He finally joined the diminishing stream of men clawing their way up the canting ladder, letting them push him along rather than trying to climb it. The moment he stumbled out into the main passageway from the hatch alcove, he was knocked flat on his stomach by a huge sailor who was running for his life with his eyes squeezed shut. An instant later, a half-dozen more incoming shells hit the superstructure, which was starting to hang over the water like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. One shell went off in the ship’s post office, thirty feet forward of where Marsh lay on the deck. Shrapnel flailed the passageway in both directions, cutting men down everywhere, followed by a noxious cloud of smoke and burning paper. He tried to get up but was flattened again by another sailor who landed on top of him, screaming in his ear and bleeding all over him. Without the use of his hands and forearms, Marsh couldn’t move. Another salvo of incoming shells hit along the port side, and he was suddenly grateful for the human cover when once again a hail of steel shards ricocheted all along the main passageway. He actually felt the man on top of him get hit and go limp.
Can’t stay here, he thought. Have to get outside.
He humped his back to dislodge the wounded man on top of him. Then he started crawling on his belly over the bodies, now all piled up on the port side of the passageway as the ship leaned into her death roll. He was clambering as much on the bulkhead as the deck because of her list, and his teeth were chattering in fear. He could feel his hands splashing through a stream of blood and worse things as he slithered like a snake toward the nearest main deck hatch. Another barrage of howling shells slammed into the ship. He could hear the thunder of shell-splash water landing on the deck outside the hatch from the near misses. Each hit felt like a punch into his own guts, and he almost vomited in sheer terror.
A dead man was draped across the hatch operating handle, and the hatch itself was perforated with dozens of holes, through which bright white light now blazed into the smoke-shrouded passageway. Marsh nudged the corpse aside and lifted the handle with his shoulder. The hatch swung out by gravity, and, because of the extreme list, he fell through it and slid across the teak deck into the lower part of the lifelines.
He was blinded as the blue-white light from the sixty-inch carbon-arc searchlight of a Jap cruiser lit them up like some kind of baleful ogre eye. The steam escaping from ruptured lines in the engineering spaces drowned out every other sound, including the screams of the wounded littering the deck, their faces contorted in that harsh white light. There was a big gasoline fire amidships where the scout planes were stored, and another one forward, probably from the avgas storage tanks. The water was enveloping the bow by now, and the fire was turning into a cloud of orange-tinged steam. A wave came out of nowhere and buried him, which was when he realized that the portside main deck edge was fully awash. She’ll roll at any second now, he thought. Go. Go now.
He took a deep breath, pushed his head and life jacket through the lifelines, and slipped gratefully into the sea. He sensed that there were others doing the same thing. Then he saw one man helping a wounded shipmate through the lifelines. A part of his brain scolded him: As an officer, he should have been doing that, but he was just too damned scared. When his head popped up above the water, he felt the full weight of Winston’s gutted forward superstructure hanging over him. There was an avalanche of things falling into the sea from where the bridge had been: signal books, battle lanterns, coffee mugs, binoculars, bodies and body parts, all accompanied by a small blizzard of paper. The roar of steam from amidships suddenly cut off, just as a severed head popped to the surface right in front of him, revealing Jack’s chalky face. Marsh cried out in horror, inhaling a mouthful of oily seawater in the process.
The Jap cruiser closed in abeam. They’d turned the targeting searchlight off, and now she looked like a long black dragon, so close that her bridge windows reflected the orange glow from Winston’s fires. Marsh could see their topside antiaircraft gun crews staring over at the wreck of the Winston. Her towering pagoda masts were clearly illuminated as her gun turrets flashed red and yellow again, fore and aft, followed by the thumping pressure of her muzzle blasts. This time all of the rounds went shrieking over their heads and into the darkness beyond as the bulk of Winston’s hull settled out of reach of any more hits. The Jap cruiser steered away and left the scene in search of more prey. She was close enough that he could hear her forced-draft blowers whining across the water as she accelerated into the night. Moments later her wake rebuked the Winston’s swimming survivors as they struggled to get away from what was coming next.
