Subordinates
Peers
Superiors??
Adequate
Good enough to come home alive
§
O’Toole had been eyeing some new letters that had been placed on his desk, and once Strong was gone he sorted them in date order and opened the first one.
Dearest Paddy,
I was so relieved to get your letter. All I got from the Navy Department was a letter saying your ship was sunk and that you were among the survivors. I worried you could have been injured, or stuck in a hospital somewhere and might not even be able to write. I was so glad to hear you were uninjured. A few cuts and bruises is nothing for an O’Toole; they grow them tough here in Gloucester.
From your letter, I could feel the pain you are going through, and I would be willing to share that with you, but don’t worry about the survivor leave. I love you more than anything, and I want nothing more than to have you with me, and be in your arms again, but I understand. I cannot imagine what you have been through. I trust your judgement and know it is the right decision.
I know you will work this out in your own way, and that may take some time. I will follow your lead, and when you are ready, I will be here to listen and understand. Perhaps it might help for you write about bits and pieces from time to time. When we are together next time, we can talk. In the meantime, just know I love you, and I am here for you.
I want to get this letter off before the mailman comes. I will write more this afternoon. Take care. Write.
Love
Kate
§
O’Toole’s tongue recoiled from the acrid and biting coffee in his cup. Seated in the wardroom, he studied the gunnery division roster. These were his men; he was responsible for them, and he was worried.
Strong strode through the door and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Why so glum?”
O’Toole resented the interruption and the need to be sociable. He had so much work to do; he didn’t have time for small talk. He leaned back in his chair only to be polite and find a way to shoo Strong away.
“I’m going over the crew list and their experience.” He reached for his coffee cup, but stopped. “Could you hand me the armored cow?”
“Armored cow?”
“Yeah, the can of condensed milk, next to the pot.”
Strong obliged. “What’s so glum about that?” Strong asked, taking a sip of his coffee. He winced. “Hand the condensed cow back over here.”
“Armored cow, Doc.”
“Okay, I’ll remember next time.”
“In the gunnery division, there is one chief petty officer and four petty officers. All the rest are kids right out of high school. Six months ago most were working the family farm. They are all untrained boots.”
“Okay, you got one foreman and four supervisors. Start there.”
“They’re petty officers, Doc.”
“Okay, I’ll remember next time.” After a moment of silence, Strong spoke up again. “So what you gonna do?”
O’Toole took a deep breath, collected the papers in front of him, and said, “Going to train the hell out of them and turn them into gunners.”
O’Toole started toward the door to escape the small talk when a petty officer came in with a lanky recruit in tow.
“XO, we got another man, thought you might like to meet him. His name is Hatfield, and he’s assigned to gunnery.”
“Sure, come on in Hatfield. Where you from?”
“Matewan, West Virginee. That sits on the Tug Fork.”
“Of the Hatfields and McCoys?” Strong asked.
“Yeah. Distant relatives, but that’s us.”
“What do your folks do?”
“Momma does some sewing for folks around town, and Daddy works the general store. He’ll do carpentry if someone’s got a need.”
“And what do you do?”
“I fight Japs, sir.”
Strong smiled.
“So you want to be a gunner?” O’Toole asked.
“I am a gunner, sir. Folks say I’s the best shot in four counties.”
“You a good shot?”
“Ya, sir. Once I was up in the attic lookin’ out the window when I spied a polecat ‘tween the trees back of Old Man Peters’ house. It was a long shot, over a thousand feet, but I got my rifle and killed it with one shot. Old Man Peters’ backyard stank until it snowed. Momma got mad at me for it, but Daddy thought it was funny. He said word was Old Man Peters had some McCoy in ‘im.”
Strong bent over in his chair to hide his face. O’Toole scowled.
“Well, we need gunners who can shoot Jap planes out of the sky.”
“Ain’t no problem. I shot hawks and quail on the wing lots of times.”
“With a shotgun?”
