“Are we It now?” Chief asked, finally.
“We’re It,” I replied. “Fleet’s coming back tomorrow, so I expect some reinforcements.”
“When tomorrow?” he asked.
“Don’t know, Chief. Halsey hasn’t been confiding in me lately. We might be breaking up.”
The chief grunted. “Those gators do any good work for Jesus back there?” he asked.
“They say they’ve recovered between sixty and seventy people; we’ll get an accounting when they rejoin.”
“Out of what, three hundred thirty people? Them’s tough odds, Skipper.”
“I’ve spoken to the gun boss,” I said. “We need everybody to start thinking how we’re gonna deal with an attack like that. Everybody with an idea, however crazy, needs to speak up, enlisted, chiefs, officers. Everybody.”
He nodded. “Aye, aye, sir,” he said. We stood there for another few minutes staring out at nothing but our minimal wake. Then I pitched the remains of my cold coffee into the wake and headed back forward, trying to ignore the leaden ball in my stomach.
* * *
We got word that Halsey and the carrier fleet were in fact on the way back to Okinawa the next morning, having savaged as many airfield and outlying airstrips as they could find within five hundred miles of Okinawa. They’d used mostly fighter sweeps, coming low and fast off the sea and strafing everything that looked like a plane or even a revetment. They’d be back within fighter range of Okinawa at around 2200 tonight. The air-raid coordinator was predicting we would have CAP overhead at about the same time.
I’d seen Lieutenant Commander Canning, the commodore’s operations officer, going into the unit commander’s cabin after dawn GQ. I’d followed him in and sat down on the bunk couch.
“I’m gonna miss him,” I said.
“We all will, Captain,” he said, sitting down at the other end of the couch. I assumed he’d come in to gather up personal effects. “I really wanted to tell him not to come up here when he said he needed to do that. But…”
“Kinda hard to tell a commodore not to sail toward the sound of the guns, isn’t it.”
He nodded.
“Tell me about his family,” I said. “Georgia, right?”
“Married, two grown children, both girls. Women, I guess. One’s in business, of all things—finance, I think. The other is disabled in some fashion. He never said what. His wife came from a Southern family and lives on the family plantation. He called it a farm, but I got the impression she considers it a traditional plantation. Anyway, they apparently made an arrangement when they got married: She would live there, on a more or less permanent basis, and he would come home when he could. He gave me the impression that she’s really old-fashioned. Kinda like the wives during the Civil War, who took over management of the plantations while ‘the colonel’ was off to war. I think he thought it was quaint, but he said homecomings were wonderful.”
He put his head in his hands, closed his eyes, and sighed. He looked old and tired, like too many of the officers in this bloody campaign. I realized he probably was older than I was, maybe two classes ahead of me at the Boat School, and yet he was a staff officer and I was in command. I wondered how he felt about having to call me Captain.
“The admiral will do the letter, won’t he?” I asked.
He nodded again. “Or his chief yeoman,” he said. “They weren’t friends, as best I could tell. Admiral Chase can be a prick sometimes.” He opened his eyes after he’d said that, then looked over at me to see if I thought he’d been disrespectful.
“I’ve never met Admiral Chase,” I said, “but he’s pretty quick with a blast, from what I’ve seen.”
“You have no idea,” he said with a rueful smile. “Jimmy Enright said we’d do the burial at oh nine hundred?”
I confirmed that, the kamikazes willing, of course.
“Can you do me a favor, then?” he asked. “Can you, um, retrieve his academy ring? I’d like to include that with his personal effects, if possible.”
I nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” I said.
“Thank you, sir,” he said. “It’s the most personal memento I can think of to send home. The rest of it—” He gestured at the commodore’s two bags, not yet fully unpacked. “It’s just uniforms, shoes, that kind of stuff.”
“I’ll take care of it personally,” I said, getting up. “Right now, in fact.”
