Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  There was no way he could manage that steep steel ladder from the bridge wing to the next level down. He lay there for another minute, trying to gather his wits while he watched what was left of his right forearm drip into the sea below. He was exhausted. It would have been wonderful to just put his head down in that soft rain. The ship wasn’t moving forward at all. She, too, was rolling in that deep swell, but not coming back very much after each roll to port. Pretty soon she’d take one last roll and keep right on going.

  Get a move on.

  Why?

  The depth charges.

  Right.

  Then he noticed that what was left of the bridge wing no longer had any sides. He was lying on a diving board. A moment later he just slid into the sea from about fifteen feet up. As he fell, he remembered the big day back at the academy swimming pool when the entire class had to do the dreaded platform jump as they trained for what it would be like to abandon ship. He managed to do a complete somersault on the way down but failed to take that big breath. Submerging to what seemed like a hundred feet, he woke back up and scrambled hard for the surface, which was maybe two feet away. Fortunately the sea was still calm, and, after the initial stinging shock, the warm saltwater actually felt good on his two stumps. He tried to eke out a clumsy sidestroke along the battered hull, very conscious of all the bloody arms and legs hanging through the lifelines. The torpedo mounts were both gone, as were mount fifty-three and most of the after superstructure, courtesy of probably just one of those fourteen-inch shells. He looked around to see if there were any more Japs inbound, but the rain obscured the surrounding sea. If there was a Jap destroyer coming to machine-gun the survivors, it was probably better not to know.

  After two hundred feet of grunting and splashing, he slithered back aboard, rolling over rather than through the fantail lifelines as Evans leaned way over, as if to see where she was going. Mount fifty-five was still trained out to starboard, its blackened gun barrel still searching for another battleship to annoy. Fifty-four had been split clean in two, as if by a giant hatchet. The barrel was missing. He could see some arms and legs in the mess, where glinting brass hydraulic lines contrasted brightly with the burned wreckage inside.

  The fantail was intact, but the deck was already under about six inches of water. There were a half-dozen bodies piled up around the after windlass, their faces covered in black oil like some ghastly caricature of a vaudeville crew. Marsh flopped across the deck like a seal, pulling with his one good hand and pushing with his remaining foot to get back to the depth charge racks. Captain Hughes’s policy had been to keep the fuze pistols set on one hundred feet as long as they were in enemy waters. What he had to do now was apply the settings wrench to each depth bomb and spin the dial over to the safe position. Otherwise, once the ship sank below one hundred feet, the depth bombs would all go off, crushing the guts out of any man still floating nearby.

  He found it difficult to concentrate. Small waves were obscuring the settings dials and momentarily blinding him each time he tried to set the wrench. That morphine injection was working too well, damping the pain at the cost of dulling his brain. He was also running out of strength. It was difficult to do the simplest things, especially without his right hand, and each time he tried to brace his body with his right leg, he came up short. Literally.

  He thought he heard someone shouting.

  Sorry, bud, he thought. I’m busy here. Couldn’t help you even if I wanted to.

  Put the wrench on the tabs. Turn it counterclockwise, all the way through the detent to SAFE.

  More shouting, excited voices. His vision was beginning to tunnel up again, but he was determined to get this final thing done.

  Ignore the noise. Move to the next one. Clear your eyes. Find the dial. Take the wrench out of your teeth, fit it on the dial. Counterclockwise. Lefty-loosey. Feel the detent. Push through it. SAFE.

  Put the wrench back in your teeth. Move to the next one. Clear your eyes. Find the dial. Spit out the wrench and fit it on the dial.

  The water was getting deeper as Evans gave in to her fate. It felt so strange to feel his knees on steel while the sea was enveloping the collar of his life jacket. The kapok was actually making it hard to stay next to the racks.

  One rack done. Now to the other side. Have to get them all, he thought, before my brain swirls into a salty, purple haze. Fifty percent isn’t good enough.

  Blink away the salt and oil. Find the dial. Spit out the wrench. Five hundred pounds of TNT. Good stuff. Kill a sub quick. Kill the swimmers even quicker.

