MacArthur's War: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan

by Douglas Niles

  And finally, Nagumo understood.

  The explosion that rocked the bridge did not even register on his numbed senses. The fire that swirled around him was a cleansing joy, the last joy he would ever know. And death, when finally it claimed him, brought the only possible relief from his disgrace and his shame.

  IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY SUBMARINE 1-19, SOLOMON SEA, 2246 HOURS

  “I have a bearing on two carriers.”

  Captain Asagi held his eyes to the periscope, slowly swiveled the tiny viewer that projected above the surface of the sea. He had been stalking this fleet for hours, moving very slowly under the water, surfacing infrequently to consult his scope. The surface ships moved much faster than a submerged submarine, but here Asagi had been lucky: he had simply lurked and waited, and the enemy fleet was now steaming right above him!

  His boat was submerged and undiscovered, literally in the middle of the American fleet. And there were two flattops visible in the scope. These were the prize targets of naval warfare—in this war, anyway—and both of them were within range of his lethal Long Lance torpedoes.

  “Stand by to fire all the bow tubes,” he ordered. “Then alter course by thirty degrees to starboard, and fire the rear.”

  Asagi’s crew scrambled to prepare the shots, while the captain went back to viewing. Two carriers, in a stealth night attack. It would be an unprecedented feat of seamanship, and they might be able to do it! Never before had such a shot been attempted.

  But then never before, to be sure, had he seen two targets so thoroughly illuminated by their own searchlights.

  ENTERPRISE, SOLOMON SEA, 2257 HOURS

  Lefty Wayner had never been so glad to feel the deck under his feet. Since they had a little more gas in their tanks, the CAP—combat air patrol—fighters landed after the strike aircraft. Even so, it was touch-and-go, and it wasn’t until his tail-hook snagged the wire that Lefty convinced himself he was really going to make it back to his cabin without getting wet.

  “How many, Lefty?” his crew chief, Mike Sanders, asked as he popped the canopy and helped the pilot out of the tiny cockpit and onto the wing.

  Lefty had spent the last hour circling in the darkness, going over the fight in his mind, and he was ready with an answer. “I got six—count ‘em, six—of the bastards!” he crowed as he hopped down to the flight deck. “Two dive-bombers, a fighter, and three of them torpeckers.”

  “Hot damn—with the four from before, that makes you a double ace!” Mike clapped him on the back.

  “You know, I guess it does. Not a bad outcome for a few hours’ hard work,” Lefty allowed.

  He was turning toward the island, looking forward to a cup of hot coffee in the pilots’ wardroom, when suddenly the pilot was airborne again—this time without benefit of an airplane. The deck jolted upward beneath him, tossing the chief and Lefty into the air. The Grumman, not yet strapped down, lurched and wobbled on its narrow landing gear as the two men tumbled down beside it. The right strut collapsed and the starboard wing smashed downward, pinning the crew chief to the deck, smashing his chest.

  Only then did Lefty hear the explosion. A great roar erupted from the bowels of the ship, and a column of flame shot high into the sky, blasting the aft elevator right out of its frame. He felt the searing blast of the heat against his skin, and as he stumbled to his feet he stared down at Sanders, motionless with his mouth gaping and tongue protruding under the weight of the aircraft’s wing.

  Men screamed and shouted. Some kept their heads enough to issue orders: “Damage control over here! Get those hoses spraying! Corpsman! Corpsman!”

  A klaxon sounded, not that anyone needed the clarification that the ship was in trouble. The terrible sounds of fire and explosion roared up through the elevator hatch and thundered through the hull.

  Lefty didn’t need a program to know what had happened: the Big E had taken a torpedo right in her guts. A Jap submarine was lurking out there somewhere, and as he knelt beside Mike Sanders he felt a rush of hatred for those sneaky bastards that went far beyond any emotion he had felt during his lethal dueling in the air.

  “Help!” he cried to a pair of running seamen. “We’ve got to get him out of here!” The sailors continued to run and Lefty tried to lift the wing on his own. Mike was motionless, his eyes open and his chest crushed, but the pilot wasn’t thinking rationally as he tried to pull the airplane off of the dead crew chief. He wept in frustration and fought the men who took his arms and pulled him away, back from the rapidly spreading fire.

  They left the pilot with many other wounded men on the forward part of the flight deck. It wasn’t until Lefty tried to get up and head back to help fight the fire that he realized that his face and hands were blistered from the heat. His throat was parched, and his legs refused to support him. A corpsman gave him cool water from a canteen, and he slumped back onto the flight deck, looking up at the pillars of fire rising from the stern of his great ship.

  Damage control parties were directing the spray of massive hoses onto the conflagration, but it was like trying to put out a bonfire with a squirt gun. More blasts wracked the ship as bombs in the magazine exploded; the noise was louder than a violent thunderstorm, and even more relentless.

  At first, the pain of his burns was maddening, but the corpsman returned and gave him a shot of morphine. The drug eased through his veins, bringing a dulling fatigue, so much so that he didn’t even care when he finally heard the order pass through the ranks of the wounded:

  “Abandon ship.”