“Nah, with my Winchester thirty.”
O’Toole had been studying Hatfield. His casual devil-may-care demeanor, welcoming smile, and the twinkling dance of his eyes told him the kid would be trouble. It would take some time to teach him how serious war can be.
“Okay, Hatfield, when we get underway you can show us what you can do. Better get squared away and meet the other guys.”
After Hatfield left, Strong stared at O’Toole for a long second and broke out laughing. “Now I see what you have to deal with.”
§
Strong returned to his quarters and searched for something to read. He never thought finding reading material aboard a ship would be so difficult. There were a few letters and the usual stack of technical manuals on O’Toole’s desk. They didn’t interest him, but O’Toole had recently brought another box of books aboard. He wondered where O’Toole had put them. Strong’s gremlin enjoyed treasure hunts and tiptoed from the shadows to participate.
Strong bent down and cracked the bottom drawer of O’Toole’s locker unit open an inch. The drawer was crammed with books. He pulled the drawer open another inch and peeked inside. Peeking back at him was a book titled Panzer Tactics.
Strong cocked his head at the book and bent over to slide the drawer all the way open. The first books were on US and Japanese naval doctrine, which seemed logical, but when he investigated a little further, he found books on tank warfare, aerial combat, and, of all things, cavalry tactics.
A cockroach scurried across the floor. Strong hated cockroaches. He spun and stomped his foot. He missed but stomped with his other foot, which hit its mark.
“What’s going on?”
Strong turned. O’Toole was standing behind him. “Roaches. I hate roaches. Where did it come from?”
“They’re a fact of life aboard ship. We do everything we can to get rid of them, but we never succeed. You’re the one responsible for the sanitary condition of the ship. They’re your problem. Get your pharmacist mates together and give the ship a good spraying.”
“This means war! I will attack at dawn!”
O’Toole glanced at his open drawer of books.
“I was looking for something to read, and you had several books in this drawer. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No secrets in there. Help yourself, but next time ask before you start going through my stuff.”
“Ah yes, sorry. If you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing with these books?”
“Found them in a bookstore in Frisco. I don’t have time for them now, and I bought them out of curiosity. Do you know what a dialectic is?”
“A form of argument?”
“Sort of. I am using naval doctrine as a thesis, which seems flawed based on what happened at Pearl Harbor, the Coral Sea, Midway, and Savo Island. I guess you would say I am trying to prove our doctrine wrong.”
“What’s that got to do with Panzer tactics?”
“I’m looking for military tactics that oppose naval doctrine. The closest military analogies are Panzer tactics, aerial dogfights, and the old-fashion cavalry charge. They create or operate in chaos with few, if any, assumptions about what the enemy will do.”
“That’s in
teresting, but what’s the point?”
“If Socrates knew what he was talking about, then neither our orderly naval doctrine nor a more chaotic doctrine is correct. Socrates would suggest we synthesize the truth from each one, put the truths together, and the result will represent reality.”
“Well I’m just a simple old country boy and all that stuff is too highfalutin’ for me. I can’t find anything to read. Mind if I borrow one of your books?”
“Go right ahead. You might find the ones on cavalry tactics more interesting. I think you’re the hero on horseback type.”
7
October 20, 1942
USS Able; Alameda Navy Base, Oakland, CA
Unable to find a place to set his small West Bend alarm clock, Leroy “Doc” Strong tied a string around its base and hung the clock upside down from a pipe directly above his upper bunk. He and his gremlin were proud of their solution since it gave the gray little alarm clock a secure home in port or at sea. It hung six inches above his head, and at night the metallic ticking reminded him of the grandfather clock in the hall at home and helped him fall asleep. The only problem with his solution was the clock’s close proximity to his ears when the jangling alarm went off, as it was doing now. The clock’s metal bell clanged away at its duties and earned itself three swats before Strong managed to push in the plunger. Strong blinked and resigned himself to another day of trying to be useful.
