Trial by Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  Peachy, he thought.

  9

  J.R. had been down in the Log Room when the Corsair crashed on deck. He was far enough down in the ship that he didn’t hear the actual impact, but the sailor manning up the sound-powered phones to PriFly suddenly yelled: “DC Central, aye!” and then turned to J.R. and told him the bad news.

  “Is there fire?” was J.R.’s first question. The talker relayed the question to PriFly.

  “Negative, sir. Bang down and then over the side. There are casualties on deck.”

  “Okay,” J.R. said, relaxing just a bit. There was actually nothing he, as fire marshal, needed to do at this moment. There were crash crews pre-positioned on the flight deck as well as two medical teams. Something like this would have had a destroyer racing to pilot-rescue quarters, but on the carrier, if the crash hadn’t sparked a major conflagration, PriFly and the flight deck crews would have it under control pretty quick. The sad truth was that although a crash on deck was definitely an inconvenience and sometimes a precursor to a really big mess, if a plane wiped out and went over the side, the major effort then became one of search, rescue, and recovery of the pilot, which was not the carrier’s job. Flight ops would resume just as soon as the flight deck was cleared of any debris and the arresting gear declared ready to work again. J.R. knew that the fact that one of their brethren had crashed was certainly of poignant interest to the other guys still up in the pattern, but so were their gas gauges.

  His duty now as fire marshal was to inspect the firefighting equipment on the flight deck to see what had been damaged. He grabbed his steel helmet, which had the words FIRE MARSHAL stenciled in red on it, and headed for the flight deck. The general rule aboard an aircraft carrier was that, if you didn’t have a specific assignment on the flight deck during actual flight operations, you didn’t go out there. His showy helmet would help him avoid questions from the guys who did belong out there. He’d make a quick survey and then report to the cheng. He hoped they’d rescued the pilot but he couldn’t let thoughts about the pilot distract him. Death was a constant companion on an aircraft carrier, and one of the first things every man had to learn was how to carry on when a shipmate standing right next to you lost his life.

  He prepared to step through a hatch onto the flight deck when it opened in front of him. Two plane handlers were helping a third man, whose face and jersey were spattered with blood from a scalp injury, over the hatch coaming and into the relative quiet of the island.

  “Where’d he go over?” J.R. asked.

  “Port side, just aft of the deck-edge elevator, sir,” one of the men responded, and then they were gone, headed down three decks to sick bay.

  J.R. stepped through the hatch and dogged it behind him. The wind across the deck was nearing fifty miles an hour and he had to lean into it to stay upright, just like every man out there. He made his way through the densely parked planes waiting for their elevator rides, going hand over hand along wing edges and under the propellers with their hold-down straps attached. The rule was a strapped prop shouldn’t suddenly spin into motion, so it should be safe to walk under it. Wisdom dictated a quick look up into the cockpit before doing that. He glanced up at the signal halyards bowing aft from the ship’s mast, where he saw the Fox flag fluttering furiously at the dip. That meant that flight ops were suspended for the moment so there shouldn’t be anyone landing, although he could hear multiple engines out there in the landing pattern above the rushing wind.

  Once across the flight deck he headed aft along the deck-edge catwalks, with their AA guns securely wrapped in gray canvas shrouds. The deck-edge elevator had been in use when the crash occurred, so there were steel stanchions linked by safety chains around the notch in the flight deck to keep people from walking off the edge. With the elevator down, he had to walk around the notch, and that’s when he saw the brutal gouges in the wooden flight deck where the plane’s propeller had clawed its way over the side. He spied some medics down in an adjacent catwalk, tending to more bleeding crewmen, victims of the murderous splinters that prop had torn out of the deck and flung everywhere right about face level. There was a piece of horizontal stabilizer jammed into a catwalk where the plane had pitched over and down into the sea. A 20 mm gun mount was dangling by its cables from the deck edge. Fortunately, none of the ship’s guns had been manned, not when they were this close to Pearl.

