Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  "I feel like we're invading Hawaii," George Tombs said. "I wish we were," McKay said.

  As the line of assault boats advanced, the battleships and destroyers joined the cruisers in a final stupefying bombardment of the beaches. While the amphtracs crawled across the barrier reef, another wave of seventy-two planes roared in from the carriers, some firing rockets that echoed across the water like the crack of a giant whip.

  The moment the amphtracs began the final rush to the beaches, the impossible began to happen. Sheets of Japanese machine-gun fire poured across the water toward them. Geysers leaped beside the fragile boats as mortar and artillery shells fell among them. On the beaches, machine guns cut down hundreds of the first Marines out of the boats. Mortar and artillery fire blew up amphtracs and LST's.

  "I can't believe it!" George Tombs cried, watching the bodies pile up. "How in Christ could they have survived that bombardment?"

  "They did," McKay said. "Now the question is what are we going to do about it?"

  For the time being, the answer was nothing. They could only watch as the situation on the beaches worsened. Japanese artillery firing from concealed positions inland soon had the coral reef zeroed in. As the fourth wave of amphtracs began crawling across it, the whole reef erupted with explosions from heavy shells.

  "My God, they must have mined it," George Tombs said. "That's artillery," McKay said. "Watch. You'll see the rounds coming in."

  "What wave is Sammy in?"

  "That one."

  He picked up the telephone and called Byron Maher in flag plot. "Why can't our spotter planes locate that artillery?" he asked. "We could blow them away with a couple of salvos."

  "I'll mention it to the admiral."

  Maher was back on the line in sixty seconds. "He says he doesn't want to interfere with Admiral Turner's operation."

  By the book. That was how Spruance operated. It was also an admission that he had no desire to tangle with Kelly Turner's violent temper and gigantic ego. At the War College, Spruance had been the senior faculty member, but Turner had overshadowed him with the brilliance of his imagination, the sheer cleverness of his lectures. He had only one flaw. He was incapable of admitting a mistake.

  Was his son being sacrificed to the system that had destroyed Win Kemble, the system that said, in essence, Those whom Cominch blessed could do no wrong?

  No, no. McKay struggled to control his careening emotions. It was the fog of war — one of Spruance's favorite phrases — that was menacing Sammy. He could hear Spruance's dry voice in the lecture hall describing how they must try to plan every detail of a forthcoming battle — and at the same time be prepared, once the battle began, to deal with confusion, chaos as the fog of war descended.

  For the rest of the day, the greatest naval force ever assembled could only watch helplessly, less than a mile offshore, while the Marines fought for their lives against an enemy who resisted with apparently unquenchable confidence. The night brought furious counterattacks, which were repulsed with the help of showers of star shells fired by the fleet. Their phosphorous glow illuminated the Japanese tanks and infantry at pointblank range for Marine field artillery.

  Around midnight, an exhausted McKay tried to sleep. It was impossible. He got up and tried to write a letter to Rita, telling her about his dinner with Sammy. No go there, either. It was too unbearable. All the love he had never been able to express, the words he had never been able to say to Sammy wound through his brain, punctuated by the distant explosions on the beach.

  On the bridge he found Montgomery West was OOD. "I don't think we're going to sit here much longer, Captain," he said.

  "Why not?

  "Spruance just got a message from a submarine in the Philippine Sea. The whole Japanese fleet is heading this way."

  The Fog Of War

  Our air will first knock out enemy carriers, then will attack enemy battleships and cruisers to slow or disable them. Battle line will destroy enemy fleet either by fleet action if the enemy elects to fight or by sinking slowed or crippled ships if enemy retreats. Action against the enemy must be pushed vigorously by all hands to ensure complete destruction of his fleet.

  There it was — the battle plan that might end the warp that might get everyone, or almost everyone, home alive. On the bridge of the Jefferson City, Captain McKay read and reread the message Admiral Spruance had just sent to all the ships of the Fifth Fleet. There was no question that the showdown of the century — the decisive battle between the Japanese and American navies — was about to take place. Somewhere in the blank six hundred miles of ocean to the west, the Combined Fleet was steaming toward them.