  More voices, close aboard now. Don’t bother me. Gotta do this, see? Five hundred pounds, turn your leg bones into broken glass and your pipes into applesauce. And I even like applesauce.

  Then strong arms. One of the voices sounded like Chief Marty Gorman. Pulling him away from his duty.

  He tried to protest, got a mouthful of seawater. Three guys yelling: It’s okay, it’s okay, you got ’em all. Come on, now. She’s going down.

  Going down. That’s what the captain is supposed to do, isn’t it? Go down with his ship? But you’re the XO, not the captain. The ghost of Beast McCarty’s face swam into his vision. “Congratulations, classmate,” the ghost said with that irascible grin. “You met the elephant today. You did good.”

  You, too, Beast, he thought.

  Okay, then.

  For the first time in the war, he was no longer afraid of anything, and on that happy note, he let them pull him off the fantail and into the welcoming sea. From behind them he thought he heard a loud, ship-sized groan.

  Good night, sweetheart. Good night.

  * * *

  Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink

  Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

  He mentally recited Coleridge’s agonized words as the life raft bounced around in what looked like calm waters, under a blazing tropical sun. He dimly remembered last night, after the ship went down and they found themselves alone on the Philippine Sea. He kept trying to get his mind back to the surface to reassume command, but their sole surviving pharmacist’s mate had given him one more jab of morphine, reducing him to a relatively comfortable zombie. When dawn broke, the mate prepared to do it again, but Marsh told him not to. He was sure they were going to be rescued soon and didn’t want to be completely out of it. That was at dawn.

  By midafternoon, it was becoming clear that they were not going to be rescued anytime soon. They’d seen distant aircraft, and even a PBY, flying low over the waters to their south, but no one came for them. It was as if the battle had never happened. No Japs, no jeeps, nobody at all except a hundred or so survivors from Evans, clutching to life rafts or floating nearby, while the Philippine sun slowly roasted them. He’d never heard such silence, but it was broken soon enough when the sharks moved in.

  There were four rafts. The most seriously injured were in the rafts. The rest of the survivors were clinging to them as their kapoks tried to soak up the entire ocean, rendering them useless. Marsh’s right forearm throbbed, and his right foot was positively on fire. They periodically dipped each severed appendage into the sea on the theory that the saltwater would keep infection at bay. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but his bleeding stumps were not impressed. The pain became his all-consuming focus, and then the waiting pharmacist’s mate gave him another stick.

  Marsh was only peripherally aware of what happened next, when the sharks came in force. The first man taken made not a sound, but the two men next to him certainly did. There was nothing any of them could do. There was nowhere to go, and no way to drive them off. If a man kicked at them, he simply confirmed he was live prey. They would circle the rafts and all the floating men, then submerge. Men would look down into the water, waiting, ready to kick or thrash or do anything that might prevent what was rising from the deep to take them, but the ones taken never had a chance to do anything but open their mouths and then disappear in a bloody swirl. It was horrible, and their hel
plessness made it even worse. Marsh eventually felt guilty being in the raft and thought about ordering men to take turns, in the rafts and then alongside, to give everyone an equal chance at survival. Deep down, though, he knew that was nonsense: No one already in the raft would have budged.

  Where were the rescue forces? There should have been planes combing the sea, looking for survivors from the tin cans who’d gone north to die under the guns of battleships. Then a thought occurred to him: Maybe the Japs had won and wiped them all out. Maybe there was no one left out there on the horizon—three, maybe four battleships against even eighteen jeeps was no contest at all. Maybe they’d sunk them all and then gone back to wherever they’d come from. Maybe the planes they’d seen had been Japs, looking for stragglers to machine-gun. His brain whirled with the effort of the what-ifs and the maybes. Once every four hours, someone gave him a couple of sips of water. They had to wrest the cup away from him each time they did. Marsh knew better, that the water had to go a long away with all these men, but his thirst was urgent. He automatically reached for the cup with his missing right hand, which they gently pushed aside.

