The Hooligans

by P. T. Deutermann

  There was little point in our going back into Rendova until we’d cleared our surgical backlog. Nouméa had promised they’d start a Catalina stream, which would stage through Cactus and then land at Rendova to move our wounded out of the immediate combat zone. The planes would bring up medical supplies and take away the patients who were deemed fit to move. It wasn’t a perfect setup, but it was apparent to all of us that everybody was doing all they could to solve this knotty problem of how to save the wounded. They wouldn’t start the stream until they knew when we’d get back to Rendova.

  The following day the weather became iffy, but Harlan County had by then put all her patients aboard Montrose. She sailed back northeast toward Rendova, disappearing into a set of dark squall lines when she was only five miles away. By this point, we’d done all the urgent surgeries. We were now doing follow-up work, second surgical repairs where necessary, and treating the lesser injuries, with the term “lesser” being very much a relative word. Colonel Maddox did another inventory and then declared that we had to go back in. He sent a message to Nouméa to start the Catalina stream, and then informed the Army at Rendova that we’d be returning at just after dark. We then set about determining who was fit to be off-loaded when we got in because we knew there’d be lots more “customers” waiting in Rendova harbor. We were overflown by another unidentified “high-flier” on our way back in, but the captain was confident that the rain-swept skies had kept us out of sight, assuming the plane was a Jap.

  We arrived on the western side of Rendova just at nautical twilight. That big, black volcano, which loomed like some presiding judge over the whole island, was turning a bright orange color. Our destroyer escort had gone on ahead to get in before we did to refuel. We couldn’t see what ships were in the harbor because we were coming in from the west, but most of the medical staff and even some of the ambulatory patients were topside on the promenade deck just to watch the spectacular sunset and get some fresh air.

  We were perhaps five miles from the big left turn into the harbor proper when one of the nurses said: “Look—a seaplane.” Everyone assumed it was one of the Catalinas until I saw that it had four engines, not two. It was approaching from behind us, and it was low, not skimming the surface but no more than a few hundred feet above it. It was coming straight at us, with no nav lights showing, aiming for our port side. Then I remembered all the stories about the Kawanishi; those huge armed Jap seaplanes that were night-capable. They’d killed many a PT boat. And, they carried Long Lance torpedoes.

  Before I could yell Japs! two dark objects dropped from the seaplane’s belly, and then she banked hard to the right and began to make a big circle to the southwest across our stern, no more than two miles behind us. I thought I heard some shouting from way up on the bridge and then felt the ship begin to heel to port as Montrose attempted to evade the torpedoes that were coming, to no avail. An enormous explosion erupted on the port quarter of the ship, big enough to push the old girl deeper into her turn, followed by a second that hit the port side a third of the way up from the stern.

  Almost everyone out on the promenade deck was knocked down by the force of the two blasts and, almost immediately, there was a roar of steam from the ship’s single funnel. As we scrambled to our feet, we could feel the unmistakable lurch to port as Montrose, mortally wounded, reacted to the thousands of tons of seawater rushing into her engineering spaces. Within seconds she slowed and began listing as her stern settled. I literally didn’t know what to do for one frightening moment. The nurses’ screams were drowned out by that blast of steam thundering out the stack as the ship’s boilers succumbed to the onrushing water. The ship continued moving slowly ahead even as she listed further to port, her own momentum carrying her forward in a slow right turn, as if she was intent on executing a death spiral into the deep.

  Two crewmen came running down the tilting promenade deck dispersing gray kapok life jackets to everyone there, especially the terrified nurses. There was a life jacket locker right next to where I was standing, so I opened it up, grabbed one, and then began pulling more of them out onto the deck. By then it was becoming difficult to stand upright. The ship was sinking by the stern and listing ever more to port. I’d barely got my jacket strings tied up before there was a great whooshing sound from somewhere aft and then she capsized, going all the way over onto her beam ends and pitching everyone topside into the sea in a waterfall of tumbling bodies. Then she slowly righted herself, paused as if to get a final breath, and then began to slide down by the stern. A big wave forced my head underwater. I had to kick violently to get back to the surface. There were bobbing heads everywhere and a sudden smell of fuel oil. One of the ship’s officers nearby was yelling Go! Go! Go! to everyone around him, indicating that we should start swimming hard to get away from the suction effect that was coming.

  I couldn’t tell how many survivors were in the water at this point but I could hear a lot of female voices calling for help. The two nurses nearest me were doggedly trying to swim away from the ship. One of them had a life jacket on, the other was clutching hers under one arm as she kicked vigorously. Then I spotted another nurse who was trying to swim, stay afloat, breathe, and get her life jacket on. Her eyes were closed and she was crying hysterically. I changed direction, came up alongside her, grabbed one of her flailing arms, and started pulling her along with me. She screamed when I first touched her but then relaxed when she saw I wasn’t a shark. She then tried to help us both make progress away from what was coming, but mostly ended up kicking me in the legs.

