Tommy

by William Illsey Atkinson

  Who?

  General D. MacArthur. Ol’ Dugout Doug. Which raises questions about his commitment to egalitarianism. Feathers purses his lips, looks pensive.

  Look here, Lieutenant. You may be the driver, but I look like the driver. If I sat in back people would assume you were the vip and had ordered your driver to swap places with you. Jesus of Nazareth! Aren’t you uncomfortable in full fig? It must be a hundred and ten in the shade.

  A gentleman is immune to discomfort, sir.

  My envy grows. Can I quote you?

  Goodness, sir, that wasn’t me. That was the penultimate gentleman, Louis Quatorze. Winter in Versailles and so cold the gentlemen’s piss froze on the marble stairs. Causing those who came afterwards to slip and break their bones.

  You said penultimate gentleman. Who’s the ultimate?

  Almighty God, sir. Or else one of my Boston acquaintances, Hank Cabot or Jimmy-boy Lodge.

  Goddammit, Feathers, even Bostonians are only human.

  Debatable, sir. If they’re not deities it’s news to them. The Lodges, anyway.

  And the Masons, Lieutenant?

  We’re New Yorkers, sir. Another phylum entirely. We prefer the stench of money to the reek of cod.

  Do you consider yourself an immortal entity, is what I’m asking.

  No comment, sir.

  At five p.m. they’re at the main entrance of the New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden, New Jersey. Tommy has their papers ready, but the mere sight of Feathers captaining the Dusenberg makes the guard snap to attention so hard he bangs his head on the back of the sentry box. The guard stands rigid, eyes leaking tears, as Feathers waves his thanks and purrs on through. Down at the slip there’s a crowd of a hundred. Feathers pulls up at its fringe and switches off his engine. The two men stay in the car. A woman in a flowered hat smashes a bottle on an axeblade prow, and an enormous flat-topped hull slides into New York Harbor in a cloud of spray. The USS Bataan has been launched.

  Thank God, Feathers says reverently. Tommy looks at him.

  The christening wine, sir. Unfit for human consumption. Likely to cause consumption, if you’ll forgive a pun.

  You can tell the quality from the smash cloud?

  Not always, sir, but certain brands stand out. The Widow shows when she’s past her prime. This christening used senile Widow.

  Widow?

  Veuve Clicquot, sir. Turns amber when she’s fifty. Most unattractive.

  Tommy’s three thousand miles from the Atlantic Theater and nine thousand from the carnage in the Pacific. The only things falling on him are dead leaves. But he’s up to his armpits in the latest plans for cvl-29 USS Bataan.

  Latest because the ship’s design keeps changing. Its keel was laid last year not as an aircraft carrier but as a light cruiser, USS Buffalo. Three months into her construction, the president realized the war would be won by aircraft, not dreadnoughts, and that meant carriers. Hence Bataan: the hull, powerplant, and armor of a cruiser, with the topside configuration of a fast carrier.

  fdr may never have a better brainstorm. The Independence-class carriers, coded cvl for Carrier Vehicle Light, are inspired bastardizations — powerful, lightning fast, and lethal. Non-cvl light carriers are also being built, but next to Bataan they’re flimsy as fishing smacks. Like Bataan they were diverted into flattops mid-build, but unlike Bataan they began not as cruisers but as transports, slow and single-screw.

  Tommy reads, entranced. Bataan’s propulsion is pure battlewagon — four huge screws, six geared turbines, state-of-the-art electromechanical controls, three overpressure boilers that together generate a hundred thousand horsepower. Impressive as this is, it’s static specification. Bataan’s dynamic specs tell the full tale. Her operational speed is twenty-two knots and her flank speed thirty-one. Tommy knows his motor mechanics and would be surprised if a good team couldn’t wring much better performance from this spanking-new ship. Properly handled, Bataan might hit forty-five knots in a following gale. That’s fifty-two miles per hour, race-car velocity for the open ocean. Tommy’s new ride is a seafaring hot rod, a waterborne stock car. She might outrun a slow torpedo. Bataan is one of the fastest carriers afloat.

