* * *
“You left station?” the commodore asked.
“I did,” I said. “I wasn’t just going to sit there and wait for that bastard to collect a new set of kamis and send them at us. Think of it this way, Commodore: The kamis are coming out of Kyushu in southern Japan and Formosa. That’s a long trip, especially at night. They get there, with just enough gas to do their one-way mission, expecting to check in with a controller. He’s not there. Now what? Turn south in the darkness and hope to find something? More likely they ran out of fuel and died in the ocean. Besides, there was no fleet formation to warn. Just us targets. We went balls-to-the-wall for ninety minutes, lit off the radar, found that bastard, killed him, then hustled back to station.”
He gave me a long, authoritative look, which then wilted. “Right,” he said. “This will stay between us Injuns. But explain something: Why didn’t he see you coming?”
“I don’t think they have an active radar,” I said. “I think they’ve been homing in on our air-search radar beams. They just listen, do a direction-find on our emissions, and establish a bearing. They don’t need a range—they know we’re forty, fifty miles above Okinawa. So they tell the kamis to fly that bearing and look out the window. We turned all our electronics off and then ran up the last known bearing of the controller aircraft. When we lit off again, there he was, fat, dumb, and happy until we killed his ass. After that, no more problems in our sector.”
“How’d you get the first three?”
“We assumed they were coming directly from the controller aircraft, so I had the five-inch open a hit-the-notch barrage fire on that bearing, pretty close to the surface. Had no idea there would be four aircraft, but they flew right into it. All but one.”
The commodore looked at me. “Pretty damn good,” he said. “You’ve been around guns, haven’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I gave him a quick synopsis of my naval career. “And now I need a five-inch mount.”
“Fresh out of those,” he said. “Had one, actually, but it just sank. Besides, there’s no way we could do an installation and a battery alignment out here, swinging on the hook. But I think we can get you a quad forty. They’re self-contained mounts and all they need is 440 volts. Better than nothing.”
I nodded. One could never have too many quad forties. “We are going back, then?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “We’re down to three radar pickets, not including Malloy. I think last night convinced even the fleet staff that they need to beef up the CAP protection, especially with this radar-controlled tactic.”
“How’s it going ashore?”
“Backward,” he said matter-of-factly. “Three days ago the casualties outnumbered the total number of reserves on the island. That’s not sustainable.”
“We have to win it, eventually. Their forces aren’t getting any bigger.”
He sat back and lit up a cigarette. “We will take Okinawa,” he said. “Like you said, we can resupply, they can only hunker down and die. If it were me, I’d stabilize the front lines and starve them out.”
“So why aren’t we doing that?”
“There’s a timetable for the invasion of the main islands. We need the Okinawa airfields so that fighters can go all the way with the bombers coming out of other bases. They’re already flying some missions from the northern part of the island, but we need the whole thing.”
I thought about that. “If Okinawa is this hard, what’s Japan itself going to be like?”
“This, times ten,” he said. “God, it’s been a lousy day. I need a drink. Fancy a whisky?”
I very much did. He broke out a bottle from his desk safe and poured a generous measure. We then went through some of the admin details of getting replacements for my losses and the tender’s plan for craning over a quad-forty mount the next day.
Finally I mustered up the courage to ask him about the captain.
He sighed. “Pudge is on the way back to the States, and that’s going to take a while. My doctor saw him before he went ashore, to be lifted back to Guam.”
“And?”
“Gone,” he said. “No one home. Sits there with a bemused expression on his face, but there’s no one home. Doc says he might come out of it, maybe when he’s back with his wife and family, stateside. But…”
Now I wanted another drink. Hell, I wanted the whole bottle.
“Someone coming in to replace him?” I asked.
“Ready to be relieved, XO?”
“God, yes, sir.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, young man. In fact—” He got up and went to his desk. He picked up a piece of paper and a small black cardboard box. He stood in front of me and gestured for me to stand.
“I have here your promotion to full commander, date of rank from the day you assumed command of Malloy, signed by Bull Halsey himself. Take those collar devices off.”
