Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  He now fully understood what the Civil War soldiers had been talking about when they talked about facing battle, the elephant of the expression: certain death in the form of two black castles of steel, whose hulls were beginning to fill the view from what was left of their bridge windows. Mick hadn’t mentioned that they might come in herds.

  Hennessy saw that Marsh was thinking about it. The torpedo officer stuck his head into the pilothouse, waiting for orders.

  “XO, we gotta get out of here,” Hennessy said.

  Marsh bit his lip. God knows, he thought—I want to escape, too.

  You’re scared, aren’t you? Scared every day you’re out there with the Big Blue Fleet. Been scared since you first went to sea.

  Yes, I am, he thought. Scared shitless. He took a deep breath.

  “We have four fish left?” he asked, after giving the helmsman another course change. Never fly straight in a dogfight. Keep her weaving.

  Hennessy’s eyes widened, and he swallowed hard. “Um, yes, sir.”

  “Go into Combat, get us in position for a torpedo attack.”

  “Attack?” he said, his voice rising to a squeak.

  “This is why we’re out here, John,” Marsh said as gently as he could, trying to keep the fear out of his own voice. “I don’t know what that real big one out there is, but it’s our duty to at least give him a bloody nose.”

  Hennessy gave him an agonized look. “Captain, that’s fucking suicide,” he whispered.

  Now it was Captain, no longer XO, Marsh noticed. “No, John,” he said. “It’s our duty. Coming down here in the first place—that was suicide.”

  He turned to the men in the pilothouse, who’d been listening to all this and were white-faced with fear. Marsh suspected he was white-faced, too, but this wasn’t the time to acknowledge it, not to all these terrified kids in front of him. “This is the captain,” he announced, “and I have the deck and the conn. Helmsman, left standard rudder.”

  He looked back at Hennessy. “Get back down there. We’ll shoot to port.”

  Hennessy backed away from him as if Marsh were truly insane, but then discipline asserted itself and he went back down to Combat, tiptoeing across the mess in the charthouse passageway. Marsh told the helmsman to steady up while he studied the relative motion of the two battlewagons, which were getting bigger by the moment. The leader was a type he’d never seen in their enemy warship recognition charts. The second in line was one of their older battle cruisers, modified to become a battleship, a Kongo class, with fourteen-inch guns. She was the one interested in Evans, and he saw her forward turret flash again in their direction. He put the rudder over, in the opposite direction this time, and hoped their maneuvers, lame as they were, were confounding the Jap’s firing solution. Evans felt even heavier in her guts now. He had to assume the forward fireroom was almost fully flooded. The DC teams still hadn’t managed to get into the wrecked compartment, and the black smoke rolling out of the bent-over number one stack was getting thicker. He visualized burning fuel oil floating on the rising waters in the fireroom.

  Three more shell splashes, this time long. As a gunnery officer, he knew what they were doing. Shoot deliberately long in range, then short, cut the difference between the two range settings in half, and fire again. Do that often enough, you’ll walk your shell pattern right onto the target.

  He turned Evans again, and this time steadied up on his best guess for an intercept course on the lead battleship. He went out onto the port bridge wing and swept the sea with his binoculars. He couldn’t see any of the other destroyers or the jeeps.

  Evans was all alone. He felt his guts clench. Alone and taking on a battleship. He did see two of the distant heavy cruisers coming about in their direction. The admiral on the lead Jap battleship must have called for reinforcements when he saw Evans make that turn toward them, because, for some strange reason, he’d left all his own screening destroyers way behind him.

  Marsh called down to Combat, telling them again they’d be firing torpedoes to port and asking them to compute an intercept course on the lead battleship, which was still lobbing main battery salvos at the jeeps.

  “Intercept, Captain?” Hennessy called back. Marsh wondered if he was losing it.

  “Yes—I want to lay her right alongside the big guy. It’s the only safe place out here.”

  That provoked a stunned silence in Combat and also out on the bridge. One of the bosuns was calmly swabbing the deck where the phone talker had exsanguinated. They’d moved his body now to the back wall of the pilothouse. It was one more surreal sight that morning, a nineteen-year-old sailor in his battle helmet and kapok with swab in hand, mopping up the slippery blood, while outside another salvo of fourteen-inch shells walked even closer to the ship, this time shaking Evans from stem to stern. The shell splashes were so enormous that a fine rain seemed to be falling. Marsh made another course change, doing it randomly now, hoping the probabilities would work in their favor for a little while longer, long enough for them to get the last of their torpedoes away.

