George was shocked. He still had no idea of how many dead crewmen were still out there on the flight deck waiting for their surviving shipmates to sweep their remains over the side with fire hoses. And then he’d have to send men into the hangar bays and the gallery deck to do the same thing. He’d been given reports that the gallery deck had been smashed up against the bottom of the flight deck. There’d been at least two squadrons’ worth of pilots waiting for the call to man their planes in the ready rooms on the gallery deck. And now the captain was saying he’d sail on to Pearl with just the remnants of the crew rather than take back the hundreds of men who’d had to jump into the sea to avoid being burned or blasted to death?
He tried to think of something more to say but just drew a blank. He was also peripherally aware of the reaction of the people on the bridge, who had to have overheard what the captain had just said. He thought about reminding the captain about his saying that all personnel who were not necessary to save the ship could get away from the calamity that was the USS Franklin. He was saved by a phone-talker.
“XO?”
“Yes?”
“Father Joe wants to know what to do about all the body parts.”
His heart fell. “Tell the chaplain to get on the phone.”
“This is Father O’Callahan here, XO.”
“Thank you for taking this on, Father. I’m at my wit’s end. I think we’ve lost almost a thousand men.”
“We all are, XO,” O’Callahan said. “Once an hour I’d think it would have been better if she’d rolled over and ended everyone’s misery. But she didn’t, so now we have to tend to the dead.”
“You’re right,” George said. “Okay, see if you can organize a working party with fire hoses into a single line abreast, the width of the flight deck. Walk as many firefighting hose streams down the deck as you can and sweep everything that will move into the catwalks. Then split the teams to hose out the catwalks. We’ll do a memorial ceremony at the appropriate time, but right now, all those bodies are a health hazard. And once the flight deck has been cleaned, they’ll have to go down to the hangar deck and do the same thing. Who’s in charge of the working parties?”
“I guess that would be me, XO,” Father Joe said. “No one else showed up.”
George sighed. “Right, Father. Thank you very much. I wish there were another way.”
“Their souls won’t care, XO. You’re correct—this mess out here is a health hazard. Are there any gunner’s mates left?”
“I’m sure there are a few, Father.”
“Send a few up here with shotguns from the armory, assuming it survived.”
“Shotguns?”
“For the seagulls, XO. The word is out among the gulls that there’s food here.”
Jee-zus, George thought. I did not need to hear that.
41
Two days later, J.R. found himself on the ship’s open forecastle, the scene of the towing operation. It was cooler in the shade of the overhanging flight deck than up on deck. He was a bit spellbound by the sight of 700 warships at anchor as Franklin entered the Ulithi Atoll anchorage area, a thousand miles distant from the bloodstained waters off Japan. He normally would have climbed up to vultures’ row to get a look at the Navy’s largest floating base west of Pearl, but the intense sun and the sight of all the damage on the flight deck had driven him down to the relative sanctuary of the forecastle and the anchor team. Besides, vultures’ row was gone.
The anchorage itself was huge—ten miles by fifteen miles—and surrounded by several small, bright green islands. Franklin had been there before, most recently after the October kamikaze strike. That time the anchorage had been full of carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers; now it was stuffed with the amphibious shipping getting ready for the impending invasion of Okinawa: troop transports, LSTs, LCIs, the rocket ships, and naval gunfire support destroyers. There were even four of the rocket artilery ships which had been refloated from the wreckage of Pearl Harbor and put back in service as shore bombardment platforms. J.R. hadn’t been aware that there were this many ships in the entire Navy.
There was a stiff evening breeze blowing across the atoll, so three fleet tugs were making up to Franklin’s scorched sides to hold her in position while she dropped and then backed down to set her port anchor. A large hospital ship, painted all white, was anchored nearby. There were several small boats circling her stern, apparently waiting to head for the Franklin with a fresh complement of doctors and hospital corpsmen.
