Sentinels of Fire (30 page)

I tried to collect my thoughts as the bridge team secured from GQ. I knew that something was wrong with my logic.
It's called fatigue, stupid.
Something about the fleet returning from their northern strike run. Of course they'd send replacement destroyers, establish a new picket line, maybe send up some AA light cruisers, dedicate a big-deck to the picket line CAP support mission. All of those things. Or would it be none of those things?

“Captain, you need coffee, sir?”

I glanced at the frightened-looking seaman apprentice standing at the arm of my chair with a mug of what looked like asphalt. He was the same one who'd been swabbing the deck a few minutes ago. His hands, which smelled faintly of disinfectant, were just barely trembling.

“Looks like your hands are shaking.”

“Just a little bit, sir.”

“Mine are, too,” I said. “But we can't let anyone see, can we.”

“No, sir. Can't do that.”

“Two sugars, son?”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“Good. Everything's gonna be okay, then.”

 

FOURTEEN

With coffee in hand and all my bulky battle gear still wrapped around me, I took a turn about deck. There seemed to be more ambient light now, which meant whatever cloud cover we'd had was beginning to lift. I had no trouble finding my way down ladders and through all the guns massed amidships. A lot of the gun crews were asleep at their stations, with one man keeping awake and manning the sound-powered phones. I could hear the talkers whispering as I left one gun mount and walked aft toward the next one. Heads up.

I was amazed to see that most of the brass had already been policed and stowed in the shell case lockers. The forties had fresh clips poised above their loading slides, and the twenties were similarly loaded up and ready to go. The after quad-forty platform gun crews were still working at picking up all the shell casings. I could smell the burned grease fumes coming off the gun barrels, which remained too hot to touch. The gun captains acknowledged my presence, but there was no impetus for small talk. Everyone had seen what happened to
Westfall,
and at least the senior people knew that there was no defense against a line attack like that. I was walking around mostly to show my face, and also to distract myself from my own feelings of nauseous fear at watching
Westfall
break in two and sink like a hot rock.

I went down the port quarter ladder to the main deck and threaded my way through the depth-charge K-guns and out onto the fantail. Both doors on mount fifty-three were open, and their crew was also picking up brass powder cans. My chief master at arms, Chief Lamont, was back there, pretending to supervise but mostly staring out over the black sea at where we'd last seen
Westfall.
I joined him by the after depth-charge racks. We nodded at each other but did not speak. There wasn't anything to say, really. Mount fifty-three's twin barrels were burned black halfway to the mount's face. I could feel the tremble of
Malloy
's twin screws beneath my feet and hear the whine of the steering engine responding to small helm commands from the bridge.

“Are we It now?” Chief asked, finally.

“We're It,” I replied. “Fleet's coming back tomorrow, so I expect some reinforcements.”

“When tomorrow?” he asked.

“Don't know, Chief. Halsey hasn't been confiding in me lately. We might be breaking up.”

The chief grunted. “Those gators do any good work for Jesus back there?” he asked.

“They say they've recovered between sixty and seventy people; we'll get an accounting when they rejoin.”

“Out of what, three hundred thirty people? Them's tough odds, Skipper.”

“I've spoken to the gun boss,” I said. “We need everybody to start thinking how we're gonna deal with an attack like that. Everybody with an idea, however crazy, needs to speak up, enlisted, chiefs, officers. Everybody.”

He nodded. “Aye, aye, sir,” he said. We stood there for another few minutes staring out at nothing but our minimal wake. Then I pitched the remains of my cold coffee into the wake and headed back forward, trying to ignore the leaden ball in my stomach.

*   *   *

We got word that Halsey and the carrier fleet were in fact on the way back to Okinawa the next morning, having savaged as many airfield and outlying airstrips as they could find within five hundred miles of Okinawa. They'd used mostly fighter sweeps, coming low and fast off the sea and strafing everything that looked like a plane or even a revetment. They'd be back within fighter range of Okinawa at around 2200 tonight. The air-raid coordinator was predicting we would have CAP overhead at about the same time.

