Then Tommy realizes whose cabin he’s in: it’s Kraweski’s, the chief navigator. Correction — former chief navigator. Now Kraweski the arrested, Kraweski the imprisoned, Kraweski the repatriated. Soon to be Kraweski the cashiered.
Tommy swings his feet over the side of his bunk and rubs his eyes. Four a.m., end of the dog watch. He’s on duty in half an hour. He senses the movement of the ship. Nice even motion: no oncoming chop, no wallowing down wavetrains, no storm swell at all. Feathers said the Trinidad high should hold all month. It’s the Ides now, mid-January, and so far Feathers has nailed it. It’s been day on perfect day for two weeks, and Tommy Atkinson has a farmer’s tan.
He snaps on a light and looks around him. Not bad at all. Two portholes for fresh air and a view. Better yet, he’s twice as far away from the Christ-afflicted catapult pistons. Best of all, he’s the whole length of the ship away from the kerosene tanks and munition stores, which means he’s as safe as anyone gets in a carrier. Tommy yawns and stretches. He hasn’t slept so well in weeks.
He’s clad in a towel with one hand on the door latch when he remembers he doesn’t have to shuffle down the companionway to use the head. The chief navigator’s cabin is its own small suite: not just bunk and shelves but head and desk as well. A hundred and thirty square feet of privacy in a ship that gives its crew an average of one-fifth that amount. Tommy smiles as he takes the first private piss he’s had since rejoining the Navy.
Up on the flight deck it’s cool and delicious. The only breeze seems to be from ship’s way. A month ago off Delaware, he thought he’d never be warm; here in the British West Indies, he’s thankful the minute the mercury goes below ninety. In all his years in the Navy, Tommy will never get used to how he’s jinked around from climate to climate.
A shape looms up and touches its hat. Tommy returns the salute. He knows Feathers even when it’s too dark to see a face.
Good morning, sir. Another fine day in the wings.
Fine for launching or just for fishing? Calm’s no good to us, Feathers. Carriers need wind.
It won’t be perfect, sir, but it shouldn’t be bad. Two months till trade winds but we’re close on Andros Island so we’ll get a land breeze soon.
Nothing yet though, says Tommy.
That’s correct, sir. Oh-seven-hundred is my guess.
Morning, gentlemen! Captain Schaeffer says. Discussing the weather?
Of course, sir, says Feathers. Too soon since landfall to talk about women.
Lieutenant Mason thinks we’ll be good to launch in two hours, sir.
You’ve verified our position?
Shot Polaris the minute I got on deck, sir. We’re where we should be.
To your usual half-inch, Tommy?
Tommy grins unseen. Yards anyway, sir.
Good, good. Keep me briefed, both of you. Schaeffer returns their salutes and leaves for the bridge.
Great class, sir, Feathers says. Tommy looks at him.
Cassidy and Schaeffer, Feathers says. Both Annapolis ’09.
Tommy nods. It was a great class.
An hour later a red sun leaps from the ocean and Air Group Fifty stands ready to fly. Four by four, two per elevator, the tbms and Hellcats of cap 1 rise from the hangar deck. Salt air grows thick with hydrocarbons as the engines fire. Tommy spots Ensign Ander and swaps a grin and thumbs-up.
The land breeze appears as promised and the launches go like clockwork, just as they did on the Chesapeake. The tbms race by on mock torpedo runs. They lock on the con island, come in low, and sheer off just before impact.
Strange when you think about it, sir, says Feathers. Any one of those little bitty aircraft could sink this great big ship in seconds.
Not if I direct aa fire, Lieutenant.
Feathers smiles, says nothing.
At oh-ten-hundred the recoveries start, tbms followed by Hellcats. Plane after plane descends and is secured. Ander, as always, floats down like a balloon.
Then there’s trouble. The final Hellcat comes in high and is waved off by the flagman. It climbs, circles, comes in for another pass, and descends.
Shit, says Feathers. Too fast, too fast.
Why is he . . .
Feathers speaks quickly. Sir? Face down on the deck please?
Tommy frowns. Lieutenant, this is no time —
Get the fuck down! Feathers hits Tommy hard between his shoulder blades.
Tommy’s on deck in an instant, Feathers beside him. Left cheek upward, right cheek against steel, Tommy sees the final fighter try its second landing just as Bataan rises on a wave. The Hellcat overshoots the arresting cables, smashes to the deck with a sound of snapping metal, bounces high, strikes hard again, and breaks in half. Its aft end slews sideways, tears through a wire-rope safety net as if the cables are knitting wool, and vanishes overside. The fore end of the Hellcat, engine racing for the anticipated wave-off, bores ahead at ninety miles an hour and strikes the island. The Hellcat’s fuel tanks explode. Tommy feels the heat like a flatiron pressed against his face. Men are yelling; someone’s triggered an alarm. The smoke above the flight deck changes from blue to black and there’s a smell like roast meat and acetone. Slowly, Feathers and Tommy stand. Tommy feels helpless.