Marsh pushed through the warm water, fighting his life jacket as he tried to make progress away from the sinking ship. He remembered practicing the same thing in the natatorium at the academy during seamanship training. He couldn’t kick properly because his knees had stiffened into acute angles. He did a crude dog paddle with his equally useless wrists, determined to get away from the ship before she rolled all the way over and took him with her. Still, after a few minutes of painful effort, he couldn’t help but turn around to watch. One of the ship’s scout planes was fully engulfed in fire to his right, the flames boiling off in bright orange balls as the avgas tanks spilled liquid fire onto the waiting sea. A huge cloud of steam and smoke was rising just aft of amidships, where the tangled steel wreckage of the after superstructure and the stack glowed red and orange. In a few minutes, he thought, he would just about be able to see down her stacks when she settled onto her beam ends. Winston hung there, filling with water, as he caught his breath. He could hear the sounds of collapsing bulkheads deep inside the ship banging into the night air. By this time he had drifted forward and was abeam of the bow, which was just about submerged. With the steam leak quelled, the night filled with other terrible sounds: men screaming and shouting, the crackle of fires fore and aft, and, beneath the water, a gathering rumble as Winston prepared to die.
Above all the noise, he suddenly heard rapid-fire hammering, steel on steel. A wave slopped over his face, and he had to wipe the stinging saltwater from his eyes. He listened again.
Banging. Someone was pounding on steel back on board. Pounding desperately.
He was maybe fifty feet away, up alongside the bow, but the sound was clear as a bell. Winston’s main deck was now hanging over at a forty-degree if not steeper angle. Every piece of loose gear topside was rattling down into the sea. One of the forward eight-inch turrets swung lazily on its roller path with a great squealing noise to point all three barrels directly into the air.
There it was again. Bang, bang, bang. It was coming from the main forecastle hatch. The portside aviation fuel tank that had been burning was now underwater, but he could see that hatch from the light of the scout-plane fire farther aft.
Banging on a hatch. There were men trapped in there.
He swallowed hard. His mouth was dry as a bone despite the constant dunkings.
You’re an officer. You know what you have to do.
He did know, but he couldn’t make himself do it. As he scanned the expanse of the forecastle deck, which seemed to be getting closer, his limbs felt paralyzed. To his right the remains of the superstructure leaned out over the water, and a small gun director tore loose in a screech of steel. He knew she was moments from capsizing, and that he was much too close.
You know what you have to do.
The hell with that.
You know what you have to do.
The port anchor chain rattled as the stoppers let go and the anchor, already submerged, took off for the bottom, three thousand feet below. The sudden noise shook Marsh out of his stupor. He took a deep breath, then began paddling back toward the ship, dimly aware that there were dozens of men behind him, thrashing hard in the opposite direction. Some of them looked at him as if he were nuts.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Clear as a damn bell, the closer he got.
The bullnose was level with the sea by the time he got alongside. The banging continued as he heaved himself over the lifelines up onto the
tilted deck, his wrists alight with pain. He had to use his elbows and feet to scrabble like an injured crab across the two-thirds of the deck remaining above water until he reached that hatch. He coiled one leg around the base of a ventilator cowling to keep from sliding back across the slick teak decking.
The hatch was dogged down and dogged hard. The dogging wrench was jammed down into its bracket, its keeper wire intact, but his hands still wouldn’t work. He could feel a thrumming through the deck as more shell-holed bulkheads down below gave way, relinquishing more interior compartments to the hungry sea. He tried not to think about what would happen if she rolled now.
He turned on his side, extracted the wrench and set it as best his rubber hands would allow, then straightened out his free leg and kicked at it until the nut loosened and the hinged dogging bolt fell away. He thought he felt his kneecap come off with that first kick. The pain took his breath away. Then on to the next one, and the one after that. He had to hang on to a davit socket with one elbow to get enough leverage, even as the deck slanted over at an ever steeper angle.
