Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  On-the-job training, however, was precisely how much of the U.S. Navy had trained during 1942, as Marsh knew firsthand. The heavy casualties in that year and the next reflected that. He’d been sent into an exec’s job with absolutely no training, other than having watched his own exec in Winston. It also didn’t help that there was a great deal of turnover among warship captains. About the time the rest of the ship’s company had gotten used to a new skipper, another one seemed to show up to take his place, as there were many commanders eager to get the command-at-sea box checked off.

  “Give me your appraisal of the individual officers, please,” the captain said. “Start with the department heads.”

  In Winston, there had been a four-striper as captain, a three-striper as exec, and five lieutenant commanders as department heads. Every officer on board except the doctor, the supply officer, and the chaplain had been regular officers and academy graduates. By 1944, things were very different: The skipper and Marsh were academy professionals. Every other officer on board was a reservist, with the most experienced department head having not quite three years of sea duty under his belt. The captain nodded when Marsh finished going through the list.

  “I’m an impatient man, XO,” he said. “I’ve never learned to coddle people. I tell them what I want and I expect them to deliver, whether it’s chasing rust out on deck or keeping a spotless engineering space. If they don’t measure up, I tend to yell. Don’t take it personally. It’s just how I do things. You may find yourself mending fences for me with the wardroom and the crew from time to time.”

  Marsh almost laughed, given what Captain Warren had told him. At least Hughes was being honest about himself, he thought. A screamer who could admit he’s a screamer was better than one who didn’t see anything wrong with acting that way.

  Marsh hadn’t counted, however, on just how explosive his temper was. It happened at the end of one of their refueling evolutions. The ship would come alongside the carrier every third day and receive and hook up span-wires, down which a thick black hose would roll. Once the hose was plugged into an on-deck refueling connection, the carrier would start pumping, and the engineers would open and close valves down below to distribute the fuel oil to the various tanks lining the ship’s bottom.

  On this particular occasion, the snipes managed to overfill one of the forward fuel tanks. When that happens, the fuel oil comes spurting out of tank vents all along the main deck, covering men, the deck, and the sides in a viscous film of heavy black oil. Since it’s the receiving ship’s job to tell the providing ship when to stop pumping as her tanks get close to full, there’s never a question as to who screwed up. To make matters worse, there’s always a gallery of senior officers lining the carrier’s island catwalks watching to see how well the tin can is being handled alongside. It was hugely embarrassing for Evans to blow black oil all over herself.

  Captain Hughes said not a word, but after the Evans broke away from the carrier to regain her assigned station in the screen, he summoned the chief engineer, the main propulsion assistant, and the oil king, who was a senior boiler-tender chief petty officer. Then he proceeded to detonate. Marsh stood behind the captain, studying the steel deck beneath his feet, while Hughes went on and on, practically foaming at the mouth. Marsh was pretty sure the rest of the crew could hear it all over the ship; the bridge watch team certainly got an earful. The oil spill had been embarrassing. Marsh thought this temper tantrum was downright humiliating.

  Afterward, the captain sat back in his bridge chair and asked him what was on tap for the day. One moment ago he had been almost purple in the face. Now he was calmly asking about the day’s schedule of events, as if he had some kind of off-on switch for his temper. After Marsh recited the evolutions planned for the day, the captain instructed him to conduct an informal investigation into how the engineers had managed to foul up the refueling so badly this morning.

  “I’m guessing an inexperienced fireman misread a tank sounding,” Marsh said. “Or we got a bubble.”

  “Don’t guess, XO. I need to know precisely what happened, and thereby where we need additional training.”

  Marsh got together with the chief engineer and the main propulsion assistant, Lt. JG “Swede” Bolser, after lunch. It was as he had “guessed.” During refueling, a fireman apprentice was stationed at every tank’s sounding tube on the deck above to periodically measure the level of fuel oil in the tank with a steel tape. A fireman named McWhenny had put the tape in upside down. It was as simple as that.