  I told her to hold on to her life jacket but I didn’t think she could hear me over the roar of steam and compressed air coming out of the dying ship. There was just enough of a seaway that my view of everyone in the water was intermittent. The sinking ship was visible, though, and everybody out there was frantically trying to get away from her as more and more of her red underbelly rose into the air. Her cargo booms began to topple over in a tangle of heavy cables and crashing steel. The roar of air leaving the hull increased and then her bow disappeared in a cloud of dust as the forward cargo hatches gave way. Then she was just gone.

  I think everyone out there in the water felt the sudden pull of a massive, sucking current back toward where she’d gone down, but, fortunately, it didn’t last. The sudden silence was overwhelming, and then the shouting began as survivors milled around in the darkening ocean. There was no more hysteria; everyone who was still alive began concentrating on getting closer to other survivors. A gray life raft popped high up out of the water and then slapped back onto the surface. Then another. And another. I vaguely remembered that the rafts had been attached to the ship by hydrostatic devices, set to release them if water pressure ever entered the devices. I steered my clingy new best friend toward the nearest raft as even more popped up from the deep. She’d been a troopship, so she’d carried lots of rafts. Soon there were small flashlights coming on across the surface as men got aboard the rafts and began helping others climb in. The rafts were pretty basic: balsa wood covered in painted canvas fabric, eight feet wide by ten long, with a netting bottom and more nets strung along the sides for people to hang on to. Then my heart about stopped when I heard airplane engines approaching. The bastards were coming back to finish the job.

  We were suddenly enveloped in a blaze of yellow-white light as the plane came in, but it wasn’t a Kawanishi, thank God. It was a twin-engined Catalina, followed by two more in close succession. They’d turned on their landing lights and began to circle the area as the pilots took stock of the situation and made their reports back to Rendova. One of them expanded his circle and then dropped some rafts to a clutch of survivors who had drifted away from the main group. I became aware that the young woman whom I’d been helping had buried her wet head against my chest and was sobbing so hard I wondered how she could breathe. I tried to calm her, telling her rescue was coming, that we were going to be OK, but she kept on crying. Finally, she got control of herself and looked up at me with a
n anguished expression on her face.

  “The patients,” she sobbed. “What happened to the patients?”

  I was embarrassed to realize that I hadn’t thought even once about all those patients, as well as the medical people tending to them, trapped belowdecks. At that instant we both knew what had happened to them, to all of them. Montrose hadn’t lasted more than a few minutes after the torpedoes struck. She hadn’t been a warship, with watertight compartments and damage-control measures installed. Those fearsome Jap torpedoes had eviscerated her, opening up probably half her underwater body to the sea. It was certain that anyone not thrown into the sea when she did that one big roll had gone down with her. I suddenly felt sick at the sheer scale of the slaughter. I put my arm around the nurse and then we both wept as we hung on to the raft’s netting.

  TWENTY-ONE

  PT boats were the first to arrive, followed by some destroyers and then a small fleet of LCMs and other amphibious craft. By midnight everyone who’d been picked up was back in Rendova harbor, exhausted but very glad to be alive. The Army created a hasty tent village ashore and gathered all the survivors into one area in a palm grove. I thought that was kind of them, but later realized it was the most efficient way of determining what the real losses had been.

  They were substantial. Montrose had lost about half the ship’s company. The ship’s captain and the bridge watch-officers and enlisted men had survived. The engineering department had been wiped out by that second torpedo hit and the resulting steam release from ruptured boilers. Cooks, ship’s service personnel—the laundry, barbershop, ship’s store, the cleaning staff—had all been lost, trapped as they were inside the ship when she first capsized. Colonel Maddox had been conducting another one of his supplies surveys when we got hit. He’d had the staff’s doctors with him along with some nurses to write down what they would need to restock in Rendova. That second torpedo had hit right beneath the big surgical suite, pushing the deck of the suite flat up into the deck above. Fifteen nurses and three docs had survived the sinking, but only because we’d been topside and rubbernecking as we came into Rendova.

  Every one of the patients who’d been recovering belowdecks died in the attack. I couldn’t imagine the horror: immobilized in a hospital bed with lines and tubes and even breathing masks attached, woozy from pain meds and basically unable to move and then feeling the explosions and being swamped by the onrushing sea. Broken bodies swirling around the flooding compartments like bloody rag dolls, tables and equipment upended, banging into the drowning patients, and then all the lights going out, for the operating room, the ship, and the men themselves.

  God, where were You?

  We could account for who’d made it, but not necessarily for who had not made it. All the ship’s records, the hospital records, and everyone’s personnel and pay records were gone forever. Montrose had gone down in 7,000 feet of water, so there was no possibility of recovering anything at all. The Army might have records of who’d been sent aboard Montrose, but we now had nothing to document what had happened after that.

  The surviving docs and I made rounds of the survivors but there were few serious physical injuries to deal with. The one common thread were the shocked expressions we encountered everywhere as the survivors, especially the medical staff, absorbed the scale of the disaster and the certain knowledge that death had not come quietly for those who’d been trapped belowdecks. All that effort, the exhausting round-the-clock surgeries, the hour-by-hour aftercare, the hurt of watching men die after we’d tried so hard. Doctors, nurses, the orderlies. The numbing strain of physical weariness, that scolding subconscious voice telling us: quit complaining. You are whole and they are not, and, in some cases, would never be. Those moments when the nurses would look up and say “we’re losing him,” and then the frantic efforts to prevent that, sometimes successful, more often not. That moment of silence when we had to recognize that we couldn’t do anything more. Those moments of sheer joy when we brought one back and then got him fixed up.

