Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (13 page)

Pearl Harbor also gave Shepard a chance to firm up his plans for a future that had little to do with ships at sea.

When Shepard had climbed aboard the
Cogswell
back at Long Beach, a new commanding officer was running the show. The
Cogswell
’s beloved first skipper, Commander Harold “Dutch” Deuterman, had been replaced by a man who lasted just a few weeks before breaking his leg, which then opened the door for the gruff and reviled Lieutenant Commander Reuben Perley to take command of the ship.

Tall and slim, Perley was an authoritative and foul-mouthed skipper who seemed to take joy in yelling salty-tongued put-downs into his sailors’ faces. One day Shepard was cracking up at another young officer’s perfect impression of their scrappy skipper when Perley appeared out of nowhere and strode silently up behind the unwitting performer. Shepard had no time to warn his friend. Perley’s mustachioed lips curled into a sneer and he barked into the man’s ear before sending him to his cabin for a few days of red-faced punishment. More than once Perley sent Shepard himself to his r
oom as punishment for one of his practical jokes, or for ignoring his duty station to watch planes take off from a nearby aircraft carrier.

Whenever an aircraft carrier cruised nearby or a cluster of planes flew overhead, Shepard seemed to be running for the
Cogswell
’s railing, straining for a better view. Shepard did little to conceal his distaste for the sailor’s life. He took his new job seriously and respected the enlisted men in his charge. But at the end of the day he believed there was only one Navy ship worth his while: the aircraft carrier.

“That was very obvious, and he didn’t hide it,” said John Huber III, who stood many nightly watches by Shepard’s side, during which Shepard talked mostly about planes. “He did his job well, but he didn’t want to be there. He was basically a free spirit. He wanted to be in the air.”

But junior officers such as Shepard were required to serve at least a year at sea before the Navy would consider teaching them to fly its planes. Shepard was more than halfway there, and Huber and other shipmates recalled how obsessively he counted down the days to the end of his first year.

At Pearl Harbor Shepard submitted his request for flight school. He passed the required physical, then waited, checking off each twenty-four-hour step toward his first naval anniversary. “One of these days . . . ,” Shepard told a shipmate one night while they both stood watch. “One of these days—if I don’t get killed— I’m going to learn to fly.”

“Shepard always had his eyes on the planes,” shipmate Andrew Atwell recalled. “He was on the wrong ship. His mind was on the carrier.”

Somewhere in the Pacific, in mid-April, the Cogswell received bad news, then good. First, President Roosevelt—the man who had dragged the country out of the Great Depression and then led it into and through the war—had died. Four weeks later, while still en route to the tropical atoll of Ulithi, the
Cogswell
received word that Germany had surrendered. The fighting in Europe was over. But up ahead in the western Pacific, war raged on, more ghastly than ever.

The Japanese, by April and May of 1945, were becoming almost desperately aggressive. In the fight to retain the volcanic island of Iwo Jima, they had adopted a no-survivors strategy: fight until you die. The same strategy applied to the kamikaze pilots who, in the samurai tradition, wrapped hachimaki headbands around their heads, then aimed themselves at U.S. ships. A few of Shepard’s old academy classmates were among the victims; their body bags were draped with American flags, then slid overboard for a somber burial at sea.

“Sorry to hear about McBride and Day,” Shepard said in a letter to Bob Williams. “We have lost a lot of classmates.”

He would soon lose many more.

In late May Shepard and the enlisted men he now commanded at his battle station sighted the bombed-out shores of Okinawa, an island 340 miles south of Japan and a crucial stepping-stone toward the expected all-out assault on Japanese soil. Marines had already swarmed onto the north end of the island, spooked by the surprising lack of Japanese opposition.

To help protect those Marines, the
Cogswell
had received orders for radar picket duty. They could have more accurately called it sitting duck duty. It worked like this: To create a buffer zone of ships around Okinawa, the
Cogswell
and scores of other destroyers (and a few battleships) lined up in rows, like slats on a picket fence. The purpose of the radar picket was to intercept approaching Japanese planes and shoot them down before they could reach Okinawa’s shores.

These picket ships made tempting targets for the waves of enemy fighter planes that Japanese admirals sent screaming down from the mainland up north. A force of more than two thousand Japanese planes, most of them kamikazes, sat ready to attack the picket ships. That assault began in early April, when seven hundred planes swarmed down upon the U.S. fleet in a two-day span, giving the sea lane north of Okinawa its nickname, “Kamikaze Alley.” One Navy report estimated that the average amount of time it took before a picket duty ship was hit by the enemy was eighteen hours. The
Cogswell
’s first picket duty was scheduled for seventy-two hours.

“If we last that long,” one sailor quipped.

Another sailor told his diary: “We have a slim chance of coming out without getting hit . . . I will have to admit, I am a little bit nervous.”

As the
Cogswell
sailed to her position north of Okinawa on June 1, the crew witnessed charred and mangled warnings of the dangers ahead—damaged destroyers, ravaged by kamikazes and unable to propel themselves, being towed to the nearest safe port. “The smell of burned flesh and cries of pain were overwhelming,” a sailor on one such destroyer later recalled. “Many of the wounded men were burned severely when the fuel tank exploded and one man was killed from jumping over the side to avoid the flames and being run over by the ship.”

