Sentinels of Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Right,” the captain said. “XO, I guess we’ll need to make two calls. ServRon Ten is senior, so he’s first. Then we’ll go see Dutch Van Arnhem, my boss. He’ll understand. Mister Weems, thank you, and we’ll let you get going. Any hiccups, don’t hesitate to come straight to me or the XO here.”

  “Thank you, sir. One more thing—if any of your people can spare some blood, we’re in short supply on the hospital deck. It’s a bloody mess over there on the main island. If half the stories we’re hearing are true, it’s black-flag time over there.”

  Kerama Retto was about twelve miles away from Okinawa, but even now, here in the wardroom, we could all could hear the thump of bombs, the thud of artillery, and the occasional deep rumble of battleship salvos.

  There was a knock on the wardroom door. The quarterdeck messenger, a deck seaman, came in, escorting a chief petty officer. “Chief Winant from the EOD to see the captain, sir,” the messenger announced.

  “Sorry, Skipper,” the chief said. “I can come back if you’re in a meeting.”

  “Come on in, Chief,” the captain said. “We’re just swapping scuttlebutt here. Coffee’s over there, and then come have a seat.”

  The chief’s face didn’t look to be more than thirty, but his hair was entirely gray and he moved with the care of a man who does dangerous work, in his case explosive ordnance disposal. He got himself a cup, and sat down at the junior end of the wardroom table.

  “I heard a pretty interesting story this morning, Skipper,” the chief said. “Something about using a sea-anchor to pull a Jap 250 off your signal bridge?”

  “We did ask for EOD assist,” I said, “but apparently your team had bigger fish to fry down here.”

  The chief grunted. “You might say that, XO,” he said. “Yesterday was about as bad as the day the Franklin got it, and I was onboard for that ordeal.”

  Mention of the Franklin holocaust was jarring, even more so because I’d been serving in her for over eighteen months, and I’d never seen this chief’s face.

  “Yeah, we heard about that one,” the captain said. “Were there really seven hundred killed?”

  “They’ll be revising that number all the way home, sir,” the chief said. “We hear there are still parts of the ship they haven’t been able to get into yet. Personally, I think she’s headed for the scrapyard. Then yesterday, we went aboard the new Yorktown to defuse two five-hundred-pounders.”

  “Well, that certainly qualifies as a bigger fish,” the captain said. “Our gun boss had had a class on how aircraft bombs are armed.” He went on to tell the chief how they’d “safed” the bomb before yanking it off the 03 level. The chief smiled when he heard the story about the monkey shit.

  “You guys were lucky beyond belief,” he said. “Your gun boss was correct about the little propellers, but those bombs were never meant to be dropped. They were supposed to hit the ship at the same time as the kami.”

  “Which means?” I asked.

  “Which means those kamikaze bombs are fully armed in flight. The arming lanyard had been pulled out manually somewhere south of Kyushu. I can’t imagine why it didn’t go off, especially when you shocked it again with the sea anchor.”

  That revelation produced a chilled moment of silence in the wardroom.

  “But they said there was no firing pin visible on the front end,” I said.

  “There isn’t one for the kami bombs. They’re fired by setback. The pin’s inside a tube. The bomb experiences a gazillion-g deceleration when it hits the side of a ship. That little pin slams forward in its tube to complete an electrical circuit, which fires the initiator, which fires the main explosive charge, all in about one heartbeat. Like I said, lucky beyond belief.”

  “And if it happens again?” the captain asked.

  “Believe it or not, you’d have been better off bringing it down to us,” the chief said. “One of us has to get inside the safing and arming compartment of the bomb, get by the anti-intrusion traps, find and disable the battery bus and then immobilize that pin and any backup exploders. Not for the faint of heart, gentlemen.”

  “I’ll pass that on, Chief,” the captain said. “On the other hand, would you care to go back to the picket line with us?”

  “The radar picket line, Captain? Begging your pardon, sir, but hell, no. That’s really dangerous duty.”

  We all laughed and then set about our day. Marty will shit a brick when I tell him the truth about his great monkey-shit gambit, I thought.

