Sometimes the signals would fade away into static and garble but then return with such clarity and volume that men on the bridge jumped to answer the radio. It was exciting stuff, and pretty obvious that the Japs were taking a pasting few would survive. Around three or so, Marsh fell asleep in the captain’s chair. Tomorrow would be another day, he remembered thinking, and then realized that tomorrow was already here. Dawn GQ, sunrise, breakfast, and then back to the gunline to tear up some more jungle.
THIRTEEN
The officer of the deck considerately woke Marsh at 0515, a half hour before they were scheduled to set the usual dawn GQ. This allowed Marsh time to get below to his cabin, grab a quick Navy shower, shave, change out of his sweat-stained khakis into a clean set, and be back on the bridge just as the GQ alarm sounded. They then test-fired all the guns, as did the other destroyers. The first time they’d done that, the jeep carriers had gone to GQ, thinking the formation was under attack, but by now they were used to it. After forty minutes of waiting around, CIC reported no contacts. Marsh noticed that a large rainsquall was bearing down on the ship, which would end up soaking all the topside small-caliber gun crews.
“Secure from GQ,” he told the officer of the deck and ordered him to slow down to give the men topside time to shake off their kapoks and helmets and throw canvas covers over the exposed twenties and forties. Then they dived inside for breakfast just as a wall of rain hit the ship, completely obscuring the jeep formation. It also made the surface search radar useless, as sea-return static clobbered the entire scope in a large green swath of video noise. Marsh went below to the wardroom to get his daily ration of scrambled powdered eggs, liberally doused in ketchup, with cold toast and hot coffee. The docs had put away all their medical gear, and the rabbi, who mustered in the wardroom with the medical team at GQ, was already having breakfast.
“We going back in for fire support today, XO?” he asked.
“Don’t know, Rabbi,” Marsh said. “With all the big-gun ships down south, we probably will. Depends on what the Japs do ashore, I guess.”
The sound-powered phone squealed next to Marsh’s place at the head of the table. He reached under and grabbed the headset.
“XO.”
“Captain, this is Ensign Cauley in Combat. We just heard a voice report from a black-cat saying he’d sighted three, possibly four battleships headed our way.”
Marsh put down his coffee mug, making a mental note to tell Cauley not to call him Captain. “Where are these battleships?”
“The PBY’s reporting they’re coming around Samar, but Taffy went back to him and told him to verify that they’re not our own ships coming back from Surigao. We’re waiting for the answer.”
Ensigns could be frustrating. “Where off Samar, please?”
“Stand by,” he said. A moment later he was back. “Northwest of us.”
“Surigao Strait is southwest of us,” Marsh said. The other officers had heard the word “battleships” and now detected the change in Marsh’s tone of voice. Everyone stopped eating.
“Yes, sir,” Cauley said. “I know that. I’m assuming the admiral meant Halsey’s battleships.”
“Don’t assume, Jerry,” Marsh snapped. Commander Hughes would have been proud of him, he thought. “Find out.”
“Wait one, XO.”
Marsh could hear Combat’s watch standers’ voices rising in the background. In his excitement Ensign Cauley was still holding the sound-powered phone’s talk button down. Why on earth would Halsey’s battleships be coming down to Leyte Gulf? Marsh wondered. Maybe to cover for the fact that the old-timers were still mopping up down south at Surigao?
Then Cauley was back. “Sir,” he said, the pitch of his voice definitely rising. “The PBY says these ships are Japs—black ships, pagoda masts, and one of them is the biggest battleship he’s ever seen. He says there’s a bunch of cruisers with them, too.”
“Sound GQ,” Marsh ordered and then hung up the phone. The other officers at the table grabbed a last bite of breakfast and then pushed back their chairs to head for their general quarters stations. Marsh followed them out of the wardroom as the alarm began to ring. He could hear some complaining voices outside in the passageway from men obviously thinking this was another damned drill, but that stopped when they saw Marsh running up the ladder to the bridge.
