Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  One of the five-inch gun mount crews managed to break a powder case in the process of loading a round during gunnery practice, spilling macaroni-sized powder grains all over the hot amplidyne motors and the interior of the gun mount. Once again, there was lots of noise on the bridge, followed by a visit from the CO to the offending mount, where he personally ran them through their paces on how to properly load, ram, and close the breech. He actually operated the loading control panel, demonstrating that he knew both how and when to cycle the appropriate machinery and that, if he knew how to do it, then by God they ought to know how to do it without risking a flash explosion in the mount. It took them two hours to clean up all the spilled powder, during which he kept the entire ship closed up at general quarters. Marsh thought he was punishing the crew for the mistakes of just one battle station and finally said so. The captain reminded him that a mount explosion was still possible until all the powder had been cleaned up and said that was why he kept the ship at GQ, not to punish anyone but in order to be ready to deal with such an event.

  Marsh realized then that Captain Hughes was thinking differently than he was. The captain was always mindful of the bigger picture, even while diving in and getting his hands dirty in a fireroom or a gun mount to make his point. He had seven years seniority on Marsh, and it seemed to him that those seven years made Hughes a hell of a lot more qualified to be the CO than Marsh would ever be. Except that three weeks later Marsh became the captain when Captain Hughes killed himself.

  It was another one of those situations where a small group of sailors managed to screw up what should have been a simple evolution. One of the lifeboat davits had turned up a cracked davit arm. The shipfitters went out to weld it back together, but first all the metal had to be cleaned. Once they got the davit arm cleaned up and ready for a weld, they discovered that three of the four bolts holding the frame of the arm to the main deck were broken. They sent a fireman apprentice to go get a power drill, and then one of them proceeded to punch several holes in the frame trying to drill out the broken bolts. A chief came by, saw the mess in progress, and, unfortunately, imitating his captain, started yelling at them.

  The captain, who happened to be one deck above, looked over to see what the fuss was about. He then came down to the davits, saw the hash the fireman had made out of what should have been a simple job, and grabbed the big drill to show him how to attack a recalcitrant bolt. He then proceeded to drill perfectly through the bolt head, through the shaft, and then right into a 440 volt cable running underneath the davit arm base. There was a sickening humming noise, a purple-white flash that seemed to envelop the captain, and then a sudden stink of cooked meat. A breaker popped in main control, and a moment later the sound-powered phone in Marsh’s cabin squealed at him in a manner that told him it was serious.

  By the time he got to the main deck, horrified sailors had managed to get the captain unstuck from the steel of the main deck, but it was obvious that there was nothing that could be done for him. His mouth was open and contorted in a snarl worthy of a feral animal, and the whites of his glaring eyes were literally cooked. Two of the younger sailors were feeding the fishes over the side, and Marsh, too, felt a moment of extreme nausea when he looked at the scorched body. The ship’s pharmacist’s mate came running with his black bag, took one look, and shook his head. He didn’t have to say anything. He sent two men to sick bay to bring up a body bag.

  Rabbi Morgenstern showed up right after he heard the pharmacist’s mate called away to the port boat davits. He knelt down next to Commander Hughes’s rigid body and tried unsuccessfully to close his eyelids. Then he put on a narrow shawl and began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. The sailors standing around took off their hats, as did Marsh. The rabbi got up from the deck and told Marsh he’d make the arrangements for a burial at sea. “That’s usually my job,” Marsh told him.

  “Not anymore,” the rabbi said. “You’re the captain now, right?”

  Marsh was taken aback. The rabbi, of course, was correct. Marsh went up to the bridge and called for a signalman to bring down a message blank. The ship was within visual range of the carrier, and Marsh didn’t think that this news was appropriate for the TBS voice radio circuit, to which all ships in the group listened. Lieutenant John Hennessy, the navigation department head, looked over his shoulder as Marsh wrote up a terse report. When he was finished, Hennessy told Marsh that he’d forgotten something.

  “What?”

  “Sir, you have to say that you’ve assumed command.”

  “They’ll know that, for Chrissakes.”