In a bit of a daze, I reached up and unpinned the gold-colored lieutenant-commander oak leaves from my shirt collar points. He pinned on the silver oak leaves of a full commander. He shook my hand and then went into the bedroom area of his cabin, returning with an officer’s cap with scrambled eggs.
“This is my spare,” he said. “You can replace it when, and if, we both survive this ungodly mess. In the meantime, you are now the commanding officer of USS Malloy. In other words, there’s no one coming to replace Pudge.”
“Couldn’t find any volunteers?” I asked with as straight a face as I could.
He glared and then laughed. We both laughed. It was all we could do. I told him about the little parody around the wardroom table.
“Will I get an exec?” I asked.
“We’ll try,” he said. Then we both felt a bump as something came alongside the tender with perhaps a little more force than necessary. Malloy was back alongside.
“That would be Marty Randolph,” I said. “He will never make a ship handler.”
“Then go train him some more,” he said. “Captain.”
I blew out a long breath. Captain.
“And for God’s sake, stay alive, please. I’m supposed to be a destroyer squadron commodore, but at this rate, I’m down to a division minus.”
“We have a unit commander’s cabin in Malloy,” I said. “This Injun right here wouldn’t mind a little adult supervision.”
“And I’d be honored to come aboard, Connie, but Halsey has other ideas. The theory is that I can do more good down here than I can do floating around up there. Okinawa isn’t just an Army-Marine versus dug-in Japs slog anymore. It’s mostly about logistics: fuel, bullets, bombs, and beans. The Japs are down to what they had stashed in their tunnels when we got here. We, on the other hand, can keep bringing more stuff to the fight. That’s probably not evident to the soldier in his foxhole, but it’s certainly evident to Imperial Army HQ back in Tokyo. Beans, bullets, and replacements are what’s going to win this thing. That tells me that the kamikaze war is going to intensify.”
“Someone needs to tell the Army to win it soon,” I said. “We’re fresh out of foxholes up there on the picket line.”
NINE
The crew of a destroyer is a perceptive bunch. The moment the quarterdeck OOD, Ensign McCarthy, spied my brass hat and those silver oak leaves, he said something to the petty officer of the watch. A few seconds later, there were four bells and the words “Malloy, arriving” echoing over the ship’s topside speakers. That single announcement changed everything, as I knew it would. I was no longer XO. I was Malloy.
I sent for Jimmy Enright and told him to assemble all officers in the wardroom, where I briefed them on what had happened.
“Look,” I said, “this is kind of unusual. The aviators fleet their execs up to command in their squadrons all the time. If you’re an aviator, being selected for XO means you’re going to become the CO. The destroyer force rarely does this, but these are unusual times.” I stopped, tried some coffee. I was a full commander after only ten years in the Navy. Somebody either
thought very highly of me or realized that I probably wouldn’t survive to present a problem later, when regular promotion cycles returned.
“The battle for Okinawa is going … badly. That’s the only word for it. Our guys are having to dig them out of their rat holes Jap by Jap, cave by cave. Our guys want to stay alive. Their guys want to die with honor for some so-called emperor who started all this shit. Our guys have resorted to using flamethrowers instead of rifles. It’s that bad.”
“Sounds like the picket line,” Jimmy Enright said.
“Yes, it does,” I said. “Last night, well, I guess we were lucky, if you can call it that. Four Vals coming in under radar control. Not one—four. We got three of them, but if we hadn’t gone after that controller aircraft, I’m not sure we’d be here today.”
“That was your idea, XO,” Marty said. “Sorry, sir. Captain.”
I think that was when it really hit me. I wasn’t XO anymore. I really was the owner.
“There are supposedly eight picket stations,” I said. “Last night we had six ships. Now we have only four tin cans left to fill them. You all saw what happened to Billingham today.”
I looked out at the ring of extremely sober faces around the wardroom table.
