“Unh-hunh.”
“Let me put it this way, Mick. Ordinarily the skipper would be throwing a temper tantrum in CAG’s office for having to cough up an experienced fleet pilot.”
“But this time, he just signed off and had another cup of coffee.”
“They requested you by name, Mick.”
“Sure they did.”
“The air boss weighed in, I think.”
“Ah. And losing my gunner, that didn’t help.”
The XO was silent for a moment. “About a quarter of the pilots who ditched that night were not recovered. We all know what happens when you go from a hundred twenty knots to zero in ten feet. If you’re not sitting just right, you break your neck. That’s most likely what happened to Gunner Sykes. So, no, that wasn’t it.”
“Too much Lone Ranger, maybe?”
“Maybe. Tell me this: Would you want you as your wingman?”
Mick had to think about that one. From a fighting competence point of view, hell, yes—but as a team player? “Wingman is fighter stuff, XO,” he said.
The exec just looked at him. Mick sighed and finally nodded.
“Anyway,” the XO said, “Evans will be alongside to refuel tomorrow morning sometime. You’ll highline over then. Ship’s bitch will have your paperwork ready by zero eight hundred tomorrow.”
Mick nodded. “Thanks for telling me in person, XO. Should I bother with departure calls on the CO and CAG?”
“Do as you please, Mick.” He closed the door behind him.
“Don’t I always?” Mick said to the closed door. The Carrier Air Group commander doesn’t know me, Mick thought. The skipper did, though, so no departure calls definitely meant he was being fired. He couldn’t win for losing.
TWELVE
Following their unscheduled holiday break at Pearl, Evans spent the next eight months with the Third Fleet as it battered its way up the Central Pacific island chains. As a lowly tin can in the Enterprise’s screen, they were not privy to any of the grand strategic plans. Every destroyer’s mission remained plain and simple: Protect its carrier, and run errands in the task force formations as assigned—move people, rescue downed aviators, run off snooping aircraft, steam as a plane guard behind the carrier during land-launch operations, refuel from the carrier or an oiler every third day, conduct training exercises and gunnery practice, train up the new guys on board, repair broken machinery, eat, and sleep when they could.
The ship routinely went to GQ just before dawn and again just at sundown. They shot at and hopefully downed any enemy aircraft that evaded the outer ring of combat air patrols thrown up by the carriers all day. Occasionally they were detached to join an amphibious group for inshore naval gunfire support duty, where they fired five-inch into the jungles on both named and unnamed islands. Sometimes the Jap army artillery fired back, but Evans seemed to lead a charmed life, never once being hit. Marsh remarked about that once to the captain, who said they were simply overdue. The captain was more afraid of mines than of Jap artillery. By this point in the war, Evans didn’t fire a gun that wasn’t under radar control. The Japanese were still mostly using optical fire control or sighting down the barrel.
By September of 1944, the United States was closing in on the Philippines, MacArthur’s holy grail and the scene of an especially painful defeat for America on the Bataan Peninsula. The Pacific had been divided by the high command in Washington into two command areas: General Douglas MacArthur commanded the South West Pacific Area, and Admiral Chester Nimitz the rest of the Pacific Ocean. For the past year, MacArthur’s Army and Navy forces had been working their way north from Australia through New Guinea and Borneo, while Nimitz’s Navy and Marine Corps forces had been blasting Japs out of the Solomons and then grinding up the Central Pacific to destroy the huge Jap bases at Rabaul and Truk Lagoon before concentrating on the Marianas Islands of Guam, Tinian, and Saipan.
From time to time elements of Halsey’s striking fleet were detached to augment MacArthur’s Seventh Fleet operations. In early August 1944, the captain had been given a heads-up that Evans was going to join the light carrier formations being assembled for the initial invasion of the Philippines. The target was the island of Mindanao, later changed to Leyte, which was south and east of the main island, Luzon. Three weeks before that, however, Marsh got a surprise. The captain called him aside in the wardroom one night after dinner and handed him a message. It contained the promotion list from commander to full captain. Evans’s captain was on the list, and he’d received news that he was going to be the commissioning skipper of a new Baltimore-class heavy cruiser.
“This means a change of command, XO,” he said. “As if you had nothing else to do.”
Marsh congratulated him while stifling a groan. Even out here in the western Pacific war zone, a change of command meant a full week of inspections, reports, audits, briefings, fitness reports, and all the other trappings of handing over absolute command of a warship from one commanding officer to his successor. It would all have to be done on top of the day-to-day operations with the carrier force. Department heads, who were standing six on, six off watches, would have to give up sleep to prepare briefings for the new captain on the material condition of machinery in their departments, an overview of their officers, chief petty officers, and enlisted men, an accounting of all high-value equipment, and then a physical inspection of all their spaces in the ship.
Usually a change of command would be scheduled for a period of time when the ship was going to be back in port, but for the Big Blue Fleet there was little in-port time, especially for the destroyers. The only time offline Evans got was a few days at one of the island anchorages, where the crew could go ashore, sit on a beach, and have a few beers and a softball game. If they were really lucky, they might get back to Pearl for Christmas, as they had in December 1943—although the fact that they had been pierside in Pearl for the past Christmas would actually work against their chances of getting back anytime soon.