  “No, sir, that’s not what I mean,” Hennessy said. “You have to make a log entry, and then you have to inform the task group commander who, by name, rank, and serial number, is now in command.”

  “Oh,” Marsh said. “You’re right.”

  For Marsh it was a more than interesting moment. Before this awful day, he had been the de facto leader of the wardroom, with the subtext being that he was one of them against, or at least afraid of, the captain and his rages. Following the advice of Captain Warren, Marsh had been shepherding the wardroom, while being very careful not to say or do anything that they could interpret as insubordination. Now that he was the captain, if only in an “acting” capacity, John Hennessy was going to be the acting executive officer. The change in Hennessy’s tone and body language, and the “sir” when he spoke to Marsh, were tacit recognition that everything had changed.

  “All right,” Marsh said. “You’re the next senior in line. That makes you acting XO, so you write the message and make sure it has all the right stuff in it, okay?”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” John said. Before this moment, he would have said, “Got it, XO.” That invisible but tangible gulf between the ship’s company and the captain was already opening, and it made Marsh more than a little uneasy.

  They jointly made the requisite log entry, and Marsh formally assumed temporary command of USS Evans. A flashing-light signal went out to the Evans’s squadron commodore, embarked on one of the other destroyers, five minutes later. The commodore came right back with instructions to initiate a JAG-manual investigation into the circumstances and saying that Marsh’s temporary assumption of command had been duly noted. An hour later the Japs sent a large raid of land-based bombers against the task group, and Evans went back to the work at hand, blasting away at the big black planes whenever they came in range. This time all the guns worked just fine, almost as if to give Captain Hughes a proper send-off. After securing from general quarters, Evans went alongside another destroyer and transferred their doctor over so he could conduct a postmortem exam. That evening, the ship’s company, led by the rabbi, conducted a formal burial at sea, after which Marsh took a mug of coffee up to the bridge and sat in the captain’s chair for the very first time in his life. It hadn’t seemed appropriate until they’d committed Captain Hughes to the deep. It still didn’t, and he wondered if he was doing the right thing.

  Remembering what Commander Wilson, Winston’s XO, had done, Marsh had removed Commander Hughes’s academy ring before the burial and put it in his safe. He wasn’t sure at that juncture who was supposed to write the condolence letter, himself or the commodore, so that night he crafted a letter to the captain’s widow expressing his profound sympathy for the loss of Commander Hughes in an operational accident at sea. He enclosed Hughes’s academy ring, bundled the package into an official Navy correspondence pouch, and addressed it to Hughes’s wife back in Washington, in care of the commodore. He knew that the Navy’s casualty notification telegram would reach her long before this package did. He’d briefly explained what had happened and then expressed how much he, as the exec, had learned from Hughes and how everyone in the ship had respected and admired his professional expertise. The last bit was a stretch, of course, but one made with the best of intentions. It was Marsh’s first command decision.

  The next morning he expected a message from the task group commander announcing that they’d found a three-s
triper on the admiral’s staff to send over to take command. Instead, the commodore sent them a message directing Evans to proceed in accordance with previous orders, namely, to detach from the Enterprise task group, proceed to a place called Leyte Gulf, and join Admiral Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet invasion forces there for duties as assigned. First they were told to go alongside the Big E and pick up an aviator who was being sent to one of the escort carriers. They dutifully made the transfer, with Marsh’s letter going over and one lonely aviator coming back.

  As they broke away from the carrier and headed south, Marsh was surprised to see whom they’d taken aboard. Mick McCarty, of all people. An image of a ravished Glory Hawthorne flashed through his mind, but he quickly smothered that and greeted Mick with as much civility as he could manage. Mick handed over a courier pouch containing the basic elements of the Leyte invasion operations order. They talked for a little while, and then Marsh turned him over to Lieutenant Hennessy to find him a bunk for the transit. Then Marsh retired to the captain’s sea cabin to read the op order. He’d decided to use that smaller cabin for steaming operations and keep his XO’s stateroom as his office until a new CO was ordered aboard. That left the captain’s in-port cabin empty, a visible reminder for the crew that he was only the acting, or temporary, captain.

