Trial by Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  Under pressure, he thought, just like the last one. Now what: wait for some of that pressure to bleed off? Or go ahead and flip the damned thing open. He recalled the tension in the XO’s voice. Jap torpedo bombers probing the defensive perimeters of the task force, all of them looking for one carrier. He lay down on the deck and spun the wheel. Once again, he released a muscular column of air, even noisier than the last one because it was being channeled through a much smaller opening. It helped that he knew what to expect. He put his head down and waited for the steady roar of air to subside and immediately fell asleep. He was awakened by the sudden silence. It took him a full minute to gather his wits and to remember what he was there to do, and falling asleep wasn’t it.

  He slipped down through the scuttle and scampered down the ladder. There were no battle lanterns still alive in the companionway vestibule, although he saw a dim yellow glow in the passageway going forward. He landed in the passageway only to discover there was two feet of water on the deck.

  For a moment he froze. The ship’s sinking, he thought. Has to be. There’s no way there can be water here. It took everything he had to get ahold of himself. His arms and legs hurt. His feet hurt. The air in the passageway was so humid that he could hardly breathe. He started forward and immediately tripped over something. He went down and hit his head on a bulkhead. Once again, the sudden pain cleared his brain.

  Firefighting water. The whole world had been shooting firefighting water into Franklin’s roasted innards. Water had to go somewhere. Some of it had gone over the side, but most of it had come down here.

  He hurried now, trying to convince himself that the water wasn’t rising. Part of his brain knew it wasn’t; another part, the survival part, wasn’t so damn sure. Here and there some battle lanterns were still barely glowing; most had died. He knew where he was, though, and he’d traveled this route at least a couple of times a day. Still: it was more than a little unnerving. The ship was unusually quiet, with no ventilation, no throngs of sailors moving fore and aft in the passageways, no other machinery running, no lights, and an atmosphere that was an ugly stew of soot particles, high-explosive residue, and the unmistakable stench of violent death. The starboard list was icing on the cake, and when the ship rolled, even just a little, part of his brain waited to make sure it rolled back the other way. Each and every time.

  Finally, he reached the passageway that led to Damage Control Central and the Log Room. The doors to the various offices along this passageway were not watertight doors, the theory being that if the sea was loose on this deck, the ship was a goner anyway. There was one operable battle lantern that had come off its bracket and now lay on the deck, covered by three inches of water on the down side of the list. It stared back at him like a baleful, slightly green eye, as if daring him to go past it. He reached for the Log Room door handle and then had an evil thought. He pulled out his pocketknife and rapped sharply on the door. He grinned as he imagined the expressions inside—this passageway had been filled with hot smoke, so what kind of hoodoo was banging on the door? He knocked again and the door finally opened. It was the chief engineer who was staring back at him. Behind him a small sea of wide-eyed faces looked ready to bolt.

  J.R. adopted a formal messenger posture and informed the cheng that, in the parlance of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy, the captain sends his compliments and that the chief engineer’s presence was required in number one engine room. It looked like the cheng got the joke, although the men behind him still didn’t seem to be so sure. The last guy who’d cracked that door had gasped when he saw the conditions, thereby inhaling enough carbon monoxide to actually kill him on the spot.

  J.R. stepped in and closed the door behind him. He explained to everyone that he had a relatively clear route for them to get down into Main Control and that Lieutenant McCauley had a boiler lit off and was close to bringing the forced-draft blowers on the line. He decided to forego any talk of Jap torpedo bombers out there in the darkness until one petty officer declared he wasn’t leaving the space. But before J.R. could explain the need for haste, the chief engineer announced that anyone who didn’t want to leave the space could stay, as long as they understood that when the big blowers came on the line, they’d suck all the air out of the ship’s interior because the intake plenums had been breached. Any resistance to leaving vanished.

  It took J.R. and his trusty parade much less time to get back to the ladder leading down to the engine room. The chief engineer led the way down, leaving J.R. alone at the top of the ladder. The entrance to number two fireroom was fifty feet away, and already he could feel a strong draft of air ruffling his uniform as that boiler began to crave some serious air. He tried to decide where to go: back to the flight deck and forward again? He experienced a sudden blinking fit as the grainy air swept by him. God, he could absolutely murder a cup of coffee.

  That’s it, then, he thought. They get steam up in number two firehouse? The first thing they’ll do is make coffee. He trotted over to the hatch leading down into the fireroom and happily dropped down into familiar territory. The sudden smell of steam, hot wet lagging, and fuel oil made him think he was finally home. And coffee. By all the gods, he could smell coffee!

  35

  George gave a short yelp of joy when he got the word that there were snipes in both a fireroom and an engine room. If they could get and keep that boiler on the line, they’d have serious electrical power, not to mention a way to roll machinery in other spaces. They’d get the big fire pumps going. Lighting in the undamaged passageways. Maybe even guns and radar. And, perhaps most importantly, a way to get this damned list off the ship.

