Navies, too, are much the same in salient points as the admirals who command them. In the Australian Navy a man or a ship who has proved himself / herself is usually in constant demand. The U.S.N. was no exception to this rule. The admiral wished to know what, if anything, was happening north of him. So the sailing orders for Scimitar and Wind Rode came just after breakfast.
Now they were well at sea, and the time was a little before dusk.
Vasco Nunez de Balboa, when he first sighted his "pacific" ocean on September 25th, 1513, must have been enjoying a sunny, windless day. Future navigators, wriggling under the discomfort of wet oilskins and saltwater boils, have decided unprintably that the largest of the world's oceans might be misnamed.
Though to the north it is limited by the narrow Bering Strait, to the south this three-eighths of the world's total sea area is wide open to the winds that blow. The Pacific boasts a mean depth of about two and a half miles, and sometimes, especially from the low decks of a destroyer, it boasts waves damned near as high.
On this particular late afternoon the Pacific was not completely belying its balmy name. There was only half a gale blowing, and only half of Wind Rode's decks were under water. The sun was setting on their port beam, and over miles of disturbed water the backs of high waves rolled across the face of the crimson disc. On her starb'd bow a white-crested ridge of only-apparent liquidity broke with a loud hissing roar, and Lieutenant Randall, officer of the dog-watches, for the hundredth time ducked his head as the spray lifted on the wind and came driving at the bridge.
Randall had been well trained, by Bentley as well as Sainsbury, and constantly he studied those waves and their effect on the ship. Not because he thought the ship was in any danger - she had outridden seas much fiercer than these - but because he had to keep continually in mind whether or not A-gun could be manned in the event of their coming upon a companion on that wind-swept waste of water. If it were impossible to man the forrard mounting, then Wind Rode's main armament was reduced by a third. But so far, he decided, there was no reason why A's twins could not bellow as well as the rest.
He glanced to port. The sun was lowering to rest, like a great yellow plate, its edge on the horizon. He nodded to the waiting bosun's mate. The young seaman pulled his pipe out as he ran down the swaying ladder, and his resonant voice came above the shrill plaint of the wind:
"Hands to night-action stations."
In obedience, men began to run along her decks. They did not race, yet they moved quickly and with purpose. Like the bosun's mate, they had been waiting. They had performed this precautionary chore thousands of times, and not once had anything been sighted while they had been closed-up, testing through. Yet there is always a first time, and never was the platitude more true than at war at sea. Certainly, only Scimitar was in sight now, but darkness comes swiftly in the Tropics, and with their visibility limit of fifteen miles there could be a whole Fleet steaming a few minutes away beneath the curve of the sea.
Bentley heaved himself on to the compass-platform and Randall reported:
"Ship closed-up for action, sir."
The captain nodded, and raised his binoculars. From B-mounting below him he could hear sounds and voices the import of which was so familiar that it barely impinged on his consciousness.
"Check base clips."
That was the gun-captains' voice, and his order would have the clips off the bases of the ready-use cordite cartridges, ensuring that the firing-pin could get at the primer if she had to go into action in a hurry in the dark.
"Cox'n on the wheel, sir."
That was Chief Petty-officer Rennie, closed-up in the wheelhouse directly under his feet. Normally a leading-hand or able-seaman steered her, but when she might need the full use of her manoeuvrability, it was Rennie's responsible and practised hands that would swing her.
"Guard-rails...?"
The gun-captain again. The pins would be coming out of the rail stanchions, making sure they were not stuck in, so that if she had to fire at maximum depression at a surfaced submarine the velocity of her shells would not be impeded by the triple row of wire bounding B-deck.
While the guns were being tested mechanically, high up in his director Mr. Lasenby, Gunner, was checking his communications with guns and the vital transmitting-station far below him. Nobody expected that there would be anything wrong with gunnery communications, but they were tested just the same; just the same as they had been checked when first she had cleared harbour that morning. You never knew...
Down aft round the tubes, and the depth-charges on the quarterdeck, the same checking procedure was being carried out. She had many potential enemies, on, above and below the sea, and she had to be ready to engage all or any of them at one and the same time. Pompom, oerlikons, machine-guns, torpedoes, depth-charges, asdic, radar, flares, signal-lamps, 4.7-inch guns. All tested, all found correct.
Except for one thing, the most critical of all.
Lasenby had his controlling director trained forty-five degrees on the port bow, and the layer's sight elevated. Then he ordered all three twin mountings on to the same bearing, to follow director. When they had reported "On," he told them to read off elevation and training pointers.
The initial part of his testing had been routine, boring. But now as the reports came up to him, he listened carefully. If one of those mountings was out, if its pointers differed from the master-sight, then, firing at a speeding target at long range, the crew of the affected gun might as well be in their hammocks. He listened. Then he relaxed.
