is not a book about battleships or the war; it is a book about hatred. Without the hatred, I simply would not have much of a story.
If this bothers you, I urge you to consider that in the navy in those days, the word “Nip,” for example, would have been surrounded by language that would have made a prostitute blush. It would have also been preceded and followed by large, heavy projectiles loaded with high explosives that would have caused a most painful and gruesome death should any of them hit you or explode near you.
I find it a striking commentary on our society that someone would notice the racial slurs and be upset about them but not be upset about the fact that we were killing people. Think about that for a second. If you were a Japanese pilot dive-bombing an American battleship, would you be more offended by the American sailors calling you bad names or the fact that twenty-five thousand rounds per minute of antiaircraft ammunition were being sent in your general direction?
But that was then, and this is now, and I do understand our society well enough to know which way the wind blows. And I do get it that some people are going to be offended by the main character’s language. If you are one of those people, I can only beg your indulgence until the end of the book. You will like how it turns out. I personally think that if the outcome of wars were determined by who could insult somebody else the worst and the high explosives were kept to ourselves, the world would be a much happier place.
The second and most obvious of these things was that when I said “battleship,” I meant something entirely different than what people who have no military experience mean when they say “battleship.” After talking about this with a few people, I came to the realization that what they mean is “any ship in the navy that fights, whether big or small,” which is not at all what one is. A battleship is a very specific thing. The big guns on one of these ships would throw a 2,700-pound projectile (about the weight of a Volkswagen) twenty-two miles. At a much closer range, that projectile would punch right through thirty inches of steel.
The first clue on this was that while I was watching some documentaries on World War II, I noticed that the men who served on these ships always spoke of them in a certain way. After listening for a while I realized they have a reverence for them. I began to wonder about this, and after doing a brief survey of the people I knew, I began to understand that people in general don’t know what a large role the battleship played in history in the formation of the modern world.
Thousands of years ago, man discovered that he could move large amounts of goods over water. Upon doing so, he became able to communicate and trade with other people in other parts of the world. And so the formation of nations was largely built on these trade routes, which became known as shipping lanes.
For as long as men have been able to move goods and wealth over water, they have desired to control the shipping lanes. If you controlled the shipping lanes, you controlled the wealth and fate of nations. Entire societies were made or destroyed by the movement over these lanes, which resulted in men who would desire power or wealth becoming very interested in them.
The merchants moving along the shipping lanes feared the pirates who clung closely to them in attempts to try and steal the wealth. The merchants employed navies to defend them from the pirates. As nations grew, kings and queens sent huge armadas to sea to protect them from pirates and the kings and queens of other nations because their kingdoms rested upon the strength of their rule of the sea. Those who would rule the world had to rule the seas, for if you ruled the seas, you could control anything the oceans touched. If you had a mighty navy, you were a superpower. If you didn’t, you were a nobody.
Somewhere around the fourteenth century, men discovered guns, and a new era of naval combat began. Instead of ramming or trying to throw fire at the enemy’s ships, they could shoot at each other.
They would square off in the open seas and slug it out, ship to ship. On each of them were the most powerful weapons their country could devise, directly facing the most powerful weapons their enemies could devise. Before long, the guns got bigger. Armor was invented to repel the bigger guns. Powerful engines were invented that replaced the sails. Soon, ships were made of steel instead of wood. Again, the guns got bigger, and the armor got thicker and would repel shots fired from bigger guns. Soon, more powerful engines had to be made to move all of the armor and guns.
From the fourteenth century until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the world discovered it was impossible to defend a ship from a large assault of relatively inexpensive airplanes, naval combat had remained basically unchanged: maneuver swiftly to deliver the hardest punch. Maneuver swiftly to evade the hard punches. And be able to take the hardest punches while still being able to deliver the hardest punches. No guided missiles, no airplanes dropping bombs, no guided torpedoes, and radar still in its infancy. Ship to ship and man to man, often in direct line of sight, was how combat was conducted, and he who was the best lived to fight another day while the other spent infinity in Davy Jones’s Locker.
The battleship was the culmination of those efforts. They were the queens of the sea and the most powerful weapons on Earth for more than ninety years.
