The Hooligans

by P. T. Deutermann

  On his third day, he picked out one boat, the 747, and declared that it would be his command boat. He ordered all four torpedo tubes removed to compensate for the weight of the stuff he was going to add, such as a second backup radar, taken from the boat that had been deemed beyond repair. He also installed extra radios, a couple of destroyer-size signal searchlights, two additional twin fifty-mounts, one on each side, and then he ripped out the crew’s berthing and installed a plotting room. We began to think he was just homesick for his destroyer. On the other hand, the skippers caught on fast: if Commander Cogswell was out there with them, on a boat that could see and communicate reliably, and which wasn’t directly involved in any given firefight, there shouldn’t be any more Tanga Point debacles.

  We had the luxury of this stand-down because the weather out in the Slot was horrible, with confused seas, heavy rain squalls, and high winds. Any boat going out would have been in a hang-on-and-survive mode, at best. The only good news was that the Japs faced the same situation, so it wasn’t as if they were getting past us. The commander, who’d never been at sea on a PT boat, went out with Deacon into one of the long bays, where the water was relatively calm. He had Deacon put her through her paces, and then he took the helm. He firewalled the throttles and then made some high-speed turns that scared the hell out of Deacon’s crew. At one point they reversed course so suddenly that their own wake caught up with them, sending everyone except Cogswell sprawling. The commander remarked that if it weren’t for the Japs, this would be fun.

  At the end of that first week, Commander Cogswell had taken a fair measure of us, and we of him. He wasn’t a jerk or a screamer. He was polite and professional at all times, even when he uncovered something that embarrassed everybody. He took out his ire on the problem and not the people, even when it was obvious that one or more of the people standing there were the root cause of the problem. The enlisted men began to relax and open up when he asked questions because it was clear he was after solutions and not them. The big breakthrough came when he asked Deacon one evening who was in charge of evening prayers. The squadron officers had ended the practice and hidden the joy juice until they saw how the new CO felt about the practice. There’d even been a betting pool established as to whether or not he’d approve or censure the whole idea. I happened to be there when he asked the question. Deacon, God bless him, equivocated.

  Cogswell just looked at him for a moment, and then said, “Let me rephrase my question, XO. I would like all the skippers who are available to meet me in the command center for a planning meeting. If someone could manage to supply some grapefruit juice, it would be much appreciated. Grapefruit juice, as you probably know, has lots of vitamin C, and I’m concerned about scurvy. If it could be fortified with a smidgen of medicinal alcohol that would be even more appreciated. Assuming such a thing is possible.”

  Then he turned to me. “Is such a thing possible, Doctor?”

  I followed his lead in speaking in that quaint passive voice so beloved by senior officers in the regular Navy. “Such a thing is eminently possible, Captain,” I said. “I will take the matter under advisement and immediate action, if you wish.”

  Deacon looked like he’d swallowed a frog. Then for the first time, we saw Cogswell’s face break into a wide grin. It was a wolfish grin to be sure, but it totally transformed his face. “Well, well, well,” he said, “maybe there is hope for you sonsabitches. And from now on, you may call me ‘commodore.’”

  The next day, Wooly approached me in the aid station and said he wanted to explore this Blind Man legend, up in the cave. I told him I’d gone up a little way into the cave, seen nothing of interest other than that talking stone, and then turned around. “It gets pretty dark,” I said. “And the footing is mostly a crack in the floor.”

  He produced two of those olive-drab, ninety-degree-headed military flashlights, liberated, no doubt, from Cactus, so up we went. I’d forgotten to mention that the “path,” such as it was, ran right along the edge of that long crack through which the water came down. Our boots were making squishing sounds by the time we reached the talking stone. Wooly looked for symbols on the plinth, but found nothing. He ran his hand over the stone, which was smooth as glass. “This must be from another place,” he said. “This is pure volcanic rock.”