* * *
I called the doc and told him what I needed to do. He said he’d be ready in fifteen minutes. When I got down to sick bay, he had the commodore’s body partially exposed on his stainless steel examining table. In repose, the commodore’s face looked relaxed, almost if he were about to smile. I tried not to look at the back of his head. The fast-patching team had come to the bridge to plug all the new twenty-millimeter holes. On the starboard side there were some deep dents, too. Flattened in one of those dents was a bloody twenty-millimeter projectile. Whether or not this was the one that killed the commodore we’d never know, but it seemed possible. Zeros carried a twenty-millimeter cannon in their nose, but the disturbing thing was that this shell had U.S. markings on the base of the projectile. Commodore Van Arnhem had probably been killed by one of our own shells, most likely fired by one of the gator gunships in that last melee. The chief shipfitter had brought it to me and shown me the markings. I remembered saying something brilliant like “Oh, shit.” He’d nodded and left it with me. I considered keeping it for about ten seconds, then pitched it over the side.
I looked at my watch. Just after dawn GQ we were going to bury the commodore and the young signalman at sea. I planned to leave the ship at GQ before the ceremony on the fantail. That way we’d have all the guns ready in case the Japs decided to crash the proceedings.
“I need his left hand,” I told Doc. He lifted the arm out from the rubber bag and exposed the hand. I removed the commodore’s Naval Academy ring and his wedding ring and put them down on the steel table. Doc then repositioned the arm into the bag.
“Now I need some scissors.”
“Sterile?”
I just looked at him and shook my head. He went to his desk and produced some regular scissors. I cut off a hank of the commodore’s gray hair and then asked for something to put it in. Doc unpacked a sterile urine sample bottle and handed it over. I put the hair in that.
Doc gave me a what-are-we-doing look.
“The commodore is—was—married to a Southern lady,” I said. “Lives in Georgia on the family farm. If I get out of this war alive, I mean to make sure she gets his rings and a lock of his hair.”
“I understand the rings, Skipper,” Doc said, “but hair?”
“It’s a Southern tradition, Doc. During the Civil War, husbands bound for battle would leave a locket with some of their hair in it as a keepsake for the ladies on the home front.”
“If you say so, Cap’n,” he said.
“I say so, Doc.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get him ready for committal, then?”
“Yes, please.”
As I went forward to put the items in my desk safe, it occurred to me that no one was doing anything like that for the signalman seaman who also died. I made a mental note to find Jimmy Enright in the next couple of days and show him how to do the condolence letter for the signalman.
I made two decisions then: I would not tell the family that their husband and father had probably been killed by so-called friendly fire, and I would take these things to his widow personally. I owed him that much. I also needed to find a more suitable container for the lock of hair than a urine sample bottle, I thought. I almost smiled. Van Arnhem would have laughed.
I passed through the messdecks, where the cooks were already working on lunch. Mooky Johns, the chief cook and maker of fine fat-pills, saw me and waved, his black face already covered in perspiration from hot ovens and warming griddles. I waved back and kept going forward, toward the wardroom and my cabin. The items in my pocket seemed to weigh more than they shou
ld.
The interment ceremony was brief, as it had to be, given our station. Thirty minutes before it began, the doc had come to escort me back to the fantail. Per Captain Tallmadge’s tradition, the signalman chief was waiting, and he told me about the young man now asleep in the rubber bag. I listened carefully, hoping I’d remember all this, his hometown, his achievements in the division, and the fact that he played a mean harmonica. I thanked him and went back to my cabin to change. The signalman went first, then the commodore. Two flags were folded after the weighted bags had been sent overboard. Jimmy Enright had come up with a nice touch: When the commodore’s remains slipped down the slanted planks, Jimmy got on the 1MC, rang four bells, and announced, “DesRon Five Oh, departing.” A seaman and a commodore, plummeting together into the darkness of the deep ocean. War was indeed a great leveller. We stood there for another minute or so to let each man on board pay his respects and contemplate his own mortality.
