So the hurried search began, and from the waters Grant and his men pulled those who would otherwise have drowned. Once they came upon a seaman floating face downward, obviously dead, and Grant began to haul him aboard, but Penzoss took his arm quietly and whispered, ‘We haven’t enough space to stretch out the wounded,’ and trying to keep the others from seeing, the pharmacist allowed the body to drift away.
Finnerty’s notes said that the Lucas Dean had broken apart at 1007 on the morning of 25 October, in the sight of at least two dozen American ships, so it was likely that rescue would be swift, but midday came without any signs of such help. Kurita’s fleet had disappeared, ignominiously, and new American ships were beginning to arrive from the south, but none came to where the abandoned men of the Lucas Dean drifted in the sea.
In late afternoon the men in Raft Three rescued a seaman from the DD Hoel who said that his destroyer had taken one hell of a beating: ‘We lost one engine and half our guns. Then we lost our other engine and the rest of our guns. In the end they moved in close and blew us out of the water.’
‘Many survivors?’ Penzoss asked in his high voice.
The Hoel man turned and said, ‘You talk just like my sister.’
As dusk approached, the floating men had to acknowledge that they would not be rescued this day, and since they had only two frail flashlights, it seemed unlikely that help would reach them this night, either. When darkness fell, some of the badly wounded died, and at regular intervals Penzoss supervised the throwing away of bodies. With the first burials prayers were said, but toward midnight this stopped.
Now the skies cleared, allowing a beautiful half-Moon to show high in the western heavens, and the stars came out, incredibly beautiful, and a farm boy from Minnesota was able to recite the names: ‘Three of the loveliest stars in the sky. Vega, Cygnus, Altair,’ A boy from New York who could rarely see the stars corrected him: ‘Cygnus isn’t a star. It’s a constellation.’
‘You’re right,’ the Minnesota boy said. ‘But that star has such a difficult name, I always forget it.’
‘Deneb,’ the New York boy said.
The ship’s navigator heard this conversation, and moved awkwardly to join the two men. He knew all the navigational stars, and through the long night he explained which ones would be setting in the west, which rising to replace them in the east: ‘Alpheratz, Hamal, Aldebaran.’ Shortly before midnight he told the listening men, ‘Soon we’ll get the finest bunch in the heavens. Orion.’
When the multiple stars of that constellation did appear, Lieutenant Savage began to groan, and both Captain Grant and Penzoss moved to his side. ‘What is it, Tom?’
‘Something’s moving. I have one hell of a pain.’
Grant wanted to touch the wound to see if a shell fragment of some kind was exposed, but Penzoss restrained him. When they were well away from Savage the medic whispered, ‘Gas, I’m afraid. The heat yesterday. The motion tonight.’
The raft was not of wood. It was a rubber affair, thick and greasy and heavy, and because it had no keel or stiffening, it rose and fell and twisted with the motions of the sea, so that even some men who had been at sea for two or three years became nauseated and a few newcomers really seasick.
‘If you must vomit,’ Penzoss said repeatedly, ‘do it over the side.’
Toward dawn, when the skies were filled with bright stars, shining even more brightly because the moonlight had long since vanished, one man who had never really seen the heavens before, told the navigation officer, ‘This is a night I’ll never forget.’
‘Look to the east,’ the young astronomer said. ‘Dawn. Planes will soon spot us, and we’ll be picked up.’
But this did not happen. And no rain clouds appeared to protect the rafts from the Sun. Now the merciless heat was beating down upon the stricken sailors, and more badly wounded started to die at an appalling rate; even some men with only minor wounds began to experience dreadful pains and the fear of death.
No matter what the condition of the men, the burden of their suffering fell on Penzoss, who crawled from one to another, apportioning his precious medicines as he deemed best. He was twenty-one years old, a boy with almost no education from a small town in Alabama, but he performed like a doctor of sixty from Massachusetts General.
‘You must do something for Lieutenant Savage,’ Grant said at noon, but there was nothing Penzoss could do. A fragment of shell, which could easily have been extracted in a hospital with proper instruments, had worked its way poisonously toward lung and heart. The pain was agonizing.
