When the same shells struck the paper-thin Chesapeake they screamed right through the ship, finding nothing hard enough to activate their fuses. When the sailors of the Chesapeake realized what was happening, one man cried, “They’re making Swiss cheese!” Four of the most powerful shells in the world had struck a Jeep carrier without causing a single casualty. There were, of course, eight gaping holes in the flattop, four where the AP shells entered, four where they left.
The Lucas Dean was not so lucky. With no more torpedoes to fire, it was only a partial warship, but Captain Grant was determined to use that part to maximum advantage. Throwing a heavy smoke screen, he dodged and zagged his way far forward until the ship reached a spot from which he could fire with some effect upon the smaller Japanese destroyers whose skins would not be thick enough to repel his shots. He fired sixteen times and accomplished nothing. But because he had taken a position close to the main Japanese fleet, the Lucas Dean had to be dealt with, and two cruisers came right at it, blazing harshly. Now there were no colored splashes, for the Japanese gunners could see their target, but there was still the game of chasing salvos, and Captain Grant played this to perfection, staying alive long enough to find shelter in another rain cloud.
But as he hid there, the Japanese cruisers could see [29] what he could not: the cloud was extremely small, and the ship must be crouching somewhere within. Laying down a creeping barrage, the cruisers scored two hits, both fore, both devastating. However, the cloud remained long enough to give Grant sufficient time to survey the damage, and now he learned the rare quality of Mr. Savage, the executive officer, for this newly arrived Texan, who had never seen any ocean a year ago, took such complete command of emergency repairs that within half an hour the Lucas Dean was able to move under its own power, not fast but quite securely.
“What now?” Mr. Savage asked.
“Back to the wars,” Grant said.
“What else?” Savage replied.
Their DE could make only half-speed, and they had only a small portion of their ammunition left, but it was obvious that if they could in any way divert or harass the enemy warships, they might contribute slightly to the American position. So moving under protection of the rain clouds, they returned to the front and saw with extreme delight that American planes from the little carriers had begun all-out attacks on the Japanese ships. If the Dean could cause only a trivial confusion, it might be enough to make some Japanese ship falter, and slow down, and become a better target for the aviators. So Grant threw his little craft right at the heart of the oncoming Japanese fleet.
In the legends of many people one finds accounts of how the gods favored men of extreme bravery. The American Indians, the ancient Greeks, the Romans and the Goths all believed that if a man displayed unusual heroism, he would receive unusual protection ... up to a point.
Norman Grant, a beginning lawyer with a wife he loved back in the small Western town of Clay, was such a man. When Finnerty asked him, as the Lucas Dean limped haltingly north, “Do you intend to take on their whole fucking fleet?” he said, “I do.”
For thirty-eight minutes this DE worked and wove its way as if it had a whole nest of torpedoes to discharge. It lobbed its few shells onto the decks of the much heavier warships, then walked the salvos back to safety. When it was clearly doomed, it found a rain cloud, and when two other equally heroic destroyers were shot out of the water, [30] it somehow survived. It was a charmed ship, for the gods had taken it under their protection.
Every man aboard the Lucas Dean realized that their captain was proving himself to be a man of remarkable heroism, and some sensed that they, too, shared his courage. But heroism aboard a moving vessel is quite different from that required of a foot soldier, who can, if his spirit fails, run away. It requires true courage of monumental character for a soldier to stay and fight when he might flee, but aboard ship the captain merely points the bow in a certain direction, and no man on board can do a damned thing about it.
What caused Captain Grant to behave as he did that October morning? What produced in an ordinary lawyer from a small land-locked town in the West an impeccable sense of naval maneuvering? A chain of trivial incidents had linked together to make him the man he proved to be that day of battle:
1921, aged 7: His father speaking: “You mustn’t lie about the box of candy. If you took it, say so. No punishment I give you will ever be as bad as the punishment you will give yourself if you become a known liar.”
