Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War

by The Winds Of War(Lit)

  'How about the California? I'm going there to take command of her."

  The lieutenant looked impressed. "Oh, really, sir? The California?

  I'm sure she's all right, sir. I don't recall any word about the California."

  This news enabled Victor Henry to sleep a little, though he tossed and muttered all night and got up well before dawn to pace the cool hotel veranda. The goony birds of Midway, big book-beaked creatures which he had heard about but never seen, were out by the dozens, walking the gray dunes. He saw them clumsily Ely, and land, and tumble on their heads. He watched a pair do a ridiculous mating dance on the beach as the sun came up, plopping their feet like a drunken old farm couple.

  Ordinarily Victor Henry would have seized the chance to inspect Midway, for it was a big installation, but today nothing could draw him out of sight of the flying boat, rising and falling on the swells and bumping the dock with dull booms.

  The four hours to Hawaii seemed like forty. Instead of melting away at its usual rate, time froze. Pug asked the steward for cards and played solitaire, but forgot he was playing. He just sat, enduring the passage of time like the grind of a dentist's drill, until at last the steward came and spoke to him, smiling. "Captain Connelly would like you to come up forward, sir." Ahead, through the pie;dglass, the green sunny humps of the Hawaiian Islands were showing over the horizon.

  "Nice?" said the pilot.

  "Prettiest sight I've seen," said Pug, "since my wife had a girl baby." 'Stick around, and we'll take a look at the fleet." Nobody aboard the Clipper knew what to expect. The rumors on Midway had varied from disaster to victory, with graphic details both ways. The Clipper came in from the north over the harbor and hooked around to descend. In these two passes, Victor Henry was struck sick by what his disbelieving eyes saw. All along the east side of Ford Island the battleships of the Pacific Fleet lay careened, broken, overturned, in the disorder of a child's toys in a bath. Hickam Field and the Navy's air base were broad dumps of blackened airplane fragments and collapsed burned hangar skeletons. Some dry docks held shattered tumbled-over ships. Pug desperately tried to pick out the California in the hideous smoky panorama. But at this altitude the ships with basket masts looked alike. Some of the inboard vessels appeared just slightly damaged. If only one was the California! "My God," Connelly said, looking around at Pug, his face drawn, what a shambles!"

  Speechless, Victor Henry nodded and sat on a folding seat, as the flying boat swooped low past a smashed gutted battleship with tripod masts, sunk to the level of its guns and resting on the bottom at a crazy angle.

  The Clipper threw up a curtain of spray that wiped out the heart-rending sight lourmy) s end.

  Passing several clanging, speeding Navy ambulances, Pug went from the customs shed at the Pan Am landing straight to the Cincpac building, where officers and sailors busily swarmed. They all wore unsure scared expressions, like people after a bad earthquake. A very handsome ensign in whites, at a desk that barred access to Cincpac's inner offices, looked incredulously at Pug, who wore wrinkled slacks and a seersucker jacket. The admiral? You mean Cincpac, sir? Admiral Kimmel?" "That's right," Pug said.

  "Sir, you don't really expect to see Admiral Kimmel today, do you?

  Shall I try his Assistant Chief of Staff?" "Give the admiral a message, please. I'm Captain Victor Henry. I've just come in on the Clipper with a personal letter for him from the marine commandant on Wake Island."

  The very handsome ensign gestured wearily at a chair and picked up a telephone. "You may have to wait all day, or a week, sir. You know what the situation is."

  "I have the general picture."

  A minute or so later, a pretty woman in a tailored blue suit looked through the double doors. "Captain Henry? This way, sir."

  The ensign stared at Victor Henry walking past him, as though the captain had sprouted another head. Along the corridor, the offices of Cincpac's senior staff stood open, and the sound of excited talk and typewriter clatter drifted out. A marine rigidly saluted before high doors decorated with four gold stars and a Navy seal, and labelled in gold comMANDER-IN-CHIEF, PACIFIC FLEET. Hey passed into a wood-panelled anteroom. The woman opened a heavy polished mahogany door.

