Sentinels of Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  “That shouldn’t be news, Connie,” he said quietly from his chair on the port side of the pilothouse.

  Gulp.

  * * *

  Refueled, rearmed, and having transferred Daniels’s survivors to the tender, we steamed back to our station north of Okinawa right after sundown. I heard from Jimmy that Rear Admiral Chase, the fleet air-defense commander, had fanged the commodore over the radio for leaving station without permission. The commodore had referenced a UNODIR message he’d sent upon recovering the Daniels’s survivors and then hung up the radio handset.

  “What priority did he use on that UNODIR?” I asked.

  “Routine,” Jimmy said, and we both smiled. That message would eventually get to Admiral Chase, but probably not for a few more days. Word was circulating on the sound-powered phone circuits that the commodore had muttered, “Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke,” before leaving Combat. The crew was beginning to warm up to Dutch Van Arnhem, and so was I.

  Our station had been changed because there were now only two radar pickets, Malloy and the Westfall. I still could hardly believe that Halsey’s enormous Third Fleet, which had begun Operation Iceberg with seventy-seven destroyers, couldn’t spare one lone tin can to bolster his early warning radar coverage by 33 percent, but apparently they couldn’t. I didn’t voice these sentiments to the commodore, however. I knew his thoughts on the matter, but I also knew that there were limits as to what could be voiced aloud. Fair enough. I was a very junior commander, USN; William Halsey was a very senior fleet admiral with five stars. Still, we were depending on the Japs’ continuing to attack from the north and northwest. Based on some of their tactics the previous night, I thought we were relying overmuch on assumptions.

  The commodore and his two staff officers, one an operations specialist and the other an air-defense expert, met with me and the four department heads after dinner in the wardroom. There’d been no more raids that day after the morning’s activity, so we all expected it to be an interesting night. As we sat down, the bridge called and said that a small flotilla of fifteen LCSs and LSMRs was approaching from Okinawa. They were asking for stationing instructions. I was about to instruct them when I remembered I wasn’t the senior officer here anymore. I passed the news to the commodore, who said to order them into a protective ring around Malloy at a distance of two thousand yards.

  The commodore’s operations officer, Lieutenant Commander Al Canning, had an interesting idea. “For the whole time the picket line’s been up here, it’s been in the same place. Ships might occupy different stations, but the Japs know where those stations are. Why don’t we move them tonight?”

  “First tell me how you guys think they’re locating our ships at night,” the commodore said.

  “We think they home in on our air-search radars,” Jimmy said, echoing my theory. “And we can’t turn them off because that’s why we’re here in the first place.”

  “So they take a passive bearing on a radar beam and fly down that bearing?”

  “Yes, sir, like when they came at us out of the east. They can come from any direction, because they know where we are. If they come in on the deck, the air search can’t see them, but they can still home in on that radar signal like a beacon.”

  “You think the individual planes are equipped with this kind of gear?”

  “If they’re flying a section of two or three, which is usual, then only one has to be equipped,” I pointed out. “The other two just have to keep station on him.”

  The commodore turned to his operations officer. “So if we somehow could move the ring of stations and bring the ships together, maybe we could do the same thing: leave one air-search radar up to suck ’em in, silence the other ones, and maybe we could surprise them for a change.”

  “Even better,” Marty said, “bring each ship’s radar up at odd times, but between those times, move the ships whose radars are off. If they’ve got something out there, say, a submarine or a controller aircraft, who builds the picture of where the pickets are and then sends that dope to the incoming kamis, we could get them to fire kamis at vacant stations at night. They only have enough fuel for one-way trips, which means they’d go into the sea instead of us.”

  “I like the sound of that,” the commodore said. “We’ll never convince the big dogs to let us leave station, but they didn’t say anything about moving ships around within the stations, even if we’re down to only three.”

  “Two,” I interjected.

  The commodore blinked, then nodded. “Two, right.”