By the time he got to the sea cabin he could hear the voice of the task unit commander calling an emergency order over the TBS for the destroyers to start making smoke. He grabbed his kapok and battle helmet out of the sea cabin and then hurried out to the bridge as Evans heeled over in a tight right turn to head across the prevailing wind.
“Where are they?” he called out over the rising noise of the relative wind rushing through the bridge wing doors.
“Three three zero, range sixteen miles,” called the officer of the deck from the port bridge wing. “I can’t see the ships, but they’re shooting at our Catalina and I can see the ack-ack.”
A flat silver sea was littered with rainsqualls. They were still low enough to clobber Evans’s radar display with thin, cottony green lines. The task unit commander issued maneuvering orders for all the jeeps to turn southeast at maximum speed. He also told them to launch every available aircraft. Because the Evans was behind the carrier formation, she didn’t have to worry about being run over as six junior bird farms tried to turn together without colliding. Then Marsh realized that they were probably the closest American ship to whatever was pockmarking the skies to the northwest with tiny black puffs of antiaircraft fire.
Even with only two boilers lit off, Evans could make twenty-seven knots with ease. The jeeps, however, would be straining to make eighteen knots.
“Do we know they’re Japs?” John Hennessy asked. “Big Eyes still don’t hold them visually.”
At that moment six enormous shell splashes rose almost casually all around the nearest jeep carrier, the Gambier Bay, which was already belching black smoke out of her angled stacks as her snipes poured on the oil.
“Now we do,” Marsh said softly. “That has to be a battleship, firing at that range.”
“And straddling,” John said. “God, those are big rounds!”
“Bridge, Combat, radar contact intermittent due to weather,” came over the bitch-box. “But it looks like two groups of contacts, range now fifteen miles and closing.”
Son of a bitch, Marsh thought, his guts closing up. Fifteen miles? Jap battleships? Where the hell are our battlewagons?
“The jeeps are launching, Captain,” a lookout called in from the starboard bridge wing.
Marsh looked out over the starboard bow and saw the first plane lumber awkwardly off the bow of Gambier Bay just as another six-pack of shell splashes rose up out of the sea, seeming to reach for the struggling airplane. The shell splashes were taller than the plane’s altitude, which was not reassuring at all. A second plane flew off, a single large bomb visible under its belly.
The admiral’s order for all the jeeps to turn southeast accomplished two things: It reduced the relative speed of approach of the Jap ships, and it was right into the wind, which the baby flattops needed to get their planes off. By now Evans’s smoke generators were going full blast, laying down huge clouds of grayish smoke that hung over the sea as they strove to shield the little carriers from the still-invisible battleships’ optical range finders. The other destroyers were racing back through the formation of jeeps to get between them and the approaching enemy, laying down smoke clouds of their own. Between the smoke lines and the rainsqualls, Marsh thought, it was getting positively foggy out there. He ordered the engineers to make smoke with the boilers, too, and soon their stacks were belching out thick black clouds of soot.
Another salvo came in, and this time the pattern obscured Gambier Bay’s after flight deck. Marsh saw a piece of the jeep’s flight deck go flying off her starboard side, followed by a gout of flame and smoke. She’d been hit, but she was still launching her planes. Some of them appeared t
o be taking off without bombs, but there were lots more of them in the sky now as all the fleeing jeeps began to spit planes off in every direction. If each one got off ten planes, there’d be fifty angry hornets to send against the Jap formation from just their piece of the Taffy task force. John Hennessy came back up on the bitch-box from inside CIC.
“Bridge, Combat, radar indicates the enemy has split his forces. The biggest contacts are closing from our west/northwest. It looks like the others are headed for the northeast side of the carrier formation.”
Cruisers, Marsh thought, even though they were still too far away to be seen. Jap heavy cruisers. Those big black predators with their Long Lance torpedoes and eight-inch guns. Even as he thought it, smaller but still impressive shell splashes started landing in the neighborhood of Gambier Bay and just behind the other five jeeps. They’re just at the edge of their range band, he thought. We’re going to have to do more than lay down a smoke screen. Sure enough, the order came across TBS. It sounded like Admiral Sprague himself.