  I was grudgingly getting used to the tin can Navy and its propensity to wing it when something had to be done and done right now. That was a trait I’d brought to my first couple of assignments, and more than once it had put me across the breakers with my department head. In the prewar cruiser Navy, appearances were everything, and junior officer initiative not much in demand. It took me some time to conform, and I think my own upbringing had a lot to do with that. My father was one of those parents who let their kids learn the hard way if the opportunity presented itself. He was an intellectual, somewhat aloof, deeply immersed in his work, about which I had no inkling while I was growing up. My mother—very pretty, very sweet, they never saw her coming—would sit down with me to analyze what I’d done to get in so much trouble as a child, and then encourage me to do better the next time but never to quit trying out new things. Now, as a junior lieutenant commander, I was exec in a destroyer, and I knew they’d be very proud. If I lived to tell the tale.

  * * *

  The next morning we sailed out of the fleet anchorage at just past sunrise. The tender repair people had done an amazing job of reconstructing the ship’s radar waveguide and reinforcing the mast’s foundations. Malloy’s crew had done an equally amazing job of “midnight requisitioning” aboard the destroyer tender. As we reached the entrance to the anchorage I was surprised to see two large aircraft carriers anchored close by, one of them showing clear signs of having experienced a large fire on her port side aft. Landing craft and small boats were shuttling between a heavily laden ammunition ship and the carriers, while up on the flight decks, fighters were turning up in the still morning air. Columns of smoke in the distance indicated that another horrible day was well under way over on Okinawa Shima.

  Motivated by tales of dawn kamikaze attacks on the anchored ships, the captain ordered 25 knots as soon as we cleared the anchorage and headed back northwest. We were bound to a new vacant radar picket station, forty-five miles north and west, named Three-Dog. We had gone out in a modified general quarters condition, with all guns and CIC stations manned but the ship not yet buttoned up. As Okinawa’s smoking ridges subsided beneath the southeastern horizon, the captain summoned me out to the bridge.

  “Wanted to debrief you on my call with Commodore McMichaels,” he said when I came out from Combat. Captain McMichaels was a senior four-striper, called commodore because he commanded a squadron of ships, in his case, the ships of Service Squadron Ten. The service squadrons had been one of Chester Nimitz’s brilliant operational ideas: Gather together as many repair ships, ammunition ships, refrigerated food freighters, oil tankers, gasoline tankers, bulk cargo ships, fleet salvage tugs, and hospital ships, plus all the utility boats, landing craft, floating dry docks, harbor patrol craft, barges, and any other kind of floating support asset that you could find, collect them into a relatively safe anchorage, and thereby create an instant naval base. Ideally they could find an anchorage that was distant enough to be safe from Jap bombers but close enough that damaged ships could get there, one way or another, get fixed, and get back into the fight. If anyone knew what was really going on with the current campaign, in this case, Okinawa, it was the commodore of the service squadron supporting the campaign. The only fly in the ointment for the floating base at Kerama Retto was the fact that they’d failed to stay out of range of Jap bombers. On the other hand, the Navy was discovering what it was going to be like when we hit the main islands of Japan.

  The captain told me that our losses were mount
ing, both out in the main fleet formations and, of course, on the picket line. From the carriers to the amphibious landing craft, the body count was climbing rapidly, all because of the kamikaze tactic. We’d seen that at close hand.

  I asked the captain if the big bosses were mad at us for trying to help Waltham.

  “I’m not sure they—and I’m talking about the flag officers at Spruance’s level—even know we exist,” the captain said. “Okinawa has turned into a meat grinder of the worst kind. The Japs know they can’t prevail, so they’re bent on killing as many Americans as they can before they themselves are all dead. He was telling me about incidents where the Japs had convinced local civilians that our soldiers were going to eat them, and then made them jump off of cliffs to avoid capture. Absolute insanity. They’re—”

  At that moment one of the lookouts called in from the bridge wing that something had happened behind us. As the captain and I went out to see what he was talking about, a deep rumble overtook the ship from the direction of Kerama Retto and we saw an enormous black cloud mushrooming up over the horizon. More fiery explosions followed beneath the initial cloud, pushing whitish yellow fireballs and smoke trails in every direction. It sounded, and looked, like a volcano was erupting behind us. The entire bridge watch team and the gun crews out on deck were all staring aft.