  He saw a fire-main riser that had been torn out of its mounting, its twin bronze receptacles gleaming in the sunshine. Then he saw something else: down at the bottom of the catwalk, where the structure made a ninety-degree turn back into the edge of the flight deck, there was a bundle of red rags. He blinked, his brain trying to determine what it was looking at. Then he knew: one of the flight deck crewmen, a yellow shirt, except that now it was a blood red shirt, crumpled into the corner of the catwalk. He looked around to see who was nearby, but everyone he saw was busy. He dropped down into the catwalk and approached the body, for that was what it surely was. His gorge rose as he beheld the tattered remains, cut to pieces by that smashing propeller. Lungs, intestines, ribs, bright white bones, all coiled in a heap. He leaned over the catwalk and vomited at the sight. He hung over the side for a long moment, breathing but trying not to. Then he stood up. He’d come aboard in Bremerton right after the kamikaze attack; he’d never seen a dead body before, and that was not what he’d expected one would look like.

  He steadied himself and then went back along the catwalk to where the medics were treating one of the injured. He stood there for a moment, not knowing what to say. When one of the docs, a chief petty officer, looked up, he inclined his head in the direction of the dead man. The doc gave him a puzzled look and then understood. J.R.’s pasty face and thoroughly shocked expression had given him a pretty good clue.

  “Okay,” the medic said. “He dead?”

  J.R., who couldn’t trust his voice yet, just gulped and nodded.

  “Right,” the medic said. “But this guy isn’t and he needs to get below. We’ll take care of it, Lieutenant.” He paused for a second. “First one?” he asked.

  J.R. nodded again. For some reason, he thought he was about to cry.

  “Wish I could tell you that you’ll get used to it,” the medic said. “But the truth is, you don’t. And we ain’t even in WestPac yet.”

  10

  Gary Peck had been so far down in the main engineering spaces that he was unaware of the crash until the alarm came over the ship’s general announcing system, called the 1MC. He was sitting in Main Control, otherwise known as number one engine room. Everyone stopped what they were doing, waiting to see if the ship was going to go to general quarters. When that didn’t happen, he resumed his inspection of the water king’s boiler water report. It wasn’t that he wasn’t concerned for the pilot or the people on the flight deck. He was, but there were several hundred men poised to take care of that situation during flight ops and there was literally nothing he could contribute. The water king was a senior chief boilertender named Harold McKenzie, whose sole job was to monitor the feedwater circulating in the ship’s eight boilers. He had twenty-five years in service and probably knew more about the ship’s 600-psi boilers and main steam systems than anyone aboard except the chief engineer.

  Water was the key ingredient to any marine steam plant. The boilers turned it into main steam, which was then piped to huge steam turbines, which were themselves directly connected to the ship’s reduction gears and through them to the ship’s propellers. This wasn’t tea-kettle steam. This was a superheated vapor under 600 psi of pressure and heated to 850 degrees Fahrenheit. Pressurizing it and superheating it made it possible for the steam to transport enormous amounts of energy, which the turbines converted to a mechanical force capable of making the ship’s twenty-two-foot-diameter propellers turn at 300 RPM. It was imperative that the boiler’s steam-generating banks, made of high-quality steel tubing, were fed only the purest water possible. This meant that there could be no contaminants, such as dissolve
d oxygen or, even worse, salts of any kind. A boiler operating at ambient temperature and pressure could withstand contamination. A boiler operating at 600 psi and an 850-degree temperature could not. A minute amount of dissolved oxygen would immediately begin to create pits in the metal surfaces. A pit could lead to a hole, and a hole could lead to a boiler explosion. Salts could accumulate on the metal of the tubing and create scale, under which an invisible chemical reaction would begin, again leading to a hole and the failure of a boiler tube. Since all the ship’s water was distilled directly from seawater, salt intrusion was a constant threat.

  “Looks good, Chief,” Gary said after studying the reports. “Where do we stand on reserve feed?”