  "Admiral, here's Captain Henry."

  "Hey, Pug! Great day, how long has it been?" Kimmel waved cheerily from the window, where he stood gazing out at the anchorage.

  He was dressed in faultless gold-buttoned whites, and looked tanned, fit, and altogether splendid. though much older and quite bald. "Have I seen you since you worked for me on the Maryland?" "I don't think so, sir."

  "Well, the years are dealing kindly with you! Sit you down, sit you down. Been flying high, haven't you? Observing in Roosia, and all thatch?" They shook, hands. Kimmel's voice was as hearty and winning as ever. this was an outstanding officer, Pug thought, who had been marked for success all the way and had gone all the way. Now, after twenty years of war exercises and drills against Orange, the fleet he commanded lay in sight beyond the window, wrecked in port by the Orange team in one quick real action. He appeared remarkably chipper, but for his eyes, which were reddened and somewhat unfocussed.

  "I know how little time you have, sir." Pug drew out of his breast pocket the letter from Wake Island.

  'Not at all. It's nice to see an old familiar face. You were a good gunnery officer, Pug. A good officer all around. Cigarette?"

  Kimmel offered him the pack, and lit one for himself. "Let's see.

  Don't you have a couple of boys in the service now?"

  "Yes, sir. One flies an SBD off the Enterprise, and-"

  "Well, fine!

  They didn't get the Enterprise or any other carrier, Pug, because the carriers at least followed my orders and were on one hundred percent alert. And the other lad?" "He's aboard the Dfish in Manila."

  "Manila, eh? They haven't hit the fleet at Manila yet, though I understand they've bombed the airfields. Tommy Hart's got some warning now, and he'll have no excuse. I only hope the Army Air people in Manila aren't as totally asleep as they were here! The Army was and is completey responsible for the safety of these islands and of this anchorage, Pug, including the definite responsibility of air patrol and radar search. Nothing on God's earth could be clearer than the way that is spelled out in the islands' defense instructions. The documents leave no doubt about that, fortunately. Well-you have something from Wake, don't you? Let's have a look-see. Were you there when they hit?"

  "Yes, sir." "How bad was it? As bad as this?" 'well, I'd say about two dozen bombers worked us over. Mainly they went after planes and air installations, Admiral. No ships were there to get bombed."

  CincPac shot a glance at Victor Henry, as though suspecting irony in his words. "Say, weren't you supposed to relieve Chip Walenstone in the California?" 'Yes, sir." Kimmel shook his head, and started to read the letter.

  Pug ventured to say, "How did the California make out, Admiral?"

  "Why, don't you know?"

  'No, sir. I came straight here from the Clipper."

  Not looking up, in the brisk tone of a report, Kimmel said, "She took two torpedoes to port and several bomb hits and near misses. One bomb penetrated below decks and the explosion started a big fire.

  She's down by the bow, Pug, and sinking. They're still counterflooding, so she may not capsize. She's electric drive, and the preliminary estimate"-he pulled toward him a sheet on his desk, and peered at it-"a year and a half out of action, possibly two. That's top secret of course. We're releasing no damage information."

  Cincpac finished the letter from Wake in a heavy silence, and tossed it on the desk.

  Victor Henry's voice trembled and he swallowed in mid-sentence.

  "Admiral, if I broke a lot of asses, including my own-ah, is there a chance I could put her back on the line in six months?"

  'Go out and see for yourself. It's hopeless, Pug. A salvage officer will relieve Chip." The tone was sympathetic, but Victor Henry felt it did Cincpac good to give someone else
catastrophic news.

  "Well, that's that, then, I guess."

  "You'll get another command."

  "The only thing is, Admiral, there aren't that many available battleships. Not any more."

  Again, the quick suspicious glance. It was hard to say anything in this context without seeming to needle the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Kimmel made a curt gesture at the letter Pug had brought. "Now there's a problem for you. Do we relieve Wake or not? It means exposing a carrier. We can't go in without air cover. He's asking for a pile of things I can't give him, for the simple reason that the Russians and the British have got the stuff. Mr. Roosevelt was a great Navy President until that European fracas started, Pug, but at that point he took his eye off the ball. Our real enemy's always been right here, here in the Pacific.