"All guns train fore and aft," he ordered, and as the mountings swung in obedience under the thrust of their hydraulic pumps, he sent down to Bentley the report which told the captain that the ship's fighting efficiency was now entirely in the hands of the men who manned her. The ship would not fail them...
The sun was almost set. The sky, wind-blown, was clear. Pale gleams ran over the faces of the waves, glinting faintly in deep hollows, leaving the watery backs dark and ominous. Bentley kept his men at their stations.
A minute. He looked to the west. Between him and the sliver of remaining light a huge roller reared, ran, and then broke into a smoke of spray. The sun, as if put out, vanished.
No gleams now, no reflected glints. Now the whole sea was a vast and turbulent immensity of blackness, relieved only by the white flash of a toppling crest. Bentley glanced up at the sky. Remote, agelessly distant, the stars glittered hard and cold above the noisy hissing of the ocean. There might be other aerial bodies up there, but he could neither see their wings nor hear their engines. He lifted off his binoculars.
"Fall out action stations," he said.
Five minutes later she was quiet again, her men at supper and her scuttles and hatches darkened. On the black and white sea she was a dimly-grey, lightless wraith, her presence and movement betrayed only by the wake churning at her stern. But it would take a close and very experienced eye to distinguish that whiteness from the breaking, crests with which the ocean was carpeted.
Bentley knew that his own supper was ready, just as he knew that he should eat now, so that he would be ready if anything eventuated out of the night. Yet he lingered on the bridge.
This break in routine was slight, yet of sufficient significance to make him consciously think about it. Always and deliberately honest with himself he recognised that Captain Sainsbury's mild rebuke was concerning him, if only slightly.
In a bitterly-fought war like this one, when commanders had to act in the heat of a violent moment, mistakes in ship-handling and strategy were common. With a torpedo racing for your bilges or a dive-bomber about to unload a few feet above your deck you could hardly sit down and get out a slide-rule and apply it to your future conduct. Yet his "mistake" did not come into this time-lacking category. He had had several minutes in which to decide his course of action, or, rather, ponder on whether it was the correct one.
He was quite sure in his own judgment that he had acted correctly. The admiral had
made no comment on the escape of the two destroyers. Yet the worry remained to irritate him. Had Sainsbury been all on the surface? Had his rebuke been aimed patently at his own failure to signal him? Or was there something else?
Was it not his action Sainsbury had been concerned about, so much as what that action in rushing in to engage the enemy revealed of his character? But what the hell was wrong with his character? Or motives, for that matter?
His bunched fingers tapped quietly at the compass-ring. He was confusing the issue - if issue there was.
The implications of what he had done were as simple as the facts. He had sighted enemy ships, and he had sunk them. He must remember that. Must keep this thing in its correct and uncomplicated perspective.
But why should he remind himself to do that? He heard the ladder chains rattle behind him and then he heard his steward's voice, mildly remonstrative:
"Your supper's ready, sir."
Bentley gave the ring a final and heavy thump and jumped down from the grating. He enjoyed his meal.
CHAPTER FOUR
ALL NIGHT THEY STEAMED.
They were on a scouting patrol, and though there was no actual objective, there were two reasons for their presence on a course which was heading them towards the Japanese Carolines.
First, this was very much enemy territory, and the admiral wished the Japs to know that he was on the offensive, that he had ships to spare to search and find and report back to him. The Australians' presence was intended to convey that this area was not a Japanese preserve.
Second, and more important, it was highly probable that they would sight something. The western Pacific was a large battle station, but there were large naval forces engaged in it. With the Indies to the west, the Carolines to the north, and the Gilberts eastward, all enemy bases, the chances of meeting an enemy ship were excellent. It was, if not a happy, then a well-stocked hunting-ground.
Nor were the Australian ships running a stupid risk in venturing into it. They were new ships, the fastest of their class, and they could outrun most things they might meet if the odds were too great. They could not, of course, outrun a battleship's shells - but they were at war, and there were risks so unavoidable that you did not bother to assess them.
Neither could they escape by speed from aircraft. But they had to the south of them aircraft and ships whose main object was to come to grips with any red-balled units the destroyers might run into. A signal would almost certainly bring prompt succour. Almost certainly. The admiral might have his own hands full. But that, again, was one of those unavoidable risks which had to be accepted without thought if you valued your sanity.
The hours and the watches dragged on. Lasenby relieved for the middle watch, and Randall took over; from him at four o'clock. Bentley had been on the bridge at midnight, and he was there a few minutes after Randall. They stood side by side on the grating round the binnacle, swaying in unison to the ship's rolling, sipping expertly from cocoa cups from which, in inexpert hands, the thick sweet liquid would have spilled at each heave of the destroyer's flanks.