The battleship sailors were an elite corps because through their hands, those who would rule the world would exercise their power. They, as battleship sailors, were the mightiest of the mighty and the proudest of the proud. They were the men who would dare to wield the Hammer of Thor.
/> The ones who are still living are the last of their kind.
The Interview
As the junior reporter at the local talk radio station, I usually get assigned by the program director to do a lot of “interesting” interviews for the entertainment and local interest segments of the news. An example of such an assignment usually comes in the form of a Post-it note on my desk or on my computer monitor saying, “Easter coming up—please go to the mall, find the Easter Bunny, and interview him for the news department next week.” So I spend a lot of time chasing down the people behind various fund-raising events, the local dogcatcher, the winner of the Best Hog Contest at the county fair, some of the more colorful homeless people, and at least once a year, even the venerable department store Santa Claus falls prey to my microphone.
So I wasn’t surprised when returning from just such an assignment—an important interview with a woman who swears she saw Jesus in a taco salad (or something like that)—to find another Post-it stuck in the middle of my monitor reading, “Please interview Jacob S. Williams—new centenarian, prior to his birthday, November 29.” “Wow,” I said out loud, “I get to do an interview with an old man.” Of course there were several chuckles from my nearby coworkers, who had learned to find amusement in the sometimes extraordinary nature of my assignments.
“A very old man at that,” I thought as I dutifully went about doing some basic research. “Centenarian, let’s see: that’s a hundred. When this man was born, what was going on in the world? Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States. The airplane was invented just three years earlier. The Panama Canal had not yet been built. This man may have witnessed Halley’s Comet, twice, if he can even remember it. This was before the Great Depression, before the Dust Bowl, before the Titanic sank or the Hindenburg blew up, before radio, television, and even movie theaters. My God! What did these people even do with all of their time?”
Just as I was thinking that he was born before World War II, a fairly good idea began to hatch in my mind. It was November the fifteenth, 2006. December the seventh was right around the corner. I was sure I would find the inevitable Post-it stuck to my monitor saying something like, “Please find World War II survivor and interview for a show on the sixty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor.”
Brilliant! I can do both interviews at the same time. A little cut-and-paste in the editing room, along with some clever questioning, and I am set for an easy day of work!
“Let’s see,” I thought. “He was born November 29, 1906, so on December 7, 1941, he would have been thirty-five. Perfect; now, if only the old man can remember that far back, then I’ve got the show all wrapped up and on the road.
“Now I just have to find out where the old guy lives and hope he doesn’t die before I get there. I sure don’t want to spend the day hanging around some stinky old nursing home, but for an easy day of work, it may be worth it.”
I began searching for Jacob Williams at all the local nursing homes, but after half a day’s work, the closest I got to him was, “Yes, the name sounds familiar, but he isn’t one of the residents here.” I was getting a little frustrated.
“Sounds familiar? What in the ever living hell does that mean? Either he is there, or he is not,” I thought. “Where else would you go to find a one-hundred-year-old man?” I was sure he wasn’t out playing tennis at the club anywhere. So maybe he was in one of the hospitals. Duplicating my efforts with the nursing homes, I started calling the local hospitals. Upon inquiring at the fourth hospital, I got an unusual question.
“Do you mean the Jacob Williams?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said slowly, a little confused because of the extra emphasis on the word the. “But I didn’t honestly know that there was a the Jacob Williams.”
“Yes,” responded the young-sounding female voice on the other end of the phone, “he has donated a large amount of money to the veterans, cancer patients, and children in the hospital. Likes to stop by on occasion. Says he wants to make sure his money is well spent. He spends lots of time in the rooms talking to patients. Always leaves them smiling. I hope he isn’t ill or anything; really, he’s one of the coolest people I’ve ever met.”
This was an unexpected turn in my concept of this man, to say the least.
Beginning to grow suspicious, I had to ask, “The Jacob Williams that you are talking about, how old is he?”
“Oh, I don’t know exactly; mid-to-late nineties, I think; why?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Thanks for your help. I’m sure he’s fine. Have a good day.”
I was feeling a little flustered as I hung up the phone. Just finding this man was taking up the easy day of work I thought I was going to get earlier.
“One of the coolest people I’ve ever met…Always leaves them smiling.” Yes, that’s what she said. What does this guy do? Teach them how to play shuffleboard with a walker or from a wheelchair while they spoon-feed him poached eggs and change his diapers?