  “Sixty percent, Mister Peck,” the chief replied. “Fresh is at seventy. Evaps are working really well.”

  “Great,” Gary said. “We’ll have to see how well they hold up out in WestPac. Ask Chief Dyer to come around. I need to see the refueling plan for when we get back in.”

  Chief Dyer was the oil king, the counterpart to Chief McKenzie, only for fuel oil—and aviation gasoline. Franklin carried 6,300 tons of Navy Special Fuel Oil, allowing her to steam for 17,500 miles. She also carried 230,000 gallons of super high-octane gasoline for the airplane engines. Dyer had three jobs: keeping track of both the fuel and gasoline inventories, ensuring there was no water in any of the fuels, and pumping the stored inventory to various tanks throughout the ship to keep her level at all times as fuel was expended. Dyer’s kingdom included all the fuel tanks, the underway replenishment gear by which Franklin could be refueled or refuel other ships at sea, the fuel and lubricant labs, and the master flood and counterflood station, by which he could deliberately alter the trim of the ship.

  Today Dyer had a problem: the diagrams for the CO2 fire-suppression systems didn’t seem to match the actual installations. There were aviation fueling stations on both sides of the hangar deck and the flight deck. These were connected to central pumping stations down below in the auxiliary machinery rooms. If an enemy attack was expected, the topside fueling lines were drained down into the deep tanks and the lines themselves were then filled with CO2 gas. Dyer said that the gas lines weren’t matching up with the pumping station risers. Gary decided to call J.R., keeper of the damage control diagrams.

  “You’re not all alone with that problem,” J.R. told him. “Looks like Hogan’s goat drew up my DC diagrams.”

  “Crap,” Gary said. “I guess I better tell the cheng.”

  J.R. told him what he’d set in motion to get his diagrams straightened out. “They’re ensigns, but they’re getting good at it. My new problem is that I’m gonna have to realign all the controls in that conflagration station, now that I know how all dem bones are connected.”

  “I don’t wanna hear that,” Gary said. “Where the hell am I gonna find ensigns?”

  “When in doubt, ask your chief,” J.R. said. “He’s the Oil King. Gotta go—Cheng’s called a meeting on the flight deck damage.”

  “That guy get out?”

  “He did. One of the tin cans has him. We probably won’t get him back until after we go back in to Pearl. I hear we’re headed west pretty soon.”

  “’Bout time,” Gary said. “All this training. I’m ready to go fight some Japs.”

  “Careful what you wish for, shipmate,” J.R. said. “I hear those bastards fight back. Hard.”

  11

  George knocked on the captain’s stateroom door and then went through. The captain was sitting in an upholstered chair in a voluminous white terry-cloth bathrobe, which made him look even bigger than he was. George banished the thought of Moby Dick in a bathrobe. The captain was reading a thick sheaf of naval messages encased in a steel clipboard. He’d obviously just had a shower, and a long, hot one at that, considering the pink color of his face.

  “What’cha got, XO?” he asked, not actually looking up.

  “I understand from the ops boss that you don’t want to go back into Pearl,” George said. “That you want to depart for WestPac directly from the op-areas?”

  “That’s right,” the captain said. “We have plenty of fuel, most of the air group on board, and stores enough to get to Guam. I’ve asked for a tanker to come out of Midway so we can top off. Last thing we need now is shore leave in Honolulu.”

  “You’re worried about the crew losing their edge?”

  “What edge?” The captain snorted. “They’re barely qualified as it is. Besides, all those shore-duty headquarters pukes will want to fiddle and fine-tune until for Goddamned ever. At this rate we’ll miss the end of the war. I want to go now. The WestPac Service Force is awash in parts, people, fuel, and ammo. This way we don’t break up the training with a boozy weekend in Honolulu.”