‘Can’t you give him something?’ Grant asked.
‘I have a few Syrettes of morphine.’
‘No better time to use them. There’ll be a rescue before dark.’
The medic’s frown indicated that he had given up hope of rescue on this day, but a scream from Savage drew his attention to that direction, and at Captain Grant’s command he administered the Syrette, breaking off the tip professionally and inserting the needle deep in a blood vessel of the left arm.
It was, as he had suspected, useless, for at 1300, when the heat was at its fiercest, the Texan died. Then began Captain Grant’s near approach to loss of self-control. Holding Savage in his arms, he started to tell Finnerty ‘write that he was the most efficient officer …’ but when the words were spoken he realized how inadequate they were to describe this glowing stranger who had boarded the Dean so late and with such distinction.
Looking aloft at the empty sky, Grant shouted, ‘Where in hell are the planes?’
‘Sir,’ Penzoss whispered. ‘The men.’
Grant cleared his head, but kept hold of Savage until Penzoss whispered in his high voice, ‘Sir, we better bury him.’
‘You mean, throw him overboard?’
‘We must. We may have to spend another night.’
Reluctantly, Grant surrendered the body to Penzoss and Finnerty, who with some difficulty raised it onto the slippery edge of the raft, then dumped it overboard. Before it had disappeared, the raft moved toward a cluster of men who had kept themselves alive for more than twenty-four hours without the aid of any life raft. They were waterlogged and near death.
Captain Grant was first to dive overboard to rescue them, but soon he was joined by two other good swimmers, and with their help he hefted the tired survivors into the raft, but when sixteen had been added in this manner, Penzoss called down quietly, ‘Sir, we mustn’t overload.’
‘And we mustn’t leave these men.’
‘Then we’ll all go down.’
‘Then we’ll all go.’ And he threw aboard the last of the swimmers.
They were from the baby carrier Chesapeake Bay and they had wild tales to share with the men from the Dean: ‘Yep, we took four eighteen-inch shells from the Yamato, probably, right through the ship without exploding. It was miraculous.’
‘But the holes did sink you?’
‘No! No! We floated just as good as ever.’
‘What did sink you?’
‘This Jap airplane. Flew right into midships. Intentionally. Blew us to hell.’
So crews from the first two ships to have been sunk by kamikazes, a word none of the men yet knew, met on the swells of Leyte Gulf, a chance encounter which Finnerty noted.
‘What are you writing there?’ Captain Grant asked, and when Finnerty would not answer, Grant took the notebook and read:
From 0700 till 1007 when the Lucas Dean broke apart, Captain Grant fought his ship with a gallantry that had no equal. Against odds that would have terrified the ordinary captain, he took his DE right at the heart of the Jap battleships and cruisers, and even when he had no torpedoes or ammo he maintained position in order to confuse the enemy, even though they could do twenty-seven knots and the Lucas Dean three because of lost power. In the life raft his courage manifested itself through two hot days and one cold night …
Grant tore the page from the book. ‘There were no heroes in this fight,’ he said. ‘The crew was the hero. An
d especially Savage.’ His voice came close to breaking.
Then came the sharks. The survivors from the Chesapeake Bay spotted one of their mates clinging to a floating chair of some kind, and they shouted reassurance, but as the raft drifted slowly toward the downed man, everyone saw with horror that two sharks were about to attack him.
‘Shoot them!’ somebody called, but before those with guns could act, the lethal fish tore at the man, ripped off his legs, then returned to shred the torso.
In the late afternoon, as the raft moved through the waters where other American ships had sunk, the men saw a score of corpses, arms and legs missing, and some watchers became so violently ill that they vomited, even though the raft was by now fairly stable.
‘They could all have been saved,’ Grant said, and this was the beginning of his great rage. How many of the incredibly brave men who in their little ships had withstood the might of the Japanese navy, how many of them were to die because some imbecile at headquarters had forgotten to dispatch rescue missions?