  He thought of Sammy, under ferocious Japanese machine gun and mortar fire on Saipan. Keep your head down for a while, kiddo, he begged him. If we can do the job out here, those bozos may realize it's time to surrender.

  "Captain," the talker said, "Admiral Spruance wonders if you would like to join him on the forcastle."

  In five minutes he was walking up and down beside the man on whom his hope — all their hopes — depended.

  "You've done your share of night fighting in the Solomons, Arthur. What do you think of this?"

  He handed him an exchange of messages with Rear Admiral Willis Lee, commander of the battleship force, and Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander of the fleet's carriers.

  First came a query from Mitscher. "Do you desire night engagement? It may be we can make air contact late this afternoon and attack tonight. Otherwise we should retire to the eastward tonight."

  Lee replied, "Do not (repeat not) believe we should seek night engagement. Possible advantages of radar more than offset by difficulties of communication and lack of training in fleet tactics at night. Would press pursuit of damaged or fleeing enemy, however, at any time."

  What daring, McKay thought. Was there an admiral in the world who would hesitate to pursue a damaged or fleeing enemy? McKay suddenly remembered Bull Halsey's anguished face in the Solomons. He heard him saying, You can't win a war without losing ships.

  "I'd ignore Lee if you want a fight to the finish. It may cost us a few ships, but once you sink your teeth into them, they'll never get away."

  Spruance looked past him into the empty western ocean, his face expressionless as usual.

  "Do you remember my lecture on the battle of Tsushima Strait?" Spruance asked.

  “Of course.”

  "I've always admired the way Admiral Togo waited for the Russian fleet to come to him. Do you think this situation is similar?"

  "In some ways. But not in others."

  "You're thinking of the carriers. You were always talking about carriers at the War College, Arthur. Why didn't you become an aviator?"

  The irritation in Spruance's usually emotionless voice was unmistakable. It was the old struggle for rank and power between the battleship and carrier men, still being fought out here six hundred miles from the Japanese coast.

  "My wife — and my friend Win Kemble — talked me out of it.”

  They walked up and down the forecastle for another hour. Spruance maintained an icy silence.

  Back on the bridge, Officer of the Deck Montgomery West ventured a cautious question.

  "Is there a fight for the heavyweight championship on the card, Captain?"

  "I doubt it," McKay said. "We're going to play it safe."

  For a moment he saw himself storming into flag plot to berate Spruance, to goad him into becoming Bull Halsey for a day and a night. Ships would sink, men would die —but thousands more would die the other way. The war would stretch over time's horizon, where grinning death waited for Sammy, the crew of the Jefferson City.

  But he was only a captain. A man who gave orders — and obeyed them.

  Again the intimation of death seized him like a spasm of malaria. It simultaneously burned and chilled his flesh. He struggled for calm, for hope. Maybe it was only his own death that he foresaw.

  For the first time, Captain McKay hoped so.

  "Wh
at the fuck's goin' on?" Jack Peterson wanted to know.

  He and the team of his gun director — Camutti, Daley, the Radical — stood on the wing outside main forward in the dusk watching the fleet swinging east, away from the enemy. From horizon to horizon, the carriers and battleships and cruisers made graceful simultaneous turns like dancers in a gigantic ballet. Their wakes formed huge white loops in the inky water.

  Lieutenant Commander Mullenoe emerged from main forward to join them. From his post at the forty-millimeter gun director just below them, Flanagan asked the gunnery boss for an explanation.

  "I don't know any more than you do," he said. But his disgust was evident. The Japs were somewhere in the darkening sea to the west. They were running away from them.

  "We can't be afraid of those guys, can we, Commander? With this fleet?" Jack said.

  "I hope not," Mullenoe said.

  “All hands man your battle stations!"

  The blue sky was full of Japanese and American planes, rolling, diving, climbing, burning, exploding above them.

