Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  “The skipper of the Evans,” she said. “Kinda iffy right now. Double amp, some second-degree sunburn, still somewhat shocky. They’ve had him back to surgery and recovery twice, but now I think they’re gonna just wait and see.”

  “Wow,” Sally said. “I wish I could talk to him, ask him about my guy.”

  “Not tonight, Josephine,” the nurse said. “Maybe tomorrow, if he’s still with us. Ooops, there goes a bottle.”

  They went back to work.

  The next morning she came on at the regular time, 0700, after an uncomfortable and depressing night. She’d seen some surgeons going into Evans’s skipper’s room just before she checked out for the evening. That doesn’t look good, she’d thought. Damn. She’d cried herself to sleep for the first time in the war.

  The next day’s duty roster had her assigned back to her regular ward, where she spent the morning assisting rounds, bringing charts up to date, and dealing with one young Marine who’d decided to get back up to the front line with his buddies, the major problem being that he did not have legs anymore. Three orderlies and a dose of tranquilizer solved the problem. It was hard to be gentle while doing forcible restraint. The rest of the day passed in a sorrowful haze.

  The following day there was a buzz in the canteen line at breakfast. An admiral had landed the night before with some staff officers from Admiral Nimitz’s headquarters. Supposedly they were going to conduct some kind of inquiry into the Evans sinking and the battle surrounding it. They rarely saw admirals at the naval hospital, although there were also rumors that Nimitz himself was going to move his headquarters to Guam sometime early next year. The orderlies in front of her were scanning the plan of the day, a mimeographed paper put out by admin each day, laying out the day’s scheduled events.

  “Can I see that when you’re done?” she asked.

  They handed it back to her and waited for the line to shuffle forward. Apparently the cooks had temporarily run out of scrambled eggs.

  Sally scanned the front page and then turned it over. On the back was a list of the recent admissions by name, rank, and assigned command. Toward the end of the list she saw the name Vincent, M., LCDR, USS Evans, and an asterisk, indicating a commanding officer.

  “Oh, thank God!” she blurted, startling the two men in front of her. She handed one of them her tray and ran upstairs.

  As she hurried down the ward aisle she saw that the door to the private room was closed. She stopped short. At this time of day, that usually meant the patient inside had died and staff was waiting for the morgue to come get the remains. Then to her vast relief the door opened and two doctors stepped out, conferring over their notes. One of them saw Sally, standing there with a hand to her mouth.

  “Yes, Nurse?” he asked.

  “Is he—”

  “I think he’s gonna make it now,” the doctor said. Sally recognized him as one of the senior internists.

  “Can I speak to him?” she asked.

  “Keep it short, Sally,” the other doc said. “He’s pretty weak. You know this guy?”

  She nodded, not trusting her voice anymore.

  They said okay, stuffed their notes into the chart box on the door, and left. She went in.

  She hardly recognized him. His face was in the peeling stage of a serious sunburn. His head had been shaved to allow his scalp to be stitched up, and his lips looked like a miniature red and black picket fence from all the cracking. The stump of his right arm was suspended in a tri-wire, and his right lower leg, or what was left of it, was elevated on some pillows. For some reason, both of his eyes were black and blue, but they were open. His left hand rested on his chest. His big academy ring was missing.

  “Well, aren’t you a regular beauty,” she said.

  He tried to smile, but all the cracks in his lips immediately bled. She pulled up a metal chair and sat down next to the bed. She took some tissues out of a box and dabbed his lips as gently as she could.

  “I’d have been here sooner, but they told me the XO didn’t make it,” she said, no longer trying to hold back tears of relief.

  He nodded but didn’t say anything. She reached across his chest and took his left hand. His chest felt bony underneath her wrist, all his ribs tangible, and his remaining hand had the strength of a damp rag.

  “I am so glad to see you here,” she said. “I was—” Then she stopped.

  He’d gone back to sleep. She slipped a finger under his wrist and felt the pulse. Thready, weak, but there. His breathing was okay, but just barely. She examined the stump of his right arm, made sure his eyes were still closed, and then leaned forward to take a sniff. It smelled of bandages, iodine, sulfa powder, but not of gangrene. His right leg had gone septic and had been amputated just below the knee. That dressing looked all right, too. She began to take away her right hand, but his fingers pressed against hers.

  She left her hand right there and began to rub his forehead as gently as she could. She saw tears at the corner of his eyes, and, strangely, this made everything all right. She cried with him, soundlessly, not wanting to upset him.

  When she came out a half hour later, she closed the door and then hung a MEDICAL STAFF ONLY sign on the door handle. At the other end of the ward she saw a small group of khaki-clad officers sitting next to one of the beds. She went down there to see what they were doing. The nurse in charge of the ward intercepted her.

  “That’s an admiral,” she said breathlessly. “Stars and everything. The other three are all captains.”

  “Wow,” Sally said. “That’s a lot of brass for this place. What’s going on?”

  “Some kind of big-deal investigation. They want to talk to everybody as soon as they can. Especially the captain.”

  “That’ll be a while,” Sally said. “Maybe a coupla days. He’s pretty beat up.”