  George couldn’t really argue with that. There was, of course, the matter of all those replacement personnel, spare engines, fresh food, four more Corsairs, the latest aviation charts, etc., all waiting on the pier for the Franklin to come back in after her shakedown period. On the other hand, the captain was right about a three-day weekend in Hawaii, although he didn’t dare mention his own real concern: that even more unhappy crewmen would jump ship. Morale wasn’t exactly wonderful just now. It wasn’t that the crew hated being on the ship. All they had to do was watch one of their escort destroyers crashing, pitching, and rolling through rough seas to appreciate their relatively comfortable circumstances. Nor was it a case of the crew despising or disliking the captain. There were probably no more than two dozen people who came in personal contact with the captain out of the 3,600 people on board.

  George thought it was the pace of operations since leaving the yard. A carrier never slept. If the ship wasn’t operating airplanes, then it was operating on airplanes, which required constant maintenance just to keep them flying, much less fighting. Then there were the endless hours of training and drilling. You couldn’t just put the high school class of last year out on the flight deck and expect them to keep their heads, literally; George figured more than half the crew—officers, chiefs, and enlisted—were new to Franklin and equally new to carrier aviation. The people who did know their way around carrier ops had to train the newbies and thus did double duty. People were tired, really tired, and now the captain wanted to head west without even a weekend off. George had no illusions about the tempo of operations en route. It would get worse.

  “Do you want me to make an announcement, then?” George asked.

  “No,” the captain said. “The four replacement planes are flying out later this afternoon. Once they’re aboard we’re gonna turn into the sunset and chase it. People will figure it out soon enough. I don’t believe in babying the crew, XO: they go where I tell them to and do what I demand of them when we get there. I want Admiral Nimitz to know that we’re not only ready to go back to war, but that we are eager to go back to war. The Navy didn’t man this thing to have people sitting around, polishing brass and passing inspections. Victory over the Goddamned Japs is in sight and I, for one, don’t plan to miss out on that. I didn’t take a step back in rank to sit out here in pineapple land looking at Diamond Head, got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” George said with a sinking feeling, thinking about all those loose ends flapping in the wind which he’d hoped to get some help with back at the Pearl Harbor shipyard. Like the problem of figuring out the actual configuration of the firefighting piping, or the CO2 system diagrams and controls. He hadn’t yet briefed the captain on these problems because he wanted to have a solution fully in view before he raised the problem.

  “Anything else?” the captain asked.

  “No, sir,” George said. “Engineering is chasing down some documentation problems in the damage control systems, but—”

  “But, what?” the captain said. “You mean like the conflagration station controls don’t match the actual piping configuration?”

  George’s surprise must have shown because the captain barked an unpleasant laugh. “Yeah, I know all about that. I know all about the oth
er problems, too. I also know you’ve got people working on it. I get around, XO, because nothing beats personal reconnaissance. I talk to people, I ask questions. Then I wait. I figure you’ll tell me when you’ve got both the problem identified and a fix in hand. I understand that. But don’t ever try to hide anything, XO. Got it?”

  “Absolutely, Captain, and I certainly wasn’t trying—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. I was an XO, too—don’t forget that. You’re doing fine. Now, I’ve got messages to read. I’ll speak to the crew in the morning once we’re safely on our way.”

  George got back to his office, wondering if his cheeks were still red. He should have known. Of course he should have known, if only because of some complaints he’d heard. The captain was accompanied by two Marines—one in front and one behind—whenever he left his cabin, even if he was only going up to the bridge. There’d been a lot of grumbling about how those Marines acted whenever the captain approached a doorway or hatch. The leading Marine would bellow “Gangway!” in a tone of voice that made it clear that it was not a request. Anyone about to step through the doorway had to leap back out of the way so that the captain and his guards could stride right through.

  The captain had overheard a couple of the Marines wondering if they should maybe tone it down a little. He had summoned the Marine detachment commander and told him not to change a thing. “You can see that I’m a big bruiser,” he’d said. “I don’t want to bowl someone over and hurt ’em just because I’m in a hurry. And I’m always in a hurry.” His orders had been somehow widely circulated, adding to the crew’s growing awareness of their imperious new skipper’s abrasive personality.