“Small boys conduct torpedo attack, I say again, conduct urgent torpedo attack!”
“Holy shit,” muttered the officer of the deck.
Holy shit, indeed, Marsh thought. He told John Hennessy to come out to the bridge to take over as the officer of the deck and to take them in a sweeping turn to head toward the incoming cruisers, which were still invisible behind the Americans’ own smoke screen. Amidships, the torpedomen trained out the two quintuple torpedo mounts and made ready to launch. The torpedo officer out on the bridge wing was ready to start taking sights and get a firing solution going. Marsh took a quick look around with his binocs to make sure the other three destroyers were coming along. They were, still making smoke and pouring on the fuel oil. Behind them it appeared that Gambier Bay was starting to fall behind the other jeeps. Hopefully the other two groups of Taffys were launching, too, but Marsh didn’t really know where they were or how far away. Distance might save them, while their aircraft could get here pretty quick. They were going to need all the help they could get.
As the ship steadied up in the direction of the approaching cruisers, Marsh waited for the senior destroyer skipper to take charge of the rest of them, but the orders never came. In a way, that made sense: Their only hope of doing anything constructive lay in a melee, and for that, they all knew what had to be done. Pick out a Jap and start shooting. Lord Nelson rules.
Evans finally punched through the wall of smoke and beheld a fearsome sight. Ten miles to the northeast of them a line of heavy cruisers was boring in on the jeeps’ flank, and to the left, much farther out than the cruisers, were the squat shapes of battleships, one much bigger than the others. Studying those ominous black pyramids through his binoculars, Marsh saw ripples of yellow-red fire bloom from them as they sent more six-gun salvos at the jeeps. A few moments later everyone could hear that menacing, rolling rumble of slowly rotating ton-and-a-half projectiles going overhead, followed by mountainous shell splashes all around the rearmost jeeps. Some of the splashes were brightly colored with dye, so that individual battleships could see where their own projectiles were landing.
Marsh knew there was nothing the destroyers could do about battleships, so the cruiser line became Evans’s objective. A gunfight between a Jap heavy cruiser and an American destroyer was a very uneven match. Their cruisers were armed to the teeth, with ten eight-inchers and more five-inchers than the American tin cans had. Coming right at each other, the Japs could swerve left or right and still fire six eight-inch guns against the two forward five-inch guns Evans could bring to bear. Now that they were approaching each other at a combined speed of nearly sixty knots, they could be alongside and duking it out, sailing-ship style, in only nine minutes. The problem was that they would have shot the American destroyers to pieces before they ever met, because, at the moment, the eight-inchers could hit the tin cans before the tin cans could reach the cruisers. Marsh realized they needed to disrupt the approaching formation somehow.
He ordered the torpedo officer out on the bridge wing to set up on the lead cruiser and told him they’d be shooting a four-fish salvo to starboard from a firing course of due north. The first cruiser in the Jap formation opened fire on one of the other destroyers racing in with Evans but overshot badly. The tin can fired back impudently with her forward five-inchers, although the cruiser remained out of five-inch range.
“Torpedo plot set,” came from the talker.
Marsh told the OOD to steady up on 000. He held up one hand.
The ship curved left handsomely at twenty-seven knots, steadied up, and then Marsh dropped his hand. He heard the whoosh from amidships as four of their ten fish slapped into the water and headed for the lead cruiser. The Japs were paying attention, because the entire cruiser line immediately turned together to the east to avoid what was coming at them. Marsh realized too late he should have faked the shot, but at least the Japs’ evasive turn would reduce their relative rate of approach on the carriers. That was the good news. The bad news was that it opened a firing arc for all of their eight-inch guns, not just their forward turrets. Every one of them began firing on Evans and her partners in crime. The seas around the ship erupted in a grand display of brightly colored shell splashes, some of them boomingly close. Marsh couldn’t see them, but they’d probably also launched a spread of those Long Lance torpedoes in Evans’s direction.