‘Where are they?’ he raged at the merciless sky and at the cruel waters. And then the stars came out, distant beacons shining impartially upon the remnants of the Japanese fleet, driven forever from the seas, and upon the victorious Americans drifting forgotten in the tropic waters.
‘If you have good eyes,’ the navigation officer said, ‘you can see differences in the color. Saturn is whitish. Jupiter is red.’
‘For Christ sake, shut up,’ an enlisted man shouted.
‘I’m sorry,’ the officer said. He and the lad from Minnesota huddled together, and soon they were joined by the young man from New York. Through the long night they would console themselves with the stars, to keep from thinking about their comrades who would die before dawn.
Penzoss, endeavoring to recall what his Great Lakes instructor had taught about sharks, told the other men, ‘Sometimes they let a man drift right past without touching him, especially if he’s moving his arms and legs a lot. But like we saw, they can also attack with terrifying power. One thing we know for sure, let them smell blood from a wounded man or fish, they go crazy and tear him apart.’
‘Are they still out there, followin’ us?’ a farm boy asked.
‘They come, they go. They could be a dozen miles from us right now.’
‘I’m gonna say a prayer on that.’
‘You people there?’ It was a voice from the sea.
One of the flashlights probed the darkness: ‘There’s a nigger out there.’
The raft was maneuvered to where a big black man swam without the assistance of any spar or floating chair. He was less than fifteen feet from rescue when flashlights showed that the water about him was being churned by huge dark shapes, and several men shouted, ‘Sharks! Sharks!’
Penzoss, remembering a tactic his instructor had advised, cried, ‘Shoot the bastards! Draw blood!’ And the three riflemen blazed away.
The stratagem worked, because when one of the sharks took three heavy bullets he began to spurt blood, which sent the other sharks insane. With great slashing swipes of their furrowed teeth, they tore the wounded one apart.
Amidst the fury the black man swam closer to the raft, but when he reached it, the sides were so slippery and he so exhausted that he simply could not hoist himself aboard, so Captain Grant leaped into the dark water while Penzoss screamed, ‘Use anything. Scare the sharks away if they start to move in.’
As Grant started to slip his right arm about the swimmer’s torso to give an upward thrust, a stray shark, inflamed by the melee in which the others were attacking a second bleeder, swept toward the raft, smelled the black man’s right foot, and snapped it off in one swift motion. Blood gushed over Grant’s face as he hoisted the wounded man into the raft, but he ignored it as his men reached down to pull him to safety just before two wildly thrashing sharks swept in, then veered away, their mighty jaws empty.
‘What happened to you?’ Penzoss asked the black man as he applied a tourniquet.
‘Chesapeake Bay went down … I was cook’s helper … I swam.’
‘Jesus! You were in the water all that time? And the sharks waited till the last minute?’
‘Am I going to lose my foot?’
‘You already lost it,’ Penzoss said.
‘Oh, oh! A colored man with no leg. A cripple. A beggar.’
‘You didn’t lose your leg. And the Navy takes care of heroes like you.’
The man made no reply, for in the moonlight he saw Captain Grant’s insignia. ‘You a lieutenant commander?’
‘He’s captain of the ship,’ Penzoss explained.
‘And you jumped in to rescue me? Among the sharks?’ He dropped his head into his hands and wept.
To distract his attention, Finnerty asked, ‘What’s your name? I got to record it.’
‘Gawain Butler.’
‘That’s a hell of a name.’
‘My mother read Tennyson.’
Penzoss looked up. ‘I didn’t know that niggers read poetry.’
‘We did,’ Gawain said.
At midnight, when darkness engulfed the castaways, and the stars shone with terrible brilliance in a sky untouched by soot or the lights of civilization, the men of the Lucas Dean heard voices in the night, and they came upon other swimming sailors from the Chesapeake Bay, and a harsh decision had to be made. ‘This raft can’t hold no more,’ a bo’s’n said firmly, and Captain Grant had to agree.
But the swimming men, survivors through sheer courage for forty hours, had to be saved, so Captain Grant dived into the water, swam to the men, and led them to the raft. Before he hefted them aboard he said, ‘Four volunteers requested to swim down here with me till morning.’ Finnerty volunteered and three other seamen. Through the long night they would hold on to ropes that rimmed the raft, relieving it of their weight.