  We continued up the long and ever-darker crevice. The cave ceiling was still way up there, but the walls had closed in and now we were forced to walk in the rushing water. My feet were cold for the first time since leaving the States, and the grade was getting steeper. Then we began to hear falling water. Wooly stopped to listen, and then switched his light off. I did the same and we stood there like a couple of statues, letting our eyes adjust to the darkness. Except it wasn’t total darkness. Ahead of us, maybe fifty feet, there was a dim glow, and that’s where the sound was coming from. We advanced some more, with Wooly in the lead. The crevice was very narrow now, and my shoulders brushed the rock walls as we took one careful step at a time. We finally got to a spot where the crevice widened out into a spherical cave, some thirty feet or so in diameter. The floor of the cave was covered in a thin sheet of water, which ended up sluicing through a notch in the rock into our crevice.

  There was enough light to see pretty well now, and I realized it had to be sunlight. Right ahead of us, across that sheet of water on the floor, was a wide but very thin waterfall, coming over a long ledge of rock ten feet above the floor. The dim light made the waterfall look like a diaphanous curtain. “Bloody hell,” Wooly whispered, pointing. “Look at that.”

  I’d been looking at the waterfall, which was truly beautiful in that spectral light, but he was pointing behind the waterfall, where I now could make out the outline of a large, familiar-looking statue, barely visible through the falling mist.

  “What is that thing?” Wooly muttered. “And how did someone get that all the way up here?”

  Then I remembered. “It looks like one of those statues out on Easter Island,” I said. “There was an article about them in Life magazine a couple of years ago. They called them moais, or something like that.”

  “Ri-i-ght,” Wooly said. We stood there just staring at it, both of us wondering the same thing: there was no way anything that big had come up the way we had come. I think we both looked up at the same time, where the light seemed to be coming from. It looked like our mountain ridge had been split, because the source of the sunlight was hundreds of feet up, creating a chasm that could not have been more than ten feet wide.

  “So, the spring has to be up above the statue,” Wooly said. “Or, all that water is coming down from somewhere above, either in the mountain or from up on top.”

  At that moment we heard the sound of thunder, which echoed around that cave in confusing waves of sound. Distant thunder, but unmistakable. Then the light, already dim, began to dim even more.

  “C’mon, Doc,” Wooly said, grabbing my arm. “Time to get the hell out of here.”

  I turned to follow him back into the crevice. He was wasting no time, and I had to scamper behind him as we slid our way down through the rushing water, with another thump and boom of thunder behind us, sounding like it was saying: faster, faster. I called ahead to Wooly, who was slip-sliding down that channel dangerously fast, just asking for a broken ankle. “What’s the big hurry?”

  Then I found out, as the water in the crevice began to swell behind me. Thunder meant rain, sometimes lots and lots of it, falling in great sheets over the jungle so hard that it obscured the trees. That chasm back there was channeling one of those tropical deluges down into that cave, whose only exit was where the two of us were trying to outrun a building flood.

  We made it to the point where we could step out of the crack in the floor and get up on somewhat higher, and dryer, ground, but Wooly didn’t stop there. I continued to follow him down into the lower reaches of the cave. We finally stopped when we got abreast of the talking stone, turned, and climbed up to its rocky platform, from which we could watch an eight
-foot high flash flood muscling its way down to the pool below.

  Wooly whistled softly as the flood swept past. “A lot of the abos live in caves,” he said above the muted roar of the water. “Some of their caves go on for miles, but they were always stopping to listen. Damn near died one time when one of those”—he pointed at the swift water below—“caught up with us from out of bloody nowhere. That’s how I knew to run for it.”

  “Thank God you did,” I said. “I heard the thunder but never made the connection. That crack has to go all the way to the side or even the top of the mountain.”

  He nodded. “And now that we’ve laid eyes on the Blind Man,” he said quietly, “we have to keep that fact secret, mate, for as long as we’re here at Tanabuli. Those elders find out we went up there they’ll be duty-bound to make something happen to us, just to keep up the legend.”

  “Got it,” I said. “But how in the hell did someone get that big thing up there?”

  “Gonna find out,” Wooly said, as the flood began to diminish. “But not today, eh?”

