“I’m sure you and Pick had other plans for this afternoon,” Jeanne Sayre said.
“This is fine,” he said. “I’m glad to be here.”
“Even though you’re going to have to have your uniform cleaned, if it’s not ruined, not to mention buying shoes, which have already been ruined?” she asked, smiling tolerantly.
“I’ve never had a chance to do something like this before,” Stecker said.
“My husband too rarely gets the chance to do anything like this,” Jeanne Sayre said. “He really works too hard, and he’s reluctant—he’s really a nice guy—to ask his aides to ‘volunteer.’ I saw his eyes light up when he heard Pick was a real sailor. I didn’t have the heart to kick him under the table when he asked if anybody would like a little sail.”
“Pick’s having a fine time,” Stecker said, smiling.
He’d be having a much better time, of course, if it wasn’t for you, the admiral, and me; and it was just him and your well-stacked daughter sailing off into the sunset on this goddamned little boat.
The boat at the moment started to change direction. Stecker’s eyes reflected his concern.
“We’re turning,” she said. “I guess my husband decided we’re far enough offshore.”
The Martha III came to a vertical position, and then started heeling in the other direction.
“Man overboard!” a male voice, obviously the admiral’s, cried.
For a moment, Stecker thought it was some sort of joke in bad taste, but then he saw the look on Mrs. Sayre’s face, and knew it was no joke. Obviously, Pick, playing Viking up front, had lost his footing and gone into the water. There was a quick sense of amusement—serves the bastard right—quickly replaced by a feeling of concern. The water out there was choppy. People drowned when they fell off boats, particularly into choppy water.
He followed Jeanne Sayre as she went quickly to the cockpit. He looked forward. Pick hadn’t gone overboard. He was halfway between the bow and the cockpit. And he had taken his blouse off.
Pick ripped a circular life preserver free and threw it over the side; and then, in almost a continuous motion, he made a quick running dive over the side. He still had his socks on, Stecker saw, but he had removed his shoes.
Stecker looked over the stern. Surprisingly far behind the boat, he saw Martha Sayre Culhane’s head bobbing in the water, held up by an orange life preserver.
Mrs. Sayre had taken her husband’s position at the wheel, and while she watched both her husband (who was lowering the mainsail) and her daughter behind her in the water, she was trying to start the gasoline auxiliary engine.
The moment it burst into life, Admiral Sayre lowered the sail all the way.
“Bring her around!” he ordered, and then pushed past Stecker to get a boat hook from the cabin.
Stecker felt both useless and absurd.
He searched the water and found first Martha and then Pickering. Pickering was swimming with sure, powerful strokes to Martha, towing the life ring behind him on its line.
It seemed to take a very long time for the Martha III to turn, but once she was through the turn, she seemed to pick up speed. When Stecker saw Martha again, Pick was beside her in the water.
It took three minutes before the Martha III reached them. Mrs. Sayre expertly stopped the boat beside them, and then Stecker and Admiral Sayre hauled them in, first Martha, and then Pickering. They were blue-lipped and shivering.
“Take them below, and get them out of their clothes,” Admiral Sayre said. “There’s still some blankets aboard?”
“Yes,” his wife said.
The admiral looked around the surface of the water, located a channel marker, and pointed it out to Stecker.
“Make for that,” he ordered. “I’ll relieve you in a minute.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Stecker said, obediently. And for the first time in his life he took the conn of a vessel underway.
When he went to the cabin, Admiral Sayre—seeing that his wife had already stripped their daughter of her dress and was working on her slip—faced Pickering aft before he ordered him out of his wet clothing. Pick stripped to his underwear, and then Admiral Sayre wrapped a blanket around his shoulders.
“I’ll hang your pants and shirt from the rigging. You’ll look like hell, but it will at least be dry,” the admiral said.
“Thank you, sir,” Pick said.
“Why the hell did you go over the side?” the admiral demanded.
“I thought maybe she was hurt,” Pick said.
“Well, I’m grateful,” the admiral said. He looked down the cabin. “You all right, honey?” he asked.
“A little wet,” Martha said.
“I’ll do what I can to dry your clothes,” her father said. “Jeanne, you go topside and take the helm.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral, sir,” his wife replied, dryly sarcastic.
Now wrapped, Martha and Pick looked at each other across the cabin.