Christ, Feathers says.
Tommy can’t speak. The Hellcat’s forward section has just chewed through a five-man fire team with its prop at full revs.
Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to receive unto Himself the souls of our dear brothers here departed: we therefore commit their bodies to the deep, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead . . .
Tommy stands at attention and lets the august words of the burial service roll over him. He doesn’t believe the stuff about gluing bodies back together, but the words are an opiate, rhythmic and comforting.
Then he glances at Feathers. The face that’s usually lit with mischief now seems chiseled from stone. Tommy recalls Yeats: A terrible beauty. Feathers’ eyes burn. He looks like Zeus about to strike.
Six bodies slide from under flags and vanish in a deep blue sea. Dismiss! says Captain Schaeffer, and hats and caps return to heads. And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs. Except that Feathers’ face doesn’t change.
Let’s get a coffee, Tommy says, and steers his friend to the mess. They drink in silence. Tommy sips and waits. Five minutes later, Feathers slaps the table.
As if the enemy weren’t enough! Even without the emperor gunning for you there’s no end to how you can die! Your friends will kill you when your foes don’t! Death from chance, death from your own side’s incompetence!
I know it’s unfair, says Tommy. You and I haven’t a scratch. But what does it matter? You’ve got the answer, Carrington. Always have.
Feathers looks at him. His face is granite.
Live while you’re alive, says Tommy. Most of us don’t. You do.
At sea aboard USS Bataan
March 25, 1944
My dearest Bet,
The warm wool sweater you knitted and sent after me arrived with the mail from a supply ship this afternoon. Let me say at once how much I appreciate it in every way. It won’t just keep me cozy, it will remind me of you and young Tom, and how much I care for you. And how much you must care for me, to have sunk so many hours into the knitting!
As I told you in Ann Arbor when Feathers and I left for Philadelphia, all our outbound mail must go through censors, and they are quite strict. I’m sure they have their reasons. Certainly if the enemy intercepted letters that contained crucial information, they could make it very hot for us. All this to say I cannot even tell you where we are at the moment, or what opposition we’re facing. We are somewhere between the North and South Poles, that’s all I’m allowed to say — not which ocean, not which hemisphere. And of course the route we took
to get to this place must stay secret as well. It’s frustrating and annoying but it’s all in a good cause, so I hope you understand. I must be the one husband in the world who doesn’t want to be evasive!
I can tell you that we’re all fine here, especially myself and Lt. Mason, who sends his respects. Actually he says, Tell Miz A that I kiss her hand so ardently I slobber it to the elbow. You know Feathers, he’s never serious.
Captain Schaeffer is also well. I enclose a portrait of him by Jim Ball, our Head of Photography. I told Jim it’s one of the best portraits I’ve ever seen, as good as a Karsh. He’s caught the captain perfectly. I’ve met some fine men in the Navy but none finer than Capt. Schaeffer. He’s tough, fair, and competent, and he’s been kind enough to take notice of me. In fact, he’s bumped me to chief navigator! There’s some news that I’m pretty sure the censors will let me say. This happened sixty days ago.
Of course, there’s no free lunch, and my promotion carries extra duties. Shipboard gunnery is overwhelmed with prep work at the moment, so the captain has seconded me to help with gun-crew training. Where we are there’s not much need for navigation — an hour or two a day — so I hope to try out some ideas I have for fire control. If my theories work, they could save a lot of lives.
All for now. Please keep this letter so we can read it together when the war is over. My affectionate greetings to your Mother, my deep respects to your Father, and more than anything my love to you and little Tom. I hope the train ride from Michigan wasn’t too wearisome and that our son behaved himself.
Affectionately, your —
Tommy
Tommy puts down his pen, picks up his wife’s sweater, and shakes his head. All that wasted work! Bet must think he’s in Murmansk. Or the Aleutians; that would at least be logical. But cold-climate clothes? No need.
Tommy glances out open windows. He’s officer of the watch, Bataan rides at anchor, and the view from the bridge is like a travel poster. Beyond his carrier lie five miles of sparkling water; then the sand and palms of Waikiki, then Honolulu. A couple of surfers ride the curl. It’s scenic and serene, no sign of war beyond some distant cruisers, and Diamond Head is a blue shape off to port. Four p.m., light breeze, eighty-two Fahrenheit in the shade. He’ll mothball the sweater till he’s back in the States.
What a wild ten weeks. Confirmed icnav while Kraweski goes through delirium tremens in a Stateside brig. First casualties, shock and burials, two ghastly days of cleanup. Witness depositions, reports and more reports, a sea of paper. Finally back to port in Philadelphia.
And on to Michigan, in time to pace the maternity ward. A boy, a son, his firstborn, mother and child doing well — that worry at least off his mind. One final day of compassionate leave, then on March first he and Feathers screech up to Bataan’s gangway with ten minutes to spare. To sea next morning; six days later, the Panama Canal.