  TWELVE

  The weather cleared four days later, which meant that the Japs would be on the move again. We received specific orders from Nouméa: interdict barge traffic, both ways if possible. Avoid contact with larger forces, also if possible. This was just what Commodore Cogswell had predicted. On the first relatively clear day, he took three boats out in formation with his command boat. Deacon and the skippers had worked up the best formation tactic for attacking a barge convoy, but when they tried it out, the skippers had to pay so much attention to radar formation-keeping that they couldn’t concentrate on a firefight should one pop up. They came back in and worked the problem some more.

  One of the skippers had an idea: our radars simply weren’t precise enough for station-keeping in a high-speed formation. Why not install a Marine 81 mm mortar on the command boat, and use that to fire illumination rounds during the engagement? The command boat would be standing off anyway, directing traffic. That way the boat drivers could do visual, loose station-keeping, while focusing on getting in on the barges and shooting them up. They put Alibaba on a boat and sent him all the way back to Cactus. Ask nicely, Deacon said, but steal one if you have to. He gave the chief a shiny bronze propeller from the hangar queen, whose key slot had been ruined, as barter bait. Marines liked to barter almost as much as they liked to brawl.

  The next night Alibaba returned with the goods. Barter hadn’t been necessary. The Marines had been forthcoming with the mortar, its baseplate, and two crates of illumination rounds. Alibaba had thought to ask for a box of of high-explosive rounds as well, which they agreed to, all in the interests of killing Jap reinforcements. He’d handed over the propeller as a gesture of gratitude and as a down payment against future urgent needs. None of the guys had ever fired a mortar before, but the gunnery sergeant said it was pretty simple for what they’d be doing. Pull the pin that was notched through the nose of the projectile, leave all the shiny yellow packets of explosive on the tail fins, and drop it down the tube. Drop only one at a time or you’ll become the mortar meat. They bolted the baseplate to the fantail area of the 747 boat and then tried it out in the bay that evening. Problem solved.

  They did one more practice run against an imaginary convoy of barges, including using the illumination rounds. A spare boat had gone out to play the role of barge convoy. The formation chosen by Cogswell, basically a column, turned out not to work, because each boat had to fire in turn as it came abreast of the target. They switched to echelon formation, and now they could all shoot. We hoped there weren’t any Japs watching, but the convoys were slow and they hadn’t had time to reach our area all the way from Rabaul yet. Tomorrow night would be the most likely time. A belated evening prayers session gave me the impression that the squadron was coming together and finally absorbing this idea of planning, practicing, fixing, practicing again. The next morning, at about nine, six Jap Betty bombers came streaming across the bay to welcome us to Santa Isabel Island. We’d been hoping to get some advance warning from the distant Cactus radars, but no such luck.

  On the other hand, the ready AA boat stations dispersed up and down that long bay ate the first three Bettys for lunch, sending them crashing down into the sea just beyond the volcanic cliffs which harbored my aid station. One of them managed to drop a stick of bombs along the flanks of the ridge that shook the hell out of my miniature hospital before going inverted into the sea. The last two Bettys split north and south, but not before scattering bombs all over the harbor. One of them landed in the village with calamitous results. Two families who’d been cowering in their huts were obliterated. I half expected that the villagers would want us the hell out of there after that, but the headman, fortunately, was mad at the Japs, not us, calling them cowards for running away like that. The bad news was that the Japs now knew for certain that there was a new MTB base on Santa Isabel. Surprising the convoys was no longer a likely option.

  Cogswell rose to the occasion. We’d send two divisions of three boats out instead of just one. Find and attack a convoy of barges with the first division, then leave. The second division, which now would know where the convoy was, would wait at idle until the command boat fired off a second string of illumination rounds, then they would make one high-speed pass. By now the first division, if still able, would get set up to do it all again. From previous experience, the skippers knew that you’d get one shot at shooting up a convoy, because the “barges” carried just about as many guns as the MTBs. Slash and run were the safest tactics. The Japs were used to being attacked once. They likely wouldn’t expect a second attack. Just like we didn’t.