A doctor to a ship full of healthy nineteen-year-olds is a man with little to do. All the medical records were in good order and shots up-to-date. Were it not for the occasional splinter, cut, or mashed finger the shipyard work provided, he’d be totally out of work.
He climbed from his upper bunk, being careful not to step on O’Toole on the way down, and danced a bit until his warm feet acclimated to the cool steel deck. His concern for O’Toole wasn’t necessary; O’Toole’s bunk was empty, and the sheets and pillow told him O’Toole might have napped but hadn’t slept there. O’Toole never seemed to sleep much. This bothered him and gave his doctor brain something to ponder. Since their first meeting, O’Toole had dashed about and kept his conversations clipped and his comments pointed as if he were mad at the world.
Strong grabbed that thought as something to ponder later on and stumbled toward the officer’s head. With his face lathered up, he wondered what he would do today. He’d hold sick call at 0800, and after tending to a patient or two he would check the cleanliness of the galley and chat with the cooks. After assigning his pharmacist mates the job of spraying the ship for cockroaches, he’d spend the rest of the day wandering the ship looking for safety and cleanliness problems. He considered the ship his patient, and he monitored her health by chatting with the crew. By the end of the day he would know of every evolution, rumor, fact, or other scuttlebutt aboard the Able. Since he was her doctor, he never repeated a word he heard. In a lighthearted conversation, Captain Shelly had told Strong he was an incorrigible schmoozer and an inveterate snoop. The captain didn’t understand southern medicine.
He arrived early for breakfast in the wardroom and sat near the head of the table where senior officers would eat. Soon a rotating cluster of four or five junior officers occupied the other end of the table and commiserated during breakfast. Captain Shelly came and went, and Strong gave up waiting for O’Toole when the stewards started to clean up. He headed for sick call. His only patient was a fireman with an infected thumb from an embedded steel filing.
After chatting with the commissary chief on the mess deck, he went looking for O’Toole and found him on the oh-one level working with Chief Starret on the number one Bofor anti-aircraft gun. Strong found himself a crate to sit on, packed his pipe, and puffed away, pretending to enjoy the morning air and the hubbub of the ship. The Bofor pointed in a strange direction, and Strong wondered why they would point it at the Golden Gate Bridge.
“I don’t give a damn about tolerances,” O’Toole said to Chief Starret. “You can get it better than five seconds of arc. That error is enough to miss a Jap zeke at six thousand yards, and that might be the zeke that gets us.”
“Sir, it can’t be done. The alignment between the director and gun is only so precise.”
“The director is lined up on a light on the Golden Gate, the gun isn’t. That’s not adequate, and it won’t be adequate until you do everything you can to align them.”
“Christ, Lieutenant, the bridge is seventeen thousand yards away—twice the range of the gun. At nine thousand yards we’d be in alignment,” Starret said.
“I’d say good enough, but men’s lives depend on the accuracy of our guns. They won’t be adequate until the gun’s aligned with the director.”
“They are in alignment, Lieutenant.”
“No they are not, Chief. Keep at it until the alignment is perfect,” O’Toole said before stomping off toward the bow.
Starret leaned on the director with one arm and stared at the deck. Strong ambled over. “Beautiful morning. A bit chilly, but still a beautiful morning.”
Starret lifted his head, and his beet-red face softened when he saw Strong. “The weather is the least of my worries.”
“You got a problem with your thing-a-ma-bob here,” Strong said, pointing with his pipe.
“Hell no. The director is perfect.”
“Hmmm. Is the gun a problem?”
“No, sir, it’s fine. It’s the XO; if something ain’t perfect in his mind, it’s broke.”
Every chief and first-class petty officer Strong spoke with had similar comments. The junior officers were more circumspect and drew the line at “O’Toole’s one tough SOB.”
“The lieutenant is holding down two jobs with lots of responsibility. Wonder if I could hold up under the pressure,” Strong said.