  “Something got that ammo ship,” the captain said softly.

  “Which we just passed at no more than five hundred yards,” I said. There was another, even bigger explosion, and now the entire southeastern horizon was being enveloped by smoke from the blast.

  “Combat reports ETA to picket station is ten fifteen,” a talker announced.

  “Not quite two hours,” I said, looking at my watch. “I think it’s time to button up and get ready for own brand of insanity.”

  “Air search working?”

  “Yes, sir, better than before, actually. We don’t have any CAP assigned yet, but they should be up soon, unless of course, that”—I pointed toward the continuing fountain of fire filling the sky behind us—“upsets the flight schedules.”

  “God help any ships that were close to that ammo ship,” the officer of the deck said.

  The captain looked at me. We both knew that every one of the small boats, lighters, and landing craft doing the shuttle work between the ammo ship and the two carriers were already part of that enormous cloud behind us. The two carriers had been parked at least a mile away from the ammo ship, but that was still within range of falling projectiles, rockets, and even bombs that had gone up in the initial explosion. The bitch-box lit up.

  “Bridge, Combat, many bogeys, two niner zero, range forty-nine miles and closing.”

  “Okay, XO, lock her down and load the guns.”

  I went back into the CIC as the sounds of hatches slamming down rang out throughout the ship when the alarm sounded. The officer of the deck put Malloy into the familiar broad weave; we weren’t on station yet, but the air-search radar was doing what it was supposed to do, and we had already sent the warning down to the fleet formations off Okinawa and in the Kerama Retto anchorage. Two other picket ships had also detected the incoming raid, which appeared to have originated in Formosa.

  I took a seat at the head of the dead-reckoning tracer table. I signaled one of the Freddies over on the air-search radar side to come over. “Still no CAP?” I asked.

  “No, sir,” the jay-gee answered, “but the ready deck is launching. Some big deal happened down in the anchorage and that’s got the command net tied up.”

  “You have no idea,” I said. I wondered if those two carriers were supposed to have left the anchorage already to provide air support. Then I relaxed: There were ten big-deck carriers assigned to support the Okinawa invasion.

  “Bogeys dispersing,” the air-search radar reported. “Range thirty-seven miles and still inbound. Looks like some are coming for the picket line.”

  “Wonderful,” I muttered. Except we weren’t yet on the picket line. We were still south of it. Maybe they’d go by us. I almost suggested to the captain that we slow down. The plotters around the DRT exchanged fearful looks. I leaned over to the bitch-box and called the bridge. “Captain, Combat. They’re definitely splitting up. Thirty-seven miles out. Looks like a couple of them are trying to get east of us. We’re going to have some business here shortly.”

  For a moment, there was no reply. Then the officer of the deck acknowledged my warning, followed by something odd: “X1JV.”

  I blinked. X1JV referred to the sound-powered phone circuit used usually for administrative matters—calls between offices, not tactical stations. The Malloy, like all destroyers, was equipped with several sound-powered phone circuits. The advantage of sound-powered phones was that they did not require electricity, only connectivity. If the ship lost all electrical power, sound-powered phones still worked. The circuits all had names, of course. The JC was the gunnery control circuit. The JA was the combat action circuit. The 1JV was maneuvering. The JX was for communications. The JL was for lookouts. The X1JV connected offices and central stations like the quarterdeck, the bridge, the engineering log room, and Combat.

  I reached down underneath the DRT plotting table and turned the handle on a large barrel switch to X1JV. That connected the handset I held in my hands to that particular circuit. Then I selected the bridge on a second switch and cranked the handle. The officer of the deck picked up immediately.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Captain went below,” the OOD said.

  “Are you shitting me?” I asked before I had time to think. “Head call, or what?”

  The OOD blew out a long breath. “He didn’t say, XO. He just left the bridge and went down the ladder. I’m guessing he’s in his inport cabin.”