1932, aged 18: Mr. Stidham speaking: “We are most pleased, Norman, that you’re taking Elinor to the dance. Remember that we’re placing her care in your hands. Home by one. And you don’t have to prove that you can drive down a darkened road at seventy miles an hour.”
1941, aged 27: Head of the firm speaking: “I tell each lawyer who joins our firm only once. Over the past two decades four lawyers in this county have gone to jail for misappropriating funds with which they were entrusted. And I’ve testified against three of them.”
1943, aged 29: Navy bo’s’n speaking: “By the old standards there isn’t one of you men prepared to take charge of a Navy vessel. But I’m convinced you have character and courage, and that will suffice.”
¯
[31] Kurita’s fleet contained one battleship the Americans desperately wanted to sink, the Haruna, veteran of many battles, and because of its emotional challenge, always a prime target. In the hideous days of late 1941 when America shivered in humiliation after Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, the nation sorely needed a hero, so enthusiastic public relations men concocted the doctrine that Colin Kelly, braver than most, had sunk the Haruna. Photographs of Kelly, his airplane and the destroyed Japanese battleship flashed across the world. But to the embarrassment of the Navy, in the next sea battle Haruna was there, spreading devastation.
But in that battle she was sunk again, after a vicious fight which the public relations men described in vivid detail. Of course, in the next battle she was present, her guns belching. Again and again she was sunk, and then again, but here, in late 1944, she was steaming menacingly right at the little carriers. A score of aviators, learning of her presence, vowed to sink her ... for real.
“Haruna is mine!” one pilot from the carrier Chesapeake Bay shouted into his radio as he peeled off to smash her with his heavy bomb. In fact, he was so determined to do so that he followed his bomb almost down to the deck, and saw with pleasure that he had delivered a mortal blow.
“I’ve sunk the Haruna!” he shouted in plain speech. But the Haruna sailed on, directly at the Lucas Dean.
When Finnerty saw the monstrous battleship bearing down, about four miles distant, he gasped, “Good God! Look!”
There was no way that the men of the Dean could determine that this was their hated enemy, and there was also no way that they could damage the perpetual survivor. But they could pretend that they had torpedoes, and if the oncoming battleship believed them, it might turn away and fall prey to the American airplanes aloft. So while shells fell about the damaged Dean, Captain Grant turned her broadside to the Haruna as if his tubes were filled with deadly fish.
He succeeded and he didn’t succeed. The Haruna did turn aside, but as it did so it launched a fourteen-inch shell that landed just aft of the Dean’s tower, creating havoc.
The Dean was not blown apart, and it was in no [32] immediate danger of sinking, but it was so sorely damaged that it had to retire, seeking what cover it could, and as it turned back in flight, as if it had been whipped by bigger boys, Captain Grant covered his face. He could visualize the terrible destruction the Japanese battleships would now wreak upon the baby flattops; he wanted to weep for the dead of this day, for the gallant hopes that had died with them. He and his men should have been able to hold back the enemy, protecting their part of the vast battlefront, but they had failed. There must have been something more he could have done, and in his failure he did not now want to see the destruction of his fleet. He was not a sailor. He was not a Navy man. He knew
none of the traditions. But he did not want to lose his ship. He did not want to know the ignominy of defeat.
Then he heard one word. It was uttered in a Texas accent: “Jesus!” He assumed that Mr. Savage had seen some final Japanese warship bearing down on them, and quickly he looked up to decide what steps to take in this last extremity, for he was determined that this little DE go down fighting.
“Look! Look!” Finnerty cried, and soon Savage was bellowing, “Look at the bastards!”
When his eyes focused on the northern horizon, he saw a sight he could not believe. Admiral Kurita, with the entire American fleet defenseless and standing by for the slaughter, which would leave General MacArthur’s forces on Leyte unprotected, had given the order for a general retreat. With victory assured, he fled the dangerous seas in which little ships had kept coming at him, no matter how many times they were hit.
