The Hooligans

by P. T. Deutermann

  “If possible, run through the Jap formation. Bob and weave as soon as they start shooting, but keep going if you can. Run right in front of them or right behind them and strafe ’em wherever you can with your guns. I’ll be right behind you and I’ll be shooting illume rounds from my 81 mm. They’ll turn on their searchlights as soon as we’re spotted, but the illume rounds ought to spook ’em. To the Jap navy, flares popping in the sky means cruisers are out there. They’ll start maneuvering, so there’s no formal attack plan—cowboys and Indians, just like in the old days.”

  “Won’t those illume rounds light us up as well as the Japs?” one skipper asked.

  “The Japs’ searchlights will do that anyway. I’ll be shooting the illume rounds to pop at three thousand feet, which will give our oncoming destroyers a visual to home in on. Now: understand this—just before I transmit the execute signal, I’ll inform the destroyer squadrons that we’re going in. They will execute their own plan right then. So, once we’ve had enough fun inside the Jap formation, everybody run west toward the back of the Jap formation. In other words, don’t linger. We don’t want to be there when our tin cans come in, because they’ll be shooting at anything that’s moving and they can’t distinguish us from the Japs.”

  “With cruisers and destroyers shooting at us, I think we’ll be lucky to make one pass,” another skipper said.

  “Don’t forget the battleships,” one wag pointed out.

  “That’s all the admiral is expecting,” Bluto said. “Jump ’em, Hooligan style, raise a bunch’a hell, and then run for cover. While they’re sorting out their formation and changing their skivvies, our tin cans will come in out of the dark and hit ’em from both sides of the straits with a shit-pot full of torpedoes. By then we need to be gone. The eventual join-up point is where we’re anchored now.”

  “What if we get hit?” someone asked.

  “Sound off on the radio and then deal with your damage. If your boat goes down and you gotta swim for it, stick together in the water. We’ll all be out looking for you, so make sure your vests have those little flashlights. You can turn ’em on after about thirty minutes, because by then all those Goddamned Japs oughta be dead.”

  God willing, I thought, but there was a better than even chance that we might be, too. Battleships, for Chrissakes.

  “We’ll go on station at twenty-one hundred,” Bluto said. “After that, it’ll be hurry up and wait for the pickets to squeak.” He paused for a moment. “Just like old times in the Slot.”

  Deacon and two skippers were nodding. That’s when I realized that the rest of them had never even seen the Slot. I’d left Higgins in the boat he’d come down on, so we met to make sure we each had about the same amount of stuff. Then we went aboard Tutuila for some chow. One of the hospitalmen in her sick bay asked if he could come along for the big show. He’d gone in with the First Marines at Guadalcanal and said he was bored out of his ever-loving mind on Tutuila. We told him to go see Deacon for a boat assignment.

  After chow I got one of the boats to take me around to each of the other boats to make sure everyone was okay and also to hold a little school-call on emergency actions for wounded personnel. It was dark by the time I made my “rounds,” so the boat dropped me off on Bluto’s command boat. Like everyone else, I tried to get some sleep, but it was just too hot and sweaty, even above-deck. Sleeping down below was out of the question. The usual night breeze had not materialized. Bluto finally showed up, courtesy of one of Tutuila’s boats, at around 2000. He’d stayed aboard Tutuila because her radio shack maintained our communications guard. He didn’t want to miss any last-minute-change orders from Oldendorf, who by now should have been twelve miles or so up the strait from our station, overseeing a line of six battleships: West Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, California, and Pennsylvania. The cruisers should be lining up at the ten-mile point, and two squadrons of destroyers were probably already loitering along both sides of the strait at around six miles from us.

  At 2100 all the boats heaved up their anchors, lit off one engine, and rumbled out to the other side of Panaon Island. Once Bluto was satisfied that he was where he needed to be, he turned on the command boat’s stern light for one minute. That was the signal for the other boats to spread out on either side. We weren’t trying for any sort of precise formation, and once the boats had opened out, everyone turned his engine off and we just drifted. With no wind and a flat-calm sea, the boats stayed pretty much wherever they shut down.

