Then Marsh noticed that they were slowing down. He looked aft and saw that the forward funnel had two large holes and was leaning askew. As he was reaching for the bitch-box talk button, yet another salvo landed short, with one round hitting so flat that it skipped across the water and slammed into their starboard anchor without going off. The rest of the rounds did go off, throwing up an amazing amount of water on Evans’s decks. The chief engineer, Lieutenant Carson, came up on the bitch-box.
“Bridge, main control, we’ve lost one-Able boiler. I think the uptakes are damaged. We’ll bring one-Baker on the line as soon as we can.”
“Bridge, aye,” Marsh answered. “It’s getting pretty hot up here.”
“So we’re hearing, Cap’n.”
Of course they were—any shells exploding underwater would sound like depth charges sounded to a submarine.
Marsh ordered another wide turn to get out of the kill zone, but not in time. As the helmsman spun the wheel, another salvo came in, and this time they took a solid hit or possibly two on the starboard side, right at the waterline. One went off right in the forward fireroom, where they’d been struggling to bring the stand-by boiler on the line. Heavy black smoke came pouring out of the tilted forward stack, followed by the roar of escaping steam.
Marsh had heard that sound before, on Winston, and he knew what it meant. Everyone down there was probably dead, and Evans was now down to a single boiler back aft. The cloud of black oil-fired smoke coming out of the ruptured stack was enormous. The only good news was that the Japs were calling it a kill and had shifted targets.
He changed course again, but the ship was not responding as handily as she had been. The Jap cruisers were now mostly concentrating their guns on the two stragglers at the rear of the jeep formations. Both were smoking badly. Mount fifty-two stopped firing, as the gun crew had to let the ammo handlers down below catch up to their furious rate of fire. Mount fifty-one had gone silent on the sound-powered phone circuits and was still leaking smoke from every seam. It was then Marsh saw the through-and-through hole in the mount’s side plating caused by an eight-inch round. If that one had exploded, it would likely have blown the ship’s whole bow off. As it was, everyone in the mount was probably done for. Evans was running on borrowed time, and that thought made him sick. He realized that he was gripping his binoculars so hard that his hands hurt.
Then American planes began to show up as Evans staggered away from her lopsided tête-à-tête with the cruiser line. He queried all stations to report damage while he watched a succession of planes roll in on the cruisers, dropping everything from bombs to what looked like depth charges. He didn’t see much in the way of heavy damage, but the cruisers went into all sorts of evasive maneuvers trying to avoid getting hit, and two of them nearly collided. Marsh wondered where the planes had been all this time. Looking at his watch, he realized it had only been fifteen minutes since the action began. Time passes fast when you’re having fun, he thought. At least the cruisers seemed more interested in the jeeps than in the tin cans, but then he remembered the battleships. He did a quick scan of the northwest horizon, and his heart sank. Not two battleships—three, still hull down on the horizon, but here they came, their forward turrets disappearing behind the fireballs of sixteen-inch salvos. He watched in horror as an entire salvo landed on one of the nearby American destroyers, obliterating it and seemingly everyone on board in a blinding second.
Time to find a rainsquall.
FOURTEEN
For the past ten days Mick and the other pilots in VC-Eleven had done some training missions, followed by the first softening-up raids behind the two main target beachheads on Leyte. They encountered no aerial resistance, and only sporadic flak from the Japanese army, which seemed to be melting into the jungles and leaving the beaches wide open for the anticipated landings.
Mick had just about gotten used to landing on the half-carrier deck. As Max had pointed out, the landing area was really no smaller than a fleet carrier’s; it just ended at the bow instead of halfway up as it did on the big ones. A fleet carrier gave you the illusion that you had some margin for error, Max pointed out. The jeep made it clear you better know what you’re doing. So far, the weather had been flat and calm. Mick wasn’t looking forward to trying any of this in a real seaway.