  More than most ships, Bataan is organized vertically. Each of her main decks has a primary function. Specific internal areas shelter, fit, repair, arm, and refuel aircraft; store food, fuel, bombs, and shells; and service thousands of items from gun bearings to radar transceivers. Other decks shelter, feed, and wash the crew, and sell them soap, pop, magazines, and cigarettes. There are doss cabins, low-ceilinged companionways, rows of heads; also newsstands, barber shops, and endless ladderways. The hospital area has operating rooms and recovery wards, dental chairs, and pharmacies. Still other areas have galleys, commissaries, messes, and storage holds. The scale of the holds ranges from the two cubic feet of a yeoman’s locker to the great steel caverns containing aircraft hangars, all-crew auditoria, and machine shops the size of a shore-based factory. Bataan is a floating town.

  All that is for the enlisted crew, the sailors and Marines. Upper decks are reserved for the brass, whose separate cabins, messes, and game rooms boast the inexpressible luxury of portholes. Most of Bataan rides blind: mid-level decks can sink below waterline in rough seas or when the ship rides low, and so have outer bulkheads of blank metal. The lowest decks are permanently under water. They house boilers and turbines, generators and transformers, and vast self-sealing tanks for marine and aviation fuel. Their depth shields them from enemy fire other than armor-piercing bombs, deep-running torpedoes, and big battleship shells.

  Additional decks are stacked inside Bataan’s superdeck structure, a tall control island whose levels are narrow, bright, and well above water. Here sit the bridge, from which the captain, executive officer, and helmsman direct ship’s course; the Command Information Center, Bataan’s battle nexus; and the thermometers and anemometers of Meteorology Section.

  Bataan’s flight deck is a long, flat plain whose main function is to launch and recover aircraft. With practice, each plane might take off or be recaptured in little more than a minute. Again, Tommy suspects, a sharp team should improve the official spec and shorten the turnaround time. As soon as the tailhook of an incoming plane snags one of the arresting wires stretched across the recovery strip and the plane is on deck to stay, its pilot kills the engine, scrambles down a moveable ladder that a recovery crew wheels up, and sprints from his craft. A restraint team detaches the plane’s arresting wire and manhandles the aircraft to a staging area beside the recovery strip. Fitters loosen lockdown bolts and raise the outer half of each wing, which is hinged in the middle to save space. In seconds, the warplane’s aggressive, aerodynamically efficient profile becomes as ugly as a hanging bat. Temporarily disfigured, the planes are jammed cheek by jowl onto Bataan’s two huge elevators, one forward and one aft. The elevators drop the planes to the shop deck, where they’re inspected and serviced. Welders and sheet-metal workers plug bullet and shrapnel holes; aviation mechanics replace broken or shot-up parts. The refurbished planes then go to the cavernous hangar deck, which holds them ready for redeployment. Just before action, the planes visit the armory, which replaces shells and cartridges and fits bombs and torpedoes, and then the refueling station, which tops up the planes’ high-octane kerosene. Finally, they rise to the flight deck for another launch.

  As an élite fast carrier, Bataan has a standard complement of thirty aircraft and a maximum of forty-five, twenty of them operational at a given time. The planes are flown by a semi-autonomous onboard unit called an air group. Its pilots fly various specialized aircraft — tbms (torpedo bombers), abms (attack bombers), dbms (dive bombers), and fighters. A cap, or combat air patrol, may have any or all of these types, each of which carries a unique set of weapons. abms and dbms have incendiary or fragmentation bombs; tbms have air-to-surface torpedoes.

  But the stars of the show are th
e fighters. Bataan will start with reliable Wildcats and swift Hellcats. If she proves herself, she may get the new Corsairs. All these planes are speedy, nimble, and armed to the teeth with bombs, rockets, fifty-caliber machine guns, and cannons. Machine guns fire solid half-inch slugs, cannons shoot shells that explode on contact. It can take a hundred bullets to splash a Jap. A single cannon shell may do it, shredding engines and blowing off wings. The fighters’ smaller rockets, called Tiny Tims, fascinate Tommy. They’re the size of a Havana cigar, but they’re self-propelled. Since they aren’t fired ballistically, they have no recoil and are kinder to an airframe. cap fighters use them for close infantry support during beach landings.