“Just what we need,” Marsh said. “Do you know the new CO?”
“I do,” the captain said, “and that’s one of the things I need to talk to you about. Let’s get some coffee and go topside.”
They headed up to the bridge. There they went out onto the downwind bridge wing to watch the stars come out. A few miles away the Enterprise, showing red and amber flight deck directional lights, was recovering the last of the evening combat air patrols. There’d be no more flight operations until just before dawn, when the entire carrier task group would launch their dawn patrols. It was one of the consequences of Pearl Harbor that the Navy day now began at dawn. Prior to the sneak attack, a Navy ship company’s day in port began in earnest around nine in the morning, pretty much like their civilian brethren.
The port lookout moved into the pilothouse to give them some privacy, but even so, the captain kept his voice down. There were no bigger gossips in the world than sailors.
“The new CO is Commander Bill Hughes,” he said. “He’s a classmate.”
That spoke volumes: The captain was completing his commander-command tour, promoting to four stripes, and on his way to an even bigger ship. His classmate was obviously a little bit behind the career power curve.
“I haven’t seen him for several years,” he said, “but the nature of your job here as exec is probably going to change, and I think I owe you a heads-up.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“Well, I had some reservations when you were sent in as XO, mostly because you were so junior. On the other hand, you had recent and downright vivid combat experience, you’d won a Silver Star for bravery, and you were academy. And you’ve done damn well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I mean it. The crew and the wardroom respect you, and that brings me to what I have to tell you: Bill Hughes is a notorious screamer.”
Marsh’s heart sank. He’d heard of that type, officers who knew only one method of command: absolute tyranny, accompanied by a perpetually furiou
s personality. They found fault with everything and everybody while demanding the highest standards of professional performance and discipline.
“This is what you need to know,” the captain said. “You will have to become the buffer between the CO and the rest of the ship’s company. The Lord Protector of your officers and enlisted men. That doesn’t mean that you become a disloyal subordinate: The captain is the captain. But when he loses his temper and verbally demolishes a junior officer in front of his subordinates, then you are the one who gets that JO to come around to your stateroom after hours, where you’ll explain that whatever he did was not an act of high treason. That the CO just lost his temper, and that he’s not going to have him shot on the fantail at dawn. You get the picture?”
“Who will do that for me?” Marsh asked, being only halfway facetious.
The captain grinned in the dark. “That’s the hard part, XO. If destroyer command is going to work, the CO and the XO have to merge professionally and, if possible, personally, as I think you and I have managed to do. With Bill Hughes, you are going to be operating in the lightning rod mode.”
“Sounds great.”
“What I mean is this: Try to set it up so that he yells at you rather than the troops. You know, chain of command. When he does yell at the troops, do damage control as best you can. Otherwise they will become dispirited. It’s bad enough to have Jap planes dropping torpedoes at you, only to then have the skipper scream at you for not shooting the bastard down before he dropped his torpedo.”
“Tell me this, then: If I’m the guy he spends most of his time screaming at, what chances do I have of getting a decent fitness report?”
“You started out in cruisers, didn’t you?” he said.
“Yes, sir. Three in a row.”
“The cruiser Navy is a little more formal than we are in the tin can Navy,” he said. “We sound the GQ alarm. A cruiser blows a bugle call. We stand watch in our short-sleeve wash khakis; a cruiser bridge requires a long-sleeve shirt and tie. A cruiser skipper occasionally visits the wardroom for dinner. A destroyer skipper eats in the wardroom with the rest of the officers.”
“I remember all that,” Marsh said.
“Well, the tin can Navy’s a much tighter community, especially when it comes to professional reputations. I’m talking about the regular officers now, not all these ninety-day wonders. If the ship does well, accomplishes her missions, and doesn’t run aground, then even a lousy fitness report from someone like Bill Hughes would be interpreted as a mark of respect for you. The people who sit on promotion and command screen boards know how this works, and they also know about screamers like Bill Hughes.”
“If he has this kind of reputation, why is he getting a command?”
“I don’t know—some admiral called in a marker somewhere, maybe? There’s probably a shortage of qualified skippers. We’ve lost a lot of middle-grade officers these past two years. Hell, you were at Savo: Three American cruisers had their entire wardrooms decimated. How many prospective XOs and COs did we lose, just in one night?”
Marsh thought back to Winston and could remember at least a half-dozen officers who would have gone on to command, except that now they were asleep in the deeps of Ironbottom Sound. The wind blowing through the pilothouse hatch was warm enough, but even so he felt a chill. Silver Star not withstanding, he still felt in his own mind that he had not distinguished himself that night. Beast was probably right, he thought: When the day came to face a real battle, he’d probably clutch up. He was starting to feel that way about the new commanding officer, and he hadn’t even met him.
“And here’s one last thing,” the captain said. “What I’ve told you tonight? You can’t share this openly with the wardroom. All you can do is protect the good guys as best you can. You cannot openly denigrate the captain, or you become part of the problem. No matter how you feel, you must rigidly support the chain of command.”
