by Herman Wouk
Pug got back to the hotel just ahead of a rain squall. The Clipper passengers were sitting down to lunch when blasts shook the floor, rattled the dishes, and sent broken windowpanes clinking to the tiles. Amid shouts and cries the passengers jumped for the windows. Fat cigar-shaped airplanes, with orange circles painted on their flamboyant jungle camouflage, were flashing past in the rain; Pug noted their twin engines and twin tails. Smoke and fire were already rising from the airfield across the lagoon, and more explosions, bigger flames, heavier smoke, came fast. Pug had often seen bombing, but this attack, destroying an American installation with impunity, still outraged and numbed him.
The marauding bombers, blurry in the rain, kept crisscrossing the islands and the lagoon with thunderous engine roars, meeting only meager bursts of fire. Soon a line of bombers came winging straight for the Pan American compound, and this was what Victor Henry was fearing. An attack on the Clipper might strand him and paralyze his war career before it started. There was no way off Wake Island, except aboard that huge inviting silvery target.
Savage explosions and crashes burst around them as the planes bombed and machine-gunned the hotel, the Pan Am repair shops, the dock, and the radio tower. A gasoline dump close by went up in a colossal sheet of white flame, climbing to the sky with a terrific howl. The passengers dove under tables or huddled in corners, but Victor Henry still crouched at the window beside the pilot, watching. They saw spurts of water approach the flying boat. They saw pieces of the Clipper go flying.
When the bomber sounds faded, Pug followed the pilot out onto the pier at a run. Like a clothed ape, Ed Connelly clambered over the slippery flying boat in the rain, making it rock and slosh. “Pug, so help me God, I think we can still fly! They didn’t hole the tanks or the engines. At least I don’t think they did. I’m hauling my passengers the hell out of here now, and I’ll argue with Hawaii later.”
The passengers eagerly scrambled aboard. The Clipper took off, and it flew. Below, smashed airplanes flamed and all three islands poured smoke. Pug could see little figures looking up at the departing Clipper. Some waved.
Even in the dead of night, nine hours later, Midway was not hard to find. The pilot called Victor Henry to the cockpit to show him the star of flame far ahead on the black sea. “Christ, these Japs had the thing all lined up, didn’t they?” he said. “They hit everywhere at once. I heard over the radio they’re already in Malaya, Thailand, Hong Kong, they’re bombing Singapore—”
“Can we land, Ed?”
“We’ve got to try. I can’t raise them. All the navigation lights are out. Midway has a lot of underground tanks. And if we can just get down, we can fuel. Soooo—here goes.”
The flying boat dropped low over dark waters, lit only by the glare from blazing hangars and buildings. On slapping into the sea, it hit something solid with a frightening clang, but slowed and floated undamaged. The airfields of Midway, they soon learned, had been shelled by a Japanese cruiser and a destroyer. An exhilarated mob of almost naked fire fighters was flooding the blazes with chemicals and water, generating giant billows of acrid red smoke. Victor Henry found his way to the commandant’s office and tried to get news of the Pearl Harbor attack. The lieutenant on duty was obsequious and vague. The commandant was out inspecting the island’s air defenses, he said, and he had no authority to show top secret dispatches, but he could tell the captain that the Navy had shot down a mess of Japanese planes.
“How about the California? I’m going there to take command of her.”
The lieutenant looked impressed. “Oh, really, sir? The California? I’m sure she’s all right, sir. I don’t recall any word about the California.”
This news enabled Victor Henry to sleep a little, though he tossed and muttered all night and got up well before dawn to pace the cool hotel veranda. The goony birds of Midway, big hook-beaked creatures which he had heard about but never seen, were out by the dozens, walking the gray dunes. He saw them clumsily fly, and land, and tumble on their heads. He watched a pair do a ridiculous mating dance on the beach as the sun came up, plopping their feet like a drunken old farm couple. Ordinarily Victor Henry would have seized the chance to inspect Midway, for it was a big installation, but today nothing could draw him out of sight of the flying boat, rising and falling on the swells and bumping the dock with dull booms.