I'd seen Lieutenant Commander Canning, the commodore's operations officer, going into the unit commander's cabin after dawn GQ. I'd followed him in and sat down on the bunk couch.

“I'm gonna miss him,” I said.

“We all will, Captain,” he said, sitting down at the other end of the couch. I assumed he'd come in to gather up personal effects. “I really wanted to tell him not to come up here when he said he needed to do that. But…”

“Kinda hard to tell a commodore not to sail toward the sound of the guns, isn't it.”

He nodded.

“Tell me about his family,” I said. “Georgia, right?”

“Married, two grown children, both girls. Women, I guess. One's in business, of all things—finance, I think. The other is disabled in some fashion. He never said what. His wife came from a Southern family and lives on the family plantation. He called it a farm, but I got the impression she considers it a traditional plantation. Anyway, they apparently made an arrangement when they got married: She would live there, on a more or less permanent basis, and he would come home when he could. He gave me the impression that she's really old-fashioned. Kinda like the wives during the Civil War, who took over management of the plantations while ‘the colonel' was off to war. I think he thought it was quaint, but he said homecomings were wonderful.”

He put his head in his hands, closed his eyes, and sighed. He looked old and tired, like too many of the officers in this bloody campaign. I realized he probably
was
older than I was, maybe two classes ahead of me at the Boat School, and yet he was a staff officer and I was in command. I wondered how he felt about having to call me Captain.

“The admiral will do the letter, won't he?” I asked.

He nodded again. “Or his chief yeoman,” he said. “They weren't friends, as best I could tell. Admiral Chase can be a prick sometimes.” He opened his eyes after he'd said that, then looked over at me to see if I thought he'd been disrespectful.

“I've never met Admiral Chase,” I said, “but he's pretty quick with a blast, from what I've seen.”

“You have no idea,” he said with a rueful smile. “Jimmy Enright said we'd do the burial at oh nine hundred?”

I confirmed that, the kamikazes willing, of course.

“Can you do me a favor, then?” he asked. “Can you, um, retrieve his academy ring? I'd like to include that with his personal effects, if possible.”

I nodded. “I'll take care of it,” I said.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. “It's the most personal memento I can think of to send home. The rest of it—” He gestured at the commodore's two bags, not yet fully unpacked. “It's just uniforms, shoes, that kind of stuff.”

“I'll take care of it personally,” I said, getting up. “Right now, in fact.”

*   *   *

I called the doc and told him what I needed to do. He said he'd be ready in fifteen minutes. When I got down to sick bay, he had the commodore's body partially exposed on his stainless steel examining table. In repose, the commodore's face looked relaxed, almost if he were about to smile. I tried not to look at the back of his head. The fast-patching team had come to the bridge to plug all the new twenty-millimeter holes. On the starboard side there were some deep dents, too. Flattened in one of those dents was a bloody twenty-millimeter projectile. Whether or not this was the one that killed the commodore we'd never know, but it seemed possible. Zeros carried a twenty-millimeter cannon in their nose, but the disturbing thing was that this shell had U.S. markings on the base of the projectile. Commodore Van Arnhem had probably been killed by one of our own shells, most likely fired by one of the gator gunships in that last melee. The chief shipfitter had brought it to me and shown me the markings. I remembered saying something brilliant like “Oh, shit.” He'd nodded and left it with me. I considered keeping it for about ten seconds, then pitched it over the side.

I looked at my watch. Just after dawn GQ we were going to bury the commodore and the young signalman at sea. I planned to leave the ship at GQ before the ceremony on the fantail. That way we'd have all the guns ready in case the Japs decided to crash the proceedings.

“I need his left hand,” I told Doc. He lifted the arm out from the rubber bag and exposed the hand. I removed the commodore's Naval Academy ring and his wedding ring and put them down on the steel table. Doc then repositioned the arm into the bag.

“Now I need some scissors.”

“Sterile?”