He was entirely ready for this day to end, and still so shocked by what he had seen that he’d entirely lost his appetite by the time the wardroom reopened to feed the officers. The chief engineer had given him a truly horrible assignment the day before. J.R. was the fire marshal, and, as such, he’d been tasked to make a physical survey of all the fire-damaged parts of the ship. He was given two young Log Room yeomen to accompany him and record his findings, and, with a heavy heart, he’d set off down the flight deck to begin his dismal survey. The efforts of the previous days had swept most of the gore away from both the flight deck and the catwalks. Teams were now working on wrangling equipment that could lift the 1,000-pound engine carcasses in the hangar and get them overboard. The engines were the only visible remains of the fully armed and fueled aircraft that had been assembled aft in readiness for the morning launch. He and his two white-faced yeomen documented the holes in the flight deck, both from the Jap bomb that had penetrated as well as all the bombs that went off in the fire. They measured the holes left by the elevator assemblies that had been blown out of their wells when the big gasoline vapor explosion hit.
The wooden flight deck was a charred memory aft of the island. The fires had been so intense that the underlying steel structure had sagged down into the remains of the gallery deck, and, in some areas, all the way down to the hangar bays, creating blackened stalactites that in too many cases were still festooned with human remains. His two yeomen had abandoned him once they entered the forwardmost spaces of the gallery deck, that maze of air group offices, ready rooms, berthing compartments, and flight deck support equipment. They’d dropped their clipboards and run for the side to be sick as a man could be. The gallery deck had been subjected to what damage control experts called deck heave. In simplest terms, that meant that the deck of a compartment was hammered up into the ceiling of that compartment, with ghastly results for any occupants. He realized that every now fully compressed compartment would have to be cleaned and disinfected, which was going to be really tough as many of them were only two feet high instead of eight and stuffed with shattered furniture, crumpled bulkheads, tangles of wiring and ventilation ducts, and, worst of all, the reeking remains of a few hundred personnel.
He decided to give up after going halfway back into the wreckage. Between the bombs going off on the flight deck and the prolonged blast furnace that followed down on the hangar deck, there’d be no cleansing operation needed. When he arrived at a patch of sunlight shining through a sixty-foot-square hole in the flight deck, he reversed course and got the hell out of there. He took a breather up on the flight deck, sitting and then lying down on the scorched wooden deck, on his back, staring into the late afternoon sky and wondering if he was man enough to do this job. Two guys had come over and asked if he was okay.
“I’ve been down on the gallery deck,” he’d replied. “And, no, I am not okay. But I’m not hurt, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I know you,” one of them said. “You’re the officer who got us out of the messdecks. I’ve been dying to thank you. A lot of us have.”
“That was easy,” J.R. had said. “This shit—cleaning up, seeing what happened to people, counting—is Goddamned awful.”
It was evident that neither of them knew how to respond to that, so they both had saluted half-heartedly and trotted off. J.R. lay back on the deck and began to weep. He discovered that evening was approaching when he woke up. He tried to sit up but his eyes just wouldn’t stay open.
The next time he woke up it was morning and the 1MC was calling for the special sea and anchor detail for entering port. He’d spent the night sleeping in one of the ten-foot-long dimples in the flight deck. He wondered where his two scribes were.
42
George felt a sense of relief when the words “anchored, shift colors” blared out over the ship’s general announcing system. Ordinarily this would have been followed by the colors being hauled down from the mast, the Union Jack being raised forward on the jackstaff, and the national ensign aft on the flagstaff. Both the jackstaff and the flagstaff were missing, so George decided to just leave the stars and stripes up on the remaining stump of the ship’s mast.
The ship was eerily quiet in the late afternoon. There were no aircraft on deck or in the hangars. The normal hum of ventilation fans was missing, as only a few ventilation systems were intact. The deck division was busy rigging an accommodation ladder from one of the sponsons on the starboard side to receive the small flotilla of hospital ship boats headed their way. That fifteen-knot breeze was a Godsend. It was warmer down here in the Carolines, and that breeze blowing down the flight deck and especially through the hangar deck doors would make it possible for the recovery crews to keep working into the night without being constantly sick.