Any moment now, he thought, perspiring in the wet air. She’s gonna roll.
He went after each dog until, finally, finally, the eighth one fell away. The hatch popped up with the force of ten men pushing on it. They erupted out of that hatch like the proverbial bats out of hell, pursued by a whoosh of hot, oily air that was being pressurized by the rising water below decks. More than a dozen white-faced men scrambled out, maintaining discipline, albeit just barely. Marsh lay there, exhausted, as he watched those guys escaping the glowing hell below and roll into the sea like lemmings. Finally, his elbow gave out and he slid feetfirst back across the now near-vertical deck, snagging in the submerged lifelines for a moment but then dropping back into the sea, where he joined the rush to get away. He paddled hard, doing a broken-handed breaststroke, kicking for his life despite the damage in his knees. Just in time, he thought, as he heard an enormous rumbling sound behind him.
No more than a minute later, she went all the way over with a ship-sized exhalation of escaping air, capsizing to port as a few desperate men aft scrambled like log-rollers up the now vertical surfaces of the main deck and then pitched backward, one by one, into the sea, where the ship came all the way over to smother every one of them in an eight-thousand-ton blanket of steel and crashing debris. For one horrifying instant, a hot white cone of steam blowing out of number two stack was pointed right at him, billowing across the orange-tipped waves. He imagined that he could feel its heat even though he was at least a hundred yards away by now. The remains of the gasoline fires aft briefly illuminated Winston’s bronze propellers, which were, amazingly, still rotating slowly as she turned turtle and went completely upside down. The red-leaded hull rolled briefly back and forth, probably as the eight-inch gun turrets fell off, and then the bulk of her sagged backward into the waiting sea. Her bow came up for an instant as she twisted, her starboard anchor hanging incongruously up against the lifelines.
Then, accompanied by another howl of compressed air and sheets of water-spray framed by a tumult of shiny black fuel oil, she was gone.
The sudden silence was just as frightening as the sinking. Marsh knew there were other men close by, but he was still somewhat night-blind from those searchlights. Then he smelled the bright stink of advancing fuel oil and began to do an awkward sidestroke to get away from it. There was still some gasoline burning in great flat lakes of fire. He felt an enormous thump from deep beneath him, followed by another and another. There go the boilers, he thought; she’s well and truly gone. He wondered if she’d land upright or upside down when she hit the bottom.
The sulfurous smell of bunker fuel oil grew stronger. Then he realized that the gasoline fires had ignited some of the fuel that was still streaming up from the wreck. There were men screaming in the distance as two racing flame fronts caught up with them, and Marsh pushed even harder to get away from the growing conflagration.
He yelped when the black thing erupted out of the sea twenty feet away. Then he recognized what it was: one of the ship’s many wood-and-canvas life rafts had torn away from the sinking hulk and popped back up to the surface.
Pushing his body through the light swells, awkwardly because of the bulky drag of the kapok life jacket, he caught up to the raft, quickly pushing one useless hand through one of the rope handholds. With the last of his strength, he hauled himself up partway into the raft. Almost immediately, the low-hanging smoke from nearby burning oil enveloped him, and he had to put his head down flat against the bottom of the raft to get some air. He felt one of the paddles that was still stowed against the bottom and pushed it out of its straps with his right foot. Taking one last deep breath of clean air, he sat back up to start rowing the raft away from the fire, only to feel a searing blast of heat against his face. The raft had drifted into the lake of burning fuel oil and was itself now on fire. He yelled with the pain of it and went back over the side, desperately trying to get away from the flames.
Basic training kicked in. Go deep, come back up slowly, open your eyes; if you see fire, push the water away from your face as you surface; grab a breath of air, go back down. It worked, sort of, except there wasn’t much air because the fire was consuming most of the oxygen and his damned hands just sort of flopped around. Down again, even as the life jacket perversely tugged him back up to the fire, repeating the maneuver until he could no longer see flickering light above. He surfaced and lay back in the life jacket, truly exhausted. The raft was still visible in the distance, but it was ablaze from end to end.