  On the bridge, Captain McKay watched the struggle unfold with bitter satisfaction. Instead of hurling a first strike at an enemy already battered by American radar-controlled gunnery during the night, the Fifth Fleet was fighting on the defensive, allowing the Japanese commander to throw every plane in his air force at them, plus whatever he could scrape from nearby Guam. He was demonstrating to Admiral Spruance and Admiral Lee that war at sea had changed drastically since the battle of Tsushima Strait in 1905.

  The Jefferson City was part of the inner battle line, close to the carriers. Beyond them stretched a dozen battleships and six times that many destroyers, their guns pointing skyward.

  In the first stages of the battle, the flagship did not have to fire a gun. "Our Combat Air Patrol is doing an incredible job," Montgomery West reported from CIC. "They shot down ninety percent of that first attack, and the picket destroyers got the rest."

  But the first attack was only the beginning. Within the hour, the radar screens swarmed with pips of over a hundred more planes. Some of the torpedo bombers, Nakajima B6N's known as Jills, got past the CAP and roared over the battleships toward their primary target, the carriers. Frank Flanagan hunched against his forty-millimeter gun director and poured shells at one of these two-engined craft as it zoomed past them at wave-top height. Ships all around them were firing at it too. Flames burst from its belly and it exploded.

  A cry of anguish from the men on the forty-millimeter mount below him jerked Flanagan's eyes away from this satisfying sight. The pointer on the mount, the man who aimed the guns if Flanagan or his director was disabled, was sprawled over the breeches. The other men were screaming and falling off the mount, frantically brushing at some substance that was all over their blue shirts. It took Flanagan a moment to realize it was blood. It took him another moment to realize that the pointer, an easygoing kid from Boston, had no head. His body had spewed blood all over the rest of the gun crew.

  "What happened?" Flanagan shouted.

  They pointed hysterically across the water at a cruiser that was firing at another Jill up ahead of them. As the plane passed between them and the Jefferson City, at least a half dozen forty-millimeter shells whined over Flanagan's head.

  "Bridge, this is forty-millimeter mount one," Flanagan cried. "Tell those guys to starboard that they're firing into us. They just killed my pointer."

  "Get him off the mount and resume firing," said the new air defense officer, Lieutenant Salvatore Calabrese.

  Flanagan passed on the order. The gun crew refused to obey it. They were totally demoralized, crying, brushing at the blood, staring at the cruiser, ready to duck another round. Flanagan scrambled down the ladder to the mount and dragged the dead pointer off his seat, trying not to look at the ugly mass of ravaged flesh between his shoulders.

  "Now get back on those goddamn guns," he shouted.

  They obeyed him and Flanagan scrambled back to his gun director. He had barely put on his earphones again when Calabrese said, "Mount one, take that plane bearing zero one five."

  It was another Jill that must have been hit by the Combat Air Patrol. It was smoking and burning, and the pilot, visible at the controls, looked dead. His hands were on his wheel but his head lolled to one side. The five-inch guns erupted with their usual ear-splitting concussions, but the Jap was too close for the proximity fuses to work. It happened so fast, Flanagan could not get him in his gun director. His hands, slippery with the pointer's blood, could not seem to grasp the handles firmly. His guns pounded, but the shots went low and his next rounds were high.

  The careening green plane tipped to one side. He had no torpedo. He had launched that long ago. His nose dipped and it looked as if he was going to crash either in the water or against the cruiser's hull. But at the last moment the pilot tried to pull up and get over her to the carrier a thousand yards beyond her. The Jap had just enough strength to attempt this last defiant maneuver.

  He did not manage it. Instead, he smashed into the main battery gun director. The plane cartwheeled to the right and exploded in the water on the port side. The impact tore the gun director off its hydraulic moorings as cleanly and as murderously as the forty-millimeter shell had decapitated the pointer. Over the gunnery circuit Flanagan heard Jack Peterson cry, "Jesus Christ!"

