by Herman Wouk
Pug recounted his prediction of the Nazi-Soviet pact, his visits to the President, his assembling of the planes for England, and his reports from Berlin. He felt he was getting loose-tongued. “Well, that’s the idea. I’ve never discussed these things before with anybody, Warren. Not even your mother. You strike me now as a thoroughgoing professional officer. It does my heart good and it gives me pleasure to confide a little in you. Also, I’m drunk as a fiddler.”
Warren grinned. “Ha! You haven’t told me a thing. That story about the planes for England cropped up in Time a couple of months ago.”
“I’m well aware of that,” said his father, “but I wasn’t the one who spilled the beans. You didn’t see my name in that story.”
“I sure didn’t. Dad, don’t you know why the President likes you? You’ve a keen mind, you get things done, you don’t talk—a rare enough combination—and added to all that, you don’t want the job. He must be up to his nates in these people you describe who keep shoving to get near him. He must find you refreshing, as well as useful. There can’t be many patriots in Washington.”
“Well, that’s an interesting thought. I don’t know why you’re buttering me up, but thanks for calling me a patriot with a keen mind. I do try to be as keen as the next guy, Warren. Possibly I was a wee bit mistaken in that small dispute about carriers versus battleships. If I’d been ordered to the Enterprise, for instance, instead of the California— which might well have been, had I ever learned to fly—I would have a command right now, instead of a skinful of booze. Thanks, Warren. Thanks for everything, and God bless you. Sorry I did so much talking. Tomorrow I want to hear all about your tangle with the Zeroes. Now if my legs will support me, I think I’ll go to bed.”
He did not stir till noon. Janice was out on the back lawn, playing with the baby on a blanket, when her father-in-law emerged yawning on the screen porch in a white silk kimono, carrying a manila envelope.
“Hi, Dad,” she called. “How about some breakfast?”
He sat in a wicker chair. “You mean lunch. No thanks, I’m still off schedule from the travelling. Your maid’s making me coffee. I’ll have a look at my mail, then mosey on down to Cincpac.”
A few minutes later Janice heard a loud clink. Victor Henry sat upright staring at a letter in his lap, his hand still on the coffee cup he had set down so hard.
“What’s the matter, Dad?”
“Eh? What? Nothing.”
“Bad news from home?”
“That coffee’s mighty hot. I burned my tongue. It’s nothing. Where’s Warren, by the way?”
“Went to the ship. He expects to be back for dinner, but I guess we can never be sure about anything any more.”
“That’s exactly right.”
His voice and his manner were strained and queer, she thought. Covertly she watched him read and reread two handwritten letters, looking from one to the other, leaving a pile of office mail unopened.
“Say, Jan.” He stood, stuffing the mail back in the big envelope.
“Yes, Dad. You’re sure you won’t eat something?”
“No, no. I don’t want to eat. I’m a little tireder than I figured. I may even crawl back in the sack for a bit.”
When night fell, his bedroom door was still shut. Warren came home after seven. Janice told him what had been happening. He cautiously rapped at his father’s door. “Dad?”
Rapping louder, he tried the knob and went into the black room. Soon he came out with an empty brandy bottle. The cork and foil lay in his palm. “It was a fresh bottle, Janice. He opened it and drank it all.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s just out. Out cold.”
“Maybe you should look at his mail.”
Warren gave her a frigid glare, lighting a cigarette.
“Listen,” she said with mixed timidity and desperation, “those letters, whatever they were, upset him. You’d better find out what the trouble is.”
“If he wants me to know, he’ll tell me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Eat my dinner.”
Warren did not speak again until he finished his meat. He sat silent looking straight ahead when food was not before him. “Dad’s taking the California thing hard,” he finally said. “That’s the whole trouble.”
“Well, I hope that’s all.”
He said, “Did you listen to the evening news?”
“No.”
“Big air strike on Manila. They made a mess of the Cavite Navy Yard. That’s all the news Washington put out. But the communicator on the Enterprise told me two submarines were bombed, and one was sunk. That one was the Devilfish.”