  To get a cap’s multi-ton birds into the air, and then to recover them when they limp back burning fumes from empty tanks, Bataan steams into the breeze and accelerates to flank velocity. Boosting headwind in this way increases her planes’ lift and reduces their landing speed. But since the flight deck is less than six hundred feet long, and since no fighter in existence can take off against a hurricane in so short a run, Bataan gives her birds an extra push. In fact, they do not take off in the strict sense: they are hurled skyward by a huge steam-powered sling. At launch, each plane has restraining chocks wedged beneath its wheels. It starts its two-thousand-horsepower radial engine with a roar of noise and a gout of blue-grey smoke, and is attached to Bataan’s catapult. The pilot lowers flaps and revs his prop until it blurs. The catapult crew catch the flight officer’s thumbs-up and yank the chocks sideways, and the plane, pulling for all it’s worth and kicked to sixty miles per hour in under three seconds, is on its way.

  Even in optimum conditions — full catapult impetus, low seas, high prop revs, flank speed maintained against a strong, steady headwind — each launch is a crapshoot. A perfectly launched plane shoots forward off the flight deck and skims the ocean, which surges only a few yards below. The plane may clip the wave tops, but it stays straight and level, accelerates, and zooms into the sky.

  A plane that’s launched unsuccessfully also stays straight and level, and also clips the wave tops. Then it hits the wave tops and is instant wreckage. The splashed pilot has seconds to snap off his five-point harness, slide back his canopy, activate a pneumatic flotation vest — called a Mae West for obvious reasons — and tumble into the drink before his aircraft makes its final dive straight down. If he’s lucky and well trained and thinks fast, he might remember to take along his life raft. The South Pacific is overflowing with great white sharks, many of which weigh more than a fully loaded fighter.

  Perilous as they are, launches are safer than recoveries. As a landing plane completes its approach, its pilot switches armaments to safety, then lowers his flaps and forward wheels. When he’s a thousand yards out, control shifts from cic duty officer to a flight-deck flagman, clad by day in a bright white suit and at night in strings of lights that turn him into a human Christmas tree. The flagman assesses the descending plane and signals adjustments that culminate in landing. Up port wing, meet her, slip windward, up starboard flap, down speed, down sink rate, down tail, clear to land.

  Or else not clear to land. The flagman is authorized to wave off a clumsy pilot and abort a bad approach. At that point, the pilot must go full throttle, overshoot, climb on emergency power, re-enter the recovery queue, and try again. Frequently, a waved-off pilot simply finds another carrier. The big cvs with their long, wide, forgiving flight decks are favorites — Hornet, Enterprise, Benjamin Franklin. These carriers are the size of two and a half Bataans.

  Like most skills, landing on a carrier gets easier with practice, yet the core of it remains an innate talent, like natural rhythm or perfect pitch. In such intricacies not all pilots are created equal. Some flyboys are artists; some, even battle aces with five or more kills to their credit, smack the flight deck like a stunned rhinoceros. It’s no surprise. Landing a plane — bringing it down to land — is no cinch, ever. Ceiling and visibility, skill and training, reflexes and alertness, all vary wildly. So does that inexplicable artistry, the dance-like touch, of a born pilot.

  Moreover, it’s wartime. A pilot may be wounded, with his plane on fire, out of fuel, and on glide descent. Even on a clear day, freak downdrafts may catch a plane in its final approach and swat it earthward. Also, the runway may be uneven. Asphalt has potholes, cracks, and humps; grass fields that look as smooth as golf greens hide irregularities that can tilt a wheel or snag a tailhook. A gopher hole can flip a plane. Even in the astonishingly up-to-date, brand-spanking-new world of 1943, in the best land airports of the most advanced nation on the planet, bringing an aircraft safely to Earth is not for the faint of heart.

  Landing on a carrier is ten times worse. Winds are wonkier, and the target strip is the size of a church roof. Spume may blind you without warning.

  Even in calm seas a carrier’s flight deck pitches, yaws, and rolls relative to a plane’s approach: it’s a landing strip balanced on a beach ball. But for everyone from executive officer to damage crew, a heavy-seas recovery is the stuff of nightmares. Human brains and bodies, even young ones at a pitch of mental and physical perfection, were not designed for this.