  George knew that the list was a much more serious problem than most people appreciated. The Essex-class carriers had gone to sea with slim margins when it came to stability. As everything else had been unfolding, he’d been doing some calculations on what it would take to get the ship back on an even keel. They’d have to counterflood, filling some voids on the port side built into the ship for this very purpose. More water in counterflooding tanks would actually help the stability problem by lowering the ship’s center of gravity. The other way to make the ship’s stability less precarious was to jettison topside weight, especially on the flight deck. Normally he’d have called the air boss, but the Air Department had been decapitated when PriFly was blown off the side of the island. At that moment Father Joe showed up on the bridge. He’d been out exploring, apparently, looking for stragglers who might have taken shelter in nooks and crannies around the forward flight deck and leading them to safety on the starboard side of the island. He reported he had a “crew” of about two dozen badly frightened sailors.

  George seized on the sudden availability of “hands.” He explained to Father Joe what he needed. The chaplain seemed a bit confused, but George didn’t have time to explain the concept of metacentric height just now.

  “Listen to me, Father,” George said. “I need every Goddamned thing that can be moved thrown over the side. Every Goddamned thing out there. Yellow-gear, cranes, plane wreckage, loose guns, ammo, burnt-out ordnance, bodies—every Goddamned thing.”

  “Um, yessir, XO. But, bodies too? Can’t we—”

  “Everything, Father. Our metacentric height right now is probably measured in inches.”

  George could tell from the chaplain’s expression that he didn’t have any idea of what George was talking about, but being Father Joe, he nodded and left the bridge to get to work. Give me ten officers as good as that Jesuit priest, George thought, and he could send the whole rest of the wardroom home.

  “XO.” This time, it wasn’t a phone-talker.

  George looked across the pilothouse. The captain was awake and calling for him. He walked over to the captain’s chair, still holding the coffee mug he’d filched earlier. “What time is it?” the captain asked, in a groggy voice. “What’s our status?”

  George looked at his watch. He’d forgotten to wind it. He looked back across the bridge at the ship’s
clock. “Almost twenty-three hundred,” he said. “We’re still afloat. Pittsburgh’s got us making three knots. The task force night-fighter CAP has been engaging Bettys who are probably looking for us.”

  A sudden rain squall lashed the front windows, sending a fine spray through the tattered glass panes. The captain blinked when he felt his face getting wet. His face looked extremely haggard in the red light from the central pelorus.

  “This shitty weather is probably saving us right now,” George continued. “That and our night-fighters. The good news is that the snipes have re-manned a couple of main spaces and we soon should have both ship’s service power and maybe even an engine.”

  The captain closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he sat up. “How many snipes we still have on board?” he asked.

  “The B-division officer, Lieutenant Gary Peck, has one partial fireroom crew manning up number two fireroom,” he said. “The chief engineer is headed down into number one engine room with his Log Room and DC Central people if Lieutenant McCauley can find a route.”

  The captain frowned. “The Log Room?” he said. “Those people aren’t main-hole engineers.”

  “They’re about to be,” George said. “They’ve been trapped in the Log Room since the first explosions. I’m guessing they’ll be very happy to go make steam. Lieutenant McCauley reported he found a way to de-smoke the third deck main passageways and is working on leading them out.”

  “God Almighty, XO,” the captain said in a low growl. “Two lieutenants, one department head, and what, thirty Log Room yeomen? How many of this crew have deserted?”

  George saw some of the enlisted watchstanders around the pilothouse recoil when they heard the captain say that word.

  “I’d hardly call it desertion when the choice is to burn to death or jump,” George said. “And if they jumped with their helmets and life jackets on, they probably didn’t survive the fall. As to your question, until we get an actual face-to-face muster, we won’t know what we’ve got left.”

  “I don’t understand,” the captain said. “The entire engineering department is below the armored deck. Where are all those people?”

  George realized then that the captain had not fully absorbed the scale of the calamity that had befallen his ship.

  “The Jap bomb or bombs ruptured the structure containing the air supply to the main holes, as well as the uptake ducting leading up to the stacks. The main spaces were enveloped in smoke from the hangar deck as well as stack gas from the boilers themselves. The main holes were all abandoned once the air ran out.”

  “I was never told that,” the captain complained.

  “Well, actually, the chief engineer requested permission to abandon the main spaces and you gave it to him, Captain. By then the world was ending back aft, so I can well imagine you might not remember it.”

  “So, where the hell are they now?” the captain snapped, ignoring what George had just told him.

  “In the event of a big fire in the main spaces, they train to get out and then muster by watch-section on the hangar deck so they can be put on damage control teams. That wasn’t possible, so many of them ended up out on sponson decks or all the way back on the fantail. Those who survived the jump are probably on the Santa Fe or one of the destroyers that came in to recover our people. Or hiding out in various shops or even their berthing compartments. They’d have no way of knowing it’s safe to come out. Especially since it probably isn’t safe to come out. There’s no breathable air belowdecks.”

  “You’re telling me that a third of my crew made their own decision to abandon ship.”