  This ocean is our nation's number one security problem. That's what he forgot. We never had the wherewithal to conduct proper patrols. I didn't want to rely on the Army, God knows, but equipment only has so much life in it, and what would we have had to fight the war with if we'd used up our planes in patrolling? Washington's been crying wolf about the japs for a year. We've had so many full alerts and air raid drills and surprise attack exercises and all, nobody can count them, but-well, the milk is spilled, the horse is stolen, but I think it's pretty clear that the President got too damned interested in the wrong enemy, the wrong ocean, and the wrong war."

  It gave Victor Henry a strange sensation, after Berlin and London and Moscow, and now this staggering personal disappointment, to hear from Admiral'Kinnnel the old unchanged Navy verbiage about the importance of the Pacific. "Well, Admiral, I know how busy you are," he said, though in fact he was struck by the quiet at the heart of the cataclysm, and by Kimmel's willingness to chat with a mere captain he did not know very well. Cincpac acted almost as lonesome as Mp Tollever had.

  "Yes, well, I do have a thing or two on my mind, and you've got to go about your business too. Nice seeing you, Pug," said Admiral Kimmel, in a sudden tone of dismissal.

  Janice answered Pug's telephone call and warmly urged him to come and stay at the house. Pug wanted a place where he could drop his bags, and get into uniform to go to the California. He drove out in a Navy car, took suitable if brief delight in his grandson, and accepted Janice's commiseration over his ship with a grunt. She offered to get his whites quickly pressed by the maid. In the spare room he opened his suitcase to pull out the crumpled uniform, and his letter to Pamela Tudsbury fell to the floor.

  In a dressing gown he glanced through the letter, which he had written during the long hop from Guam to Wake Island. It embarrassed him as one of his old love letters to Rhoda might have. There wasn't much love in this one, mostly a reasoned and accurate case for his living out his life as it was. The whole business with the English girl-romance, flirtation, love affair, whatever it had been-had begun to seem so far away after his stops in Manila and Guam, so dated, so unlike him, so utterly outside realities and possibilities! Pamela was a beautiful young woman, but odd. The best proof of her oddness was her very infatuation with him, a grizzled United States Navy workhorse with whom she had been thrown together a few times. Dour and repressed though he was, she had ignited a flash of romance in him in those last turbulent hours in Moscow.

  He had allowed himself to hope for a new life, and to half believe in it, in his elation over his orders to the California.

  And now-how finished it all was! California, Pamela, the Pacific Fleet, the honor of the United States, and-God alone knew-any hope for the civilized world.

  A knock at the door; the voice of the Chinese maid: "Your uniform, Captain?"

  'Thank you. Ah, that's a fine job. I appreciate it." He did not tear the letter up. He did not think he could write a better one. The situation of a man past fifty declining a young woman's love was awkward and ridiculous, and no words could help much. He slipped the envelope into his pocket, When he passed a mailbox on his way to the Navy Yard, he stopped and mailed it. The clank of the box was a sad sound in a sad day for Captain Victor Henry.

  Sadder yet was the trip to the California, through foul-smelling water so coated with black oil that the motor launch cut no wake, but chugged slimily along in smoky air, thumping like an icebreaker through a floating mass of black-smeared garbage and debris. The launch passed all along Battleship Row, for the California lay nearest the channel entrance. One by one Pug contemplated these gargantuan gray vessels he knew so well-he had served in several-fire-blackened, bomb-blasted, down by the head, down by the stern, sitting on the bottom, listing, or turned turtle. Grief and pain tore at him.

  He was a battleship man. Long, long ago he had passed up flight school. Navy air had seemed to him fine for reconnaissance, bombing support, and torpedo attacks, but not for the main striking arm. He had argued with the fly-fly boys that when war came, the thin-skinned carriers would lurk far from the action and would fuss at each other with bombings and dogfights, while the battleships with their big rifles came to grips and slugged it out for command of the sea. The fliers had asserted that one aerial bomb or torpedo could sink a battleship. He had retorted that a sixteen-inch steel plate wasn't exactly porcelain, and that a hundred guns firing at once might slightly mar the aim of a pilot flying a little tin crate.