  “It’s possible,” I continued, “that some of these suicider planes have their own radar. It wouldn’t have to be too sophisticated if they’re given the initial bearing to their targets. I’ve heard our own submariners talk about Jap antisub planes having radar, but they’re usually multiengine jobs, not fighters.”

  The commodore threw up his hands. “If that’s true, then what’re we doing here?”

  “Well,” I said, “let’s suppose one or more of them does have a functional radar that’ll tell ’em how far we are in front of them. What if we take all the pallbearers that CTF 58 just sent up and assign them to one destroyer. Make him the one who has his radar on. As they approach, their radar sees thirteen targets, not one lone destroyer. Then when they get here, they run into thirteen floating gun batteries instead of one. They never said anything about not moving the gators, either…”

  The commodore nodded. “Concur,” he said. “Al, put a plan together. We’ll send it off to CTF 58, but not until we get the ships in place.”

  “Routine precedence, Commodore?” Canning asked, innocently. Everyone grinned.

  “Carrier pigeon, Al. With a busted wing.”

  * * *

  There were four small kamikaze raids between sundown and midnight, aimed at Kerama Retto for a change. Because of our warnings, nine kamis in all arrived to a basin obscured by artificial smoke and a warm welcome from the gun emplacements on the hills surrounding the anchorage, as well as from the assembled logistics ships and the smaller amphib gunships. Night-fighters had cut the original eighteen-plane raiding force in half again, based on warnings from the picket destroyers, but they had to break off once they approached the defensive gun circles the Army and the Marines had put up on those hills. All nine who made it to KR were shot down without achieving anything. Congratulations all around, but, as the commodore noted, this was yet another tactical change. Someone in Tokyo had finally recognized that it was the American seaborne logistics train that was going to defeat them.

  While we listened to the air-raid reporting circuit during the KR attack, Radio Central brought up a message. Halsey was taking the Third Fleet carrier striking forces north and west again to hit Jap air bases along a big arc ranging from Formosa to the southeastern coasts of Honshu Island in Japan proper. It was another good news, bad news deal: The good news was that Halsey was going up there to reduce the numbers of planes available for kamikaze missions. The bad news was that we were not going to have any night-fighters while the big-decks were away. Halsey had left four escort carriers behind to protect KR and the picket line, but the smaller carriers did not carry the precious night-fighters.

  At 2330, the 1MC quietly announced midrats. Individuals from the gun stations were cycled in groups of two or three through the messdecks for sandwiches and a mug of hot soup: midnight rations, or midrats, as the sailors called them. Most of the officers grabbed some soup and sandwiches in the wardroom, but everyone was careful to leave no station completely unmanned.

  The commodore came in for some chow just after midnight. He and his two staffies had restructured the picket line as per our brainstorming session earlier. Malloy was now in the center of the overall picket line arc, fifty-five miles, not forty, north of Okinawa. Three hours earlier, starting at 2100, and while Westfall was still thirty miles away, Malloy and Westfall alternated bringing their air-search radars into standby for thirty minutes at a time, during which Westfall made five-mile
position adjustments and then came back up on the air, each time moving closer and closer to Malloy. She was now ten miles from us. Our personal swarm of amphib gunships continued to match our movements, more or less. Station-keeping was not an art much practiced in the gator Navy. Each time we took our radar down, our weary radar operators got to take a short nap, as did the Freddies. They’d simply slump at their consoles and give in to what they’d been resisting all night. Otherwise, just about everyone on board, along with half the engineering department, was awake and wondering what the Jap devils would come up with next.

  At 0130, as I was beginning to nod off in my chair on the bridge, we found out.

  “Bridge, Combat. Holding six to eight bogeys, bearing three three zero, range sixty-five miles, inbound. There’s something flying out ahead of them, something larger.”

  “Our radar or Westfall’s?”

  “Our radar, Captain. Westfall is currently radar silent.”

  “Alert the pallbearers, and Westfall. Tell her to stay radar silent. Plan to light her off when they get to thirty miles. Inform the commodore.”