In the wardroom that night there was lots of talk about a series of strikes carried out that day by the fast carrier striking forces up north of Leyte. Apparently the Japs had sortied from Borneo with some of their battleships but had been badly battered in the Sibuyan Sea west of Leyte. According to the radio scuttlebutt, the Helldivers had managed to sink the biggest battleship they’d ever seen. Now the big-decks were hauling ass up north chasing reports that the Nips’ carrier fleet had come out to fight again. Halsey was apparently ready to make up for Spruance’s much talked-about “failure” to get all the Jap carriers during the Philippine Sea battle. The pilots were all talking about it over coffee in the small wardroom.
“Seems to me,” Max said, “if Spruance shot down all their carrier aircraft at the Turkey Shoot, who cares about their carriers?”
“What if they reloaded?” one of the other bomber guys asked.
“With what?” commented a fighter pilot. “More teenagers? Last Zero I went up against, the pilot looked twelve years old.”
“You saw the pilot?”
“I T-boned his ass,” the fighter jock said. “Saw his face just as his tail broke off. Looking at me in total shock. Then I killed him.”
“There you go,” Max said. “That’s the important part.”
“Halsey take the whole fleet with him?”
“Supposedly left the battleships behind, in case the Japs decided to make another try at Leyte.”
The fighter pilot seemed surprised to hear that. “I was hanging on a CAP station this morning, northwest of here, up by Bernardino Strait? I didn’t see any battleships.”
“Probably out east, refueling. It makes sense that the Bull would leave them behind—battlewagons aren’t much use when you’re going after carriers.”
“Hate to see one of theirs coming over the horizon,” Mick said. “I’ve been on the receiving end of that shit. Really noisy.”
They all laughed, then drifted off to their cabins. They would launch for the 0545 dawn GQ, then come back aboard for breakfast before heading over to the amphibious objective area gulf and their daily Army missions.
* * *
The next morning Mick went up to the flight deck from the wardroom for a cup of coffee and a cigarette topside after breakfast. The day was already warming up, with calm seas and scattered line squalls sweeping in toward distant Samar Island. There were five jeep carriers in their formation, scattered haphazardly with about five miles distance between ships to allow for unrestricted air traffic. Three destroyers and a lone destroyer escort were prowling around their stations outside of the carrier formation. The other thirteen escort carriers were out of sight to the southeast somewhere. Madison Bay’s group, known as Taffy Three, had the frontline support mission for the day. Taffy One and Two were offline, for the morning, anyway, but supposedly ready to launch whatever support might be needed ashore, be it fighters or bombers.
The Army had advanced inland from Leyte Gulf and finally run into real opposition in the hills behind the beaches. Mick anticipated a long day of dropping relatively small bombs on bunkers, while Madison Bay’s fighter guys would be loading up with rockets for essentially the same mission. The other CVEs would have already put up the CAP stations between the amphibious area and the main island of Luzon, from which land-based Jap air had been coming out in dribs and drabs to harass the invasion shipping.
Mick was settling into the routine and beginning to like his job again. The composite squadron was a mixed bag of nuggets and experienced fleet pilots who, for a variety of mostly unspoken reasons, had been eased out of their squadrons. Max, the skipper, called the gang the Untouchables, but that was a bit of an exaggeration. Everyone p
retty much knew that the glory days with the big-decks were coming to a close; after Midway, the long, grinding, Solomons campaign, and then the recent Marianas Turkey Shoot, the big-decks were running out of worthy opponents. The real job from here on out was what Mick’s squadron was doing, close air support of Army and Marine divisions ashore as they chewed up the islands in search of prospective long-range bomber bases close enough to start working over the Japanese homeland. For that, they needed numbers, and the shipyards at home had quit building big-decks and were now churning out dozens of the little carriers. As the crew said, the letters CVE stood for combustible, vulnerable, and expendable, but in a war of attrition, numbers counted.
Mick’s plane was being refueled and armed up for the day’s work. It was second in line for the lone catapult, and he watched as the shirts humped the small bombs onto their racks and fed shiny belts of fifty-cal into the wing guns. The rear gunner seat had been taken out to trade weight for ammo. His hand was throbbing a little this morning, and he’d already removed the glove to give it the ghoulish smell test. He’d taken to wearing the glove constantly to conceal the dark red skin; everyone knew about the problem, but no one said anything. As long as he could grab the stick and fly the plane, it was an entirely private matter. This morning the Hand, as he’d begun to call it in his mind, felt swollen, and the skin was tighter than usual. Some of the other pilots had some physical problems as well, and strangely, that seemed to cement the bonds within the Untouchables. One thing was obvious: There was none of the hypersensitivity to screwups that he had experienced on the big-decks. These little carriers were more like the tin can Navy.