  His natural conservative streak had been reinforced by his football experience. To him, carriers had been the fancy-Dan team with tricky runners and razzle-dazzle passers; batdewagons, the heavy solid team of chargers, who piled up the yardage straight through the line.

  These tough ground gainers usually became the champions. So he had thought-making the mistake of his life. He had been as wrong as a man could be, in the one crucial judgment of his profession.

  . Other battleship men might still find excuses for these tragic slaughtered dinosaurs that the launch was passing. For Pug Henry, facts governed- Each of these vessels was a giant engineering marvel, a floating colossus as cunningly put together as a lady's watch, capable of pulverizing a city. All true, all true. But if caught unawares, they could be knocked out by little tin flying crates. The evidence was before his eyes.

  The twenty-year argument was over.

  The setting sun cast a rosy glow on the canted superstructure of the California. She listed about seven degrees to port, spouting thick streams of filthy water in rhythmic pumped spurts. The smoke.-streaked, flameblistered, oil-smeared steel wall, leaning far over Pug's head as the motor launch drew up,to the accommodation ladder, gave him a dizzy, doomed feeling. The climb up the canted and partly submerged ladder was dizzying, too.

  What an arrival! In bad moments in Kuibyshev, on Siberian trains, in Tokyo streets, in the Manila club, Pug had cheered himself with pictures of his reception aboard this ship: side boys in white saluting, honor guard on parade, boatswain's pipe trilling, commanding officers shaking hands at the gangway, a sweet triumphant tour of a great ship shined up to holiday beauty and brilliance.for the eye of a new captain. Often he had played a minor part in such rituals. But to be the star, the center, the incoming 'old man"I It was worth a lifetime of the toughest drudgery.

  And now this! A vile corrupt stink hit Victor Henry in the face as he stepped on the sloping quarterdeck of the California, and said, "Request permission to come aboard, sir 'Permission granted, sir." The O.O.D's salute was smart, His sunburned boyish face attractive. He wore grease-streaked khakis, with gloves and a spyglass. Five corpses lay on the quarterdeck, under sheets stained with water and oil, their soggy black shoes projecting, their noses poking up the cloth, water trickling from them down the slanted deck toward the O.O.D's stand.

  The smell came partly from them, but it was a compound of reeks-seeping smoke, gasoline fumes from the pumps, burnt oil, burnt wood, burnt paper, burnt flesh, rotted food, broken waste lines; a rancid mildewy effluvium of disaster, of a great machine built to house human beings, broken and disintegrating. Unshaven sailors and officers in dirty clothing wandered about. Above the filth and mess and tangled hoses and scattered sh
ells and ammo boxes on the main deck, the superstructure jutted into the sunset sky, massive, clean, and undamaged. The long sixteen-inch guns were trained neatly fore and aft, newly and smoothly painted gray, tampions in place, turrets unscathed. The ship bristled with A.A. guns. The old Prune Barge was tantalizingly alive and afloatwounded, but still mighty, still grandiose.

  'I'm Captain Victor Henry."

  "Yes, sir? Oh! Yes, sir' Captain Wallenstone's been expecting you for quite a while." He snapped his fingers at a messenger in whites, and said with a winning sad grin, "It's awful that you should find the ship like this, sir. Benson, tell the C.O. that Captain Henry is here."

  "One moment. Where's your C.O.?"

  "Sir, he's with the salvage officers down in the forward engine room."

  'I know the way." Walking familiar decks and passageways that were weird in their fixed slant, climbing down tipped ladders, choking on smoke, gasoline, and oil fumes, and a gruesome smell of rotting meat, penetrating ever deeper into gloom and stench, realizing that these fume-filled spaces were explosive traps, Victor Henry got himself down to the forward engine room, where four officers huddled on a high catwalk, playing powerful hand lights on a sheet of oil-covered water.