  And then it was hurry up and wait.

  THIRTY

  I was dozing when the initial report finally came in.

  “Radar contacts, bearing two-eight-zero, range twelve miles and closing. Composition many.”

  “Track and report,” Bluto replied. Then he gave the order for all the boats to light off. All around us big marine engines cranked up, creating clouds of smoke in the night. Our own boat frequency was different from the battle-line ships, meaning Bluto had to switch to our second radio so he could come up on the HF frequency of the main battleship force. He then reported the contacts to Oldendorf’s flagship. The cruisers and destroyers gathered up in the strait copied that frequency, so everyone should have been alerted that the Southern Force was coming on after all.

  Our radar pickets now both had contact on what was headed for Surigao Strait at an estimated speed of twenty knots. Bluto ordered both of them to rejoin the MTB attack force by coming around the back side of Panaon Island. I looked at my watch. It was just after midnight. Bluto told our boat’s radar operator to stop his cursor on 230 and report when he got contact and then when the lead Jap ships crossed that bearing.

  Engines were rumbling all around us. Clouds of engine exhaust drifted across our loose formation even though we were a quarter mile from the nearest boats. The approaching Japanese formation would stay in the radar shadow of Panaon Island until just about the last moment. One of the picket boats came up on our tactical net and reported that there appeared to be two columns of ships, with one very large radar contact in each column. We waited. If they were doing twenty knots, they should appear around the southern tip of Panaon in about thirty minutes. They didn’t, which meant they’d slowed down. Had one of them intercepted our radio transmissions? Or detected us? We’d been told the Japs had radar now, but that it wasn’t very good.

  Bluto ordered his crew to roust out a dozen illumination rounds for the mortar and stack them right next to the tube. “When I give the order,” he said, “fire them all, one after another.”

  I volunteered to hand the individual rounds to the gunner so that we didn’t have to leave a gun unmanned.

  “Radar contact,” the operator down below announced. “Bearing two-four-seven.”

  The double-ratchet sound of 50-cal machine guns being chambered echoed through the darkness. The gunner picked up the first 81mm round and pulled the safety pin on the nose. I could just barely make out the little yellow packs of high explosive taped to the tail.

  “Bearing two-four-zero.”

  Another minute passed.

  “Bearing, mark! Two-three-three.”

  “Execute,” Bluto said into his handset, then hung it back up. All around us the roar of engines erupted as the boats headed out into the strait. Bluto waited until he could see wakes out in front of him, and then I was sent ass over teakettle to the deck as our boat accelerated. I’d forgotten to hold on.

  Now there was a breeze as the boat came up on the step and began planing at about thirty-five knots. I could no longer see any of the other boats, but I could see the torpedomen setting switches on their tubes and then cranking them out ten degrees for launch. I stayed down on the deck just below the conning station, right next to the mortar, tightened my life jacket straps, and clamped a steel helmet on my head.

  The Japs were absolutely not asleep at the switch. We’d closed in at top speed for no more than a minute before the first searchlight blazed in our direction. Bluto yelled for the mortar gunner to comme
nce firing. He dropped in the first round, which thumped away. I pulled the pin on the next one and handed it to him. He dropped that one in and was reaching for the third when the first shells came howling out of the night, passing so close overhead that I could actually feel them before they exploded behind us in red-tinged fountains. And then a truly amazing searchlight came on and began traversing the waters ahead of us. This was a carbon-arc light, blue-white in intensity, and much bigger than what we were used to from destroyers. It reminded me of the searchlights that Hollywood used at their premieres. Now I could actually see some of the other boats, or at least their wakes, as they charged in among the great black shapes ahead of us.