“Oh God, no!”
“And there’s no word on survivors.”
“Maybe it’s a mistaken report.”
“Maybe.”
“Warren, I feel in my bones that Byron is all right.”
His chilly grim face looked much like his father’s. “That’s comforting. Till we get some more definite information.”
61
TO military specialists, “Clark Field” is the name of a United States defeat as grave as Pearl Harbor. With this catastrophe at the main Army airfield on Luzon, the Philippines lost their air cover; the Asiatic Fleet had to flee south; and the rich south sea islands and archipelagoes were laid bare at a stroke for conquest. There has never been a rational explanation for what happened there. Yet Congress did not investigate it. Nobody was relieved. History still ignores Clark Field, and remembers Pearl Harbor. Clark Field was half a day late for immortality. Two great disasters five thousand miles apart in one day are boring, and like any good editor, history has cut the repetition.
Clark Field occurred half a day later than Pearl Harbor because the Japanese could not, for all their clever planning, arrange for the dawn to come up everywhere at once. They gave up hope of surprising the Philippines, for the sunrise took five hours to traverse the bulge of ocean from Hawaii. Their bombers waited for good weather in starting from Formosa, and droned straight in over the main island of Luzon just before high noon, expecting alert and violent opposition. The ground observers, on a war footing after the Pearl Harbor news, sent a spate of reports to the command center, tracking the attackers from the coast all the way to their objective. They got there unopposed, nevertheless, and found the fighters and bombers of the Far East Air Force—a formidable armada, built up in recent weeks as the hard core of resistance to Japan—lined up on the ground. This ignominious occurrence remains unaccounted for. It was the Japanese, this time, who were surprised, very pleasantly so. They laid utter waste to General Douglas MacArthur’s air force, and flew away. Thus ended, in a quarter of an hour, any hope of stopping the Japanese in the south seas. No course remained for the American forces there but last-ditch stands and surrenders.
The Japanese at once set about to cash in on this startling success. Step one was to make Manila Bay uninhabitable for the United States Navy. Two days after Clark Field a horde of bombers came in and carefully, painstakingly destroyed the Cavite Naval Base at their leisure, having no air defenders to worry about. The Devilfish and Byron Henry were at dead center of this attack.
When the attack actually began, Byron was ashore with a working party, drawing torpedoes. The terrifying wail of the siren broke out not far from the big open shed of the torpedo shop. The overhead crane clattered to a halt. The echoing clanks and squeals of repair machinery quieted down. Chiefs, torpedomen, and machinists’ mates in greasy dungarees trotted away from their benches and lathes to take battle stations.
Byron’s party had four torpedoes in the truck. He decided to load two more before leaving. His orders called for six, and false alarms had been plentiful ever since Clark Field. But with the overhead crane shut down, it was slow work moving an assembled Mark 14 torpedo, a ton and a half of steel cylinder packed with explosives, propellant, and motor. The sweating Devilfish sailors were rigging one to the guy chains of a small cherry-picker crane when Byron’
s leading torpedoman glanced out at the sky. “Mr. Henry, here they come.”
Hansen had the best eyes on the Devilfish. It took Byron half a minute to discern the neat V of silvery specks shining in the blue, far higher than the German planes he had seen over Poland. The old Warsaw feeling overwhelmed him—the fear, the exhilaration, the call to look sharp and act fast.
“God, yes, fifty or sixty of ’em,” he said.
“I counted fifty-seven. They’re headed this way, sir. Target angle zero.”
“So I see. Well, let’s hurry.”
The sailor at the wheel of the cherry picker began gunning the motor, tightening the chains on the torpedo. “Hold it!” Byron exclaimed, hearing a distant explosion. More CRUMPS! sounded closer. The cement floor trembled. Now for the first time since Warsaw Byron’s ears caught a familiar noise—a high whistle ascending in pitch and getting louder.
“Take cover!”