  Marsh told the chief engineer to put something on all the tapes that would make it impossible to put the wrong end in the tube and then to hold a training session for all the junior firemen assigned to sounding duties.

  “Is he going to take McWhenny to mast?” Lieutenant “Kit” Carson, the chief engineer, asked.

  “I hope not,” Marsh said. “The kid made a mistake, that’s all.”

  “Based on the captain’s reaction, I thought we were going to be taken out to a yardarm somewhere.”

  “He’ll get over it,” Marsh said. “It’s embarrassing to foul up in front of all those airedales.”

  “Well, Swede and I are going to be spending a lot of time down in main control this week,” he said. “I don’t ever want to be screamed at like that again.”

  “Then don’t screw up,” Marsh said. “Because that’s what he’ll do.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the Japs come. He starts screaming like that, people are gonna get rattled, and then we’ll have a real problem.”

  Which is exactly what happened two days later after the carriers had made a strike on Guam. The Japs launched a retaliatory raid against the task group, a few dozen Kate bombers accompanied by just enough fighter escorts to keep the carriers’ own fighters fully occupied. The Kates went after the three big carriers, but most were driven off or shot down. One, however, came after Evans. He’d been hit trying to get at a carrier and was now trailing a lot of smoke. Having overshot his target, he was flying at about one thousand feet but losing altitude. Marsh suspected the pilot knew he was never going to make it back to his base and had decided to take at least a destroyer with him, because he put his damaged plane into a shallow dive and headed right for Evans.

  The ship was shooting with everything she had—the five-inchers, the forty-millimeters, even the short-range twenty-millimeters. Since he was coming straight in, there wasn’t much of a fire-control problem. Marsh saw pieces of the plane come off as shells and bullets whacked into it. His general quarters station for an air raid was back on the secondary conning station, which was behind the after stack. That way, if the ship got hit on the bridge, the second in command would still be alive to take over, but for now Marsh had nothing to do but to watch. The gun noise was incredible, but even with every gun blasting away, he could hear Captain Hughes from a hundred fifty feet away screaming at the weapons officer to get that bastard. Marsh thought the captain should have been conning the ship in evasive maneuvers, but instead the Evans was going straight as a die at twenty-seven knots, making it easier for the pilot to set up his aim point. He released three bombs just as one of their five-inchers put one right into his belly tank. The Kate exploded in a ball of burning aviation gasoline, but those three bombs kept right on coming, and Marsh and his two phone talkers instinctively ducked behind a splinter shield.

  The first bomb landed in the water about a hundred yards away and went off in a tremendous explosion that Marsh thought must have scared the absolute hell out of the snipes down below. The middle one hit the back of the signal bridge, behind and above the pilothouse, bounced off with a loud clanging noise, and went cartwheeling into the water without going off. The third went over the forward stack and detonated two hundred yards away. Bits of the bomber landed in the water all around the ship, and its tail assembly went skipping across the sea like a flat rock before finally sinking out of sight.

  The relief was as dramatic as the sudden pressure dro
p when all the guns ceased firing. The only sound that Marsh could hear in those few moments of stunned silence was Captain Hughes, still screaming at the weapons officer for having let that Kate get so close. Marsh thought it surreal, and then the normal noises of a destroyer going full bore through a light chop intruded and everybody went back to scanning the skies for more Kates. Five minutes later Marsh was summoned to the bridge, even though they were still at GQ and some of the screening destroyers nearby were blasting away at unseen enemy planes.

  The captain was visibly furious. He pointed to the forward five-inch guns with a shaking finger and commenced a tirade about mount fifty-one not even firing on the incoming bomber, while mount fifty-two had put several rounds right into the water. At that moment, mount fifty-one, the forward-most five-incher, let go with one round to starboard, away from the formation. The sudden bang startled everybody, especially the captain, who had his back to the bridge windows. He jumped, and his steel helmet went sideways on his face, making him look ridiculous.