  Two other destroyers were detached with Evans, and they officially became what was known in Navy jargon as a task element. The senior skipper of the three, which was most certainly not Marsh, took command of the three-ship unit and formed them up in a column for a twenty-knot dash to Leyte Gulf. The invasion fleet was some two hundred miles to the southwest of where the big-deck carrier groups were operating. Once they’d settled into transit formation, Marsh got on the ship’s announcing system and formally declared to the crew that he had taken temporary command. He also laid out the details of what had happened to Captain Hughes, because he knew there had to be all sorts of rumors spreading below decks. He told them that they would be operating in support of a task group of escort carriers, who were in turn supporting General MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippine Islands, beginning with Leyte Island. Based on some of the things he’d read in the op order, he also briefed them on what to expect.

  “Once American forces land on Leyte, the Japs are going to hit back and hit back hard,” he said, pausing between sentences to let the echoes of his voice die down on the topside speakers. “If they lose the Philippines, we will be sitting on all their supply routes from Southeast Asia. That’s where their oil comes from. If we can cut that off, they’ll be finished. They have dozens of airfields and a large army on Luzon Island, and we’re going to be hearing from them on a daily basis. They might even send out their battle fleet. The Philippines are that important.” He finished up by announcing that they’d be refueling and rearming as soon as they joined the invasion task force.

  The next morning they did just that, refueling from a fleet oiler and then going alongside an ammunition ship. It took most of the day to get their supplies topped up, and Marsh spent all of it on the bridge in the captain’s chair or supervising the young officers who were conning alongside. They were still a hundred miles away from Leyte Gulf itself, which was probably why the Japs didn’t come out to play. Yet. It would have been a tempting target, though—escort carriers, fleet oilers, transports, supply ships, some seven hundred ships in all, headed for Leyte Gulf, a narrow body of water between the Philippine islands of Leyte and Samar. Halsey’s Third Fleet, back from a week of air strikes on Formosa, was operating to the north, conducting daily air raids on Jap air bases on Luzon and the primitive Jap airstrips on Leyte itself. That pressure may have accounted for the relative peace and quiet in the assembling invasion fleet.

  The escort carriers were odd-looking ships. Some of them were converted merchant ships. The Navy designated these as CVLs, light carriers. The rest had been purpose-built and were designated as CVEs, escort carriers. They carried about two dozen aircraft, as compared with the ninety-plus carried aboard the much bigger Essex-class fleet carriers. They were unarmored and just about unarmed—one open five-inch mount on the stern was typical. They displaced eight to ten thousand tons, as compared with the thirty-six thousand tons of the fleet carriers. They made up for their light capabilities by their sheer numbers, though, and they’d been assigned to provide air support for the landing forces so that the soldiers didn’t have to defend airfields ashore as they’d had to in Guadalcanal.

  Evans was assigned to protect one of the three task units into which MacArthur’s group of sixteen small carriers had been divided. The task unit into which Evans had been assigned was to be stationed closest to the actual invasion ships and the landing areas, and consisted of six of the small carriers and their escorting destroyers. The other two task units were to operate farther offshore as an air-support general reserve until the invasion revealed how much opposition was waiting for the landing forces. The task group’s radio collective call sign was Taffy, and the three task units were Taffy One, Two, and Three. Everyone thought that it was a ridiculous call sign, but call signs were deliberately chosen so as not to suggest to a listening enemy what kind of ships were talking. By evening the three destroyers took up their assigned escort stations and began to settle in while getting used to the new, much smaller carriers. Evans’s first assignment was to transfer Mick McCarty to the USS Madison Bay.

  * * *

  The Madison Bay was not much of an aircraft carrier, Mick thought, as Evans sat astern, waiting to come alongside for the highline transfer. He’d read up on the class before he’d left the Enterprise. The Madison Bay was not quite five hundred feet long and barely displaced eight thousand tons. She carried a mixed bag of twenty-four aircraft, fighters and bombers, in a single so-called composite squadron. She had one catapult, and the island structure was almost all the way forward. Her smokestacks stuck out the side of the flight deck at an ungainly forty-five-degree angle to keep boiler exhaust gas turbulence away from landing planes. On a good day and going downhill, she could make a maximum speed of eighteen knots and still look pretty ugly doing it.