  “When burning avgas started pouring over the round-down and onto the fantail, I’m guessing that wasn’t a hard decision for anybody back there to make,” George pointed out.

  “XO.” A talker, this time.

  “What?” George snapped.

  “Lieutenant Peck says he’s ready to bring number two boiler on the line and send steam to number one engine room.”

  “XO, aye,” George replied. “Tell him the priority is to get a generator on the line as soon as possible.”

  The talker acknowledged and repeated the message to the boiler room.

  “XO?” the captain said, softly.

  “Sir?”

  “Those are my decisions to make from here on out, got it?”

  George felt his face flush in the darkness. He’d been handling everything for so long he’d never thought to consult the captain, who’d been sitting right there. “Aye, aye, sir,” he said, automatically. “Do you have other orders?”

  “Getting power is important,” the captain said. “But right now, getting away from the Japs is paramount. I want whatever steam number two fireroom is producing to be dedicated to one ship’s service generator and two engines. Instruct the chief engineer to limit power distribution until we have two boilers on the line. That’ll give us fifteen knots and we can then break this tow. Then we’ll start distributing power throughout the ship, starting with air-search radar and guns.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” George said. He wondered if the captain remembered the air-search radar antenna landing on top of the island in the first few minutes of the disaster.

  The captain got out of his chair, gave everyone in the pilothouse a stony look, and then headed aft to his sea cabin. George took a seat on the navigator’s stool and dialed up number one engine room to tell the cheng the plan. He was still a bit red-faced about his chain of command faux pas. And yet, the captain had seemed to be strangely passive for the worst of the conflagration; George had simply stepped up. Now that the captain was apparently “back,” he felt a little bit better. He realized he was more than ready to hand command back to someone else.

  Now, he thought: Why am I sitting here? Oh, yeah, number two fireroom: when can we have two boilers?

  36

  “XO.”

  George opened his eyes. “What?”

  “Fresh coffee,” the junior officer of the deck said. “And I think the captain’s up.”

  George took the hot ceramic mug and sat back to inhale the fragrant steam. Then he realized the significance of what the JOOD had just told him. Balancing his mug, he slid down out of the unit-commander’s chair on the port side of the pilothouse. If an admiral had still been aboard, that would have been his chair. George definitely didn’t want to have the captain find him occupying the admiral’s chair. He stood by the center pelorus with one arm hooked around it. He’d been so tired that he’d finally just had to sleep. Sitting in the captain’s chair was an even bigger sin, so he’d opted for the port side. He remembered someone draping a coat over him as he fell asleep. Now he could barely make out the outlines of the flight deck below in the light of false dawn. “Where are we?” he asked.

  One of the quartermasters told him the ship was 150 miles from the southernmost home islands of Japan. Well, that’s better than fifty miles, he thought.

  The officer of the deck joined him at the center pelorus with his own coffee in hand to bring him up to speed.

  “We’re headed southeast and we’re making ten knots, courtesy of two boilers and two engines,” he began. “The captain called out from his sea cabin and told us to break the tow, so we’ve just sent a flashing light message to Pittsburgh that we want to disengage.”

  “How many boilers we have on the line?” George asked. “Two?”

  “Two now and a third one lit off and raising main steam. That’ll give us fifteen knots.”

  George nodded. The sun hadn’t yet risen. The air was clear but still cold. A sea breeze was blowing lazily over a slate-gray sea. “We have escorts?” he asked.

  “Indeed, we do,” the OOD replied. “Enterprise and Wasp are out ahead, about three or four miles. Santa Fe and four destroyers are out on defensive stations around us. Admiral Davison formed up a new task group of damaged ships, Task Group 58.1. We’re all headed to Ulithi.”

  “What happened to Wasp and the Big E?” George asked.

  “Kami
kazes,” the OOD said. “They’re nowhere as bad off as we are, but we’re guessing Admiral Spruance decided to get them away from all those airfields on Kyushu and Shikoku. Hancock has CAP up because there’ve been Jap snoopers out all night. They apparently know about Task Group Cripple.”

  George snorted. The American fleet had come to introduce the Japanese home islands to carrier warfare, he thought. Seemed like the Japs had been more than ready to introduce the Americans to two unsinkable island aircraft carriers named Kyushu and Shikoku. All that talk of invading Japan soon would need some rethinking if what had happened to Franklin was any indication.

  He could finally see the other ships as daylight bloomed. Pittsburgh was in the process of dropping back to get closer to Franklin’s bow. There was a small crowd on her fantail preparing to heave in their towing hawser. Three destroyers cruised along in the light chop nearby, two on one side, one on the other, and probably a fourth astern. He couldn’t see Santa Fe.

  Normally there would have been several hundred men on the flight deck by now, swarming around planes and getting ready for a launch, but this morning there wasn’t a single soul. Bloody coils of ship-to-ship lines still dangled into the catwalks over on the starboard side. George registered the sad silence down below while the reality of the catastrophe came flooding back. He was almost afraid to go out on the port bridgewing.