  “I’ll find out what happened,” Marsh said quickly, not wanting him to see any snickering on the faces of the bridge crew. “I’m guessing—”

  “I told you,” he yelled. “No guessing! Facts. I want to know facts. That bastard almost got us, and two of my five guns weren’t even in the goddamned game! Go find out now, right now!”

  “Shall we secure from GQ, Captain?” the officer of the deck inquired. “Combat says the raid is over.”

  “No!” he replied. “Keep everyone on station until I know what happened with those two guns.”

  The gunnery officer, Lieutenant “Killer” Keller, was at his station up on Sky One, the forward and highest gun director on the ship, two levels above the bridge. Once again, Marsh was pretty sure he knew what had happened: Mount fifty-one had had a hang-fire, and fifty-two had probably lost elevation synchronization with gun plot. He climbed the ladders to the director, and Killer confirmed his suspicions.

  Mount fifty-one had gotten off thirty rounds before the thirty-first failed to fire. Since it was technically a hot gun, the rule was that they trained the gun at the enemy or in a safe direction and waited ten minutes before dropping the breechblock, extracting the defective shell, and inserting a clearing charge. If a hot gun experienced a hang-fire and the crew opened the breech immediately, the defective powder round could cook off from the heat of the previous thirty rounds and blow the gun mount right off the ship. Hence the prescribed ten-minute wait.

  “And fifty-two?”

  “They lost electrical power,” Killer said. “Went to manual control. New kid on the pointer seat. Forgot to point in all the excitement.”

  “Wonderful,” Marsh said. “The captain is not pleased.”

  “So we heard,” Keller said with a rueful grin. “Japs probably heard it too. But looky here: We got us a souvenir.”

  One of the signalmen, a third-class petty officer, was holding up the badly bent tail-fin structure from the Jap bomb that had failed to go off when it bounced off the signal bridge. Both of the officers noted the wet stain on the front of the signalman’s dungarees.

  “Give you a little skeer there, sigs?” Keller called down over the wind.

  The kid grinned back at him. “You should see what Pettybone did,” he called back. “Had to throw his dungaree trou over the side.”

  This was more like it, Marsh thought. Guy pissing his pants and then laughing about it. I’d have probably pissed mine, too, he thought, but this was the way it was supposed to be in the tin can Navy—up close and personal. What had happened was hardly unusual: Lots of things went off the tracks, especially on a relatively new ship. The power loss to mount fifty-two was probably caused by the vibration of all the guns firing at once tripping a breaker somewhere. The new kid getting the naval version of buck fever as he watched his first real live Jap bomber come at him was by no means without precedent. Somehow, Marsh thought, he had to find a way to make the captain understand these facts of life and relax a little bit. He’d come from a staff assignment, where perfection was achieved on a typewriter. He was in the real, frontline, down and dirty Navy now, and he had to realize that perfection out here did not exist.

  That’s not how it went. The captain wanted the new gunner’s mate moved to a different GQ station. He wanted the chief engineer to personally check every circuit breaker in the gunnery electrical system to verify operability. He kept the entire ship at GQ while these orders were carried out, even as Combat sent out recommendations to steer Evans back into her assigned antisubmarine station out behind the carrier. As for the hang-fire, the captain declared that those were peacetime rules, and in the heat of battle they were to clear a hang-fire immediately and get that gun back on the line.

  Marsh dutifully carried out his orders, although later that evening he brought the captain the operating procedures manual from the Bureau of Ordnance for the 5"/38 naval gun, which specifically stated that hang-fire rules were to be followed regardless of the operational situation, since a cook-off with the breech open could lead to a magazine explosion and the loss of the ship. The captain read it, closed the book, and gave Marsh a sour look.

  “It’s my ship, goddammit, and I will make the decision on what to do with a hang-fire. Assuming, of course, that I know about it. Tell me this: Why didn’t they report that they had a hang-fire?”