The four hours to Hawaii seemed like forty. Instead of melting away at its usual rate, time froze. Pug asked the steward for cards and played solitaire, but forgot he was playing. He just sat, enduring the passage of time like the grind of a dentist’s drill, until at last the steward came and spoke to him, smiling. “Captain Connelly would like you to come up forward, sir.”
Ahead, through the plexiglass, the green sunny humps of the Hawaiian Islands were showing over the horizon.
“Nice?” said the pilot.
“Prettiest sight I’ve seen,” said Pug, “since my wife had a girl baby.”
“Stick around, and we’ll take a look at the fleet.”
Nobody aboard the Clipper knew what to expect. The rumors on Midway had varied from disaster to victory, with graphic details both ways. The Clipper came in from the north over the harbor and hooked around to descend. In these two passes, Victor Henry was struck sick by what his disbelieving eyes saw. All along the east side of Ford Island the battleships of the Pacific Fleet lay careened, broken, overturned, in the disorder of a child’s toys in a bath. Hickam Field and the Navy’s air base were broad dumps of blackened airplane fragments and collapsed burned hangar skeletons. Some dry docks held shattered tumbled-over ships. Pug desperately tried to pick out the California in the hideous smoky panorama. But at this altitude the ships with basket masts looked alike. Some of the inboard vessels appeared just slightly damaged. If only one was the California!
“My God,” Connelly said, looking around at Pug, his face drawn, “what a shambles!”
Speechless, Victor Henry nodded and sat on a folding seat, as the flying boat swooped low past a smashed gutted battleship with tripod masts, sunk to the level of its guns and resting on the bottom at a crazy angle. The Clipper threw up a curtain of spray that wiped out the heartrending sight.
Journey’s end.
Passing several clanging, speeding Navy ambulances, Pug went from the customs shed at the Pan Am landing straight to the Cincpac building, where officers and sailors busily swarmed. They all wore unsure scared expressions, like people after a bad earthquake. A very handsome ensign in whites, at a desk that barred access to Cincpac’s inner offices, looked incredulously at Pug, who wore wrinkled slacks and a seersucker jacket. “The admiral? You mean Cincpac, sir? Admiral Kimmel?”
“That’s right,” Pug said.
“Sir, you don’t really expect to see Admiral Kimmel today, do you? Shall I try his Assistant Chief of Staff?”
“Give the admiral a message, please. I’m Captain Victor Henry. I’ve just come in on the Clipper with a personal letter for him from the marine commandant on Wake Island.”
The very handsome ensign gestured wearily at a chair and picked up a telephone. “You may have to wait all day, or a week, sir. You know what the situation is.”
“I have the general picture.”
A minute or so later, a pretty woman in a tailored blue suit looked through the double doors. “Captain Henry? This way, sir.”
The ensign stared at Victor Henry walking past him, as though the captain had sprouted another head. Along the corridor, the offices of Cincpac’s senior staff stood open, and the sound of excited talk and typewriter clatter drifted out. A marine rigidly saluted before high doors decorated with four gold stars and a Navy seal, and labelled in gold COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, PACIFIC FLEET. They passed into a wood-panelled anteroom. The woman opened a heavy polished mahogany door.
“Admiral, here’s Captain Henry.”
“Hey, Pug! Great day, how long has it been?” Kimmel waved cheerily from the window, where he stood gazing out at the anchorage. He was dressed in faultless gold-
buttoned whites, and looked tanned, fit, and altogether splendid, though much older and quite bald. “Have I seen you since you worked for me on the Maryland?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“Well, the years are dealing kindly with you! Sit you down, sit you down. Been flying high, haven’t you? Observing in Roosia, and all that, eh?” They shook hands. Kimmel’s voice was as hearty and winning as ever. This was an outstanding officer, Pug thought, who had been marked for success all the way and had gone all the way. Now, after twenty years of war exercises and drills against Orange, the fleet he commanded lay in sight beyond the window, wrecked in port by the Orange team in one quick real action. He appeared remarkably chipper, but for his eyes, which were reddened and somewhat unfocussed.
“I know how little time you have, sir.” Pug drew out of his breast pocket the letter from Wake Island.