Skinny Graham walked up, his face practically obscured by a big fat cigar.
“’Nother fine Navy day,” he commented.
“Yeah, buddy,” Mick said. Skinny was overweight, which was hard to do on wartime chow. He had a big round face and a pleasantly hearty outlook on life. His fighter, an early model Hellcat, was the plane on the cat in front of Mick’s barge.
“Ain’t much wind,” he noted. “Gonna shoot and droop this morning. Hear about the big fight down south last night?”
“Heard some guys talking in the wardroom about the Japs running into a buzz saw,” Mick said. “What’d you hear?”
“Battleship fight,” Skinny said. “Japs lost big.”
“So our battleships are around,” Mick said.
“These weren’t Halsey’s,” Skinny said. “These were the old guard ships, the ones who got hit in Pearl. They raised some of ’em and put ’em back in service as shore-bomb platforms. They’re too slow to run with the big-decks, but good enough to set up an ambush. It must have been a truly satisfying night’s work.”
“Isn’t that something,” Mick said. “I used to watch newsreels of the so-called battle line. Looked like a parade of dinosaurs. I guess Pearl was the end of an era for those things.”
“You know what really hurt?” Skinny said. “The Japs used modified battleship shells to bomb those guys. Put fins on fourteen- and sixteen-inch armor-piercing shells, because that’s what it took to get through their armor. In a way, they got sunk by their own kind.”
Mick watched the red and white Fox flag travel halfway up the signal halyards atop the island, signaling that the ship was preparing to launch airplanes. The shirts had most of the planes’ wings down and locked. The plane captains were walking around their grimy charges, making last-minute checks and wiping oil off the engine cowls, pulling tags, and cleaning windscreens. Madison Bay hadn’t turned into what little wind there was yet, so Mick and Skinny walked over to one of the catwalk piss-tubes and anointed the deep blue sea one last time before strapping in for a three-hour close air support mission.
“What the hell’s that?” Skinny asked as he was zipping up his flight suit.
Mick heard it, too, his brain telling him he’d heard that sound before but not yet being able to place it. In the next instant, three smallish splashes rose off the carrier’s port side, which then turned into thundering eruptions of smoke and water, the edges of which were bright yellow.
“Holy shit!” Skinny said, as they stared at the enormous columns of water that were cascading back down to the surface a mere five hundred yards away. Mick was dimly aware that the ship’s engines were turning up, and then the call for pilots to man their planes blasted over the topside speakers, followed by the GQ alarm. All pilots. On the double. Emergency launch.
Mick dropped his coffee mug into the catwalk and ran up three steps to the actual flight deck, sprinting for his Dauntless. The all-hands pipe was blaring again over the topside speakers, followed by the announcement that this was no drill. As Mick reached his plane, six more huge shell splashes erupted, this time in front of the little carrier, blasting red-dyed water a hundred feet into the air, close enough that Mick could feel the explosions through the wooden flight deck. Definitely no damned drill.
Skinny lumbered by him and was helped into his cockpit by three shirts. The carrier leaned over to starboard as she turned southeast into the prevailing wind, and Skinny, cussing a blue streak, almost tumbled out the other side of his cockpit.
By this time Mick was strapping in and starting up the engine. His brain had finally classified what he was seeing: battleship rounds. He’d done a quick horizon scan as the engine was turning up but could see nothing except distant rainsqualls. Then he remembered that the battleships could shoot from nearly eighteen miles away, and the visible horizon from a ship was only about eleven or twelve. He looked ahead as Skinny’s fighter turned up, blowing clouds of blue and white smoke down the flight deck. Other planes behind him were also cranking up, and the carrier’s slanted smokestacks were beginning to pour out thick coils of black smoke. The Fox flag snapped up into the two-block position, and the carrier leveled up as she came onto flight course. She was shaking. Mick realized he was, too.