  “I’ll tell them that. I’d heard you lost someone on the Evans?”

  “Found him,” Sally said, beaming, wiping fresh tears from her eyes. The other nurse squeezed her hand.

  Over the next few days some facts of the battle began to leak out within the hospital gossip networks. The presence of the high-level team from Pearl, of course, had everyone talking. Sally thought that the rumors were pretty wild, considering that they were talking about a lone destroyer, but one of the doctors said they had other people in the hospital who’d been there on one of the escort carriers and were corroborating the rumors. The story was that they’d been attacked by Japanese battleships, that the Japs had been driven off by three or four destroyers. Everything Sally knew about actual naval warfare she’d learned at the O-club, but that didn’t seem plausible. She’d seen some American battleships in Pearl, the new ones, not the sunken ones, and they looked like they’d just run smack over any destroyer that was pestering them.

  She saw Marsh at least three times a day when she could sneak away from her regular duties, which she increasingly managed with the covert cooperation of the other nurses. He was making steady but slow progress, but she still had to dab his lips with an anesthetic ointment before he could speak coherently. She did not ask about the battle, but on the third day she did tell him about the delegation from Pearl.

  “Have some questions for them, too,” he said.

  She blinked in surprise. “You do?”

  “Like why they didn’t come looking for us. The guys saw Catalinas picking up aviators, but no one came for us.”

  “My God, are you serious?”

  “How many here now from Evans?”

  “I think ninety-some.”

  “Had more than that get off the ship,” he said.

  “But where—”

  “Sharks got the rest. We got to watch.”

  She gasped. How could the Navy not have been looking for them?

  “We’ve been putting them off,” she said, “but they really want to talk to you.”

  He nodded. “I’m ready,” he whispered. “Just keep that goop handy.”

  * * *

  They cam
e into his room, the three of them—a two-star aviator and two captains. Each of them was carrying a metal chair. They must have gotten used to looking at the blasted human wreckage from the battle off Samar, because none of them flinched when they saw his face. Even Sally, a wartime nurse, had flinched. Hell, he had flinched when Sally brought him a shaving mirror. He felt like he should be sporting a bell and a candle to warn people off. Between the stubble, the red sutures, raccoon eyes, and the peeling skin, he looked like a candidate for the leper colony at Molokai.

  The admiral introduced himself as Bill Devereaux, deputy chief of staff for operations at the Pacific Fleet headquarters. Marsh thought he looked too young to be an admiral, but he guessed being an aviator accounted for that. The two captains were probably five years older than the admiral was. They looked like seamen.

  “Captain, I’m honored to meet you,” Devereaux said.

  “Why?” Marsh croaked, which took Devereaux aback for a moment.

  “Well,” he said, “you and your crew drove off the Jap battle fleet at Leyte. They had the destruction of MacArthur’s whole invasion fleet in their grasp, and yet they turned around and ran.”

  “We had lots of help,” Marsh said. “Planes from the jeeps. The other tin cans. Hornets’ nest around each Jap.”

  “Yes, we’re finding that out,” Devereaux said. “Let me explain why we’re here and what we need from you. First let me emphasize that you talk only as long as you’re able. We’ll quit whenever you say so. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” Marsh said. His mouth was hurting already.

  The admiral explained that they had the preliminary operational reports from the task force and task group commanders and from the COs of the Taffy Three light carriers who had survived the attack. All three of Taffy Three’s destroyers who’d gone out to attack the battleships had been lost, and only one other CO had survived. Navigation, engineering, and damage control logs and records had, of course, all gone down with the ships, so for right now, the Navy was dependent upon individual testimony from survivors to reconstruct what had happened. He acknowledged that a lot of the information would be unreliable—sailors always exaggerated, and the stories got bigger the more often they told them. The horrors men had witnessed were in many cases erased in their minds by the brain’s survival mechanism.

  “So the idea is to move quickly, take everything said as the gospel truth, and then go back to Pearl and try to put it together.”

  “How did it happen?” Marsh asked.

  “How did what happen?”

  “Jap battleships in the amphibious objective area? And none of ours?”

  “That’s the supreme question, Captain,” Devereaux said with a wry smile, “but that is handsomely above your pay grade and mine. For what it’s worth, that question is a matter of intense discussion between Admirals Nimitz and Halsey. I won’t be invited to those talks, and neither will you.”

  He smiled again to make sure Marsh knew that he wasn’t admonishing him. Marsh liked the guy, actually. No stuffiness or superior airs. Sally sat on the other side of the bed, periodically dabbing the ointment on his lips with a cotton stick so he could keep talking.

  “What we need to know from you, and others, is how the small forces there managed to drive off three, maybe four battleships, not to mention all those cruisers. So to start with, why don’t you tell me what happened from the very beginning, when the first reports came in that there were Jap battleships approaching Leyte Gulf.”

  So he did. It took the next three days, with morning and afternoon sessions each day. Marsh was good for about an hour before his energy would run out. The first day he actually went to sleep on them in the middle of a sentence. They were patient, polite, and very thorough. He had been afraid that talking about it would bring back all the bad dreams he’d been having since being picked up, but the reverse was true. It was cathartic, even though at the time he didn’t know that word. He wept a couple of times, such as when he described his last sight of the rabbi, kneeling on the port side in waist-high water, burned blind and bleeding from both eyes, holding a dying sailor’s head above the water as long as he could. Marsh could not judge their reaction at moments like that, because he was no longer with them in that room when those memories surfaced. There were some long silences, which they respected.