  When night fell on the second day, he let them give him another morphine jab. He remembered telling the pharmacist’s mate, “No more water for me. I’m not gonna make it anyway.” The badly sunburned young man grinned in the darkness.

  “Yeah, you will, Skipper,” he said. “They’ll figure it out. Tomorrow for sure.”

  * * *

  They did come. The young pharmacist’s mate had been right. A Black Cat PBY seaplane showed up one hour after sunrise, circled them twice, dropped some water supplies and four more rafts, and then flew off. A small herd of Army Higgins boats arrived four hours later to begin the rescue, while the seaplane flew overhead, making sure no one was left behind.

  They were much diminished. Marsh wasn’t sure how many of them had made it into the sea as Evans went down, but there were fewer of them than that waiting to be picked up. John Hennessy was in another raft, and Swede Bolser was alive but badly burned. Marsh’s second night had been one of violent dreams as he relived taking his ship alongside that battleship, her towering steel sides rising in front of his face like a moving black mountain, looming ever closer until he was smothered by her sheer size.

  As the captain, he felt he had failed the survival experience entirely. Once a day, someone jabbed him in the thigh with a syringe, and all became better. He was actually in the raft, while most of the survivors were hanging on to the sides. Even so, he was often out of his head, which was a mercy when the pharmacist’s mate dunked his severed limbs into the saltwater. Every time they relaxed one of the tourniquets he bled like a stuck pig. They gave him precious water and salt tablets, while making a paste of seawater and sulfa powder as a poultice for his open wounds. There were times when he thought the crew ought to just pitch his useless ass over the side to make room for men with better chances. He was pretty sure he’d babbled on in this vein, because one of the gunners finally put a wet cloth over his mouth and told him to “hesh up,” as he was encouraging the sharks.

  There were moments of lucidity. He remembered that fateful decision to go back and expend their remaining torpedoes. What price had we all paid for that decision? he thought sadly. The look in John Hennessy’s eyes, the terrified faces of the bridge watch, the false bravado of the chief engineer—Give ’em hell, Cap’n—they’d trusted in him and he’d killed many of them in the next half hour, while doing next to nothing to the Japanese. He himself had been reduced to a one-legged, one-armed impostor. If this was what command was about, he wanted no further part of it. These were good men, brave and true, and he’d selfishly led them to slaughter, egged on by a memory of being called a coward by a man who’d taken a woman with whom he was still in love. Because he could, and Marsh couldn’t.

  He was in tears when they passed him over the gunwales of the Higgins boat. The Army medic on board took one look at his injuries, thought Marsh was weeping because of unbearable pain, and gave him yet another jab of morphine. By now Marsh welcomed it, but not because of the physical pain.

  SIXTEEN

  Glory Lewis felt despondent and didn’t know why. Her confinement and delivery had gone as well as any other, as the attending midwives so amiably put it. No infections, normal baby. They had let her nurse the baby, a boy, for three weeks before switching him over to a bottle. After that she was permitted to feed him once a day, while one of the nuns took care of the rest. “We have to wean both of you, don’t we,” Mother Superior had reminded her, “since you are giving him up for adoption.” Glory had wanted to name him, but they wouldn’t allow it, entering the words “unnamed baby boy” on the birth certificate along with her name. When he was placed, his new family would name him, they told her; that was how it worked. The sisters, for the most part Hawaiian women, had been universally kind.

  Increasingly Glory had wanted to keep the baby, but the logistical difficulties would have been overwhelming. She had no husband and no place to live where she could care for an infant. This war seemed endless, grinding up lives, families, and all the normal functions of what used to be everyday life. There were even more casualties now that the Japanese were fighting a Pacific-wide rearguard action. On every island the Allies invaded, Japanese in their thousands fought to the last man, each determined to take at least one Allied soldier with him. Far too many of them were succeeding in that.