And then Pick crossed the cabin to her.
“You want to tell me what that was all about?” Martha asked.
“If I had a bicycle, I would have ridden it no hands,” Pick said.
She walked past him to the ladder to the cockpit, and turned and walked in the other direction.
“It was a dumb thing to do,” Martha said. “You weren’t even wearing a life jacket. You could have drowned, you damn fool.”
“So could you have,” Pick said slowly. “And if you were going to drown, I wanted to drown with you.”
“Jesus,” she said. And she looked at him. “You’re crazy.”
“Just in love,” he said.
“My God, you are crazy,” she said.
“Maybe,” Pick said. “But that’s the way it is. And this was my last chance. We’re leaving Tuesday.”
“Jim Carstairs told me,” Martha said, and then: “Oh, Pick, what are you doing to me?” she asked, very softly.
“Nothing,” he said. “What I would like to do is put my arms around you and never let you go.”
Her hand came out from under her blanket and touched his face. His hand came out and touched hers, and then his arms went around her, as he buried his face in her neck.
This served to dislodge the blankets covering the upper portions of their bodies. Martha had removed her brassiere, and was wearing only her underpants. As if with a mind of its own, Pick’s hand found her breast and closed over it.
“My God!” she whispered, taking her mouth from his a long, long moment later. “My parents!”
They retrieved their blankets.
When Admiral Sayre came into the cabin no more than a minute later, they were on opposite sides of the cabin, Martha sitting down, Pick leaning agains a locker.
But maybe it wasn’t necessary. They had color in their faces again. Martha’s face, in fact, was so red that she could have been blushing.
“You two all right?”
“Yes,” Martha said.
“Couldn’t be better, sir,” Pick Pickering said.
Postscript
Kwajalein Island
16 October 1942
The following is factual. It is taken from “Record of Proceedings of a Military Commission convened on April 16, 1946, at United States Fleet, Commander Marianas, Guam, Marianas Islands,” under the authority of Rear Admiral C. A. Pownall, USN, the Commander, Marianas Area, to deal with the cases of Vice Admiral Koso Abe, Captain Yoshio Obara, and Lieutenant Commander Hisakichi Naiki, all of the Imperial Japanese Navy:
Early in October, a Lieutenant Commander Okada, who was a staff officer of the Central Japanese Headquarters, visited Kwajalein in connection with an inspection of Japanese defense fortifications. While he was there, Vice Admiral Abe, Kwajalein commander, solicited Commander Okada’s assistance in securing transportation to Japan of nine prisoners of war, Marine enlisted men who had been captured following the Makin Island operation and brought to Kwajalein. The Imperial Japanese Navy had been unable, or unwilling, so far to divert a v
essel to transport the prisoners.
Commander Okada replied to Vice Admiral Abe that “from now on, it would not be necessary to transport prisoners to Japan; from now on, they would be disposed of on the island [Kwajalein]” or words to that effect.
On October 11, 1942, Vice Admiral Abe delegated the responsibility of disposing of the prisoners to the Commanding Officer, 61st Naval Guard Unit, Imperial Japanese Navy, Captain Yoshio Obara, IJN, a career naval officer and a 1915 graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy. The Marine prisoners of war were then being held by the 61st Naval Guard unit.
Vice Admiral Abe’s orders to Captain Obara specified that the executioners, as a matter of courtesy to the prisoners of war, hold the grade of warrant officer or above.
There was a pool of approximately forty warrant officers (in addition to officers of senior grade), none of whom was initially willing to volunteer for the duty. When prevailed upon by Captain Obara and Lieutenant Commander Naiki, however, three warrant officers stepped forward, as did an enlisted man, who would serve as “pistoleer.”
Lieutenant Commander Naiki proposed to dispose of the Marine prisoners on October 16, which was the Yasakuni Shrine Festival, a Japanese holiday honoring departed heroes. This proposal received the concurrence of Captain Obara and Vice Admiral Abe.
A site was selected and prepared on the southwestern part of the island.
Captain Obara ordered that the evening meal of October 15, 1942 for the prisoners include beer and sweet cakes.
On October 16, the Marine prisoners were blindfolded and had their hands tied behind them. They were moved from their place of confinement to a holding area near the disposal site and held there until Vice Admiral Abe and Captain Obara arrived, in full dress uniform, by car from activities in connection with the Yasakuni Shrine Festival.