  One of the captains was particularly interested in his decision to turn around and go back in after the first torpedo attack. “Why didn’t y’all just git while the gittin’ was good?” he asked. He was a Southerner.

  “Still had torpedoes and targets,” Marsh said.

  He nodded and wrote something down in his notebook. “And why did you lay Evans alongside the Yamato?”

  “Is that what she’s called? I’d never seen anything like her.”

  “No one had until Halsey sank her sister ship, the Musashi, in the Sibuyan Sea.”

  “Big bastard. Actually, big doesn’t describe it. But I put Evans alongside because there were two, maybe three heavy cruisers and a Kongo class shooting at us. I figured if we closed in on the big guy, they’d have to stop firing, and they did.”

  “How long were you alongside?”

  “A year?”

  They smiled at that. Sally smiled, too, probably because Marsh was starting to show some signs of life.

  “We were hurt pretty bad by then, so we could only stay in her lee while she was making a wide turn. As soon as she steadied up, she drew ahead, and then we were back in hot water, with one cruiser in particular. He’d set up to enfilade us with his eight-inch. One of the bombers from the jeeps saved us.”

  “Yes, I wanted to ask directly about that,” Admiral Devereaux said. “We’ve been told by one of your chiefs that a Dauntless purposefully dived into a cruiser and blew her up.”

  “Certainly what it looked like,” Marsh said. “He was smoking pretty bad, and I’m guessing the pilot was already wounded, because he was doing everything too slow.”

  “Deliberate or just how it came out due to his damage?”

  “Deliberate, I think. One moment he was climbing out of the AA fire, the next he rolled over like they do when they’re going to dive on something and then flew straight into that cruiser’s side. Huge explosion.”

  “Could you see a bomb?”

  “No, sir. None of them flying around us had bombs, or if they did, they were little-bitties. Most of them were strafing the bridge levels. Some of them couldn’t even do that, so they made fake torpedo runs, which made the Japs turn and evade.”

  “Why do you think the cruiser exploded, then?” one of the captains asked.

  “Couldn’t tell you, sir, but she surely did. I could see the masts tipping into each other after the blast. Had to have broken her back.”

  “And you say Evans got two torpedo hits on the Yamato?”

  “Such as they were, Admiral. One fish porpoised, hit the side. It did go off, but it mostly scratched the paint. The other one hit farther aft, went off high order, but didn’t seem to faze him.”

  “Gentlemen,” Sally said, pointing at her watch.

  “Right, of course,” the admiral said. “Thank you very much. We’ll probably be back.”

  “One question for you, Admiral, when you do come back.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did we have to spend three days and two nights drifting at sea before they came looking for us?”

  The admiral gave Marsh a stern look, suddenly less nice guy and more admiral. Then his face softened, and he nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “I don’t actually have the answer to that question now, Captain, but I will. Will you entertain my best guess?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “My best guess is that Admiral Sprague saw all of you disappear into the smoke screens, headed for a force of battleships and heavy cruisers, and nobody returned. I think he simply assumed no one could have survived an engagement like that.”

  “Assumed,” Marsh said.

  “Yes, exactly,” he said. He paused
for a moment. “Assumptions in wartime,” he said. “They’ll bite you in the ass every time.”

  “Every time, Admiral. I lost a lot of men out there, and the ones who did make it want to know why nobody came.”

  “I understand, Captain. For starters, you can tell them the fault was all ours.”

  It was a gracious reply to a question the admiral did not have to answer. Marsh had one further question.

  “You’ve been calling me Captain,” he said. “I was only acting commanding officer. The real captain was killed in an accident. I—”

  “Were you in command when you put your ship alongside an enemy battleship?”

  Marsh took a deep breath. “Yes, sir, I guess I was.”

  “Then you were the captain. Besides, there’s another reason we’re calling you Captain.”

  Marsh waited.

  “Someone has to be responsible for the loss of the Evans. Captain.”

  “Right,” Marsh said. “Of course.”

  Then Deveraux grinned. “I’m kidding. Mostly. Get well. We’ll talk some more.”

  On that happy note, they left.

  Marsh was exhausted. Talking was physical torture. His cracked lips stung. His missing limbs also hurt. Not the stumps but the limbs themselves. He couldn’t understand that. It hurt to breathe, and he wondered if he’d lost a lung or something. After this long session, he asked Sally for some morphine.

  “Let me see what I can do,” she said. He later learned that what she brought him was a Coke laced with some codeine. “Drink this,” she said, “while they rustle up some morphine for you.”

  Ten minutes later he was long gone.

  * * *

  The admiral and his team went on to pick on someone else. Marsh spent the next few days sweating through the hours between pain medications. The docs told him that this was a good sign, that the tissues were trying to heal. He told them to bring the tissues some morphine, they apparently had developed a taste for it in the life raft.