After we secured from the burial, I called a meeting of the department heads in the wardroom to brainstorm a tactic that might give us a chance against the line attack that killed Westfall. Marty had brought his fire-control chief and both gunner’s mate chiefs, Chief Lamont and Chief Christie, along. Lieutenant Commander Canning also sat in.
I sat at the head of the wardroom table and listened to a parade of ideas, some reasonable, some pretty silly, but all of them earnestly trying to come up with something that might keep us alive. After thirty minutes I finally put up my hand and silenced the table.
“It seems to me,” I began, “that the five-inch are good for knocking an approaching suicider down from a max of nine miles into about three miles. They’re the only guns we have that can place a VT-frag shell right in front of an approaching Jap plane and, hopefully, kill him.”
I paused and sipped some coffee. “But that’s a band of six miles. If the Japs are coming in at 300 knots, that means the five-inch have a minute and a half, at max, to do their best work. After that, from three miles in, or six thousand yards, the five-inch are running out of range. Their shells leave the barrel unarmed to protect the ship. They then have to arm, turn on their transmitters, and start looking for a return signal. At three hundred knots, the target covers five miles a minute, which is four hundred forty feet a second. What I’m saying is that the five-inch are good for about two minutes of effective work, all in. After that, the problem moves to the forties. A minute later, it’s the forties and the twenties. Agreed?”
Nods all around.
“Okay, let’s count barrels. If the Japs come from dead ahead, we have two five-inch barrels and, as a result of battle damage, four forty-millimeter barrels and four twenty-millimeter barrels. Right?”
More nods.
“If they come from dead astern, we have two five-inch barrels, eight forty-millimeter barrels, and four to six twenties, depending on the angle of approach. Here’s my point: Heretofore, we’ve always presented one side or another to maximize the number of barrels firing at the incoming Jap. The problem with that is, if we don’t get his ass, he hits us in the side and opens us to the sea. For those of you who saw Westfall die last night, you saw one open her up, and two more tear her in two, because three out of four hit her on the side, in the same place, in rapid succession.
“Here’s what I think: If we present the side, either side, to four kamis coming in a line formation, we’re done for. We might get one or even two, but two more will fly through the forward engine room and break us in half. Whereas, if we present the front end or the back end to a line formation, they can tear up the entire superstructure above the main deck, but they can’t open us to the sea. Since we have more barrels pointed aft than forward, I’m thinking we show them our sternsheets and take it from there.”
“We give up two quad forties amidships if we do that,” Chief Lamont said.
“I know,” I said. “If we still had mount fifty-one, I’d point the bow at them. But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: The five-inch aren’t that useful. At long range, nine down to three miles, they’re the only thing that can hit them. After that, they’re of no use, because their shells won’t have armed before they’re flying right past the targets. The five-inch have stopping power, I’ll admit, but it’s the forties and the twenties that can tear these line formations apart. I’d rather get hit with fragments than a whole Zero, with bomb—and not in the side.”
There was silence around the wardroom table. We’d been presenting our broadside, as it were, to all the attacks we’d seen. With this new tactic, that wouldn’t work anymore. The side was what they were after. Send three, four, hell, ten suiciders, and there was no way out for the target destroyer.
“Gonna be hell on wheels for all the gun crews topside,” Chief Christie said.
“Yes, I know,” I said. “So what can we do to protect them better than we’ve been doing?”
“Tell ’em to jump right the hell over the side when the second kami shows up over the fantail?” Lamont offered.
“Why the second?”
“’Cause we’d have shot down the first one, Captain,” he said. There were some grins around the table, but they were halfhearted.
“That’s what’s different now,” he continued. “They’re gonna hit us. We can shoot down as many as we can, but those numbers you just talked about, three hundred knots, they’re gonna hit us.”