  All for nothing.

  Goddamned Japs.

  The news that the campaign’s only hospital ship had been torpedoed and lost sent shock waves throughout Rendova and New Georgia. Strangely, the incident was kept close-hold elsewhere. Word was that Halsey didn’t want the Japs to know how bad they’d hurt us, but there was no keeping it from the troops. Most of us didn’t think we were keeping it from the enemy, either. They’d sent a lone armed seaplane out to find us. That meant that there had to be some residual pockets of Japs on Rendova, left behind with a radio to report what they saw going on in the harbor. Like an unmarked passenger ship embarking wounded every other night and then heading west.

  I was the senior surviving medical officer after the sinking, so the Army expected me to take charge and turn the small field medical station on Rendova into something a lot bigger and more capable. Maddox’s final message to Nouméa about starting the Catalina resupply train our way meant that we were able to begin stockpiling medical supplies right away. The Seabees also jumped right to it, building log and tent facilities, laying hoses to a nearby spring, and then digging out more bomb-shelter bunkers. The Army docs had been moved over to New Georgia Island itself as friendly front lines finally began to advance toward Munda, but they’d been tasked to provide immediate first aid and then turn over anyone who needed more than that to Montrose.

  We then had to wrestle with what to do about the nurses. The Catalinas could ferry some of them down to Cactus and beyond, but if we were going to set up surgeries, I needed those nurse anesthetists to remain behind. And then, of course, they’d need separate living quarters. There were thousands of men here and over on New Georgia, and more coming, who’d not seen an American female for more than a year. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about boy-girl problems. The nurses were too heartsick about what had happened to Montrose and all those patients to be interested in flirting with the GIs.

  After five days, the Seabees had worked their usual miracles and we had a fairly capable facility just off the harbor on Rendova. My former cohorts on Bau Island moved in with us, including Chief Higgins. Cactus sent up a senior Navy Medical Service Corps officer to take over the administration of the facility and all logistics, which was a huge help. Four of the nurses stayed while the rest took Catalinas all the way back to Nouméa. I’d expected that they’d be rotated to Guadalcanal, but there were big changes in the works that none of us knew about. We learned that the hospital on Guadalcanal was going to be dismantled in preparation for the next push up the Solomons. I thought that was premature, given the battles going on across the channel, but then we got word that the airfield at Munda had finally been taken and that the Japs had evacuated their troops from New Georgia. The Seabees immediately landed at Munda and began repairs and new construction to make the airfield fully operational and even bigger.

  As casualties fell off with the capture of New Georgia, we were sitting there on Rendova in a log-and-tent facility staffed by three of the surviving Montrose docs, one of whom was a surgeon, the four nurse anesthetists, three medical orderlies, Chief Higgins and two hospitalmen from the MTB squadron station, and myself. It wasn’t that we were eager for “business” but the speculation about what was next got inventive. The sinking led to an investigation, which was standard procedure. As someone who’d been topside when the attack occurred, I was interviewed along with the four nurses. The investigating officer, a full captain from Halsey’s staff, was surprised that I even knew what a Kawanishi was until I explained I’d been with the MTBs, who knew them all too well. He was particularly interested in finding out the extent of the casualty losses. We survivors had to sit down and try to come up with a count, which eventually led to some more waterworks from the nurses. We manly men of course maintained our composure, but to be honest, it was damned hard to do so. The captain, to his credit, was sympathetic and treated the nurses gently during their interviews.

  “I know you people are hurting,” he told us
. “If it makes you feel any better, one of our submarines sank a Jap freighter a month ago. We found out last week that it was carrying one thousand Allied POWs and civilians back to Japan to the Mitsubishi slave labor camps. They were locked down in the cargo holds when she sank. Think how that sub skipper feels.”

  No one felt better after hearing that story, but it pointed out the fact that when people talked about the horror of war, there was simply no overstating it.

  The Army headquarters camp was in turmoil now that New Georgia had been taken and the airfield at Munda was being rebuilt. Then our old nemesis, malaria, reared its ugly head. I went to headquarters again and asked them to request the Navy to send up some APDs, which were destroyers configured to carry troops. Malaria wasn’t something that could be fixed by surgery. I needed a way to get patients out of here and down to either Guadalcanal or Nouméa, where the existing medical infrastructure could take the time required to get them back to health. Rendova simply wasn’t the place for that. That night, Bluto showed up at our tent.

  “Heard the bad news,” he said. “Wanna come back and join us for a prayer session?”

  “Hell, yes, Skipper. None of us here are doing too good.”

  “Are those nurses I see over there?”

  “They are, but they’re pretty fragile just now. The investigating officer just made us come up with a body count of the casualties on board Montrose when the Kawanishi hit.”