In the dark waters, Finnerty clutched Captain Grant’s right arm and said, ‘When we’re rescued, I’m going to write all I wrote before, and a hell of a lot more.’
Grant said nothing. He was torn apart with fury that his men had been required to exhibit such bravery in their DE, and now were drifting, abandoned, after the fight. His guts were fiery with disgust, and only the fact that he was in charge of this pitiful bobbing craft kept him from screaming at the gods who had treated his men so shabbily. The rampaging sharks had moved well away to inspect other groups of survivors, and mercifully they did not return.
Never was the Sun hotter than when it rose on the morning of 27 October 1944, and as soon as it was high, seven moderately injured men succumbed, and only when their bodies were tossed overboard did Captain Grant consider the raft sufficiently lightened to warrant his climbing back aboard. He lay exhausted in the awful heat, but his mind was churning, and it was in these three dreadful hours of morning that he saw with wonderful clarity the course he must take if he survived.
He had been reared in the small city of Clay in the state of Fremont. He’d attended the state university in his hometown and the University of Chicago law school. He’d married Elinor in 1940 and had attended a crash course for prospective naval officers at Dartmouth College in the cold winter of 1943. Never brilliant, he had received in all his schools what professors called Plodders’ A’s, and some had recognized him as a better prospect than those who received such marks through their sheer brilliance.
His father was a merchant, and his wife’s father a farmer, so he had no inheritance to look forward to. From 1939, when he acquired his law degree, to 1942, when he volunteered for the Navy, he had earned only a meager living in Clay as a general lawyer handling routine cases, but in his last year he had been approached by the Republican party to run for the state legislature, and he had given serious thought to that possibility.
Now he remembered the words of Yeoman Finnerty as they swam together in the shark-threatened waters: ‘You’re the greatest hero I ever heard of, Mr. Grant, and I’m going to say so.’ He had told Finnerty to shut up, but now the words echoed, and he th
ought: In the world that exists after this war, men who are known as heroes will be valued. Look at Colin Kelly, who sank the Haruna, or thought he did. What a fuss they made over him. The state of Fremont can find a place for me. In his near-mania he gritted his teeth and muttered, ‘It damned well better.’
‘What’s that, sir?’ Finnerty asked, his own head reeling from the heat.
‘Finnerty, what you said in the water … What I tore out of your book … You saw things better than I did.’
‘What do you mean?’
And Captain Norman Grant, USNR, formulated his philosophy: ‘Finnerty, the world is a shitty place. Leaving us to die out here. If we get back …’
‘We’ll get back.’
‘You and I are going to take the world by the balls and squeeze till it screams.’
‘A partnership?’
‘Till death.’
‘I think it’s a plane, sir.’ And it was. After forty-eight hours in the raft, with the Negro Gawain Butler sloshing his right stump with salt water to prevent infection, the survivors of the Lucas Dean and the Chesapeake Bay were rescued. They were flown to Manus, where skilled doctors and considerate nurses performed the saving operations which had been denied the many who died.
Captain Grant spent his first two days at Manus casting up accounts, and to the best of his knowledge, supported by what data Finnerty and Penzoss could supply, the facts were these: Lucas Dean known complement, 329; killed while aboard ship, 49; died while on rafts, 57; died floating in the sea, 92; known survivors, 131. When he looked at the deaths, many so needless, his rage returned.
But then he commandeered shore-based officers to help assemble the figures for the three-part battle, and its magnitude staggered him: Total number of Japanese warships, 69, including 13 under an Admiral Shima who trailed along behind; total number of American warships, 144; total Japanese ships lost, 28; total American ships lost, 5, to which should probably be added the DD Albert W. Grant, which was almost sunk not by Japanese guns but by American warships firing in the dark. Total number of Japanese sailors who died that day, probably 10,000. Of course, the Americans also lost numerous planes, the Japanese almost none—except the suicides. But at this time all the figures had to be tentative.
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