“That was heartbreaking,” I said. “There’s no other word for it. But we’ll win this battle, if ‘win’ is the right word. We will take Okinawa, and all those Japs out there are going to be annihilated. On the grand scale, it’s simple math: We can keep bringing more troops, more ammo, more ships, more supplies in every day. The Japs are making do with what they had when we showed up. Nothing’s getting through to them. No food, medicines, ammo, people. Nothing. They’re all going to die, and they’re apparently ready to do that. We will prevail, but the cost has every level of command wondering how we can keep this up, and we haven’t even begun the invasion of Japan itself.”
I stopped to let them think about that.
“Most of you have known me as XO. That’s a special position in a warship, the guy with all the authority of the captain, but lacking that final degree of ownership, of ultimate authority. You’re going to have to make that jump. I’m the captain now. Jimmy Enright is the XO.”
I paused to think about what I’d just said. “I’m going to have to make that same jump. I’m the captain now, not the XO. I didn’t ask for this. I kept waiting for them to send in a new skipper. They didn’t. They made me skipper, so now I’m going to act differently. I’m going to distance myself from the day-to-day camaraderie in the wardroom. Jimmy is taking over as XO.” I paused for another moment. This was harder than I’d expected.
“This will sound a bit conceited, but I have to say it. You could kid around with the XO. You don’t kid around with the CO unless he starts it. There’s a reason for that: When extremis arises, there has to be one officer whose orders are executed without question. If he happens to be your buddy, then you might question what he says. If he’s the captain, you do what he says. That’s why officers eat separately in the wardroom, and why we don’t call the enlisted men by their first names. Truth is, this separation, however artificial, makes things easier once the serious trouble starts.
“That said, the truth is we’re all in this lovely little fire pit together. At some point, the Japs over there on Okinawa are going to give up, do their ritual suicides, and maybe some of them might even surrender. Once the home islands cease to hear from the defenders of Okinawa, they’re gonna know it’s over. Here. That’s when I think the kamis will stop coming here, if only because they’ll be saving them up for the really big show.
“Our objective is to stay alive until that moment when they write off Okinawa, as they’ve had to write off Iwo, Saipan, Guam, Tarawa, Truk, Guadalcanal … After that, we’ll see.
“The other night we opened a blind barrage on the bearing of where that controller aircraft was and killed three out of four kamis who were coming specifically for us. We need to do more of that kind of thing, and we need, I need, everybody thinking about tactics. What can we do to screw them up? We all feel we’re in a desperate position up there on the picket line because we’re effectively tethered, but I think the Japs, for all their banzai bullshit, are feeling the same thing. They know it’s almost over. They know goddamned Halsey actually is going to ride the emperor’s white horse down the main drag in Tokyo. They know they’re finished, in China, Southeast Asia, everywhere. Their fleet is gone. Our bombers have begun burning their cities to cinders. They know. They have to know. Which means we are dealing with a cornered animal. A fierce cornered animal, which means they are at their most lethal, and if we know anything about the Japanese, lethal is absolutely their stock-in-trade.
“So you guys have to help me to help you to stay alive. We can’t retreat or otherwise run away, so we have to outthink them. We have to outwit them. We need to stay up late and get up early, every day, until this business is over. Any questions?”
“Still two sugars?” Jimmy Enright asked.
“Absolutely,” I said with a grin, “XO.”
He tried to grin back but didn’t quite pull it off. I made a mental note to formally split out his responsibilities as navigation officer with the next-senior guy in his department, Lanny King, the CIC officer. How? Hell, I’d tell the XO to make it happen, that’s how.
* * *
Our new quad-forty gun mount was a hand-me-down from the USS Pawley, a tin can that’d been running with the carriers until a kami missed one of the flattops and careened lengthwise down Pawley’s port side, cleaning house in a spectacular fashion. Her hull was intact, as was her main plant, so she was bound for one of the larger anchorages in the rear just as soon as the tender’s shipfitters could build her a temporary bridge and pilothouse. We were going to scavenge her starboard-quarter quad forty, one of the few guns left intact along her superstructure. The tender’s welding gang cut the mount off the 01 level aft on Pawley, and then one of the tender’s large cranes lifted the entire mount up and over the back of the tender and down onto our forecastle, where the same welding team fastened it to our main deck in a fiery display of sparks right over the roller path of the late departed mount fifty-one.