“Not at all. It’s nice to see an old familiar face. You were a good gunnery officer, Pug. A good officer all around. Cigarette?” Kimmel offered him the pack, and lit one for himself. “Let’s see. Don’t you have a couple of boys in the service now?”
“Yes, sir. One flies an SBD off the Enterprise, and—”
“Well, fine! They didn’t get the Enterprise or any other carrier, Pug, because the carriers at least followed my orders and were on one hundred percent alert. And the other lad?”
“He’s aboard the Devilfish in Manila.”
“Manila, eh? They haven’t hit the fleet at Manila yet, though I understand they’ve bombed the airfields. Tommy Hart’s got some warning now, and he’ll have no excuse. I only hope the Army Air people in Manila aren’t as totally asleep as they were here! The Army was and is completely responsible for the safety of these islands and of this anchorage, Pug, including the definite responsibility of air patrol and radar search. Nothing on God’s earth could be clearer than the way that is spelled out in the islands’ defense instructions. The documents leave no doubt about that, fortunately. Well—you have something from Wake, don’t you? Let’s have a look-see. Were you there when they hit?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How bad was it? As bad as this?”
“Well, I’d say about two dozen bombers worked us over. Mainly they went after planes and air installations, Admiral. No ships were there to get bombed.”
Cincpac shot a glance at Victor Henry, as though suspecting irony in his words. “Say, weren’t you supposed to relieve Chip Wallenstone in the California?”
“Yes, sir.”
Kimmel shook his head, and started to read the letter.
Pug ventured to say, “How did the California make out, Admiral?”
“Why, don’t you know?”
“No, sir. I came straight here from the Clipper.”
Not looking up, in the brisk tone of a report, Kimmel said, “She took two torpedoes to port and several bomb hits and near misses. One bomb penetrated below decks and the explosion started a big fire. She’s down by the bow, Pug, and sinking. They’re still counterflooding, so she may not capsize. She’s electric drive, and the preliminary estimate”—he pulled toward him a sheet on his desk, and peered at it—”a year and a half out of action, possibly two. That’s top secret of course. We’re releasing no damage information.”
Cincpac finished the letter from Wake in a heavy silence, and tossed it on the desk.
Victor Henry’s voice trembled and he swallowed in mid-sentence. “Admiral, if I broke a lot of asses, including my own—ah, is there a chance I could put her back on the line in six months?”
“Go out and see for yourself. It’s hopeless, Pug. A salvage officer will relieve Chip.” The tone was sympathetic, but Victor Henry felt it did Cincpac good to give someone else catastrophic news.
“Well, that’s that, then, I guess.”
“You’ll get another command.”
“The only thing is, Admiral, there aren’t that many available battleships. Not any more.”
Again, the quick suspicious glance. It was hard to say anything in this context without seeming to needle the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Kimmel made a curt gesture at the letter Pug had brought. “Now there’s a problem for you. Do we relieve Wake or not? It means exposing a carrier. We can’t go in without air cover. He’s asking for a pile of things I can’t give him, for the simple reason that the Russians and the British have got the stuff. Mr. Roosevelt was a great Navy President until that European fracas started, Pug, but at that point he took his eye off the ball. Our real enemy’s always been right here, here in the Pacific. This ocean is our nation’s number one security problem. That’s what he forgot. We never had the wherewithal to conduct proper patrols. I didn’t want to rely on the Army, God knows, but equipment only has so much life in it, and what would we have had to fight the war with if we’d used up our planes in patrolling? Washington’s been crying wolf about the Japs for a year. We’ve had so many full alerts and air raid drills and surprise attack exercises and all, nobody can count them, but—well, the milk is spilled, the horse is stolen, but I think it’s pretty clear that the President got too damned interested in the wrong enemy, the wrong ocean, and the wrong war.”
It gave Victor Henry a strange sensation, after Berlin and London and Moscow, and now this staggering personal disappointment, to hear from Admiral Kimmel the old unchanged Navy verbiage about the importance of the Pacific. “Well, Admiral, I know how busy you are,” he said, though in fact he was struck by the quiet at the heart of the cataclysm, and by Kimmel’s willingness to chat with a mere captain he did not know very well. Cincpac acted almost as lonesome as Kip Tollever had.