I just looked at him and shook my head. He went to his desk and produced some regular scissors. I cut off a hank of the commodore's gray hair and then asked for something to put it in. Doc unpacked a sterile urine sample bottle and handed it over. I put the hair in that.

Doc gave me a what-are-we-doing look.

“The commodore is—was—married to a Southern lady,” I said. “Lives in Georgia on the family farm. If I get out of this war alive, I mean to make sure she gets his rings and a lock of his hair.”

“I understand the rings, Skipper,” Doc said, “but hair?”

“It's a Southern tradition, Doc. During the Civil War, husbands bound for battle would leave a locket with some of their hair in it as a keepsake for the ladies on the home front.”

“If you say so, Cap'n,” he said.

“I say so, Doc.”

“Yes, sir. I'll get him ready for committal, then?”

“Yes, please.”

As I went forward to put the items in my desk safe, it occurred to me that no one was doing anything like that for the signalman seaman who also died. I made a mental note to find Jimmy Enright in the next couple of days and show him how to do the condolence letter for the signalman.

I made two decisions then: I would not tell the family that their husband and father had probably been killed by so-called friendly fire, and I would take these things to his widow personally. I owed him that much. I also needed to find a more suitable container for the lock of hair than a urine sample bottle, I thought. I almost smiled. Van Arnhem would have laughed.

I passed through the messdecks, where the cooks were already working on lunch. Mooky Johns, the chief cook and maker of fine fat-pills, saw me and waved, his black face already covered in perspiration from hot ovens and warming griddles. I waved back and kept going forward, toward the wardroom and my cabin. The items in my pocket seemed to weigh more than they should.

The interment ceremony was brief, as it had to be, given our station. Thirty minutes before it began, the doc had come to escort me back to the fantail. Per Captain Tallmadge's tradition, the signalman chief was waiting, and he told me about the young man now asleep in the rubber bag. I listened carefully, hoping I'd remember all this, his hometown, his achievements in the division, and the fact that he played a mean harmonica. I thanked him and went back to my cabin to change. The signalman went first, then the commodore. Two flags were folded after the weighted bags had been sent overboard. Jimmy Enright had come up with a nice touch: When the commodore's remains slipped down the slanted planks, Jimmy got on the
1
MC, rang four bells, and announced, “DesRon Five Oh, departing.” A seaman and a commodore, plummeting together into the darkness of the deep ocean. War was indeed a great leveller. We stood there for another minute or so to let each man on board pay his respects and contemplate his own mortality.

After we secured from the burial, I called a meeting of the department heads in the wardroom to brainstorm a tactic that might give us a chance against the line attack that killed
Westfall.
Marty had brought his fire-control chief and both gunner's mate chiefs, Chief Lamont and Chief Christie, along. Lieutenant Commander Canning also sat in.

I sat at the head of the wardroom table and listened to a parade of ideas, some reasonable, some pretty silly, but all of them earnestly trying to come up with something that might keep us alive. After thirty minutes I finally put up my hand and silenced the table.

“It seems to me,” I began, “that the five-inch are good for knocking an approaching suicider down from a max of nine miles into about three miles. They're the only guns we have that can place a VT-frag shell right in front of an approaching Jap plane and, hopefully, kill him.”

I paused and sipped some coffee. “But that's a band of six miles. If the Japs are coming in at 300 knots, that means the five-inch have a minute and a half, at max, to do their best work. After that, from three miles in, or six thousand yards, the five-inch are running out of range. Their shells leave the barrel unarmed to protect the ship. They then have to arm, turn on their transmitters, and start looking for a return signal. At three hundred knots, the target covers five miles a minute, which is four hundred forty feet a second. What I'm saying is that the five-inch are good for about two minutes of effective work, all in. After that, the problem moves to the forties. A minute later, it's the forties and the twenties. Agreed?”

Nods all around.

“Okay, let's count barrels. If the Japs come from dead ahead, we have two five-inch barrels and, as a result of battle damage, four forty-millimeter barrels and four twenty-millimeter barrels. Right?”