  Before Flanagan's horrified eyes, the director toppled from the superstructure, hit the railing of the flag bridge and bounded out beyond the main deck into the sea. For a second it poised there on the surface beside the burning fragments of the plane and Flanagan thought, It will float. They'll get out. A second later the director vanished. There was only a swirl of blue-green water and the sea resumed its blank expressionless face.

  "Jack, Jack," Flanagan sobbed. "No. Jesus. No."

  The air battle raged for the rest of the day, with amazingly light damage to the American Fleet. Listening to the exultant American pilots as they blasted the enemy from the sky, Captain McKay soon realized that the Japanese were not the skilled airmen who had swirled out of the sun to smash the Enterprise and the Hornet in the Solomons. They were poorly trained replacements for those lost veterans.

  From CIC, the number of reported kills reached astronomical heights. "We've shot down at least three hundred and fifty of them," West reported.

  By the time the defensive battle ended, it was, late in the afternoon. The American carriers turned into the east wind to launch their dive bombers and torpedo planes. When these pilots reached the enemy, three hundred miles to the west, there were only twenty minutes of daylight left. They scored hits on a few carriers but darkness swiftly shrouded their targets. Ninety percent of the Combined Fleet steamed on untouched.

  As the American pilots groped back to their carriers, the radio became a chaos of desperate voices reporting imminent disaster.

  "Candy? Candy? This is Batman. Come in, please." "Can anyone tell me where I am?"

  "Give me a vector. Can anyone give me a vector?"

  Spruance was finally forced to order the carriers to turn on their landing lights to prevent a catastrophe. The Americans spent the night frantically fishing pilots from the sea — while the beaten Japanese Fleet, shorn of its air defenses, fled to safety. The frustration in the wardroom of the Jefferson City was intense.

  "We should have had them by the balls by now," Bob Mullenoe yelled, kicking a chair halfway across the room. "We should be flipping coins to see who was going to sink the cripples."

  Everyone felt the same way. Even Edwin Moss could not think of anything good to say about Admiral Spruance.

  "Clean out their lockers. Put all their stuff in their seabags and take them down to the chaplain."

  Boats Homewood's voice was thick with grief. He was in a daze. Flanagan was almost as bad. He went to work on Daley's locker first. In the back was a glossy purple rosary, a packet of holy pictures his mother had sent him, a picture of a dark-haired Italian-looking girl he had never mentioned to anyone.

 
Camutti's stuff was mostly photos of females in various alluring poses. Some were movie starlets, others were straight porn from girlie magazines. Not one had a personal inscription. There was a packet of letters from his father but none from his supposed squadron of Philadelphia girlfriends.

  Jack Peterson's locker was the hardest. Almost everything in it made Flanagan weep. The spitshined black shoes, the carefully folded tailor-made blue uniform. In the back, a lot of pictures of women with undying testaments of love written on them and a packet of Martha Johnson's letters, which triggered a spasm of guilt as well as grief.

  What else? His hand touched metal — a lot of it. Almost as much leather. He peered into the dark coffinlike rectangle and saw at least a dozen silver bracelets and as many wallets.

  Jack was the thief. For a moment Flanagan was too stunned to think. Then he acted instinctively. He stuffed the loot into the pockets of his dungarees. No one was watching him. Everyone in the division was in a funk over the way Jack and his team had died. They stayed as far away as possible from this ritual removal of the effects of the dead.

  Flanagan took the seabags down to the chaplain's office and left them with his yeoman. Then he began a frantic search for Boats Homewood. He did not know what to do with the loot. If he returned it to the rightful owners, Jack's reputation would be ruined forever. If he threw it over the side, was he Jack's accomplice?

  He could not find Boats anywhere. Flanagan's bulging, clinking pockets made him more and more frantic. Someone said he had seen Homewood go up on deck. Flanagan started at the bow and worked his way down the starboard side. The ship was steaming west with the rest of the fleet, in pursuit of the Japs. The grand strategy of the battle of the Philippine. Sea was beyond Flanagan. He still thought the shootout that would end the war was imminent.