Of Men and War
Page 9
We had a few drinks, now and again, on a New Zealand corvette that worked out of Tulagi. Its skipper was a man named Brittson who weighed two hundred and eighty-five pounds and had a laugh in every pound. He used to play the accordion, and in his wardroom he had a gadget he called the American Horse-Dung Grinder, and he would turn the handle whenever our stories got too tall.
One night Les Gamble, who was easily our highest scorer—two destroyers and several other hits—was on patrol. Communications and our dispositions were all fouled up that night. Les fired a couple of fish at what he thought was a Jap. Fortunately he missed. Brittson came up on the radio, “Are you little nitwits firing at me?”
Les had to admit weakly that he had been.
Brittson said in a lordly tone, “The bar of His Majesty’s ship Censored will be closed to Americans for the duration.”
Our particular “duration” wasn’t to be much longer, thank goodness. One morning in the middle of February a mail boat came in, and someone handed a slip of paper to Nik, who happened to be on the deck. “This is it, this is it!” he screamed. He showed it to Robbie, who jumped up and down and shouted.
“It” was supposed to be a confidential document, but within sixty seconds the whole island had the news. “It’s come! It’s come!” Men hugged each other and cried.
The order instructed the officers and operative personnel of our squadron to proceed to another base. We were relieved at last, after four long months.
We left our boats behind. We care now but we didn’t then. We were bitter then, and we thought PT’s weren’t good for much except to carry generals out of places. All in all, we had encountered some two hundred and fifty targets. We had only been able to claim one cruiser (Bobby and Jack Searles), six destroyers (Brent Green, Stilly Taylor, Jack Searles, Nik Nikoloric, and two for Les Gamble), one positive patrol ship (Jack Searles), and one probable (Tom Kendall and Nik Nikoloric). We had twenty-two hits altogether, and we think Les Gamble sank two or three other ships, and Robbie, two. But we thought that wasn’t a very devastating average. We knew we hadn’t prevented the Japs from fulfilling a single mission.
Later, when we cooled off, we knew that we had been useful as a harassing force, and that we had not been intended to sink the whole Jap Navy.
But bitter as we were when we left, we were at least friends. For the boat captains, at any rate, that was worth all the horrible things. We boat captains mostly had gone to Ivy League colleges; we had led rather sheltered lives. To discover what the men in our boats were like was the best thing that could have happened to us. We valued their loyalty and friendship. Stilly said that the thing that pleased him most out there was not sinking a destroyer, not getting his Silver Star. It was having one of his men come up one day and say, “Skipper, don’t mind if I say this, but I hope to——we’ll have a chance to go out on a binge together some day.”
They have.
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{1} The wording and signature of this message are as Kennedy gave them to me in Boston in 1944. The message was in fact slightly, though not substantially, different; and many years later, after Kennedy had become President, the identity of the actual signer was uncovered—A. Reginald Evans. Wherever the name Wincote appears in the rest of this story, the reader will understand that that of Lieutenant Evans should be substituted.