Black Star Rising

by Robert Gandt

But you take an awful chance,

  I’m no fighter I have learrrned . . .

  By the time they closed the bar a few minutes before midnight, the party had gotten rowdy. A drunk pilot had to be subdued after demonstrating how to smash the mirrors behind the bar. Another stuck his fist through a plaster wall. One of the junior officers nearly drowned when he passed out over the toilet. Several had to be hauled in comatose condition back to the ship and loaded aboard like cordwood. The Intrepid’s departure the next morning was a hazy, indistinct memory for most of the Tail End Charlies. As the ship entered the heaving ocean, the hangovers magnified to roiling bouts of barfing. Eric Erickson, who had never been aboard a vessel larger than a canoe, stayed sick for three days.

  After a week of provisioning and training in Hawaii, Intrepid was underway for the west Pacific. In the low ceilinged ready room of Bomber Fighting Ten, the pilots learned for the first time where they were going. The intelligence officer stuck a map on the bulkhead. It was a chart of southern Japan and the Ryukyu island chain.

  The Tail End Charlies stared at the map. They knew some of the place names—Shikoku, Kyushu, Okinawa. Until today that’s all they were, just names. Now reality was setting in. Those places on the map—the ones with the hard to pronounce names—were where they would see their first combat.

  But there was more. What none of them yet knew—not the pilots or the intelligence officers or the flag officers planning the operation—was that the island in the middle of the chain, the one called Okinawa, was where the Imperial Japanese Navy would make its last stand.

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