The Marine prisoners were then led one at a time to the edge of a pit dug for the purpose, and placed in a kneeling position. Then they were beheaded by one or another of the three warrant officers—using swords, according to Japanese Naval tradition. The services of the pistoleer, who would have fired a bullet into their heads should there not be a complete severance of head from torso, were not required.
A prayer for the souls of the departed was offered, under the direction of Vice Admiral Abe, who then left.
A woven fiber mat was placed over the bodies, and the pit filled in. Additional prayers were offered, and then the disposal party was marched off.
On 19 June 1947, Lieutenant Colonel George W. Newton, USMC, Provost Marshal of Guam, reported to the Commandant of the Marine Corps that, in accordance with the sentence handed down by the Military Commission, Vice Admiral Abe, Captain Obara, and Lieutenant Commander Naiki, late of the Imperial Japanese Navy, had that day been, by First Lieutenant Charles C. Rexroad, USA, hanged by the neck until they were dead.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. E. B. Griffin, who was once a soldier, belongs to the Armor Association; Paris Post #1, The American Legion; and is a life member of the National Rifle Association and Gaston-Lee Post #5660, Veterans of Foreign Wars.
1 The traditional title of the senior officer of the Marine Corps, Major General Commandant, was in its last days. Holcomb shortly became the first Lieutenant General of the Marine Corps, and assumed the simple title of Commandant.
2 Each company consisted of two rifle platoons, plus a company headquarters. Each platoon, under a lieutenant, consisted of three squads. Each squad consisted of a squad leader, and a three-man fire-team, armed with a BAR, an M1 Garand, and a Thompson submachine gun.
3 Grandly known as High Speed Transports, the APDs, which were supposed to transport Raiders on missions, were in fact modified World War I—era “four-stacker” destroyers. Two of their four boilers and their exhaust stacks had been removed, and the space reclaimed converted to primitive troop berthing. They were “high speed” only when compared to freighters and other slow-moving vessels.
1 When an officer was caught doing something he should not be doing, such as being out of uniform, he would receive a letter from his commanding officer specifying the offense and directing him to “reply by endorsement hereto” his reasons for committing the offense.
2 She was to be sunk by Japanese destroyers between Lae and New Guinea on 10 January 1943.
3 A British weapon, essentially an oversize bolt-action rifle. Loaded, on its monopod, it weighed almost forty pounds. Fed with a top-mounted clip, the .55-caliber weapon fired a tungsten-cored bullet larger than the U.S. .50-caliber machine-gun round. It had proved ineffective against German tanks, but it was believed it would be effective against lighter armored Japanese vehicles.
2 Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life, was then functioning as the supreme editor of the Time-Life empire.
1 Pan American had been using Wake as a refueling stop.
1 The Navy rank structure provides four grades of “flag” officers corresponding to the four grades of “general” officers of the Army and Marine Corps. The lowest of these grades, corresponding to brigadier general, is rear admiral (lower half). But where brigadier generals wear only one star, rear admirals (lower half) wear two silver stars, as do rear admirals (upper half) and major generals. The result of this inconsistency is a good deal of annoyance on the part of brigadier and major generals of the Army and Marine Corps.
1 The Stearman N2S, an open, twin-cockpit training biplane, painted yellow for visibility, was officially called the ‘Cadet.’ But like the other basic training aircraft, the Navy-manufactured N3N, it was rarely called anything but the “Yellow Peril.”
1 Caliber is expressed in decimal portions of an inch. For example, the .50-caliber machine gun projectile has a diameter of one-half inch.
1 A two-and-one-half-ton-capacity, canvas-bodied truck, called “6×6” (pronounced “six-by-six”) because all of its six wheels could be driven. Six-by-six was something of a misnomer, because the double axles at the rear usually held eight wheels.
1 In 1920, the League of Nations authorized an identity/travel document to be issued to displaced persons, in particular Russians who did not wish to return to what had become the Soviet Union. It came to be called the “Nansen passport” after Fridtjof Nansen, League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugee Affairs.
1 As a captain, Griffith had been sent with Captain Wally Greene to observe and undergo British Commando training. He was regarded within the Marine Corps as an expert on commando, or Raider, operations.
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