  His departure from the Big E had been a quiet business. He’d said good-bye to his few friends in the ready room the morning of his departure. He’d actually gone to find Georgie until he remembered that he had not been recovered. The skipper had been “busy,” but the exec had caught up with him in the passageway and wished him good luck. He’d stopped by sick bay and procured some more skin cream for his bad hand. Then he’d gone down to the hangar deck to the starboard side midships sponson for his transfer to Evans. He’d highlined over only to discover that his classmate was now the captain. After their quarrel back in Pearl almost nine months ago, Mick wasn’t sure how he’d be received, but Marsh was courteous and reasonably friendly. By unspoken mutual agreement, neither of them mentioned Glory Lewis.

  Now, one week later, they were bouncing around in a moderate sea behind his prospective new home, this ugly duckling of a carrier. He stood next to Marsh on the bridge, wedged between the captain’s chair and the centerline pelorus station.

  “So,” Marsh asked. “Whaddaya think?”

  “I think I’ve been well and truly shit-canned,” Mick said. “Look at that thing. She’s bouncing around as much as this tin can is.”

  “Yeah, but they see action damned near every day,” Marsh said. “The Big Blue Fleet does the grand-scale stuff once in a while, but these guys are smokin’ Japs on a daily basis. There’ll be sixteen of ’em out there when MacArthur’s boys finally go ashore.”

  Sixteen? Mick thought. He did the math. Given the usual hangar queens, that was still more planes than they’d had at Midway. Too bad all they’d be dropping on was a bunch of pillboxes and trenched emplacements. The fighter guys might have some fun when the Japs came out in force from Luzon, but Halsey’s big-deck carriers had been pasting their airfields for two weeks now. After the Philippine Sea, which the world of naval aviation was starting to call the Marianas Turkey Shoot, they couldn’
t have that many experienced pilots left. War birds without pilots weren’t war birds.

  Marsh had his binoculars up to his face. “There goes Roger,” he called out. “Let’s go.”

  The officer of the deck called the signal bridge and told them to two-block Evans’s R flag, indicating that the destroyer was commencing her approach. Mick said good-bye to Marsh and offered his left hand. Marsh took it absently, but he was already engrossed in supervising the dangerous maneuver coming up as Evans increased speed to twenty-two knots and aimed for a spot no more than a hundred feet off the carrier’s starboard side.

  Mick felt a bit dejected as he waited for the highline rig to go across. Ever since Midway he’d been bouncing around the Pacific from ship to ship, station to station. He was still a lieutenant, permanently so in all probability, while his classmate and roommate Marsh Vincent was a lieutenant commander with a destroyer command, however strangely he had come by it. The brass must think highly of him or they would have sent someone else aboard immediately.

  Then there was Glory. That night in Pearl had not been about love and romance. His argument afterward with Marsh had probably damaged their friendship irretrievably, no matter how polite Marsh had been for the past week. Mick had brought up the argument only once since coming aboard. He’d apologized for calling Marsh a coward. Marsh had waved the whole incident away, citing the destructive power of too much booze in a hot climate.

  “Lieutenant?” one of the sailors said. “We’re ready if you are.”

  Mick tightened the strings on his kapok and climbed into the flimsy-looking highline chair. A minute later he was bobbing his way between the two ships, suspended in the chair from a rolling block on a two-inch-diameter manila line, getting splashed by the waves erupting between the steel sides of the ships and hoping like hell they didn’t dunk him. Tin can sailors were known to enjoy giving the occasional flyboy a real scare with the chair. Finally he came bouncing over the folded-down lifelines of the CVE, where six strong hands grabbed the chair and invited him out. His damp seabag was already sitting on one corner of the after sponson platform. As he got out of his life jacket, a large officer in an oil-stained flight suit came across the deck to greet him.