  This time the Bettys stayed high, eight to ten thousand feet, and made a traditional bombing run well out of range of our 50-caliber and 20 mm guns. All our guys could do was run for the bomb shelters. There were five bombers and they laid sticks of bombs in fairly precise lines, hitting nothing except the harbor, the beaches, and the coastal palm groves. It was loud, though, even from my sheltered position in the cave. I’m not sure they’d spotted the medical station, hidden as it was under the overhang of the ridge, but we’d moved as many patients as we could once the bombing began. I didn’t want to take any chances that they might come back and strafe our bamboo huts and tents.

  Our little harbor was covered in smoke, sand, and dust after they left, which probably convinced them they’d wiped the new base out. Mostly they’d deepened the channel, not that our boats cared. That night Cogswell took his two divisions out into the Slot. The two bombing attacks must have meant something was coming down from Rabaul. We all prayed it wasn’t a formation of heavy cruisers, but the night patrol was a complete bust. They detected nothing, not even local fishing boats. The next morning, we got a report from the coast-watcher net, saying that at least fifty barges had been spotted headed south and passing the southern tip of New Georgia, the island right above Santa Isabel, escorted by two destroyers. Cogswell called a quick council of war. The two destroyers made our planned tactics more dangerous, especially with the use of illumination rounds. One of the guys spoke up. Let’s send an additional boat out, one that still had all four torpedo tubes. If the mortars lit up a Jap destroyer it would be his job to torpedo it if possible.

  Captain Cogswell had to think about that. First of all, it was a new wrinkle to the tactics they’d already practiced. Second, two destroyers could bring a total of ten five-inch guns to the table, not to mention their secondary batteries of 40 mm and 20 mm cannons. They kicked around the idea of not firing the illumination rounds and just blasting in and starting a melee.

  “Starting a melee and finishing one are two different things,” Cogswell observed. Then Deacon spoke up.

  “At some point we’re just going to have to go out there and attack the bastards,” he declared. “We’ve made a plan. Everybody knows no plan survives first contact with the enemy, but, hell: when star shells start popping over their convoy, those tin cans’re gonna think we’ve brought so
me big boys to the party. Forget the second pass idea. Blast in there, tear ’em up, and disappear into the night. If the lonesome-end boat, who’s gonna be just sitting out there, gets a shot, great—torpedo one of those suckers.”

  This was the most I’d heard Deacon say in one go since I’d known him. Cogswell looked at him for a moment and then nodded. “I agree,” he said. “Any questions?”

  The boats went out an hour after sundown. The plan was that they’d set up the ambush ten miles off the coast of Santa Isabel, on a line between the island and Guadalcanal, and then just wait. Back at the base the left-behind skippers congregated at the command bunker, where we had a radio set up on the formation’s frequency. I joined the small crowd, sipping a mild screamer surreptitiously in a coffee mug, anxious to see how this would come out. The commodore had galvanized the squadron since he’d arrived. It wasn’t as if Boss Cushing had done a lousy job, but Cogswell had tried to elevate the squadron’s game substantially. Tonight, we’d see.

  One of the radio rules he’d initiated was that he would talk and they would listen. The only time he wanted to hear from a boat was if that boat got a radar contact that the command boat had not yet announced. Otherwise, he wanted to issue orders, and they were to acknowledge with nothing more than a blast of static. The boats’ radios were really good at producing static. At just after midnight, as some of the officers were drifting off to sleep, the command boat announced that they had multiple radar contacts, bearing 330, range twelve miles, on a heading of 230, speed eight knots. Cogswell then repositioned the lonesome end to put him in position to fire torpedoes along the enemy’s line of advance.

  After that, the command boat began issuing enemy position reports. Bearing 329, range ten miles. Eight miles. Bearing 330. Five miles. The boats presumably were just sitting there at idle, already in loose echelon formation, but making no wakes and no radio noise, either. The command boat had the radar picture and was broadcasting the developing situation in short, clipped transmissions. The attack would begin when the command boat began firing star shells. The field phone squeaked. It was the Marine post up on top of the ridge. Deacon answered, listened, and then hung up.