  “Five, maybe six bogeys inbound,” the air-search radar operator announced. “Constant bearing, decreasing range. Director fifty-one in acquisition mode.”

  I was stunned. The captain had left the bridge with a raid inbound? What in the world—

  “XO, recommend coming to course zero two zero to bring all guns to bear,” the CIC watch officer said. “Range is twenty-six miles, constant bearing, target video is in and out.”

  That meant the Jap planes were descending. I wondered for a brief moment how the hell the Japs knew where we were, and then remembered: They were probably homing in on Malloy’s own air-search radar beam. I hit the talk-switch on the bitch-box.

  “Officer of the Deck, take Combat’s course recommendations until further notice. Increase speed to twenty-seven knots.”

  “Bridge, aye!”

  I then reached for the barrel switch again, turning it to the JC circuit, selected the main battery gun director station, and cranked the call handle. “Sky One,” the gun boss responded.

  “Marty, we’ve got a six-pack inbound. I think they’re homing in on our air-search radar beam, so I’m gonna take the radar down and do a sidestep. The big raid’s been reported, but we have no CAP, so I’m not gonna make it easy for ’em.”

  “We’re gonna hide, XO?”

  “We’re gonna try. It’s visual from here out. Knock ’em dead, Marty.”

  “Sky One, aye.”

  I turned to the CIC watch officer. “Take down the air search. Now!”

  There was a moment of hesitation, but then they jumped to it. I called the OOD on the bitch-box. “Come left, head three three zero at maximum speed. Tell main control to make no smoke.”

  “Bridge, aye.”

  We all felt the ship thrumming to the pulse of her twin screws. The lighting fixtures began to shake, and the deckplates in CIC were trembling as the snipes down in the engine-room holes poured it on.

  Twenty-something miles, I thought. Forty thousand yards. The five-inch could begin to do effective business at eighteen thousand yards, or nine miles. The Jap planes were descending from eighteen, maybe twenty thousand feet. Now they’d lost their homer bearings. The sky outside was clear but a bit hazy. No cloud cover. We might just get a
way.

  The wake. They’d see the wake, just like those American carrier bombers at Midway had seen that lone Jap destroyer’s wake, pointing directly at the carrier formation they’d been so desperately looking for.

  “Bridge, Combat. Slow to fifteen knots,” I ordered. “Broad weave around base course three three zero.”

  “Bridge, aye,” the OOD responded.

  I desperately wanted to go out to the bridge so I could see what was developing, but my GQ station was officially in Combat, the nerve center. This was where I belonged. In a few minutes, the lookouts would see the incoming Japs visually, and then it would turn into a gunnery exercise. Five-inch, forties, twenties, and nothing for the command to do but watch.

  Well, not quite. When the kamikaze was finally visible to the naked eye, the ship had to be maneuvered. You never pointed the long axis at the kami—that gave him three hundred and fifty feet of ship to hit. You turned, presenting the side—that gave him thirty-six feet to hit and all the gun barrels to greet him. Then you’d twist and turn as the pilots tried to line up a better attack position.

  I found myself biting my lip as the noise level went up in Combat. Search sector orders were going out to the lookouts: Split the search. High and low. That’s the way the Japs would attack.

  The gun teams knew their business. They also knew what would happen if they got it wrong. By this stage of the war, Malloy was a well-oiled machine—But the captain was a damned important part of that machine, and he was … where?

  More phone-talkers were making reports, sounding like altar boys at the beginning of Mass. I could hear the big gun director overhead turning on its roller path as the pointer searched through his optics for incoming black dots in the sky.

  What should I do—right now, what should I do? Go find the captain, roust him out of wherever he was hiding, if that’s indeed what he was doing? I could hardly believe that was what was happening, but …

  The JC talker was tugging on my sleeve. Something about asking for the air-search radar to come back up. “Make it so,” I responded, almost reflexively. The gun director’s radar needed a cue from the larger, search radar as to where to look. My gambit to remove the beacon of their search beam hadn’t worked.