  PORTLAND, SOLOMON SEA, 2301 HOURS

  “Holy shit—the Enterprise just blew up!” The announcement, by a seaman observer in a cracking voice, was not strictly necessary. Chadwick could see the other carrier, less than a mile away, erupt with a gout of flame shooting high into the sky from the afterdeck.

  The first torpedo struck astern of the carrier’s island, heaving the elevator upward and spewing that spectacular column of fire. A few seconds later the pressure wave from the explosion sent Chadwick—and hundreds of other men aboard the Portland—staggering and sometimes falling, rocking the heavy cruiser in the water like a toy boat in a bathtub.

  Moments later a second explosion ripped through the stern of the Enterprise. Frank could see that the great ship was savagely hit, burning furiously in the stern, with her hull punctured in at least two places.

  “There’s a Jap sub out there!” Chadwick realized immediately. “Submarine! Lights out!” he yelled.

  “Submarine, lights out, aye, captain,” came the answering chorus.

  He was not the only one to understand—already the lights on the fleet were blinking out, even though the last of the combat air patrol planes were still coming in to land.

  “See if you can raise the Enterprise,” he ordered.

  His radioman got to work with the set, shaking his head in frustration. Frank stayed on the exterior bridge, hands clenching the metal rim of the rail, counting off the seconds, wondering if the Wasp, too, had been made a target.

  The answer came with stunning violence. Another fireball blossomed amid the now darkened fleet, followed by the dull boom of explosions thundering over the sea. The other carrier was three miles away, but the men aboard the Portland still felt the concussion through the water and across the gulf of space.

  The Minneapolis had serious engine room damage and was likely going to need a tow back to Nouméa. With the Enterprise down, that left the Portland as the lead ship, at least until Admiral Halsey could transfer his flag or establish communication from the Big E.

  It didn’t look like the latter eventuality was going to happen anytime soon, if ever again. Fire engulfed the whole stem of the ship, and the flames made steady progress, creeping through the midsection of the carrier, surrounding the island, encroaching toward the bow. Already she was settling by the stem as water gushed in through the two massive holes in her hull.

  “We’re going to be ready if the Enterprise needs evacuation,” Frank ordered. “Sen
d half the screening destroyers after the sub—even though he probably turned tail and ran after he fired all his tubes. As for the rest of us, we’re not going to worry about it. Let’s move in as close as we can. Order the rest of the DDs in as well. Put all the boats in the water, and let’s get the survivors on board.”

  As the Portland closed on the Enterprise, Frank could see the great ship settling more dramatically by the stern. In addition, she was listing to starboard, so much so that the men on the cruise could soon see the carrier’s flight deck as it leaned toward them. Fires from the engine room and magazine were spreading, slowly getting beyond human control. Through his binoculars, Frank saw men running in every direction, and amid them he saw motionless forms, bodies crumpled awkwardly, broken and shattered.

  The crew of the Big E would fight to save the ship, but from here, her fate looked certain. Long rows of wounded men had been laid out near the bow while ropes were secured to the catwalks just below the flight deck. These lines trailed down to the water, and almost immediately men began to descend toward the sea.

  There was still no communication with the stricken carrier, but it was clear that she was being abandoned. Already the ocean teemed with bobbing, swimming men. Oil spreading from the stern of the ship was burning, and the slick was growing dangerously.

  “Closer—take us in closer!” Chadwick demanded. “There are men dying in that water!”

  Ignoring the danger to his own ship, the captain took his heavy cruiser right up to the edge of the burning oil slick. Destroyers dodged in and out, while small boats were lowered, and many oil-soaked men—a good number of them wounded—were pulled from the water.

  Meanwhile, other destroyers chased the elusive submarine. Depth charges boomed through the night, the sounds growing farther and farther away. Though the little ships couldn’t claim a kill with any certainty, they at least drove the enemy sub deep enough so that it couldn’t shoot again.

  Through the long night, Frank directed the rescue operations. Out of two thousand two hundred men on board the Enterprise, his ships recovered only nine hundred, many hurt, some critically. Last to leave was the carrier’s captain, when the fate of his ship was finally beyond any doubt. He brought along another man, badly burned and carried in a canvas stretcher. When that motionless figure was raised up to the Portland’s deck, Frank was standing there to assist. He looked down at the stern, weather-lined face, now relaxed as if asleep. It was hard to believe that snapping voice had been stilled, the indomitable spirit quenched.

  But the ghastly wound in the chest and the peaceful visage made clear:

  Admiral Bill Halsey was dead.

  EIGHT

  The White House

  • MONDAY, 19 OCTOBER 1942 •

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC, 1700 HOURS

  The movement of the President’s wheelchair was the signal for the traveling road show in the Oval Office to meander upstairs to the Oval Study on the residence level. Although five o’clock signaled the end of the regular workday, it meant only a change of venue for the office of the President of the United States.

  The President traveled through private study and then by private elevator, of course, accompanied by valet and personal physician. Various aides—assistants to the President and deputy undersecretaries and senior advisers and people so important they had no recognizable title whatsoever—milled haphazardly down from the West Wing into the residence, and from there up the wide staircase to the Oval Study. Some aides peeled off from the pack to go about their mysterious business until only three remained.