Marsh stepped back into the pilothouse, personally took the conn, made a bold course change to avoid torpedoes, and began to chase the shell splashes. The theory was that, having missed, the Japs would adjust their gunnery solution. That should make the last spot they shot at reasonably safe, for the moment anyway. They must have realized that by tacking away they were giving the carriers a chance to escape, so back they came onto their original course, still firing at Evans but also at the nearest jeeps with their other guns. They were getting two salvos away for every one the distant battleships were firing, but the waters around the carrier formation looked like a cotillion of waterspouts.
Marsh told the gun boss to engage whatever was in range, and the five-inchers opened on the lead cruiser at a range of seventeen thousand yards, the extreme outer end of Evans’s effective reach. Evans was firing the five-inch version of armor-piercing rounds. Even so, if they hit the cruisers’ armored sides, the projectiles would probably just bounce off. Marsh was hoping they’d get lucky and put a few into their upper works, which typically were not heavily armored.
A near miss went off right at the surface and blasted a spray of shrapnel through Evans’s bridge portholes. Something hit Marsh’s steel helmet and spun it sideways on his head. The 1JV sound-phone talker grabbed his throat and slowly knelt down, spurting arterial blood everywhere. The wide-eyed lee helmsman bent down to help him, but there was nothing he could do for a severed artery. Marsh yelled at him to pick up the sound-powered headphones and take over as 1JV talker, just as another eight-inch round landed close aboard, showering the main deck with a combination of seawater and whining hot steel fragments. The lee helmsman slid the bloody phones on and tried a voice check with the other stations, but first he had to empty the mouthpiece of about a cup of blood. Marsh thought the man was going to puke, but then he buckled down. His own head hurt, and he wasn’t thinking as clearly as he had been. He put his hand up to his neck and felt blood. His helmet didn’t seem to fit anymore, so he took it off. It had a ragged dent the size of a tennis ball in it. Did its job, he thought, as he tried to clear his ringing ears.
He decided to keep chasing shell splashes while trying to get in position for another torpedo attack. Every time he turned Evans’s side toward them, they would zig or zag just enough to spoil the firing solution. Getting a hit on a cruiser going by at thirty-five knots was just about impossible, even though they were close enough now that the Japs’ secondary batteries, four- and five-inchers, were joining the fight. It had turned into a melee, sure enough, and now it was pretty much time for Marsh to let the gun boss and director crews do
their job. Everything out there was a viable target, and there were plenty of them. Marsh’s job was to keep the ship from getting hit, and the secret to that was constant maneuvering. Like the fighter pilots said—never straighten up in a dogfight.
Suddenly the lead cruiser’s forward section disappeared in an explosion of water and fire as one of the other tin cans managed the impossible and got a torpedo hit. She slowed down perceptibly but didn’t stop shooting. The cruisers behind her, also blazing away with all guns, slipped around her, barely avoiding a collision, and kept coming, getting bigger and bigger. As the two cruisers overlapped, Evans got an opportunity, and two more of her torpedoes leapt into the ocean. One porpoised immediately and went skipping across the sea, utterly useless. At least it didn’t circle back at Evans, for which Marsh was truly grateful. The other went true and banged into the side of the third cruiser in line right amidships, raising a satisfactory plume. To Marsh’s dismay, she kept right on going, as if nothing had happened, and fired a full broadside at Evans as she went by. All ten shells went howling overhead.
Marsh heard a few cheers from amidships over the whistling wind when their torpedo hit, but then Evans took a partial salvo of eight-inch shells close aboard and all along her starboard side. The cheering turned to screaming as the forty- and twenty-millimeter gun crews were decimated. One round came through the chartroom, punching clean through because the armor-piercing shell’s fuze hadn’t even noticed Evans’s thin steel superstructure. A radioman in the chartroom did notice when the round drilled right through him, cutting him in half. Up forward, mount fifty-one blew a huge cloud of dirty gray smoke from both hatches and stopped firing. Fifty-two kept going, as did the after mounts. The salvo had missed the bridge, but one round had removed their bedspring-sized radar antenna from the foremast.
Pacific Glory Page 28