  Marsh called the chief engineer, Kit Carson, down in main control. “Tell DC central to forget number one fireroom,” he ordered. “I need all the turns you can give me, and I want a full team stationed in after steering, right now.”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” Carson called back. “We’re shoring both bulkheads, fore and aft of one-fireroom. I think she’s flooded to the waterline—we’re starting to get water through some of the overhead cableways.”

  “All right. I can feel it up here, too. We’re going in on a torpedo attack against a Jap heavy, so it’s gonna get noisy again.”

  “Give ’em hell, Cap’n,” he called back. No more XO, Marsh noticed again. When you’re putting everyone’s life on the line, they don’t call you XO. Even the snipes knew what was coming. He could just imagine the chatter going on through the ship’s many sound-powered phone circuits.

  At that moment an entire line of relatively smaller shell splashes erupted around them. Marsh looked over the bow to see that the two heavy cruisers, closing in echelon formation to clear their firing arcs, were inbound with visible white bones in their teeth as they increased speed. Apparently the Jap battleship admiral had figured out what Evans intended by turning toward his column.

  Marsh brought the ship farther to the right to keep a steady bearing, decreasing range on the lead battleship, which appeared to be doing close to thirty knots. With their limited speed he had to take a broad angle of approach to intercept, and this exposed more and more of Evans to more and more heavy guns. He saw the massive after turret of the monster swinging to face the Evans as she closed in. He called out to the torpedo officer that he wanted to fire torpedoes at four thousand yards, assuming they made it in that close. The remaining five-inch guns opened up at about that time and began firing at the lead battleship. The second battlewagon, the Kongo class who’d been ranging on at Evans, was still just beyond their effective five-inch range. His guns did not have a range problem, and at that moment the ship managed to drive right into the Kongo’s range notch.

  One fourteen-inch shell took care of the leaning forward smokestack by smacking it right over the side with a loud clang. A second punched into the hull just above the waterline, going right through the already wrecked forward fireroom and out the other side without exploding. Battleship projectiles were designed with fuzes that delayed the explosion until the shell had penetrated the target battleship’s armor. Evans didn’t have any armor.

  A third round came through the portside wall of the pilothouse, obliterated the torpedo officer and both his enlisted men, wrecked the steering and engine-order telegraph, and amputated Marsh’s right foot before smashing out the starboard side, taking most of the starboard bridge wing with it. Just as Marsh had predicted to the chief engineer, it was really noisy.

  He had been sitting in his chair, leaning over the bitch-box to hear above the wind noise coming across the bridge and the sudden racket from their one operationa
l forward mount, which was only fifteen feet away. His right foot had been pointed back behind the footrest so he could reach the face of the bitch-box. He never felt a thing, other than just a sudden pressure on his foot. He was as stunned by the sight of the two torpedomen literally exploding into a bloody blur as he was by the fact that he’d been hit, too. He turned in his chair, pulled up his right leg, and saw that everything below the ankle was gone, with only the top part of his black uniform sock still hanging on to his shin over a bright white bone. It was bleeding, but not as much as he would have expected.

  “Six thousand yards, Cap’n,” John Hennessy called from Combat. “Still want to wait?”

  “Not anymore,” Marsh called back, his voice suddenly weaker than before. “Tell the torpedo mount captain he has control. Let ’em go as soon as he’s on solution. Fire two, wait thirty seconds, and then recompute if the target turns before shooting the other two. Set ’em deep, now—twenty feet.”

  The ship’s junior pharmacist’s mate came out of the haze of smoke and dust swirling about the pilothouse and knelt down by the captain’s chair, his hands full of bandages. He ignored the human debris in which he was kneeling. Before Marsh could say anything, the corpsman jabbed a morphine syringe into his right thigh, applied a tourniquet below his knee, and then started wrapping the stump. Marsh still had experienced no pain from getting hit, but the moment the corpsman touched it he surely did.