  “Combat, aye.”

  The commodore’s two staff officers were standing watch-and-watch in CIC, four on, four off. The commodore was in his cabin. The one on duty would call him, but I still had to make sure that they did. I called back to Combat and told them to tell the boss what I’d ordered them to do. Once again, I’d forgotten that I had a unit commander embarked.

  The word was already going out over the sound-powered phone circuits, GQ in five minutes. I’d found that telegraphing the GQ alarm made for a better setting of all the watertight and firetight doors and hatches throughout the ship. It gave people five minutes to wake up, gather their wits, and head for their GQ stations, instead of falling out of their racks in a panic when the alarm rang, scrambling for shoes, life jackets, and helmets, and then pounding through passageways and up ladders in the dark. The phone-talkers alerted people on their circuit to go into each berthing compartment and rouse the petty officers, who then roused the sleeping crewmen, and then everything went better. Another Pudge Tallmadge innovation.

  By the time the commodore came up to the bridge, GQ was as good as set throughout the ship. He commented that he hadn’t heard the alarm, and I explained Malloy’s system. Then, just to make sure, we did sound the general quarters alarm. The manned-and-ready reports came in in quick order.

  “Bridge, Combat. We’ve got something new.”

  My heart sank. “Go ahead.”

  “There’s a band of radar interference opening up on the air-search scope,” Jimmy said. “It’s like someone’s painting a ring around us, out at about forty miles.”

  “That’s chaff,” the commodore said from his chair on the other side of the pilothouse. “They’ve got a bomber out there, dumping chaff to disrupt our radar picture, and I’ll bet he does have a radar of his own.”

  “What’s chaff?” I had to ask.

  “Shredded aluminum strips,” he said. “We’ve been using it in Europe. You get a bomber to deploy bags and bags of aluminum foil clippings out ahead of our bomber formation. The air-defense radars see it and nothing else. Somebody’s given the idea to the Japs.”

  “Bridge, Combat, the interference is spreading across an arc, from three three zero to zero three zero, true. We’ve lost contact on the bogeys.”

  The commodore leaned down to his own bitch-box. “Tell Westfall to come up on her air search. You guys go silent. Watch your surface-search radar for low fliers.”

  “Combat, aye.”

  “We’ll wait three minutes,” he continued, “and then switch, your radar up, Westfall’s down, and then we’ll call Westfall in toward us at max speed. You ready with that star shell?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Start firing star at max range in”—he looked down at his watch while he did the time-motion problem in his head—“four minutes. Set for highest possible airburst. Tell the gators what we’re doing, and how close the bogeys are.”

  “We can’t see the bogeys,” I pointed out.

  “Then do a dead-reckoning plot—start the star shells when they’re fifteen miles out. I want the stars to blind them, not us. Bosun mate, I need coffee.”

  I relayed his orders to Sky One and then sat back in my chair and stared out the glass-free portholes. With that gash across the front of the pilothouse, they looked like Oriental eyes staring back at me. There was a fair amount of moonlight, not terribly bright but sufficient to reveal our little armada of gray gunships. My eyes were fully night-adapted, and the nearby small ships looked pale white in the moonlight. I wondered if we’d be able to see the suiciders; I had little doubt that they would be able to see us.

  I marveled at the commodore’s calm demeanor. This had become a technical fire-control problem, as far as he was concerned. Move the ships here, fire the star shells there, and then sit back, have some coffee, and wait to see how it all came out. I tried to remember if he’d actually ever been subject to a kamikaze attack on a destroyer. It was one thing to watch one come in on a carrier. When they came for us small boys, it was a lot more personal. Outwardly I tried to match his apparent calm, but inwardly it wasn’t working. Even with two destroyers, one the Japs might or might not yet know about, along with a gaggle of small-caliber AA guns from the gators, we were still looking at six to eight suiciders, who apparently knew where we were, if maybe not how many we were. I wasn’t sure if a Jap radar operator could tell the difference between a destroyer-sized return and that of an LCS. Either way, it took a major effort on my part to sit there in my chair and appear to be as confident as Commodore Van Arnhem.