“Finnerty,” Captain Grant said quietly. “Mark this. At 0949 the Japanese fleet turned north and left the battle. The Lucas Dean has absorbed four major hits and can make only three knots, but she is still afloat.”
And then the gods had had enough. From out of the clouds to the west appeared a new type of warfare. It consisted of a Japanese dive bomber, manned by a single aviator wearing a white scarf decorated with a red rising sun. It was the first of a special breed of warrior, never before seen in warfare, and it came on and on, heading directly for the Lucas Dean.
[33] It was a kamikaze, a plane and a man blessed before takeoff from a nearby land-based airfield. It was on a journey of no return, for the Japanese high command realized that if Sho-Go, their master plan, failed, they would be forced to rely upon other tactics.
“Shoot him down!” Mr. Savage screamed, but the bullets missed, their tracers showing high and low.
“Get that son-of-a-bitch!” Finnerty yelled at the gunners, but they could not adjust their guns to the resolute speed of this plane.
On and on it came, one small plane, one small man. In the end, just before the pair crashed into the Dean’s tower, the men of the Dean could see their enemy, a young Japanese, his face frozen into a horrible mask, his hands frozen to the controls.
There was a massive crash and an explosion of flame, which Mr. Savage’s men might have controlled except that from the north came another kamikaze, headed straight for the Dean. It, too, avoided the gunfire, and at the last moment the sailors on the Dean could see its pilot’s face, smiling, shouting, exultant, but they could hear no words, for almost instantly plane and man crashed into the port side of the DE, which exploded violently, broke in half and started sinking.
When Captain Grant climbed into Life Raft Number Three he made a swift automatic survey of what was now his command station: Some food, less water, the three guns, no radio. When this was completed he started an assessment of the crew’s condition, assisted by Pharmacist’s Mate Penzoss, who had a clear understanding of what had happened during the wild two hours of the DE’s rampage through the Japanese fleet: “Original complement, 329. I counted at least forty dead before that last plane hit. Let’s say ten more when she exploded. That makes fifty gone, 279 somewhere in the water.”
“How many went down with the ship?” Grant asked over his shoulder as he helped a swimmer climb aboard. “Let’s say fifty. So cut the number of swimmers to 229. How many here?”
Making a hasty count of the tangled bodies, Grant supposed that he had thirty aboard, including a dozen who [34] were near death. Among those with lesser wounds was Tom Savage, the executive officer, whose face was very white.
“Where’d it get you, Tom?”
“A little fragment, must have been, here on the left side.”
Grant asked Doc Penzoss, a high-school graduate who dispensed aspirin and Atabrine, to look at the wound. “Did it break a rib?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Rescue craft’ll pick us up noon. We’ll have a before doctor look at you within the hour.”
Penzoss was called away from Captain Grant by cries from seamen who saw their comrades dying. He had one small bag of disinfectants and Syrettes and was determined to use them efficiently.
His place was taken by Yeoman Finnerty, who jotted in his notebook the figures that Captain Grant recapitulated: “If all six life rafts got into the water, and if each contained forty men, we’ll have saved the complement.” But Grant could see only three rafts afloat in the oily waters, and none contained more than thirty.
So the hurried search began, and from the waters Grant and his men pulled those who would otherwise have drowned. Once they came upon a seaman floating face downward, obviously dead, and Grant began to haul him aboard, but Penzoss took his arm quietly and whispered, “We haven’t enough space to stretch out the wounded,” and trying to keep the others from seeing, the pharmacist allowed the body to drift away.
Finnerty’s notes said that the Lucas Dean had broken apart at 1007 on the morning of 25 October, in the sight of at least two dozen American ships, so it was likely that rescue would be swift, but midday came without any signs of such help. Kurita’s fleet had disappeared, ignominiously, and new American ships were beginning to arrive from the south, but none came to where the abandoned men of the Lucas Dean drifted in the sea.
In late afternoon the men in Raft Three rescued a seaman from the DD Hoel who said that his destroyer had taken one hell of a beating: “We lost one engine and half our guns. Then we lost our other engine and the rest of our guns. In the end they moved in close and blew us out of the water.”