  I dropped the next mortar round as Bluto made a high-speed dodging turn just in time to evade a trio of shell bursts on our port side. The gunner scrambled to pick it up and dropped it in the tube. I’d forgotten to pull the pin so that one was wasted, but by now flares were popping in the sky. Then all of our machine guns opened up, and I caught a glimpse of a pretty big ship flashing by us as our tracers stitched the night, searching for their bridge windows and the topside AA gunners. One of the torpedomen shouted “Stand by!” I looked ahead and saw the outline of a very big ship with a huge pagoda superstructure dead ahead. There were flashes of red light all along her side as she came on.

  “Launch, Godammit!” Bluto yelled.

  All four of our torpedoes whooshed out of their tubes. The gunner slapped his hand on my helmet.

  Rounds. He needed rounds.

  I picked up the next mortar round, pulled the pin this time, and passed it to him. He dropped it into the tube and then we were both thrown to the deck as Bluto turned hard right to dash down the port side of the battleship, for that’s what it had to be. I hit my head on something and felt a sharp pain in the top of my skull, even with the helmet on. The mortar fired but we were heeling at such an angle that the round went directly into the superstructure of the ship and burst in a shower of fire. I was thunderstruck for a moment as I took in the size of that ship, no more than a hundred yards away from us, sliding through the dark sea like a mountain of black steel and with what seemed like a hundred small guns firing in our direction. Then we were past it and turning again, everyone just hanging on as we felt the bottom of the boat bouncing sideways in the turn until finally, she gained traction and bolted out into the darkness.

  I looked behind us and saw a maelstrom of gunfire, explosions in the water, and tracer fire slashing everywhere. Our own guns had gone silent as Bluto executed a wide turn back toward the formation, which is when we saw several familiar-looking gasoline fires low down on the water. We’d gotten clear, but it looked like some of our boats had not. I didn’t see any ships burning, just black shapes headed away from us, up the strait, their wakes painted orange by the burning PT boats behind them.

  Bluto slowed down. I had this terrible feeling it had all been for nothing, but then one of the smaller Jap ships, probably a destroyer, blew up in a white-hot fireball, revealing the entire Jap formation like a flash-camera as she broke in two. And then the remainder of the first destroyer squadron’s torpedoes began to arrive, with at least two and possibly even three hitting the leading battleship, which spouted fire down one side.

  Bluto slowed even more because we were spectators now as the approaching destroyers ran at the Jap formation, firing five-inch guns and drawing return fire from five-, six-, and eight-inch guns. Our mission had been to disrupt and distract the Japs; the destroyers did a much better job as we saw Jap cruisers suddenly turning sideways and their own destroyers trying to get out of the bigger ships’ way. I saw what looked like one of their cruisers colliding with another, but there was so much noise and so many gun-flashes that I probably imagined it. As we watched we suddenly saw a torpedo coming straight at us from the melee up ahead. Bluto didn’t even have time to move the throttles before the damned thing buzzed right underneath us and sped off into the night. Then star shells began to pop above the madly maneuvering ships, which were some five miles from us now, as the first American destroyer squadron cleared away and the second one came in, running down the wakes of their own torpedo salvo, which claimed another Jap destroyer and yet another hit on the bigger of the two battleships.

  Bluto turned again, this time back toward Panaon Island and the numerous gasoline fires still flickering out there. One of the gunners yelled: “Hey, look!” He was pointing up into the sky, where small things, glowing dark red, were descending on the Jap formation. None of us had ever seen battleship projectiles before, and certainly not near the receiving end, but they were unmistakable when they went off all around the two Jap battleships, raising shell-splashes that rose as high as those pagoda towers. They were followed by more, many more glowing objects that came down out of the sky and blasted entire chunks off their targets, or disappeared into their hull with a small flash, followed by a booming explosion deep within the battlewagon’s hull. We were transfixed by the carnage taking place in front of us. Then one of the battleships blew up, broke into two halves, and then disappeared.