  The last few seconds of a recovery are the most critical. Touch down on land and you generally stay down; this is less certain on a carrier deck. Your sink rate could be a perfect two feet per second, a gossamer caress ashore, and that gimballed deck could suddenly soar skyward on a rogue wave and smack into you at another twenty feet per second. The sum of these vectors is like jumping off the roof of a two-story house; it knocks your nuts into your nose. Even then you might not stay down. You can bounce. That’s okay if you bounce nose-up. Your tailhook usually — usually — stays on the arresting wire and brakes you, though your nuts then leave your nostrils with a pleasant popping sound. But if you bounce nose-down and your tailhook rips away from the wire: then, flyboy, you are fully fucked. There’s a steel-rope safety net at the far end of the recovery area, but when it has to field a million foot-pounds of runaway machinery it’s as useful as a daisy chain. Get ready to splash, ace. Put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.

  Tommy reads, reads, and reads some more. He thought he was smart, but he’s floundering. There’s so much to take in. At eleven p.m., he leaves the ship’s specs and turns to theater briefings.

  As he memorizes enemy plane silhouettes, it dawns on him that Bataan and her caps are up against some nasty competition. True, much of the Imperial Japanese Air Force is ho-hum. A Judy, for example — the enemy aircraft have U.S. code names — is a small slow bomber, fodder for any cap or shipboard anti-aircraft gun used well. On the other hand, a Mitsubishi g4m Betty (Tommy smiles at the name) is big, quick, tough, and maneuverable. It can deliver a ton of high explosives two thousand miles and return home without refueling. If a single Betty sneaks through fleet anti-aircraft defenses and nails a critical site on a carrier — its island, say, or one of the elevators that are royal roads to a jam-packed, violently inflammable interior — then it’s r.i.p. for the ship and a medal for the Jap.

  The elevators are a carrier’s Achilles heels. Nimitz and Spruance may as well stencil bull’s eyes on them: they’re easy to spot and hard to miss for every Betty, Jake, Judy, Kate, Myrt, Nell, Tojo, and Zeke.

  Zeke most of all. Zeke is Allied code for the Mitsubishi a6m1, a fighter designed by the transcendent genius Horikoshi Jiro and logged in his production records as Zero-One-One — first airframe model, first engine design. The Zero is the scourge of its opponents; it’s far and away the best plane made in Japan. Or the worst, if you’re an enemy. A later historian will say the very name Zero implies sudden death.

  Zero-san carries two twenty-millimeter cannons with explosive shells, fully equal to Bataan’s smaller anti-aircraft guns. It has two .303-caliber machine guns that together spit thirty slugs a second, each with a muzzle velocity exceeding three thousand miles an hour. On a single fill-up, the Zero can fly five hundred miles, deliv
er two two-hundred-and-sixty-pound bombs, and return to base. It can orbit six miles above the Earth for three hours. It climbs quickly, maneuvers sweetly, and is sturdy enough to be based on Japanese carriers. It is so light, tight, and stiff that its engine, already strong, gives it an enormous power-to-weight ratio. The Zero is like a racing motorcycle. It is to the air what Bataan is to the sea — an apex predator. God help the United States of America, Tommy thinks. What have we bitten off.

  He knows one place the Zeroes will certainly strike. Bataan’s island is as narrow as a submarine’s conning tower, but twice as tall; it clusters met, cic, damage control, and radar. The radar is a weak point. Undamaged, it images ships, planes, and land-based emplacements up to eighty miles away. It feeds its range and bearing data to cic, whose human observers and automatic target locks then put attackers in a hail of fire before they’re close enough to do destruction. Or so goes the theory; Tommy has begun to doubt the effectiveness of standard Navy fire control. Without her radar Bataan is practically sightless.

  Even more important than the radar, the island houses the bridge whose people command the ship — navigator, cic and met chiefs, helmsman, executive officer, and above all, the captain. As Bataan’s mind and senses, the island is a key target. Yet it is even more exposed than the elevators.

  Tommy sets down his papers, snaps off the desk light, removes his glasses, and rubs his eyes. It’s past midnight and as usual he’ll be up at five. Bet went to bed hours ago.

  So much to review. What was the phrase he heard in church? Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. He’ll have to go over this stuff like a theologian glossing holy writ. And he will. But one thing he cannot yet do: feel his floating lady — how well she answers helm, what she smells and sounds like, how she weathers both emergencies and the day-to-day. Her trim in all weathers, the speed and swiftness of her systems, how she pays off in a following sea. Where she meets, exceeds, or fails her fabulous specifications. Her quirks, her mannerisms — in sum, how she behaves. What makes a lifeless It into a living She.