by Herman Wouk
He startled all the officers from the exec down with his hard manner and precise criticisms, for they had been taking him as a quiet sort, out of touch after all his years on the beach. The conferences went on for fourteen straight hours. Alemon kept brewing and serving fresh coffee, pot after pot, and made hamburgers for dinner, which Grigg and the captain ate as they conferred. When Grigg, having taken hundreds of notes in his “urgent” notebook and drunk a dozen cups of coffee to stay alert, looked ready to faint, Pug quit. “Prepare a dispatch to ComCruPac,” he said, “requesting a tug with target upon our return to base.”
“We can’t break radio silence, sir,” said Grigg nervously. “Not for that.”
“I know. Send a scout plane with it.”
Halsey’s task force, a long column of gray warships streaming battle flags, entered Pearl Harbor to a wild welcome: sirens, whistles, bells, cheers, and rainbows of flags decking every ship in port. For journalists and radio commentators the raid had been a mighty shot in the arm. They were hailing Admiral Halsey’s gigantic attack on the Marshalls and Gilberts as the resurgence of American power in the Pacific, the turn of the tide, the proof of the resilience of free governments, and so on and so forth. Coded intercepts of battle reports had told Victor Henry a different story. Air attacks at Kwajalein had destroyed some planes and probably sunk a few small ships. The coordinated air strikes by the Yorktown in the Gilberts had produced small results. Surface bombardments had nowhere been effective.
The captain summoned his officers to the wardroom as soon as the Northampton moored. They had all been out on deck enjoying the tumultuous victory greeting, and they looked fresh and happy. “Let’s understand one thing,” he said. “The purpose of all the hoopla out there is to boost civilian morale. Hirohito isn’t losing any sleep over what this raid did. As for what the Northampton did, the less said the better. We sortie at dawn for gunnery runs.”
He had some trouble obtaining the target vessel. ComCruPac summoned him by messenger mail to explain his failure to schedule liberty for his crew after their arduous combat cruise. He went ashore and brusquely confronted the chief of staff, an old classmate. The Northampton had to be jolted into war, he said. Wives, girl friends, bars, beds, would all be there when the cruiser returned from forty-eight hours of hard drills. He got a promise of a target.
Returning aboard, he found on his desk a pile of personal mail: two letters from Rhoda, a thick one from Madeline, one from his father, who at eighty-one seldom wrote, one from his brother, a soft-drink dealer in Seattle, also one from Senator Lacouture, which he tore open as he settled in the armchair of his inner cabin. The news that Natalie was interned with a group of journalists in Siena upset him, though the attached State Department letter was reassuring about her prospects of getting home. It was better than not knowing where she was; at least, he hoped Byron would take the news that way. Rhoda’s letter written at Christmas was long, conciliatory, submissive —“When you get back, I’ll be right here in Foxhall Road, waiting like a good Navy wife in my best bib and tucker, with a full martini jug…. I have never respected and loved you more…” The other, a short note, merely gossiped, as though nothing had ever gone wrong, about a big snowfall on New Year’s Eve, and the dinner at the Army and Navy Club.
The thickness of Madeline’s letter proved deceptive. It was a single typed yellow sheet, triple-spaced, with a folded page from a theatrical trade paper. Madeline bubbled that she hated publicity and couldn’t imagine how this silly story had gotten into print, but here it was.
…Love to Byron and Warren, if you see them. Tell them I’ll write them both long letters very soon. To you, too. This one doesn’t count. Hugh is screaming at me to start the script conference. Just wanted you to know that your wandering girl is fine and happy, and not exactly unknown anymore.
Love,
Madeline
P.S. — Look, about that last dopey letter of mine, just pretend you never got it. Mrs. Cleveland is a very sick woman. It’s a good thing she didn’t go ahead with all those threats, especially about naming me. I guess she’s not that crazy. I could have sued her to kingdom come.
M.