  Sally Adkins had shipped out to Guam with one of the augmentation units under Stembridge’s command, leaving Glory without her closest friend in Hawaii for the last three months of her pregnancy. She’d been transferred to administrative duties in the hospital’s main office as her third trimester began. There she endured real and imagined slights from the nonmedical people around her. As she had predicted, no one except the hospital commanding officer had directly addressed the socially charged issue of her being an unwed mother. The captain, however, had been surprisingly supportive: Work the OR for as long as you’re able, then we’ll put you in the office. You can have the baby here, if you’d like, as long as we have facilities open. You’re doing the right thing, and once you’ve gotten through it, we want you back here. Business is, unfortunately, booming. And don’t let all those gossiping bastards get you down.

  The first time she’d had to acquire a larger uniform, she’d sat down with Stembridge before he left and told him what was going on. He had begun to fold her back into the expansion planning, and she knew that the project would be disrupted if she had to leave it, as she certainly would. He reacted with uncharacteristic silence and then surprised her. “I wish it were mine,” he’d said. She had been too astonished to respond. He’d asked her who else knew, and she told him. Then he’d surprised her again. “If you’d like, I’d be more than happy to tell everybody it’s my child and that we’ve been secretly married since last year. That’ll wipe away the social stigma. Accidents and unplanned pregnancies happen. I’m sure we could find quarters in town. I’m sure we—”

  She’d raised her hand and told him that everything was going to be okay, and thank you so much for your kind and generous offer. She was not going to marry anyone just because she was pregnant, and if there was stigma attached, so be it. He’d protested, saying he didn’t mean they’d actually have to get married, just pretend they were. He’d be shipping out to the western Pacific any day now, the war couldn’t go on forever, and … then he’d run out of words as he saw the impossibility of it. She’d squeezed his hand and apologized for the way she’d behaved that night at the New Year’s party. That was their last personal conversation before he’d gone off to Guam to the same new hospital as Sally.

  So now she was alone, really alone. There’d been major personnel upheavals as both the Navy and the Army established forward base hospitals, saving the Pearl Harbor facilities for the long-term repair of the most grievously wounded men. Of the original team of post–December 7 OR supervisors, she was the only one left, and she felt much older than the
women who were coming in now, even though she was only thirty-four. She’d moved into a different room once Sally left and now lived by herself. It had been two weeks since she’d seen her baby. She knew without asking that the next time she visited the convent they were going to tell her the baby was somewhere else. It had seemed like such a logical and appropriate thing to do when she’d discovered that she was pregnant, but now she knew she’d given away something very special.

  The only times she felt at peace were when she made her nocturnal visits out to the Arizona. A cottage industry had sprung up in and around Pearl Harbor during 1943, one that the harbor authorities knew about but chose officially to ignore. More and more of the Americans coming to and through Pearl wanted to see where the battleships had been sunk. Locals with small boats would show up at fishing piers outside the base after hours and off the Hospital Point seawall at night. They would offer to take people out to Ford Island so they could get a close-up look at Arizona and Utah. They would accept either the military scrip or a carton of cigarettes in payment.

  Glory had befriended one of these boatmen, Manoea by name. Because she could buy more cigarettes with her ration book than she could ever smoke, she paid him in cigarettes to take her out to what remained of Battleship Row. The boatmen were careful not to get too close to Ford Island, which was still in use as an auxiliary air station. They carried a single candlelit lamp in the bow of the boat, and the Ford Island sentries all knew who they were, what they were doing out there, and that it was harmless.

  Manoea liked to talk, and Glory had been on the island long enough that she could understand most of the pidgin dialect the locals used when they spoke to haoles, as all white foreigners were called. When he’d learned that her husband was entombed in the battleship he stopped charging her, although she still made sure she left some cigarettes in the boat when he brought her back to Hospital Point. Now when he took her out there, he would simply let the boat drift near the Arizona and smoke while she let her mind drift along with the boat. The Navy had removed all of the remaining superstructure by then, so the only prominent features visible were the after turret foundations and the large centerline hole that had been the belowdecks base of the armored conning tower. A sheen of bunker oil surrounded the wreck. Schools of small fish swam between what had been the front face of the bridge superstructure and the forward part of the ship where the fourteen-inch ammunition magazines had exploded.