“He’d hold up better if he let us do our jobs rather than making us do pointless work.”
“I overhead you mention something about five seconds of arc. Was that what you two were arguing about?”
“Yeah, the specs say to stay within ten seconds of arc. We’re half that, and the XO wants us to get it to zero.”
Strong used the radian rule for the sine of small angles and did the math in his head. “Ten seconds of arc at ten thousand yards would only be about eighteen inches. Is that doable?”
Starret’s eyes popped wide open. “How did you figure that out?”
“Just a wild lucky guess, I guess. Is it doable?”
“No, sir, the optics aren’t that accurate. We could be dead on and not realize it.”
“What you gonna do?”
“Get a cup of coffee, cool off, and find something useful to do.”
“Sounds reasonable. I think I’m going to head forward and see what’s happening there.”
Starret studied Strong’s face for a long second and said, “Thank you, sir.”
“Hmm. For what? But you’re welcome all the same.”
§
November 1, 1942
Headquarters COMNAVORDPAC; Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii
Admiral Garrett read the message header and shook his head. This was the second message request from the Able. He had turned the first request down before he’d finished reading it. An impertinent Lieutenant on the USS Able wanted to use thirty percent of their ammunition load-out for training. Ten percent was standard.
This new message pushed the Lieutenant’s impertinence to new limits:
USN MESSAGE
1452 19421101
FROM USS ABLE
TO COMNAVORDPAC
Able will leave Oakland with full ammunition load-out. Prior request to use thirty percent of ammunition load-out for training is now posed as a question. Be a warrior? Challenge anyone who is not?
Lt. O’Toole, Executive Officer USS Able
USS Able, Lt. Cmdr. Shelly Commanding
His own words made him pause and recall his lunch with O’Toole. He cocked his head to one side and smiled. As COMNAVORDPAC he was responsible for the allocation of all naval munitions. He was curi
ous what O’Toole would do with the extra gunnery training. He kept a small reserve hidden in the numbers for unforeseen events, and Lieutenant O’Toole was certainly unforeseen.
USN MESSAGE
2150 19421102
FROM COMNAVORDPAC
TO USS ABLE
Training allowance increased to twenty-five percent of load-out. There is a war going on you know.
§
The next day, Captain Shelly returned from a meeting in the shipyard office and found Doctor Strong on the main deck going through boxes of foodstuffs stacked on the fantail. An idle and annoyed work detail surrounded him.
“What are you doing, Doc?” Shelly asked.
“Looking.”
“For what?”
Strong tore into the next box in the stack. “Cockroaches. They are getting aboard somehow.”
Shelly glanced at the chief commisaryman; his face said, “Please, Captain, let us get this stuff stowed.”
“Doc, you can’t inspect every box before the crew stows it. They gotta get this stuff in the reefer or it will spoil.”
“I hate cockroaches.”
“Let the men get this stuff stowed and you can inspect the boxes in the reefer.”
“Yes, sir. It’s just that—well, I need to talk to you anyhow, Captain. You got a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
“Can we talk in your cabin?”
Once seated in Shelly’s cabin, Strong said, “I need to talk to you about O’Toole. Two of the toughest jobs on ship are the executive officer and the gunnery officer. He is holding down both of those jobs and is working himself to death. He’s not eating, he’s losing weight, and he’s not sleeping. All he does twenty-two hours a day is work. Some days he doesn’t sleep at all. In my medical opinion, if he maintains the same pace much longer, he’s going to collapse from exhaustion.”
“I’ve noticed the same thing, but I didn’t think his condition was medically threatening. He’s also been getting short tempered with the crew.”
“He’s emotionally brittle because of his physical condition and lack of sleep; one causes the other. He’s supposed to work the men hard, but he is turning into a brutal slave driver. He needs help, Captain. The workload is only part of the problem; I suspect he is trying to punish himself.”
Vows to the Fallen: O'Toole (The Marathon Series) Page 6