They had done this, in this way and at this time, countless times. They were much more in each other's company than a man and his wife. So they did not speak, for they knew each other's professional thoughts: would the wind continue, would it increase - or would it change direction, thus mounting a confused sea which for a time before it decided on the direction of its run could prevent A-gun firing efficiently, if at all; would Sainsbury hold on this course, or would he decide to bear across to the westward; would he consider another day's run sufficient, or would he press on into the next night; and would - and each man's mind returned to this possibility again and again - would the coming dawn reveal an empty wind-driven waste, or the masts; or even hulls, of enemy ships?
Bentley held out his cup behind him and the ready bosun's mate took it. He waited there for the first-lieutenant to finish.
"I don't think it will ease much," Bentley said, "perhaps with nightfall..."
Randall nodded and passed his cup back. It happened often in the Tropics like that - the setting sun seemed to draw the wind down with it. But for most of the coming day they would pitch and roll across this pointless sea on their apparently pointless mission. You didn't feel this way when you were in company with a Fleet. It was hard to suppose that a great mass of ships was not out with a definite target in mind. But now, in company with only a sister-ship, alone on a wide sea, it was easy to feel lonely, shiftless.
He remained silent, leaning and straightening beside his captain, left leg taking the weight, then right. There was nothing to say. He could not even make a spoken guess at what they might meet. They had no knowledge whatever of what could be in this area-that was why they were here. The dawn might bring battleships, or a cruiser squadron, or a flotilla of destroyers, or a battery-charged submarine on the surface. Or it might bring nothing except a rolling, tossing field of blue and white.
Of one thing was he certain. There was nothing within a radius of fifteen miles. The wind was blowing but there was no cloud, no interference; radar was operating efficiently. There was another certainty - at fifteen knots, their economical speed, a matter of minutes could bring something into sight, if it were there.
Bentley lowered his night-glasses from their careful sweep ahead and looked out to starb'd. Only that he had waited for it every night for years he would have missed the minute lessening of the darkness over there, the faintest diffusion of grey in the black.
"Dawn action," he said.
They closed-up, grumpy and sleepy, and they repeated the routine of a few hours before. Though now, beneath the querulous reports, there lay an intangible tenseness. It was just another dawn, one of hundreds spent precisely like this one, yet it differed significantly from the closing-up for night-action. Then the dark opacity enveloped the other fellow as well as you; his vision, too, was strictly confined. Now the day would shortly reach widely on all sides, and he, too, would be closed-up for the same reason you were - to sight first, to fire first, to kill and sink before you got your own quietus.
They clustered round the guns and they knew there was nothing on radar because no order had come down to load. They would not be jumped, then. If there were something out on that wide and windy stretch the captains would have time to see and assess, to position their ships, to fight or run. And in a destroyer with a skin not much more than a quarter of an inch thick, but great power in her boilers, time to decide meant life.
The pinch of grey in the east widened. They could see their breeches plainly, pick out the threads of the block and the firing interceptors. They could see the waves and detect the crests not as flashes of white but as wind-whipped curls topping lowering foreheads. The foc'sle became visible, and the guard-rail stanchions marching in ordered procession to meet at the bull-ring.
Then it was full light, and Scimitar was there, long and graceful and assuring, rolling easily to the waves, her stern tossing white and her funnel streaming a haze of heat from its capacious lip.
And nothing else was there to keep them company, friendly or otherwise. The sea's dark ominousness changed magically into the full brightness of sunny day. The waves were no longer black ridges crowned with menacing crests but familiar swells, long and methodically moving under the wind's suasion, blue, white, throwing back the young sun's light in a million sparkling facets that cheered them as intangibly as earlier they had been tensed.
And into their faces, on to their backs, the sun beamed warmly. They wriggled out of their duffle-coats. No, they would not be jumped. Not this bright and - empty morning.
"Fall-out action stations," Bentley ordered, and Lasenby passed the order to all guns, and the torpedo-tubes and the depth-charges got their permission through their own phones.
It seemed just another morning, and they reacted the same way they had done every other morning over the past dangerous years. They grumbled at the needless call which had got them out of their hammocks and they were secr
etly thankful that it had been needless.
They punched a friend on the back at the same time as they gripingly wondered what evil concoction the cooks had dreamed up for what in the ship's log passed as breakfast. They bustled on their way to the mess-decks and the bathrooms and they privately and irreligiously gave thanks for the sounds of normalcy all about them.
And then they heard the alarm.
Not the bosun's pipe this time. This time the strident, demanding clangour of the action bells. A sound never used for exercise, nor for closing-up for testing through, but only for the real thing. This time they ran, urgently.
It was the fastest the ship had ever been closed-up for action. They cleared the guns and tubes away and the captain's voice told them the reason for their delayed breakfast - not battleships, nor cruisers, nor destroyers. Aircraft. A large force, winging southward from the direction of the big Jap naval base at Truk, and due, if it maintained its course, to pass almost directly over both destroyers.
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