[35] “Many survivors?” Penzoss asked in his high voice.
The Hoel man turned and said, “You talk just like my sister.”
As dusk approached, the floating men had to acknowledge that they would not be rescued this day, and since they had only two frail flashlights, it seemed unlikely that help would reach them this night, either. When darkness fell, some of the badly wounded died, and at regular intervals Penzoss supervised the throwing away of bodies. With the first burials prayers were said, but toward midnight this stopped.
Now the skies cleared, allowing a beautiful half-Moon to show high in the western heavens, and the stars came out, incredibly beautiful, and a farm boy from Minnesota was able to recite the names: “Three of the loveliest stars in the sky. Vega, Cygnus, Altair.” A boy from New York who could rarely see the stars corrected him: “Cygnus isn’t a star. It’s a constellation.”
“You’re right,” the Minnesota boy said. “But that star has such a difficult name, I always forget it.”
“Deneb,” the New York boy said.
The ship’s navigator heard this conversation, and moved awkwardly to join the two men. He knew all the navigational stars, and through the long night he explained which ones would be setting in the west, which rising to replace them in the east: “Alpheratz, Hamal, Aldebaran.” Shortly before midnight he told the listening men, “Soon we’ll get the finest bunch in the heavens. Orion.”
When the multiple stars of that constellation did appear, Lieutenant Savage began to groan, and both Captain Grant and Penzoss moved to his side. “What is it, Tom?”
“Something’s moving. I have one hell of a pain.”
Grant wanted to touch the wound to see if a shell fragment of some kind was exposed, but Penzoss restrained him. When they were well away from Savage the medic whispered, “Gas, I’m afraid. The heat yesterday. The motion tonight.”
The raft was not of wood. It was a rubber affair, thick and greasy and heavy, and because it had no keel or stiffening, it rose and fell and twisted with the motions of the sea, so that even some men who had been at sea for two or three years became nauseated and a few newcomers really seasick.
[36] “If you must vomit,” Penzoss said repeatedly, “do it over the side.”
Toward dawn, when the skies were filled with bright stars, shining even more brightly because the moonlight had long since vanished, one man who had never really seen the heavens before, told the navigation officer, “This is a night I’
ll never forget.”
“Look to the east,” the young astronomer said. “Dawn. Planes will soon spot us, and we’ll be picked up.”
But this did not happen. And no rain clouds appeared to protect the rafts from the Sun. Now the merciless heat was beating down upon the stricken sailors, and more badly wounded started to die at an appalling rate; even some men with only minor wounds began to experience dreadful pains and the fear of death.
No matter what the condition of the men, the burden of their suffering fell on Penzoss, who crawled from one to another, apportioning his precious medicines as he deemed best. He was twenty-one years old, a boy with almost no education from a small town in Alabama, but he performed like a doctor of sixty from Massachusetts General.
“You must do something for Lieutenant Savage,” Grant said at noon, but there was nothing Penzoss could do. A fragment of shell, which could easily have been extracted in a hospital with proper instruments, had worked its way poisonously toward lung and heart. The pain was agonizing.
“Can’t you give him something?” Grant asked.
“I have a few Syrettes of morphine.”
“No better time to use them. There’ll be a rescue before dark.”
The medic’s frown indicated that he had given up hope of rescue on this day, but a scream from Savage drew his attention to that direction, and at Captain Grant’s command he administered the Syrette, breaking off the tip professionally and inserting the needle deep in a blood vessel of the left arm.
It was, as he had suspected, useless, for at 1300, when the heat was at its fiercest, the Texan died. Then began Captain Grant’s near approach to loss of self-control. Holding Savage in his arms, he started to tell Finnerty “write [37] that he was the most efficient officer ...” but when the words were spoken he realized how inadequate they were to describe this glowing stranger who had boarded the Dean so late and with such distinction.
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