  Our five-inch swung out four minutes later and began slow, measured salvos of star shells. We’d alerted the gators so no one would panic when the five-inch began to speak. That chaff cloud had really clobbered the air-search radar, confirmed by Westfall when they came back on the air and we went down. We simply had to assume the suiciders would keep boring in. Somewhere out there in the dark Westfall was also closing us. They’d take a station two miles away, just outside of the ring of amphib gunships.

  The first star shells burst way out there at eighteen thousand yards, ten miles, and hung in the air under their parachutes just like they were designed to do. Then Combat reported that the kamis had burst out of the chaff cloud at twenty-five miles and back onto our radars. They were already low, and they immediately split up, four going east, four going west, each section executing a wide circle around our little formation. Combat kept the gators informed as to what was happening, and I heard director fifty-one training around up above, straining for a lock-on. The commodore stopped the fireworks show and told us to load up with the real stuff. I wondered if the kamis were circling because they were trying to regain some night vision. They might also be trying to figure out what they were looking at when they could see. They were used to attacking a single destroyer, accompanied sometimes by one or more gunships. Now there was a crowd.

  “Bridge, Combat. They’re low and still circling, at about twelve miles now. Nothing on the air search, but they’re all showing up on the surface search, so they’re on the deck.”

  The commodore ordered the entire formation, such as it was, on a course of due east at 12 knots. There was no point in going any faster or we’d leave our bevy of gators in our wake. Combat reported to the air-raid control center on the light carrier Cowpens that we were being attacked, although that was mostly pro forma. There was nothing Cowpens or any of the other light carriers could do about it.

  Then suddenly, from eight points of the compass, they all turned in and began their attack. We couldn’t see that from the bridge, of course, but the radars picked them up immediately, and warnings went out over both radio and sound-powered circuits. Here they come! I was about to jump out of my chair when I realized there was nowhere to go. In daylight I would have been out on a bridge wing, maneuvering the ship to make sure the maximum number of guns could cover any black dot coming
at us—but at night?

  I thought I heard director fifty-one stop its search and steady up on a bearing, but before I could even think, our two remaining five-inch mounts, fifty-two just in front of the bridge and fifty-three aft, opened up in a rapid-fire chain of gun blasts. The forties joined in moments later, and then the twenties. The night erupted into lines of tracer fire, sheets of fire from the muzzles of the twin five-inch mounts, and the scream of airplane engines. I was dimly aware that all of the amphib gunships were firing with everything they had, but at what, I couldn’t see. Then there was a familiar boil of flaming avgas sheeting across in front of us, followed by a second one on the port quarter. I was literally deafened by all the shooting. The muzzle flashes from both the five-inch and the new forty-millimeter mount forward illuminated the interior of the pilothouse like heat lightning, revealing faces and hands in a flickering electric arc light like a movie theater projector gone wild. I actually saw the commodore, still seated in his chair, holding a cigarette to his mouth for a deep, glowing drag, with his eyes closed, his other hand clamped onto his coffee mug.

  There was nothing for me to do, and that still astounded me. My officers and crew were doing what they’d been trained to do, and the din of gunfire, the eye-stinging flashes from the gun muzzles, the clouds of gun smoke streaming through our broken portholes, and above it all the scream of airplane engines driven beyond their mechanical limits overwhelmed my brain until I just sat there like some kind of head-bobbing mental patient, nodding and rocking out on the lawn of an insane asylum. Then I heard an approaching airplane engine, its scream rising like a locomotive’s whistle as it comes at you, followed by a hail of what sounded like rivets smashing all over the bridge and against the sides. There was a great whooshing sound, and then a ball of fire appeared on the opposite side as the kami went into the water. I had to work my jaws to get my ears to pop as I tried to gather my wits.