  Bluto yelled at us to look for survivors, bringing us back to the reality of what happens when PT boats go up against the massed fire of cruisers and destroyers. We stopped next to a patch of flaming gasoline, and then Bluto maneuvered the boat slowly to put the fire between us and any surviving Jap ships so as not to be silhouetted. We then started looking for swimmers, but found none in this patch of gasoline, whose fumes stung our eyes. He then headed for another patch some five hundred yards distant, and this time we recovered four men. All four were wounded and unable to get themselves aboard. Two of our gunners went over the side to bring them to the gunwales and help lift them up to the deck. I was tending to the first one aboard when a rifle shot rang out, followed by another, as the rear gunner drove off a shark.

  The rifle shots produced some shouts from the darkness closer to Panaon Island, so we drove over there and found an entire crew hanging on to the bottom of their boat, which had overturned during the battle. At that point our radar operator reported a contact closing on us, which turned out to be one of our boats. Bluto decided we’d form a two-boat search line to go look for more survivors. All the shooting had stopped up in the strait, which I hoped meant that Bluto’s prediction had come true. I had an increasingly bad headache as I tended to the wounded out on deck as best I could. One man sat up suddenly, puffed out his cheeks as if he was going to vomit, and then collapsed, unleashing a river of blood from his mouth as he died. Bluto ordered the crew to put the man’s corpse over the side and then resume looking for other men in the water.

  By dawn we had thirty-five survivors stuffed aboard our two boats. Five boats had rejoined us just before sunrise, reappearing from the coves of Panaon. Seven out of sixteen; it had been a bad night, although what had happened to the Japs seemed even worse. We laid alongside Tutuila, which had spent the night tucked into the back side of Panaon, and got our wounded into her sick bay where I could do a much better job. Bluto radioed in his report and requested a destroyer to come take off our most seriously wounded. The flagship did not respond to that request, but then, five minutes later, reported that a Jap battleship force was in Leyte Gulf attacking the invasion shipping.

  We stared at each other in astonishment. That’s when Bluto saw the two holes in my helmet, one on each side. “Doc?” he said. “You okay?”

  I couldn’t figure out what had prompted that question until he came over and tried to get my steel helmet off. One of the crewmen moved over and undid the chin strap, but the helmet seemed stuck on my head. When they managed to pry it off there was an ugly sucking sound and then a pretty big blood clot slid down my cheek. The crewman stared at the helmet; there was an entry hole on one side and a clear exit hole on the other, way up at the top of the rounded steel. I felt my head and discovered a sticky mass of bloody hair running from one side of my head to the other in a straight line. Bluto swore and sent for soap and water. I remained seated on the front of the cons
ole, wincing when the soapy water hit that line. It didn’t help my headache much, either. I gobbled two APC tablets while they bandaged my head.

  Bluto ordered the surviving boats to join up with Tutuila and refuel and then our much-diminished squadron headed back toward Leyte Gulf at twenty-five knots. No one had any torpedoes left, but if Jap battleships were shooting up the Leyte Gulf landing area the boats would be needed, if only to pick up survivors. I stayed aboard Tutuila with the rest of the wounded, so I ended up being the only one in the squadron who got breakfast.

  THIRTY-ONE

  One more man died of his wounds as Tutuila headed back toward Leyte Gulf. We buried him at sea with a small ceremony. There was a hospital ship waiting when Tutuila finally pulled into the landing area, so we went directly alongside the much bigger ship, which was anchored a mile offshore. I supervised the transfer of the casualties from Tutuila to the hospital ship. I’d gotten used to my head-scarf bandage although there was a thin hot line of fiery pain where the bullet had grazed my skull. Thank God for the helmet.

  When I came back topside from accompanying the wounded to the triage area, Tutuila was pulling away. Something urgent must have come up, which probably involved Bluto and his remaining hooligans needing fuel. For a moment I didn’t know what to do or where to go, which is when I realized I was probably exhausted. The hospital ship had a long promenade deck filled with reclining deck chairs. I walked past recuperating sailors until I found an empty chair. I sat down, pushed the back all the way down, and closed my eyes. The warm tropical sun for once felt wonderful, although the headache seemed to be getting worse. Thankfully, I fell asleep, to the accompaniment of visions of alien ships being torn asunder.