The captain had taken his evening meal in his sea cabin behind the bridge; George had been brought a hot steak sandwich and some fresh coffee while he remained on the bridge. Apparently, a great quantity of steak had thawed out during the fires, so everybody was eating steak in some form or other. He finally had a better idea of the human cost of their disaster off Shikoku, and he was dreading the moment when he presented it to the captain. Even more disturbing was the captain’s continuing grim determination to accuse all the able-bodied men who’d left the ship of desertion in time of war. The whole idea was unprecedented, if not outright preposterous. Anyone who’d seen what was happening to the Franklin that morning would be appalled at the notion that men trying to escape a holocaust on that scale would ever be charged with anything at all. He knew that at some point he would have to testify as to what the captain had said at the height of the explosions, and yet that order had been so vague that it was no wonder that men had leaped at the chance to get over to the Santa Fe or one of the destroyers. Many of them had probably believed that the order had been given to abandon ship.
He stared down at his piece of paper, the results of an hour-long confab with the department heads. Two more musters revealed that there were actually 704 men presently aboard; of those, only 285 were able to fully resume their duties. The remaining 419 were classified as wounded, some superficially, some with work-inhibiting injuries but who could remain aboard, and some who needed hospital attention. That left almost 3,000 men who needed to be accounted for.
There was no way of telling how many had been killed outright or who had died jumping overboard. Reports from Santa Fe and the escorting destroyers were incomplete, but it looked like there were about 1,000 men who’d been recovered, which meant that between 800 and 900, maybe more, men had been killed. These numbers didn’t include the air group’s casualties. A lot of the air group had been on its way to Japan that morning. Those who hadn’t launched yet had been either sitting in their planes, warming up, or waiting down on the gallery deck. He knew that none of them could have survived what happened.
He knew the numbers didn’t quite square but the reports from other ships were fragmentary. Still these numbers were beyond devastating. Eventually he would have to prepare a preliminary report for the Navy Department, but until the ship got back to Pearl and all the recovered men got back to Pearl, they wouldn’t be able to construct an accurate picture. If ever, he thought. He’d toured the hangar deck earlier with the captain. The blackened shards of human remains hanging everywhere brought home how hard this was going to be. The captain, once he’d seen what had happened to the gallery deck, had declined to go any further, especially since going up one of the ladders to the gallery deck level meant walking on crusty remains still coating the ladders throughout the hangar. Even worse was how the working parties were dealing with all the bits and pieces. They were working in two-man teams. One was carrying a steel GI can, the other a shovel. While one held the can, the other would scrape the deck and deposit whatever he’d scraped up into the can. When the can got too heavy, they’d carry it out to a sponson and jettison its contents overboard.
He and the captain walked over to the port side where one of the missing hangar bay doors was allowing in fresh air. The captain’s face was ashen. George thought his own face was probably ashen, too. “Great God,” the captain said softly. George could only nod. And God had certainly been missing in action that day, he thought, bitterly.
He wanted to curse the Japanese, but the American fleet had stuck its haughty face into homeland airspace, a mere sixty miles away. Of course they’d attacked. The captain turned around and stared into the blackened cavern that was the hangar deck. “This must have been what it was like for them at Midway,” he said softly, echoing something George had thought earlier. Only unlike the Japanese, they had managed to bring Franklin back. To what end George could only speculate, but it was something.
“The difference is,” he said, “they worship the idea of death in battle. Everyone has to die sometime, but the man who can die in battle garners supreme honor. We revere life; they revere death in service to their emperor.”
“Yeah, the divine Hirohito,” the captain sighed. “Divine spider is more like it.”
George decided to broach the topic of repatriating the Franklin personnel from the Santa Fe while he had the captain to himself. “Sir, I think we need to get all our people back from Santa Fe,” he began. “They don’t have room for that many additional people, and they’re not going back to Pearl when we do.”