In the Variety page, a marked paragraph was all about Madeline Henry, Hugh Cleveland’s assistant. “Maddy” came from a great Navy family. Her father commanded an aircraft carrier, one brother led a squadron of fighter planes, and the other was skipper of a submarine. A publicity agent had used the Henry background, obviously, to puff Cleveland; he was mentioned four times. Aside from the inaccuracies and the wisenheimer slang, the whole thing revolted Pug. His pretty, clever daughter, once his darling, had sunk into a world of crass fools, and was turning into one herself. He could do nothing about it; best to close his mind to that misfortune.
On a tan envelope addressed with green ink in an unfamiliar hand, the postmark was Washington, the posting date blurred. The single sheet was undated and unsigned.
Dear Pug,
This is from a true and well-meaning friend, who has known you and Rhoda for years. I realize what war can do to marriage, but I can’t stand to see it happening to a “model couple” such as you two dear people have always been.
Write Rhoda and ask her about that very tall man (his name begins with K) that she plays tennis with at the St. Albans court. That isn’t all she “plays.” She has been seen with him in the wrong places and at the wrong times — if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Everybody in Washington who knows you two is talking about it. Rhoda stands in awe of you, as we all do, and a word from you probably can still make her “straighten up and fly right.” Better do it before it’s too late. That’s a “word to the wise” from a well-wisher.
The letter had come by surface mail. It could be months old, dating back to the time before Rhoda’s request for a divorce. Still, it brought back the full pain of the first disclosure, with the bitter new knowledge that his misfortune was on people’s tongues.
While the other crews of Halsey’s task force celebrated victory on the beach, the Northampton went back out to sea. The word was going around the decks that this bastard meant business. After the first mutterings subsided, there was little real dissatisfaction. The crew had tasted the disgrace of bad shooting. They had passed through showers of warm salt water from close misses of enemy salvos. They had seen the Salt Lake City straddled, and they had heard that five men in a twin-forty mount had been hit and blown to bloody smears. They were ready to learn how to fight. From the first collision drill, which started with sirens and alarm gongs while they were still in the channel, the sailors responded to the whip. Catapulting and recovering the float planes, a chronic sore of the Hickman days and the prime disgrace at Wotje, smoothed down in a day to a controlled chore. The time for setting condition Zed was halved. Surprise fire drills, air attack drills, abandon ship drills, broke out at all hours. It was hell, but by 2300, when Pug’s drastic drill schedule at last ended, the crew was exhilarated as well as exhausted.
Not Pug. The anonymous letter had sapped him. He sat in his cabin well past midnight, leafing through three weeks’ accumulation of news magazines. They showed a country still grinning at itself from giggly advertisements, still failing in any way — war production, war training, combat operations — to show awareness that defeat was not only possible, but coming on. The whole country was like the Northampton at Wotje. Meantime, the U-boats had wolfishly lunged against American shipping. The figures passed all belief; over a million tons sunk in one month! Rommel was sweeping across North Africa, smashing up the British armies. With the Americans falling back on Bataan, and the British retreating to Fortress Singapore, Pug could see little hope anywhere, except in the Russian counterattacks. These, too, seemed mere holding actions, while the tough gigantic Wehrmacht regrouped for the summer knockout.
In his War Plans service, Victor Henry had come to know well the inventory of armed force and natural resources of the planet. The changing picture seemed to him frightening. Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, wh
ich looked sure to fall, were immense prizes, greater in area and in warmaking potential than Japan itself. The Japanese advance into Burma threatened the United States, because it shook the British hold on the murmuring hundreds of millions of Indians. The loss of India could close the Persian Gulf, the best Lend-Lease route to the Soviet Union, and the great fountain of petroleum, the propellant of this whole world disaster. All the land masses, all the oceans, were strategically interlocked in this war. Everywhere except on the Russian front the situation was growing catastrophic; and nothing was worse in the whole flaming panorama than the continuing softness, complacency, and ignorance of the American people.