“Yes, well, I do have a thing or two on my mind, and you’ve got to go about your business too. Nice seeing you, Pug,” said Admiral Kimmel, in a sudden tone of dismissal.
Janice answered Pug’s telephone call and warmly urged him to come and stay at the house. Pug wanted a place where he could drop his bags, and get into uniform to go to the California. He drove out in a Navy car, took suitable if brief delight in his grandson, and accepted Janice’s commiseration over his ship with a grunt. She offered to get his whites quickly pressed by the maid. In the spare room he opened his suitcase to pull out the crumpled uniform, and his letter to Pamela Tudsbury fell to the floor.
In a dressing gown he glanced through the letter, which he had written during the long hop from Guam to Wake Island. It embarrassed him as one of his old love letters to Rhoda might have. There wasn’t much love in this one, mostly a reasoned and accurate case for his living out his life as it was. The whole business with the English girl—romance, flirtation, love affair, whatever it had been—had begun to seem so far away after his stops in Manila and Guam, so dated, so unlike him, so utterly outside realities and possibilities! Pamela was a beautiful young woman, but odd. The best proof of her oddness was her very infatuation with him, a grizzled United States Navy workhorse with whom she had been thrown together a few times. Dour and repressed though he was, she had ignited a flash of romance in him in those last turbulent hours in Moscow. He had allowed himself to hope for a new life, and to half believe in it, in his elation over his orders to the California.
And now—how finished it all was! California, Pamela, the Pacific Fleet, the honor of the United States, and—God alone knew—any hope for the civilized world.
A knock at the door; the voice of the Chinese maid: “Your uniform, Captain?”
“Thank you. Ah, that’s a fine job. I appreciate it.”
He did not tear the letter up. He did not think he could write a better one. The situation of a man past fifty declining a young woman’s love was awkward and ridiculous, and no words could help much. He slipped the envelope into his pocket. When he passed a mailbox on his way to the Navy Yard, he stopped and mailed it. The clank of the box was a sad sound in a sad day for Captain Victor Henry.
Sadder yet was the trip to the California, through foul-smelling water so coated with black oil that the motor launch cut no wake, but chugged slimily along in smo
ky air, thumping like an icebreaker through a floating mass of black-smeared garbage and debris. The launch passed all along Battleship Row, for the California lay nearest the channel entrance. One by one Pug contemplated these gargantuan gray vessels he knew so well—he had served in several—fire-blackened, bomb-blasted, down by the head, down by the stern, sitting on the bottom, listing, or turned turtle. Grief and pain tore at him.
He was a battleship man. Long, long ago he had passed up flight school. Navy air had seemed to him fine for reconnaissance, bombing support, and torpedo attacks, but not for the main striking arm. He had argued with the fly-fly boys that when war came, the thin-skinned carriers would lurk far from the action and would fuss at each other with bombings and dogfights, while the battleships with their big rifles came to grips and slugged it out for command of the sea. The fliers had asserted that one aerial bomb or torpedo could sink a battleship. He had retorted that a sixteen-inch steel plate wasn’t exactly porcelain, and that a hundred guns firing at once might slightly mar the aim of a pilot flying a little tin crate.
His natural conservative streak had been reinforced by his football experience. To him, carriers had been the fancy-Dan team with tricky runners and razzle-dazzle passers; battlewagons, the heavy solid team of chargers, who piled up the yardage straight through the line. These tough ground gainers usually became the champions. So he had thought—making the mistake of his life. He had been as wrong as a man could be, in the one crucial judgment of his profession.
Other battleship men might still find excuses for these tragic slaughtered dinosaurs that the launch was passing. For Pug Henry, facts governed. Each of these vessels was a giant engineering marvel, a floating colossus as cunningly put together as a lady’s watch, capable of pulverizing a city. All true, all true. But if caught unawares, they could be knocked out by little tin flying crates. The evidence was before his eyes. The twenty-year argument was over.