“Mid-to-late nineties…” she said. It had to be him. It had to be the right guy.
It was then I noticed the smirks and grins on several of the coworkers I share my office space with. “One of these days, I swear, I will have an office with walls,” I thought.
“What?” I said.
Then Joyce, the woman who works in advertising, who also occupies the desk directly across from me, looked over her reading glasses and said, “Maybe you should ask Scott who Jacob Williams is.”
“Why not?” I thought. “He is the one who left me the Post-it note asking me to interview this Williams guy.”
So off I went to the end of the room where there was an office door with the large gold capital letters on it that said, “SCOTT MURPHY—PROGRAM DIRECTOR.” I knocked.
“Come on in,” replied the voice on the other side of the door. “Ah, Don! How can I help you?” he said with a smile after I had opened the door and poked my head in.
Scott was one of the best people you could work for. In spite of some of the assignments he kept giving me, he was the friendliest person I’ve ever known. He was in his early thirties, totally honest, trustworthy, and always looked you in the eye, which made the striking blueness of his own really stand out. There were pictures of his wife and kids on his desk. Beautiful family, the whole bit.
“Yeah, Scott, about this interview with this centenarian you gave me to do. Joyce seems to think you may know how to contact him. I’ve called all the nursing homes and most of the hospitals in the city and can’t seem to get a lead on where he might be or how to contact him.”
“Oh, I didn’t give you his address?” Scott replied. “I’m sorry. Boy is my face red. Come in, sit down.”
“No, sir, you didn’t. But who is he? He seems to have some notoriety at the hospital.”
“Jacob Scott Williams is my great-grandfather,” Scott said as he opened the address book on his computer. “I got my first name from his middle name. I’d like to try to pattern my life from his; sort of the chip off the, chip off the, chip off the old block, as I like to say. What an inspiration, and a lot to live up to. He made a lot of money in the early days of electronics. Williams Industries, Inc. Owns a lot of interest in this station, as a matter of fact. As well as owning some small portion of about half the businesses in town. At least that’s the way it seems. He retired decades ago.
“He’s a totally silent partner, so if you’re thinking that’s how I got this job,” he added with a big grin, “get it out of your mind. I know exactly what he would say: ‘Son, I wouldn’t do you the disservice. The only opportunities worth taking are the ones you make for yourself.’ He’s the last person in the world who would do the ‘family favorites’ thing.”
About then, the printer finished spitting out the name, address, and phone number of Jacob Scott Williams, along with a map and specific instructions on how to get there.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Don?”
“No, sir,” I said, taking the information and exiting the o
ffice. “Thank you.”
Scott’s face wasn’t the only one that was red.
I had nothing else to do but dial the number on the paper Scott had just handed me and try to set up a time and date that I could talk to him.
“Eight in the morning tomorrow will be fine,” I said to the voice of the older woman on the other end of the line. “Yes, I will be prompt,” I replied to her comment that the “Admiral” doesn’t like to be kept waiting.
“Thank you, have a nice day. Goodbye,” she said in a very cheerful voice before she hung up the phone.
“Admiral? Admiral?” Yes, that is what she said. Then I realized, no longer having any idea what to expect and being totally off my guard and in a mild state of shock, that I was talking to myself out loud.
As I grabbed my microphone and recorder, making sure I had plenty of extra time on it, I couldn’t help noticing some snickering from the other office workers who were obviously having somewhat of a joke at my expense. “Yeah, you got me,” I said, realizing they had known all along. Grabbing my jacket and keys, I headed out the door at the end of my “easy” day’s work. I’d have to get up early in the morning and head straight to the Admiral’s place rather then come into the radio station.
Finding the Admiral’s place the next day was not difficult, given the directions his great-grandson gave me, but it did take awhile to get there. During that time, I tried my best to keep hope alive that this interview would turn out to be a good thing. But any hope of an easy day of work was rapidly becoming a distant memory. I’d already spent most of it in my search for this guy the day before. My consolation prize was that a retired admiral might know something more than the average veteran about the attack at Pearl Harbor. That is, if the old geezer could remember anything about anything at all. And what a hundred-year-old man would be doing that he would be so sensitive to being kept waiting, entirely mystified me.