  Captain Frank Chadwick, still disoriented from his rapid transit from the Solomons, and from the still smoldering work of disaster recovery management, let himself be drawn along with the mob. He was surprised no one was telling him to get lost, that he had no business in the company of these people.

  In addition to the people he already knew—Navy Secretary Frank Knox and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King—Frank also recognized Treasury Secretary Morgenthau. He was pretty sure the guy with the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist was OSS. The White House staffers who remained with the party included two old enough to be pretty senior and one young enough that he had to be acting as somebody’s ADC, or whatever the civilian equivalent was called. The young guy, Frank was sure, would be writing down any action items and reminding his boss about them in the morning.

  Because this was Frank Chadwick’s first visit to the White House, they’d briefed him on what to expect, but he hadn’t believed half of what he’d been told about the chaos surrounding the President. Although it certainly looked chaotic, in Frank’s opinion the appearance was deceiving. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was much more in control than it appeared.

  Everybody wanted to be the first to tell Frank about the wheelchair, of course. He pretended polite surprise for admirals, “old news” familiarity for anyone of lower rank. The fact of the President’s disability wasn’t that well kept a secret.

  What nobody had briefed him about was how shabby the presidential mansion looked. The paint was old and peeling in places, the carpet threadbare, the furniture cast off from various federal agencies. Generations of tobacco smoke, cooking odors, and human sweat merged in the humid Washington autumn to crowd out any hint of oxygen. The Solomons smelled almost pleasant by comparison. The President didn’t seem to mind: the ashtray built into the arm of his wheelchair was already overflowing with ashes from the day’s second pack of Camels by the time the navy men had arrived at four o’clock sharp, the original appointment time.

  Chadwick trailed behind his two bosses. Frank W. Knox was an FDR man brought in to get the navy department under control. Ernie King, running the navy from his offices in the temporary buildings down on Constitution Avenue, figured Knox would just leak any real information to his press buddies and so seldom bothered to give him any.

  The civilians wore linen or seersucker, mandatory in the humid Washington summer. Knox was a linen man. Chadwick and King, the only military officers present, wore navy dress blues. Knox, a natural politician, was at home in the give-and-take of Roosevelt’s informal office. Admiral King’s sour apple expression was slowly darkening, like mercury rising in a thermometer, as the men continued to wait their turn.

  King had predicted this when he briefed Frank during the car ride down Constitution Avenue. “That son of a bitch will have people from his last three appointments still hanging around the Oval Office yammering away, and we’ll walk in and cool our heels for God only knows how long until we have a chance to get our business done.” Chadwick wasn’t too surprised to hear King call FDR an SOB. For the CNO and COMINCHFLT—chief of naval operations and commander in chief, United States Fleet—that was mild language.

  It was certainly true that Roosevelt had a unique management style, not at all what Frank had imagined from years of listening to fireside chats and reading the newspaper. He grinned as realized he’d half expected the President to be about the size of the statue in the Lincoln Memorial, but the wheelchair with built-in ashtray, the haze of smoke and sweat, and the chaos of six simultaneous conversations swirling around the President brought him down into the mortal plane. If anything, the mortal President impressed Frank more than the memorial-sized version.

  The staircase opened up onto a wide corridor that ran the length of the residence level. It, too, had seen better days, but the carpet showed less wear. A white-jacketed Negro valet opened the double doors to the Oval Study, directly opposite the staircase, and the party flowed in. Frank noticed two discreet but obviously serious Secret Service agents, one blocking each way down the corridor in the event of any unauthorized tourism.

  The Oval Study was, if anything, in much worse shape than the rest of the White House. Crowded full of sofas, card tables, bookcases, and knickknacks FDR had picked up over a lifetime, there was barely enough room for the eleven people who had packed themselves in.

  FDR himself was already stationed behind the makeshift ba
r, ready to perform his self-appointed daily duty as mix master. After handing a rather wet martini to the secretary of navy, the President of the United States put the finishing touches on an old-fashioned for himself and made the first toast.

  “Gentlemen,” the President said. “To victory.”

  A ragged chorus of “To victory” came in reply, and those without drinks nodded or lifted an empty hand in salute.

  “Now, where were we?” This was the general signal for conversations to start back up again. The evening work session at the Roosevelt White House was officially under way.

  The President continued to serve his more senior guests before turning over bartending responsibilities to his valet. Either FDR remembered what everybody drank or nobody wanted to complain, because he continued to mix drinks without interrupting the flow of conversation.

  FDR poured King a scotch, neat, of a brand Chadwick had never seen. “It’s another single malt Winston sent over, Ernie. There’s an extra bottle for you, too. I had it delivered to your office.”

  With the current emotional temperature reading on King’s face, Frank expected the admiral to say something grumpy or worse—so, by the expression on his face, did Knox—but instead King gestured toward Chadwick. “Mr. President, I hope you won’t mind pouring one more of those.”

  “And who might this young man be?” the President asked, reaching out one hand with the scotch and another to shake.

  King made the introduction. “Mr. President, this is Captain Frank Chadwick, recently of the Northern Solomons. Frank, I have the honor to introduce the President of the United States.”