Then Skinny was launching, accelerating in a ribbon of hydraulic mist down the cat track, disappearing for a few moments below the bow and then angling off to starboard at max power, his prop cutting visible spirals of moisture in the heavy tropical air. Just then three more shells came in. Two hit close aboard the port side, raising more of the towering shell splashes. Mick felt a double-thump through the landing gear. He looked over his shoulder and saw a commotion back on the flight deck. There was smoke starting to rise from the starboard side, but it was dirty brown, not oily black like the stuff coiling out of the stacks. He saw the flight deck medic crew racing aft, pushing their wheeled litters in front of them through the cluster of spinning propellers. Then the shirts were waving at him to mount the cat. He released the brakes and gunned the engine to move the Dauntless into position.
Battleships. Jap battleships. Right here?
Where in the hell had they come from? And where the hell were our battleships? Or, for that matter, Halsey’s? If the jeeps were being chased by Jap battleships, there was going to be a real slaughter out here.
He snapped his chin strap and pulled the radio mike in front of his lips as the shirts hooked him up. There was already pandemonium on the land-launch circuit. Jap battleships approaching from the northwest. A line of Jap cruisers closing in from the northeast. The escorting tin cans had been ordered to make smoke and attack with torpedoes. The jeeps were getting rid of all their aircraft as fast they could, armed or not.
He checked in with PriFly. The air boss told him to switch to Tactical Four as soon as he’d launched, gaggle up with the rest of the squadron once they got off, and then go out there and get those bastards. Sounds like a worried man, Mick thought. With good reason. Madison Bay was in the back of the pack, along with Gambier Bay. More shell splashes erupted out of the flat gray sea, clawing ever closer to the fleeing carriers.
The cat officer was signaling him to run it up. He checked his straps, did a quick scan of the gauges, made sure his flaps were set, pressed hard on the brakes, and ran the mill up to full power. Another gauge scan, everything at twelve o’clock. He grabbed
the stick, sending an unusual lance of pain up his right wrist. He cycled the stick, looking left and right to confirm that the control surfaces were responding, then centered it. He looked right to the cat officer, saluted him, grabbed the stick again, took a deep breath, and held it. An instant later he was hurtling over the bow at just over a hundred knots. His head and body jerked forward in the harness as the g’s came off, and then he nursed the Dauntless into a gentle climb after his airspeed built up.
Go get the bastards? With what, two hundred-pound bombs and fifty-cal? He switched to Tactical Four and found Skinny already up.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“Three one zero,” Skinny said. “There’s a whole shitpot full of ’em, too, and one of ’em’s a real monster. Form on me until Max gets up. Angels eight.”
As he gained altitude he could begin to see the big picture. Below him the little carriers were running for their lives, spitting off airplanes as fast as they could while dodging salvos from the distant battleships. His own carrier was leaving two trails of smoke, one on purpose, to obscure themselves from distant range finders, and one that indicated she’d been hit. As he watched Madison Bay weaving through the white circles of previous shell splashes, nine shells erupted around her, two close enough to obscure the flight deck in cascading sheets of water. She turned slightly in the direction of the center of the pattern, desperately trying to avoid the next salvo.
From a mile and a half in the air, he could clearly make out two groups of enemy ships. One line of several medium-sized warships was steaming to the east by southeast, as if trying to get ahead of the fleeing Kaiser Coffins and box them in. They were all leaving broad white wakes behind them and firing their forward turrets as they came. If those were heavy cruisers, Mick thought, they’d catch the jeeps in about twenty, maybe thirty minutes, close in to point-blank range, and tear them apart with eight-inch.
Some distance behind the cruiser line there were two, no, three very large ships, whose features were indistinguishable in the hazy air. Then he saw what looked like a few dozen destroyers trailing behind them. Those had to be battleships, Mick thought, as he saw the red winks of their muzzle blasts envelop them in smoke. He also saw the American escorting destroyers, each streaming heavy smoke to further obscure the jeeps, heading in all directions but mostly northerly, running at high speed. Mick shook his head in wonder: What were they going to do when they got there?
Pacific Glory Page 29