The sailors dove under the truck and a heavy worktable nearby. An explosion blasted close to the shed, then a cataract of noise burst all around, the floor shook and heaved, and Byron too threw himself under the table onto rough cement coated with sandy grease. Quarters were narrow here and his face was jammed against somebody’s scratchy dungarees. Byron had never endured a bombing like this. Over and over he winced and gritted his teeth at the cracking blasts that shook the ground. It seemed to him a fifty-fifty chance that he would get killed in the next minute. But at last the noise lessened as the bombing moved along to another part of the base. He crawled free and ran outside. Flame and smoke were billowing all around and walls were starting to crash down. The serene blue sky was flecked with A.A. bursting impotently far below the bombers, which were quite visible through the smoke. The Devilfish sailors came huddling around Byron, brushing themselves off and staring at the fires.
“Hey, Mr. Henry, it looks kind of bad, don’t it?”
“Are we going back aboard?”
“Should we finish loading the fish?”
“Wait.”
Byron hurried through the smoky shed to see the situation on the other side. Hansen came with him. Hansen was an old able submariner, a fat Swede from Oregon more than six feet tall, with a bushy blond beard and a belt pulled tight under a bulging paunch. Hansen had failed to make chief because once in Honolulu he had resisted arrest by three marine shore patrol men, had given one a brain concussion, and had broken another’s arm. He liked Byron and had taught him a lot without seeming to; and Byron had grown his beard partly in sympathy with Hansen, because the captain had been harrying the stubborn Swede to trim it or remove it.
On the other side of the torpedo shop, large fires also roared and crackled, fanned by a sea wind. In the street a bomb had blown a large crater; water was shooting up out of a broken main, and fat blue sparks were flashing among the torn and twisted underground cables. Three heavy Navy trucks stood halted by the smoking pit, and their Filipino drivers, chattering in Tagalog, were peering down into the hole.
Byron shouted above the chaotic din, “Looks like we’re stuck, maybe, Hansen. What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Henry. If these trucks would move clear we could probably get out by doubling back around the Commandancia.”
One of the drivers called to Byron, “Say, can we drive through this shop? There a way through to the wharf?”
Byron shook his head and raised his voice over the shrieking siren and the yells of fire fighters dragging hoses along the street. “All blocked on that side! Solid fire, and some walls down!”
Squinting up at the wind-driven smoke and flame, Hansen said, “Mr. Henry, the fire’s gonna spread to this shop and all these fish are gonna go.” Byron understood the pain in the torpedoman’s voice. Without torpedoes, what good was a submarine squadron? The shortage was already well known and acute.
He said, “Well, if you could operate that overhead crane, maybe we could still pull out a few.”
Hansen scratched his balding head. “Mr. Henry, I’m not a crane man.”
Standing by the flooding crater was a lean civilian in overalls and a brown hard hat. He said, “I’m a crane operator. What’s your problem?”
Byron turned to the Filipino driver. “Will you guys give us a hand? We want to move some torpedoes out of here.”
After a rapid exchange in Tagalog with the other drivers, the Filipino exclaimed, “Okay! Where we go?”
“Come on,” Byron said to the civilian. “In this shop. It’s an overhead crane.”
“I know, sonny.”
In the bay off Sangley Point, meanwhile, a gray speedboat swooped alongside the Devilfish, which was under way, fleeing the Navy Yard and heading for the submarine base at Bataan. It was Red Tully’s speedboat, and he was bringing the skipper of the Devilfish back from the base. Branch Hoban jumped from the speedboat to the forecastle of his vessel, as Captain Tully yelled up at the bridge through a megaphone, “Ahoy the Devilfish! What about Seadragon and Sealion?”
Lieutenant Aster cupped his hands around his mouth. “They were all right when we left, sir. But they’re stuck alongside. No power.”
“Oh, Christ. Tell Branch to lie off here. I’ll go have a look.”
“Shall we pull the plug, sir?”
“Not unless you’re attacked.”
Hoban arrived on the bridge as the speedboat thrummed away. “Lady, what about Briny and the working party?”
Aster gestured back toward the Navy Yard, which appeared solidly afire under towering pillars of smoke. “They never showed. I figured I’d better get away from alongside, Captain.”