The secret mail he had read during the day reinforced his gloom. The landing craft program was stalled. Production was far behind the schedule he had himself drawn up in the War Plans section. Like a tidal wave a thousand miles off, a crisis was rolling toward President Roosevelt: a shortage that would one day halt major landing operations, or lead to shoestring assaults and bloody defeats. Pug felt he could avert that. He knew the problem to its core. He had grappled with the chief people in design and manufacture. He knew how to get raw material priorities. The Navy decision makers listened to him. Even Ernest King did, on the matter of landing craft. Many four-stripers could command a heavy cruiser. Nobody else had his grip on this key aspect of the war.
The fact he was coming to face was that he had plunged for forgetfulness into a past which he had outgrown. Big ship command was a challenge and an honor, but it was less than the best he could do in the war. Wotje had in any case deepened his doubts about heavy cruisers. The submarine panic had reflected the fear of the Salt Lake City skipper — fear he had himself felt — of the vulnerability of these beautiful, heavily armed, thin-skinned monsters. All operations plans now starred the carriers. The battleships were finished; and what was the Northampton but a kind of flimsy battleship that one torpedo or bomb could finish off? Wotje had rubbed his nose, too, in the mistake of his career, his choice of big guns over naval air. His son Warren, in a gnatlike dive-bomber, with one enlisted gunner, had perhaps caused more damage at Kwajalein than he had at Wotje, with his ten-thousand-ton cruiser and its crew of twelve hundred officers and men.
Worry about Warren, too, plagued him. Not till his visit to ComCruPac, when he had telephoned Warren’s home and heard his son’s cheery casual “Hello!” had his heart leaped with relief. Warren crashing, Warren burning, were anxious pictures that rose in his bad nights, and this was one of them. At two in the morning he went and woke the ship’s doctor, a paunchy old regular, and asked him for a sleeping pill. The doctor sleepily proposed a good dose of medicinal brandy: it would promote the skipper’s slumber better than a pill, he said, and might be a hell of a lot more fun. Victor Henry, standing in the doctor’s cabin in an old bathrobe, barked, “Never suggest that again, Doc. Not to me. Not to any other officer or man on this ship. Not for sleeplessness.”
The doctor stammered. “Well, ah, Captain, sometimes in the case of excessive nerve fatigue et cetera — you know, Captain Hickman, he —”
“Insomnia and nerves at sea in wartime are not emergencies. They’re common nuisances. You prescribe brandy for them, and I’ll end up with a wardroom of closet drunks. If they can’t have the stuff, I can’t. Understood?”
“Ah — understood, Captain.”
Next day the concentration was on shooting. ComCruPac sent out a minesweeper with a sled and a plane towing a red sleeve-target. Everything about the cruiser’s gunnery — rate of fire, ammunition handling, communications, fire control, score of hits — improved. So did Pug’s mood. Recruits or draftees, these sailors were quick learners. When the Northampton moored in Pearl Harbor at sunset, the exec announced that, except for a skeleton watch, there would be liberty for all hands. Usually only half the crew went ashore at once. A cheer went up that sealed the status of Captain Henry; he was no longer the new skipper, he was the Old Man.
The flag lieutenant brought Pug a handwritten note:
Captain— Will you be dining ashore with your family? Otherwise, please join me. Armed Forces will rebroadcast your friend Tudsbury from Singapore at eight.
R. A. Spruance
Since the admiral had walked off the bridge at Wotje, Victor Henry had not once seen him. Through several days of fine weather, he had failed to appear topside. Pug showered and was dressing for dinner when the mail orderly came in. There was only one personal letter, another tan envelope addressed in green, this time sent airmail, its postmark clear, January 25; one month after Rhoda’s contrite Christmas letter.
Dear Pug,
You may hate me, “sight unseen,” because the truth often hurts. But the whole thing is now getting too blatant for words, and unless you do something “p.d.q.” you can kiss your marriage good-bye. They go to the theatre together now, and to restaurants and I don’t know “what all.” Everybody who has ever known you two is talking about it, and I mean talking. Write to any “old pal” who is stationed in Washington. Tell him you’re getting letters from this “awful person” (me) and ask him on his honor what he knows about Rhoda. “Nuff sed!”