The captain shook his head. “Nope,” he said, setting his jaw. “I want all Franklin officers and chiefs who are now on Santa Fe and the destroyers, and who are fit for service, to return to the ship, where I propose to serve them with a letter outlining what I propose to charge them with. The rest of the crew can go to a transport here in Ulithi to await a trip to Pearl. There’s always some ship or other going back to Pearl. They’re Goddamned deserters, and I won’t have them back aboard fomenting insubordination. Did you see my ‘personal-for’ message this morning?”
George nodded. The captain had sent a message out directly to the commanding officer of the Santa Fe, and a copy to all the ships who’d reported they had Franklin crewmen aboard, informing him that the Franklin crewmen aboard Santa Fe who hadn’t come aboard as casualties were to be treated as prisoners awaiting court-martial for desertion in time of war. He’d then said that Franklin’s damaged berthing and messing spaces could not accommodate the return of any other crewmen who’d been forced to go over the side.
George cringed when he’d read it and then wondered if any of the other commanding officers, including the skipper of Santa Fe, would comply. And what about the Franklin’s air group personnel who’d gone over to the cruiser? Were they facing charges? He made a mental note to write down that order the captain had issued when he’d said that men not necessary to the survival of the ship could escape. Maybe get it into the ship’s log as a late entry. That was going to be the only thing that could save all those people on Santa Fe. What a mess.
“I’m serious about this, XO,” the captain continued. “By the latest count, there were some seven hundred or so men who stayed aboard to save the ship. I want to honor them as much as I want to punish those who ran.”
“Some of those seven hundred didn’t get a choice, sir,” George protested. “They were trapped in various spaces by fire or damaged compartments.”
“And yet some of those who were trapped and then rescued by ship’s officers stayed to fight the fires. I get your point, XO. No broad brush. I will want to know the circumstances surrounding each man who survived the attack to be determined officially, from those who chose to r
emain and fight to those who took advantage of confusion, fires, explosions—to abandon their duty stations and run away.”
George nodded. He’d kind of been expecting this. “That’ll take some time, Captain,” he said. “And manpower.”
“Well, XO,” the captain said with a faint sneer. “When we leave here, we face something like a twelve-thousand-mile journey back to the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard. That’s halfway around the world. At fifteen knots, that gives you thirty-three days. I suggest you form a committee of department heads and get on with it. It’s not like we’ll have anything else to do, is it.”
Except keep cleaning, George thought. While trying not to weep.
43
J.R. found himself almost alone in the one operational wardroom. It was midmorning, and the ship had been at sea since yesterday, on her way to Pearl at last, some 4,000 miles to the east. God, he thought, but the Pacific Ocean was big. There were four destroyers in company to provide an escort. Word was that they’d stop briefly for fuel and reprovisioning, and then proceed on to the Panama Canal. It would take them twelve days just to make the transit to Pearl. Apparently, a fleet oiler had been dispatched to meet Franklin mid-ocean to refuel her and, more importantly, the destroyers, since the captain was unwilling to have them come alongside to take fuel from the badly damaged carrier. There’d been a series of engineering problems down in the main plant, with boilers being shut down due to contaminated fuel or feedwater. The ship’s electrical grid was hanging together by various scorched threads. The captain didn’t want to add a collision to Franklin’s already mountainous woes.
J.R. was also heartsick. He was halfway through his assignment to detail all the damage, and that had turned into a horrendous task, both in its scope and because of what he and his two reluctant scribes had encountered. He’d asked the cheng if his intrepid two ensigns could replace the two kids from the Log Room. A day later the cheng informed him that Ensign Sweet had been killed in the first hour of the attack when a wave of burning aviation fuel had overflowed from the flight deck down into his gunnery station in the catwalks. Ensign Sauer was officially reported as missing but, like most of those declared missing, was probably gone.
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