“Damn right. Glad one of us was aboard.”
In a short time the speedboat returned. The coxswain swerved it alongside and Tully came aboard the Devilfish white-faced and hoarse. “Bad business. They got straddled with bombs. I think the Sealion’s a goner—she’s on fire, her after engine room’s flooded, and she’s sinking fast.”
“Ye gods,” Hoban said. “We were outboard of her.”
“I know. Damn lucky.”
“The Pigeon’s trying to tow the Seadragon clear. Better go back in there, Branch, and see if you can help.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
A sooty motor whaleboat was puttering toward the Devilfish. “Who’s this now?” Tully said.
Hoban shaded his eyes. “Say, Lady, is that Pierce?”
“Yes, it’s Pierce, sir,” Lieutenant Aster said, glancing through binoculars.
Sailors ran out on the forecastle to help the young seaman scramble aboard. He came to the bridge, his eyes showing white and his mouth red as a minstrel’s in a soot-covered face. “Captain, Mr. Henry sent me to tell you the working party’s all right.”
“Well, thank God! Where are they?”
“They’re taking torpedoes out of the shop.”
Tully exclaimed, “The torpedo shop? You mean it’s still standing?”
“Yes, sir. The fire sort of blew away in another direction, so Mr. Henry and Hansen got these trucks and—”
“You come with me,” Tully said. “Branch, I’m going back in there.”
But when the squadron commander and the sailor reached the blazing Navy Yard, there was no way to get to the torpedo shop. Fallen buildings and smoking debris blocked every route into the wharf area. Tully circled in vain through drifting smoke in a commandeered jeep, avoiding bomb craters, rubble, and careering, screaming ambulances. “Captain Tully, sir, I think I see them trucks,” said Pierce. He pointed to a grassy area on the other side of a small bridge crowded with cars, ambulances, and foot traffic. “See? Over there by the water tower.”
“The big gray ones?”
“Yes, sir. I think that’s them, sir.”
Tully pulled the jeep out of the road and shouldered his way over the bridge. He found Byron Henry sitting on top of heaped torpedoes in a truck, drinking a Coca-Cola. Byron was almost unrecognizable, for his hands, face, and beard were sooty. The three trucks were full of torpedoes, and two cherry-picker crane trucks he
ld more. A small Army truck was piled high with stencilled crates and boxes. The Filipino drivers sat on the grass, eating sandwiches and cracking jokes in Tagalog. The Devilfish working party lay sprawled in exhausted attitudes, all except Hansen, who sat smoking a pipe with his back to a huge tire of the truck on which Byron perched.
“Hello there, Byron,” Tully called.
Byron turned around and tried to jump up, but it was hard to do on the heap of long cylinders. “Oh, good afternoon, sir.”
“How many did you get?”
“Twenty-six, sir. Then we had to leave. The fire was closing in.”
“I see you scooped up a truckload of spare parts, too.”
“That was Hansen’s idea, sir.”
“Who’s Hansen?”
Byron indicated the torpedoman, who had leaped to his feet on recognizing Captain Tully.
“What’s your rating?”
“Torpedoman first class, sir.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. You’re a chief torpedoman.”
Hansen’s beard opened in an ecstatic smile, and his eyes gleamed at Ensign Henry. Tully looked around at the trove of rescued torpedoes. “You got exploders?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, good. Suppose you drive this haul around to Mariveles.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“I’ll want a report on this, Byron, with the names and ratings of your working party and of these drivers.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any chance of getting more fish out of there?”
“Depends on what the fire leaves, sir. The shop hadn’t caught when we left, but now—I don’t know.”
“All right. I’ll see about that. You get going.”
Next morning Byron presented himself to Captain Tully. The squadron commander was working at a desk in a Quonset hut on the beach at Mariveles Harbor, a deep cove in the mountainous Bataan peninsula. Behind Tully’s tanned hairless pate a large blue and yellow chart of Manila Bay covered most of the plasterboard wall. Byron handed him a two-page report. Tully glanced through it and said, “Pretty skimpy document.”