With this black acid eating at his heart, Pug Henry went to dine with the admiral.
He found Spruance neat and erect as ever, but morose and dull of eye. Silence stretched through the meal, but it did not embarrass either of them, for they had come to know each other. Addiction to exercise was their bond. Spruance would stride the main deck for an hour or mere in fair weather, and in port he would walk daily five or ten miles. Pug went along when he could, and their walks passed for the most part in such long silences. When Spruance now and then asked him to his quarters for a meal, they sometimes talked about their sons in submarines, and about themselves. The admiral, like Pug, harbored rueful second thoughts about having stayed in surface ships. Halsey’s foresight in learning to fly at fifty Spruance considered masterful. He was not happy with a cruiser division, and foresaw a war career pass in obscure drudgery. Pug thought that the Wotje fiasco must be weighing on him as a blight on that career.
Over a dessert of canned peaches, Spruance surprised Pug by telling him to prepare for an award ceremony at morning quarters. He, Spruance, would receive the Navy Commendation Medal from Nimitz’s own hands for his distinguished leadership in the Wotje bombardment. Bitter humor glimmered in the admiral’s eyes as he said this. “The Navy needs heroes right now. To get decorated, it’s enough to have been shot at. All I did at Wotje was lose control of a small task group. Turn on the radio, it’s time for your friend. My compliments, incidentally, on what you’re doing with the Northampton. It’s needed.”
Tudsbury sounded shaken and grave. Japanese heavy artillery was shelling downtown Singapore across the Johore Strait, the correspondent reported, killing hundreds of civilians each day. The enemy army was in plain sight on the far shore, making large-scale preparations to cross the water barrier. The military authorities now conceded (here Tudsbury’s voice sharpened) that Singapore’s one hope lay in letting the democratic world know exactly how desperate the situation was, since if help were ever to come, it had to come now.
Spruance and Pug Henry exchanged quizzical looks near the end, when Tudsbury said, “My American friends will forgive me if I quote one of the many gallows-humor jokes circulating here. It goes so: ‘Do you know where the American Navy is? Well, it can’t operate because it’s still under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.’
“Still, whether relief comes or not, I still believe that the Europeans and the Asians of Singapore, rallying shoulder to shoulder, can themselves, even at this late hour, turn the tide and destroy the badly worn-down invaders. I will gamble my overstuffed old hide on this belief, but not the person of my daughter, Pamela, a clever and lovely young woman who assists me in my work. So off she goes tomorrow with the other women and children who are being evacuated. She told me a story not two hours ago that I want her to share with you. Here, then, is Pamela.”
With a strong effort of the wil
l, Pug kept his face calm and his attitude relaxed.
“My story is a short one.” The remembered husky sweet voice cut into him with a sensation of joy verging on agony. “For the past two weeks, I have been working at a troop hospital as a volunteer. Today a badly wounded man left his bed, took me aside, and gave me a thing called a Mills bomb. It’s a sort of grenade. ‘Ma’am, you’ve been very nice to us. If you think a Jap is about to rape you ma’am, he said, in a charming Aussie accent, his face calm and serious, ‘just pull the pin and you’ll know nothing more.’
“I have only one thing to add. I leave under protest. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” came the other voice, “from Alistair Tudsbury in Singapore.”
“There are interesting parallels, Henry,” said Spruance, reaching over and snapping off the radio, “between the battle problems in Malaya and Luzon. White garrisons plus mixed native troops defend water-girt land masses with Asian populations. An Asian invader advances on a north-south axis. The defenders execute a fighting fall-back toward a heavily armed island citadel in the extreme south. We seem to be doing a bit better with the problem than the British. After the war, it’ll be instructive to compare the campaigns in detail.”