  He had Marsh with that question. Marsh had assumed they had made a report. “I’ll have to find that out,” he said. “That’s standard procedure, too.”

  “XO, let me tell you something. To use your favorite expression, I’m guessing you assumed they had. You guessed they’d lost power or had this problem or that problem. You have to stop that. Assuming and guessing is unprofessional: You have to know. You have to know. I have to know.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll work on that.”

  “What’s the chain of communications from the gun mount to me on the bridge?”

  Marsh described the sound-powered communications links for control of the gun systems.

  “So if they have a hang-fire, the gun reports to main battery plot, plot reports to Sky One, who reports to Combat, who reports to me on the bridge?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you are not in that loop?”

  “I have a barrel switch back at my secondary conn station, so I can listen to any sound-powered phone circuit I want to. My phone talker is tied to the command circuit, the 1JV, so that I can take over if something happens to the bridge.”

  “Like a bomb hitting the signal bridge because two of our guns didn’t work.”

  “Yes, sir, just like that.” Marsh hadn’t mentioned the “souvenir.” Somehow it didn’t seem like the best moment.

  “You know, that’s pretty cumbersome. I think that the best place for the XO would be in Combat, where he would have the tactical picture right in front of him, instead of being back behind number two stack with his shirtsleeves in the breeze.”

  His voice was calm now, and he was thinking aloud. Marsh suddenly realized there was a big brain in there, and maybe all the shouting had to do with frustration rather than anger.

  “But if we take a hit up there, say right between Combat and the bridge, the two most senior officers in the ship could be lost at the same time.”

  “You’re in there for an antisubmarine action.”

  “A torpedo isn’t going to hit the bridge,” Marsh pointed out. “Remember the San Francisco, off Guadalcanal? They took a hit on the bridge that killed the admiral, the captain of the ship, the admiral’s staff, and all the ship’s bridge officers except one. The communications officer ended up taking over not only the ship but effectively the whole task group until the shooting stopped.”

  “I know,” he said. “Let’s do this: I want to have a meeting in the wardroom tomorrow with the gun boss and the chief snipe, assuming we’re not dealing with Jap bombers again. I want to sort out our internal communications so that something like a hang-fire doesn’t have to go through four sepa
rate phone talkers before I know about it.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Marsh said.

  And so it went from that day forward. Anytime something went wrong, Captain Hughes would scream and yell, embarrassing himself as much as the officers he was mad at. This would be followed by an uncomfortable discussion between Marsh and the captain, where he would be as calm and in control then as he had been out of control earlier. In each case Marsh learned something valuable, he realized, while striving to protect the department heads and even the junior officers from the captain’s wrath.

  The ship’s company, interestingly, did not hate the man as Marsh half expected them to. After a while, they came to expect and endure the temper tantrums, because he would inevitably explain why he got so mad, what had to be fixed, and why it was important in the context of a warship in the battle zone. There was little arguing with his rationale. Marsh just wished he wouldn’t make it so unpleasant, but that was his nature, and he was, after all was said and done, the captain. Chief Marty Gorman, promoted twice now since Winston, offered Marsh the lower-decks view: Captains are issued from above just like spare parts for the engine rooms. Some are noisier than others, but they all serve a purpose.

  Sometimes Captain Hughes would personally take a hand to show everyone how something was supposed to be done. On one occasion, Evans had had to shut down one of her four boilers for maintenance, and, upon relighting it, the snipes managed to lay down a cloud of black smoke that was very visible within the carrier formation. It got so bad the flag officer over on the carrier sent Evans a flashing-light message telling them to knock it off. The captain treated the engineers to his usual verbal fireworks and then went below to the forward fireroom and personally lit off the boiler, while making all the boiler-tenders watch him go through the procedure. Marsh had to admit: There was very little black smoke when he did it, and he also demonstrated to the snipes that he knew how to line up the fuel pumps, the blowers, and the burners to get a proper light-off with no smoke.