We were going to be one funny-looking destroyer, I thought as I watched the welders burning steel. Still, a quad forty was better than nothing. Its rounds were one-third the size of the five-inch, but there were four barrels, it had a higher rate of fire, and that mount could flat create a cloud of metal fragments close in, which was where the kamis finally had to quit jinking and turning and settle into that final, lethal glide path. I was glad to get it. We could store forty-millimeter ammo down in fifty-one’s magazine spaces, but we’d have to figure a way to get it up to the actual gun crew. All the ammo-handling machinery for mount fifty-one had been extracted from the handling rooms like the root of an excised tooth when the mount went over the side. I was thinking about that until I saw the gun boss arrive on the forecastle to examine the installation.
No longer my problem, I reluctantly told myself. Technically, anyway. This was Marty Randolph’s problem, and he was fully capable of solving it. My problem was making sure that we didn’t forget to ask for more forty-millimeter ammo, now that we had a third mount. I’d already asked the commodore for some more people to make up our losses, but he’d come up empty. He said the carriers were sucking up all the replacements coming out from Pearl. I’d said something silly like “How do they think we’re going to defend them if we can’t man our own guns?” He’d replied that the carrier people didn’t think about us at all. Period.
I realized I knew that. When I’d been gun boss in Big Ben, destroyers were simply little gray things out there on the horizon, zipping here and there and either shooting at something or coming alongside for fuel and begging for ice cream.
In the end we did get more forty-millimeter ammo craned down to us from the tender, but in turn, we had to relinquish most of mount fifty-one’s ammo. Marty tried to hang onto mount fifty-one’s VT frag ammo, but thos
e VT frag rounds were still in short supply and some bean-counter knew where every one of them was hiding, even after the chief gunner’s mate had told the tender’s people that we’d shot it all up. That declaration had produced a wizened warrant officer with zero sense of humor who said he would need to come aboard and take a physical inventory, if we pleased. I quickly dispatched Marty to put out that incipient fire, because I did not want the tender’s people to know what we had been stashing in the other two five-inch magazines. Sometimes the damned bean-counters were as big a threat as the Japs. The warrant came to see me to complain that my people were fudging the ammo logs. I told him he was welcome to come up to the picket line and count the brass. I’d even speak to his skipper about it. He seemed to lose interest after that.
They got a fuel barge alongside at 1530, and while the fuel was being loaded on board, Marty and I joined the tender’s chaplain and wardroom in holding a memorial service for everyone who’d perished that morning when Billingham suddenly sank alongside. The commodore and his small staff also attended. The tender had lost eighteen people, and nobody seemed to know how many of Billingham’s crew had still been aboard helping the tender’s engineers when she gave up the ghost. Both her captain and the exec had been killed during the attack. There’d been no one picked up out of the water alongside, alive or dead, and there was still a large oil slick streaming to the surface not far from the tender. If that continued, the tender would have to shift anchorage to keep her own main condenser inductions free of Navy special fuel oil.
As I listened to the chaplain’s words, I realized I’d become numb to the loss of so many people. I suppose it was because I knew, once we had completed refueling, that we were going back up there. I would never have said that I didn’t care about the tender’s losses or Billingham’s dead, but the simple fact was that I cared only about my people and my ship. I still felt somewhat out of place with my new, if borrowed, brass hat and those silver oak leaves on my shirt collar, but it had been interesting to observe the transition that had begun in how my own officers and men acted around me. When the service was over, I asked the commodore for permission to shove off and return to station. He took my hand and said he’d pray for our safe return. He meant it, too. The commodore and Pudge Tallmadge were cut from the same cloth. Now Tallmadge was on his way home, his good and generous mind wrecked. The commodore had gone up to his cabin to weep for what he’d just witnessed. I think that disturbed me more than anything else up to that point in our Okinawa experience.
Sentinels of Fire Page 17