  He looked back through the bridge window openings while the GQ bridge team tried to reconstitute itself. They could no longer steer from the bridge so he shifted steering control back to the after steering compartment, relaying his conning orders through a sound-powered phone. Marsh knew he wasn’t going to send any more engine orders other than what he’d already told the snipes: Crank the throttles open and leave ’em there. He tried to gather his wits and absorb the tactical situation, but it was hard. They were, despite the massive hits, still closing on that lead battlewagon, and she was getting bigger by the moment. The cruisers were firing at them again, but in a few minutes they’d have to stop or risk hitting their own flagship, assuming Evans stayed afloat long enough to get to the launch point.

  Marsh heard the reassuring sound of two torpedoes going over the side above the banging of mount fifty-two, which was now landing hits on the big guy’s towering pagoda superstructure. The after mounts were working him over, too, pelting the huge black mass of armored steel with their peashooters. Marsh thought he saw a couple of planes swooping down on him, but the battleship’s AA fire was going like gangbusters, keeping most of the planes at bay. Where oh where was Halsey with all those brand-new Iowa-class battleships?

  Another salvo of fourteen-inchers came howling in all around them, with one hitting the forecastle. The shock detached their remaining anchor, which went over the side in a rattling cloud of dust and perhaps ten shots of chain before the detachable links broke. The only thing keeping them alive was that these huge shells, designed for long-range artillery duels with another battleship, were still punching through Evans’s thin skin without going off. Marsh could barely see the Kongo, though, because his line of sight was being obscured by the fact that Evans was getting very close to the lead battleship, so close that his secondary batteries, five- and six-inchers, were opening up on Evans even as the monster began to turn away from their torpedoes.

  Turning.

  His mind was getting a little fuzzy not to have noticed that, probably from the morphine.

  The battleship was turning away, and he’d stopped firing on the jeeps out on the horizon. Okay, Marsh thought. That’s what they sent us out to do. He yelled into the bitch-box to tell CIC that the target was coming to port.

  “We see it on the track, Captain,” Hennessy called back.

  Two eight-inch rounds hit forward, punching yet another hole in poor old mount fifty-one. The second round hit somewhere underneath the bridge, probably in the in-port cabin, and this one did go off, with enough force to hump the bridge’s deck up a foot or so, knock everyone off his feet, and shake Marsh’s chair into a momentary spin.

  He called back a new course to after steering, aiming to cut across the turning battleship’s wake and then come around to match his course and get as close to him as they could, forcing the other enemy ships to stop firing at them for fear of hitting what had to be their flagship. Though making more knots than Evans was, his speed of advance slowed markedly when he went into his turn as that huge multileveled pagoda superstructure began to lean out over the water. Marsh could actually see the battlewagon’s enormous optical range finder way up on the tower, turning to stay on whatever target his main battery guns were working.

  Their first two torpedoes had gone past him by a wide margin, as Marsh halfway expected, but they got the opportunity of a lifetime when he made that turn. Marsh heard their last two fish go off the starboard side at about two thousand yards range. As Evans closed in on his mile-wide wake, Marsh waited with his heart in his throat to see if they hit him. Then he saw the first fish broach as it encountered the huge ship’s underwater pressure wave. It literally leaped out of the water and went off on the side armor belt, making a big bang but not doing any visible damage. The second one hit him farther aft on the starboard side and produced a satisfying, thumping waterspout.

  Ninety seconds later Evans cut across the battlewagon’s wake. Marsh ordered hard right rudder to take station on the battleship’s port quarter, where he then maneuvered to match the giant’s wide, sweeping left turn back to the northeast. There now erupted a hot duel between every gun they had and every gun the Japs could point down, which thankfully did not include his after main battery turret, whose muzzles had appeared to be as big as the Lincoln Tunnel.