“And I’m saying it’s better to get hit along the length of the superstructure, as opposed to three or four of them breaking us open to the sea.”
“That superstructure you’re talking about,” the chief said. “That’s where we are.”
“That’s where I am, too, Chief. I’m not arguing that they’re gonna git us. I’m simply recognizing that they don’t necessarily have to sink us. Westfall was gone in sixty seconds with most of her crew. Look, we can’t survive what they threw against Westfall unless we keep them from opening up the hull. We need them to tear up stacks, director columns, life rafts, the mast, but not the hull. Now, let’s talk about protecting all the people in the path of these things.”
“Yeah, sure,” the chief said. “Like I said, we gonna jump over the side?”
“Yes.”
That produced a moment of stunned silence.
“Look, we make sure every man topside has a kapok life jacket and a flashlight clipped to that life jacket. We brief the gators: If we get one of these line attacks, there are going to be lots of our people in our wake. Look for those lights when it’s all over. Pick ’em up. I’m serious. The gun crews see that there are a bunch of kamis coming down to hit us along our whole length? Jump. Go over the side. We have fifteen amphib craft around us. Go over the side, wait until the main event is over, and then turn on your light. Whatever happens on board, you’re going to be safer in the water than on the oh-one level where three, four, five goddamned kamis have crashed, with all their gasoline and their goddamned bombs.”
Marty raised a hand. “You’re serious, sir?”
“Yes, I am. We cannot survive what they did to Westfall last night. No lone destroyer can. I believe they’ll be back tonight with the same program. They had a controller out there last night, and he had to have seen what happened. I’m talking about saving as many lives as we can, given what’s probably coming.”
I looked around the table at their incredulous faces.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, “and I’m not saying we’re going to abandon ship at the first sign of a night attack. If they come in the conventional manner, one, two, diving at us from wherever, we stay on station and we shoot them down.
“But if our radar sees that they’re coming in line formation—four, five, six of the bastards—then I’m going to point the stern at them and blow the ship’s whistle. You hear that, get your people to safety. You don’t have to go over the side, of course. Mount fifty-three’s crew can open the emergency hatch to the upper handling room and drop down there. Quad forties on the oh-one level aft? Get down to the main d
eck, get inside the superstructure, and from there, down to the second deck berthing spaces. Midships forties? Same deal—get down to the main deck and get inside.”
I paused to think. “I know this sounds like heresy, but I’m telling you, here’s what I saw happen to Westfall last night. Those bastards came in three-second intervals, and no one, no one, had the first chance in hell of living through that. All their guns—and, unlike us, Westfall still had all their five-inch—were ineffective against that. Fact of life, people: The guns are ineffective against that. I’m trying to save your lives, so don’t fight me on this. We’ll shoot at them for as long as the guns can do good work for Jesus, but after that, you hear the ship’s whistle blowing, execute the survival plan. Get below the main deck, and if you can’t do that, go over the side.”
Every man at the table was staring at me, and it was Jimmy who asked the salient question. “The bridge team,” he said, “and CIC. What do they do?”
“Drop down to the wardroom,” I said. “We’ll give it our best shot, which is the five-inch opening up to start hitting at eight miles. But if it’s a line formation, at some critical point, I want all hands to get down, get down into the ship, because the oh-one level and probably the main deck are going to turn into a sea of fire. As bad as that is, it’s better than turning to shoot at them and exposing our flanks.”
There was a long moment of absolute silence. Then one of the other chiefs had a question. “You think Halsey’s not going to send reinforcements?”
“Who’s this Halsey guy?” I asked. “Has the Big Blue Fleet ever given the first thought about what’s going on up here? We’re on our own, gents. It’s time to think clearly. Tomorrow, there may be a dozen new tin cans coming up here. Tonight? It’s just us chickens, along with our gator gunships. We’re on our own here. Let’s stay alive, shall we? Somebody needs to welcome all those reinforcements.”
Sentinels of Fire Page 23