More than thirteen hundred U.S. ships were ordered to support the Marines’ invasion of Okinawa, dubbed Operation Iceberg, which had begun April 1, nearly two months before Shepard and the
Cogswell
arrived. The Okinawa invasion— fought on land, at sea, and in the air—would last nearly three months, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of World War II and involving one of the greatest wartime armadas in U.S. history. Although thousands of Marines would die during bitter fighting against a hundred thousand Japanese soldiers entrenched and hidden in caves on Okinawa, radar pick
et duty was considered one of the most dangerous and terrifying jobs of the campaign.

In addition to facing the menacing kamikazes, picket ships had to confront rockets, bombs, and—hanging beneath some Japanese planes—stocky little glider bombs called
baka,
which were guided toward U.S. ships by a suicide pilot crammed inside.

The
Cogswell
stationed itself in Kamikaze Alley, and it took less than twenty-four hours for the first kamikaze planes to appear from the clouds. One night, with bombs and planes exploding on either side of the
Cogswell,
many of the crew members shook hands, believing they’d not survive until morning.

The
Cogswell
’s prime defenses against such attacks (since her five-inch guns were often too big for close combat) were the 20 mm and 40 mm antiaircraft guns that Shepard and his men operated. When the
Cogswell
nailed its first kamikaze, Shepard’s
supervising officer—gunnery officer Charles Evans Hughes III, the grandson of the famous Supreme Court chief justice—began screaming, “We got ’em, we got ’em, we got ’em.” Surly Captain Perley yelled back, “The war’s not over yet!”

Shepard spent his days (and most nights) anxiously scanning the horizon for approaching kamikazes. On the rare nights when he was allowed to sleep, he had to fight back images of Japanese soldiers who sometimes swam from the nearest shore or from a small boat, pushing mines into U.S. ships’ paths or climbing aboard to slit the first throat they could find. One night it was the throat of an officer on a ship directly behind
Cogswell.
After that, Shepard began taking turns on night watch, a recently issued pistol clipped to his belt, firing his handgun or his 20 mm guns at anyth
ing potentially human bobbing in the water.

Shepard had received only a few days of practice firing his guns during training exercises back at Pearl Harbor. But now, like most World War II warriors, he quickly learned the harsh lesson of kill or be killed. When a kamikaze drew near, he’d stand behind his guns, screaming at his men—some older than himself— to fire and keep firing and bring the bastards down. The noise of his guns, and the occasional report from the nearby five-inchers, was painful and physical. It racked the body and punished the eardrums; very few men at the time wore earplugs.

One morning early in June, shortly after midnight, the
Cogswell
and a few other nearby destroyers helped blast apart twenty-eight Japanese planes that had swarmed around them “like a flock of blackbirds,” as one Navy officer described it. One Japanese plane dove straight down onto the nearby USS
Caperton
but missed the deck by just a few feet. Another, flying just forty feet above the water, sped directly between the
Caperton
and the
Cogswell—
which prevented both ships from shooting, for fear of hitting each other—then inexplicably fell harmlessly into the drink. Yet another plane,
already damaged by gunfire, came straight at the
Cogswell,
which shot off its wi
ngs before it could reach the ship. Shrapnel from the exploding planes washed over the
Cogswell
’s decks. Such nights sparkled with the glitter of bullets and rockets flying, the air roaring with the bursts of exploding planes, the
boof-boof
and
rat-a-tat-tat
of guns, the metallic pinging of fragments bouncing off hulls.

“The kamikazes raised hell last night,” one Cogswel
l sailor said.

Shepard chomped at the bit to be up in the air, to be inside one of the mean-looking American F4Us that were gaining a reputation as effective kamikaze-killing machines. Each day brought him closer to flying—if only, he sometimes hoped, the war would last long enough for him to get his Navy pilot’s wings.

In the year since graduation he had matured in countless, unexpected ways. He may not have been a pilot or a hero, but he was also no longer just another man in uniform. Shepard was now, at twenty-one years old, a fighter, an officer, a killer—an American warrior. And his diligent efforts, along with the others blasting
Cogswell
’s guns at the enemy, prevented his destroyer from joining ships such as the USS
Porter
and the USS
Pringle
on the ocean floor.

On June 7 the USS
Porter
had relieved the USS
Caperton
as the
Cogswell
’s partner on picket duty. Just two hours later a kamikaze plane broke through U.S. air defenses and dive-bombed straight at the
Cogswell.
Shepard and the other gunners had the plane in their sights, ready to start firing, when it twitched left, then right, and twirled drunkenly down upon the
Porter.
The Japanese plane ticked the
Porter
’s radar tower and splashed into the water beside the ship.

The kamikaze’s bombs exploded, which ignited the plane’s own fuel tanks, punching a fist of flame into the
Porter
’s hull. The
Porter
gulped up the East China Sea and began to sink, fast. The
Cogswell
’s crew watched as the
Porter
swallowed water, leaned to one side, then went away. All aboard
Porter
were rescued by the
Cogswell
and other nearby ships—one sailor sc
rambled aboard the
Cogswell
crying like a baby because he’d had to leave $7,000 in poker winnings down below in his locker—but the sailors on the
Pringle
weren’t so lucky. A kamikaze strike blew a hole in her side and knocked out the power. The men who jumped into the shark-infested waters were the lucky ones. Many others were trapped in the darkness below deck when, just five minutes after the attack, the ship’s bow rose to the sky and the vessel slid backward beneath the sea. “I heard screams as she slipped under the water and disappeared,” one of
Pringle
’s survivors said.