“These guys aren’t dumb, Skipper. They’ll see right through that.”
“Yes, they might, but remember, discipline is the only thing that keeps a ship going, especially in wartime. If a popular and respected XO becomes openly disloyal to the captain, then the crew loses confidence in the captain. Then along comes one of those moments of extreme peril, where he gives an order, the exactly correct order, and someone questions it. Then everybody dies.”
“Suppose it’s the wrong order, though?”
“That’s the deeply embedded hook in the military seniority system, XO. A junior officer can never know whether or not his boss might be privy to information that he, as the junior officer, is not. If you think it’s a mistake, you can say that, but once the CO shakes his head and says no, do it, you must comply. Somebody has to be the ultimate authority, and that’s the captain. That’s why he gets that great big cabin.”
That was a joke, of course; the captain’s in-port cabin was maybe eight feet wide and twelve long. Marsh knew what he was talking about, though.
“Sometimes I feel that we’re all actors,” he said. “Pretending that we have the answers to everything.”
“A surprising amount of this command business is an act. I don’t mean play-acting in the Hollywood sense. I mean that when you’re the captain, everyone is watching you, every moment. So you have to present a calm, confident, wise, compassionate, patient demeanor, even if personally you are none of those things.”
“Yes, sir, I understand that, I think. But what if you’re the XO and the captain doesn’t live up to those rules?”
“Then you have to fill in for his professional failings while not appearing to. In the end it’s not about the XO or the CO—it’s all about taking care of the ship and her people. You concentrate on doing that, and your fitness reports will take care of themselves, one way or another. It’s actually a beautiful system.”
“Did you know all about this when you took command?” Marsh asked.
“Nope,” he said with a smile. “The screening boards select officers for command based on their potential to step up and fill the shoes. Sometimes they get it wrong, but for the most part they get it right, as I think you’ll find out when your turn comes.”
Marsh shook my head. “The closer I get…”
The captain chuckled in the darkness. “Yeah, I know. That’s the amazing thing, when you think about it. We regulars are more afraid of screwing up professionally than we are of the Japs and their bombs and torpedoes. I think you’ll do just fine when the time comes, and it’ll come sooner than you think.”
“I just made lieutenant commander,” Marsh said. “I’m years away.”
“You’re probably one year away, XO. If nothing else, Bill Hughes will be superb training for when you get your own ship. On how not to act under fire.”
“And a free education at that.”
The captain laughed quietly. Marsh was going to miss him.
* * *
Commander Bill Hughes came aboard a week later, after a long trip from Pearl through a succession of waypoints across the Pacific and finally to the Enterprise. The Evans came alongside the bird farm one fine morning and Hughes and his seabag were highlined aboard. He was a tall, rangy officer, with a narrow, bony face and pronounced dark circles under his eyes; he was obviously exhausted by the long trip to join Evans. The captain gave him his in-port cabin and moved himself to the even tinier sea cabin right behind the bridge. Commander Hughes slept for the first twelve hours of his stay on board. He even slept right through the next morning’s dawn gunnery practice, with five-inchers banging away fore and aft.
Commander Hughes was accompanied by a second officer, who was as short and round as Hughes was tall and thin. He was Rabbi Sidney Morgenstern, and he was Evans’s brand-new chaplain. Marsh had not known they were getting a chaplain, and his surprise showed when they met on the midships highline platform.
“Welcome aboard, Rabbi,” he said after Morgenstern introduced himself. “Are you rotating through the screen ships or are you our new chaplain?�
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“I think I’m all yours, XO,” he said with a grin. “We had three rabbis on the Bunker Hill, and I was voted most likely to become expendable, so they sent me to a tin can.”
“Well, let’s find you a berth, then,” Marsh said. “We have maybe three men aboard who are Jewish, but I assume you can counsel anyone who needs it, right?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “That’s why I have the Star of David on one collar and the cross on the other. Same God, last time I checked in.”
Marsh handed the rabbi over to the supply officer and went to catch up with the new skipper. As the exec, his job was to coordinate the turnover process and the actual change of command ceremony. It all went pretty well over the next week, with only a few custody signature items such as binoculars having to be “surveyed” because no one could find them. After it was all over, and Captain Warren had been highlined off to begin his own long journey back to the States, Commander Hughes called Marsh into his cabin for the customary here’s-how-I’m-going-to-run-it conversation. He was not especially friendly, but Marsh sensed that was more his professional demeanor than any antipathy toward him.
“Everybody gets one mulligan,” Hughes said. “After that, when someone screws up he’s going to hear from me. I will not tolerate incompetence or slack behavior.”
Marsh nodded. There really wasn’t any response he could make to that, other than perhaps to point out that, in the main, the Evans was sailing with a crew made up of last year’s high school class and a wardroom of ninety-day-wonder reservists. It wasn’t so much that they were incompetent as it was that they were necessarily ignorant of how everything was supposed to work.
“This is a good, solid crew, Captain,” Marsh told him. “They’re willing, but they’re still green. If they screw up, it’s usually because they don’t know any better.”
“Then we need to beef up the training program,” Hughes said. “You can’t be doing OJT when the Japs come calling.”
Pacific Glory Page 24