So much for that, he thought. For the first time he wondered if he was going to survive all this.
Almost unconsciously he kept paddling backward, keeping a wary eye on where the flames were headed, aware now that his life jacket was getting heavier as it inevitably began to soak up water. They said that a kapok life jacket was good for twenty-four hours max before it became totally waterlogged. The fire on the water suddenly blew sideways as a breeze came up, and the air became breathable again.
Where was everybody? There had to be more survivors—he had seen dozens of men abandoning the ship just before she rolled over. He tried a shout but produced a barely audible croak. The right side of his face felt like it had been badly sunburned. He tried again, and this time he heard another voice yelling, “Over here.” He turned around in the water and saw another, larger raft about fifty feet away, low in the water from the weight of a couple of dozen men hanging on to its sides. He struck out for the raft with renewed energy and was soon able to stick his forearm through one of the free ropes.
Every other handhold was taken, and there were a dozen men actually in the raft itself, most of them badly injured. He heard someone identify him by name—“It’s Mister Vincent”—but everyone else was strangely silent. They were probably as exhausted as he was and were literally saving their breath. The back of his head stung, and he touched it to see if he was bleeding. He felt a flap of skin come off in his fingers. One of the men in the raft suddenly sat up, swore, and pointed. He turned to look, just in time to see a black shape looming out of the darkness, casting a bright white bow wave as she came on.
“She’s gonna hit us!” one of the men croaked.
No, she’s not, Marsh thought, but it’s going to be close—and she’s not one of ours.
“Japs!” cried another man. “It’s the fuckin’ Japs!”
The black cruiser loomed over them in the darkness, close enough to create a powerful pulse of underwater pressure as her thirteen-thousand-ton hull pushed by at twenty-plus knots. Marsh braced for the bow wave he knew was coming and was surprised how good the warm water felt as the wave foamed over the raft. Then a searchlight switched on, followed by a second one. These weren’t their big targeting searchlights but close-in devices, signal lamps, throwing off a yellowish glow as they swept the surface before settling on the raft. Instinctively, Marsh knew what would happen next. He yelled for the men to bail out, took a dee
p breath, let go of the handhold, and pushed himself underwater as deep as he could get with his kapok on. He could feel the twenty-five-millimeter shells tearing into the life raft and hear the rounds buzzing by his ears as they spent themselves in the sea.
He kept windmilling his arms backward underwater until the lights went out and the shooting stopped. By the time he popped back out of the water, lungs close to bursting, the Jap ship had disappeared into the darkness. So had the raft, torn to pieces by one of the AA crews on the cruiser’s main deck. There were a few heads in the water, but they were all facedown, bobbing lifelessly in the remains of the cruiser’s wake. Another man popped up a few feet away, hacking and coughing as he gulped air. He thrashed around for a minute before taking in the scene in front of them.
“God damn them all to hell,” he said, spitting seawater. “Sonsabitches ain’t human.”
“Just finishing the job,” Marsh said. “Allowing us the privilege of a quick death in battle.”
The man looked over at him with raccoonlike eyes. His face was covered in a sheen of oil with only the whites of his eyes visible. “You gotta be an officer,” he said. Marsh noticed he didn’t have a life jacket.
“Lieutenant Vincent, assistant gun boss.”
“Monkey-mate Second Marty Gorman,” he said. “Wish we had some of them guns of yours.”
“Gone to Davy Jones,” Marsh said. “You need a kapok.”
“They all burned up in two-engine,” Gorman said, wiping some oil off his forehead. “Believe it or not, I went out through the torpedo hole. Big as a damn house, it was. I think everybody else was already killed. I’d been down behind the main reduction gear, taking a lube oil sample. I guess that’s why it didn’t get me, too. Goddamn miracle.”
A piece of the raft floated by, and Marsh grabbed it. Gorman swam over and latched on. He was pretty old for being a second-class petty officer, which told Marsh he’d probably been to captain’s mast a few times in his career.
Pacific Glory Page 2