  Marsh knew that once Evans steadied up on whatever course the looming battleship was coming to, he would soon draw away from them, and then they’d pop out from the big ship’s shadow and become easy meat for the waiting Kongo. For an exhilarating few minutes, though, the tattered remains of their starboard-side twenties and forties fired round after round into his top hampers and his deck-mounted AA gun mounts. The Evans gunners could shoot up, but the Japanese could not shoot down. Even his bigger, six-inch secondary guns, designed mainly for antiaircraft work, could not depress low enough to get at Evans, although they tried plenty hard. There was an infernal blizzard of white-hot steel sizzling through the air above Evans, while her AA crews blasted away at his lightly armored AA gun mounts. Mount fifty-two, firing in local control now, took it as a personal mission to shoot up the towering heights of the pagoda structure. Marsh had visions of their bridge and staff people all lying flat on the deck from the hail of steel, and then a Jap twenty-five-millimeter managed to rake Evans’s bridge, and Marsh joined what was left of his bridge team on the deck until one of Evans’s forty-millimeters silenced the offending fire.

  Marsh clawed his way back up into the captain’s chair, which seemed the best place for him to be with one foot gone. The Kongo was visible about five miles behind them on Evans’s port quarter, coming to his left. Marsh told the torpedo mounts to train out in his direction. The Kongo must have been watching, because he put his rudder over at once and came back right, disappearing out of Marsh’s sight behind the blocky stern cranes of their new formation partner. Evans’s five-inch guns had started a big fire on the battleship’s fantail with a hit among his scout planes and catapults, although Marsh knew that wouldn’t pose any real danger to this giant. Their lone torpedo hit hadn’t even slowed him down. Then he felt a large thump way back near the stern, followed by another and another. It took him a minute to figure it out: The gunners on the fantail were rolling depth charges, set at fifty feet, alongside the battleship. It was the equivalent of a five-hundred-pound bomb achieving a near miss deep along his port side. The charges were, however, also banging the hell out of the emergency steering team, so Marsh ordered them to knock it off.

  At that moment one of the jeep carrier planes came out of the morning sun from low a
head and strafed the pagoda structure of the battleship. Some of the ricochets hit Evans’s own superstructure, but Marsh didn’t mind too much. He could see their guy’s shells and tracers slashing into the battleship’s upper command and control levels. Definitely some Jap-burger being made up there, he thought. The plane shot overhead and banked hard, obviously intending to do it again, this time from the big guy’s port side. Marsh weakly cheered him on, and then he disappeared behind that pagoda tower. Marsh caught a brief glimpse of something white painted on his fuselage, something besides the white star emblem. He wondered if it could be Beast. Machine-gunning a battleship would be right up Mick’s alley.

  As Marsh had anticipated, the battleship was steadying up now and beginning to pull ahead. This meant that those two cruisers would soon get a clear shot and be on them like a tiger. Marsh wished they had more torpedoes, more ammo, more speed, but the truth was that Evans’s time on this earth was about up. Along with his own, he realized. As the battleship’s massive stern pulled ahead up their starboard side, mount fifty-two finally ran out of ammunition with one last hit up on the battleship’s searchlight platforms. The moment Evans emerged from her protective shadow, Marsh could see the two heavy cruisers dead astern coming on like black panthers, their forward eight-inch turrets training out over their starboard bows to begin the end of Evans as he watched.

  Then another Jap cruiser came sailing in from the monster’s starboard side. Marsh hadn’t even seen her coming, but her intent was pretty clear: Cross perpendicular to the battleship’s wake and then open an enfilading fire on Evans with every one of her eight-inchers. Now Marsh knew what the French admiral Villeneuve must have been thinking when he saw Lord Nelson’s massive Victory sliding past, perpendicular to his flagship’s stern, preparing to rake him from one end to the other.

  Lie down, he thought. Lie down. But he was too tired now to get out of his chair.

  * * *

  Mick overshot the clutch of cruisers and was closing in on what he now confirmed as two battleships, followed by some destroyers with maybe a couple of cruisers in that mix, too. He fastened his attention on the biggest battlewagon, which looked to be nearly a thousand feet long. At the very least she was longer than one of the American big-deck carriers, and her forward turrets were belching out flame and smoke in the general direction of the jeep formation way off to the southeast. So far, however, Mick wasn’t seeing any flak. Maybe they hadn’t spotted his lone Dauntless approaching their formation. I’d give my right hand for a thousand-pounder about now, he thought. Or maybe my left—nobody’d want my right paw just now. Then he laughed and rolled in on the big bastard from ten thousand feet.