That was navigation: two-yard clearances abaft both beams. Kraweski would have run them aground. March fifteenth in San Diego; three days to strike Bataan’s planes belowdecks and carpet her flight deck with lashed-down dc-3s; Pearl Harbor on March twenty-second; first aa drills. And a spanking new sweater, handmade by Bet with love and care and utterly useless, delivered on the twenty-fifth.
Enough woolgathering. Back to gunnery.
Tommy sees the irony of it. He’s a farm boy, raised among game from deer to bear to sturgeon, and he’s never fished or hunted. Never fired a gun in anger; rarely fired a gun at all. Now he’s commanding ordnance that would frighten Wyatt Earp. Tommy is mentally tough, and those who lean on him learn not to, but he’s rarely violent. The thought that so civilized a man — one who respects the law and reveres education — might become a kill-crazed berserker surprises everyone. It scares the hell out of Tommy himself. The only one who isn’t shocked is Feathers.
Do you understand it? Tommy asks one evening in a Honolulu bar. Can you tell me why I love getting ready to kill people?
Feathers makes a moue. You, sir, are Bugs Bunny. A gentle soul who wants only to consume carrots, or in your case, scotch. But one doesn’t slight Bugs. He never starts a fight, but he always wins. Don’t stare, sir. Drink your carrots.
So Bugs/Tommy becomes an expert in naval ballistics. He loves to learn. Nothing exists that he’s not curious about, and as always the first thing he does is hit the books. To his delight, much gunnery proves basic mathematics, and here Tommy is not dunce but dean.
Newton’s laws of motion.
Path of a projectile in zero gravity, viz. a straight line.
Path of a projectile given a nonnegligible gravitational field and negligible atmosphere, viz. a parabola, assuming Vm < Ve, where Vm = muzzle velocity and Ve = escape velocity; defined as that velocity, oriented radially from the center of gravity of a governing mass, which enables an object in possession of that velocity to continue onward indefinitely and not fall back toward said mass. [cf. Note 1]
Path of a projectile in a nonnegligible gravitational field in a resistant and nonnegligible atmosphere, viz. a hyperbola.
Note 1. Unless otherwise stated, escape velocity shall be taken to be terran escape velocity, whose generating mass is by definition the Earth. Cf. Glossary, q.v. infra [p.844]
All this doesn’t seem like extra duty. It’s fun. (Tommy has an atypical idea of fun.) In a day he’s mastered the principles, in a week he’s got the calculations. In ten days he’s working out approximate flight paths in his head and in three weeks he’s deriving absolute paths the same way. One morning, Captain Schaeffer sticks his head into Tommy’s cabin and asks how things are going. Glowing with enthusiasm, Tommy tells him. Twenty minutes later, the captain, dazed and slightly strabismic, nods his head and leaves, gently closing the door. Tommy’s back in his books before the latch clicks.
Master math and you master the universe. If you can’t quantify or correlate it, forget it. So runs Tommy’s mantra, courtesy of Dr. Gibb. Thus, not merely ballistics but also chemistry, compression ratios, rifling helices, propellant burn rates, and smoke and flame generation are characterized, filed, and neatly cross-referenced inside Tommy’s voracious brain. What some people feel reading Shakespeare, a link with a long-dead soul so intimate that the poet seems to murmur in your ear, Tommy feels for gunnery. There are times when he closes his eyes and shivers at an equation.
Yet at some point perfect theory must encounter the real world’s imperfection. Bataan’s weapons are certainly imperfect: her aa guns are laughable compared to land-based artillery and tiny even by naval standards. Her heftier barrels have inside diameters of forty millimeters, well below two inches. At twenty millimeters, her lighter barrels are hardly bigger than a buffalo gun. Battlewagons such as USS Missouri fire shells fifty times as wide. Bataan’s ordnance is a set of popguns even compared to the five-inch recoilless rifles aboard destroyers and corvettes. But Bataan is designed to hammer ships and shore emplacements with airplanes, not artillery. The confetti her aa throws is meant for one target only: Japanese planes.
Then there are the explosives. Since China invented them, they’ve progressed from black powder, used during the American Revolution, to guncotton, used during the Civil War, to cordite, in World War I. Each advance created a bigger bang. In the impossibly modern world of 1944, the most powerful shell propellants are artificial, produced in chemical plants via batch nitration of glycerol. Last year, Tommy told Captain Cassidy his unease about usn trajectory tables. Now, buttressed by more information, he asks again: do we use our potent new explosives optimally? The stronger the propellant, the flatter the trajectory; projectiles fly farther for every inch of gravitic fall. Synthetic nitrates give even Bataan’s aa ordnance muzzle velocities approaching one mile per second. That means gunners must shorten their leads on a moving target, must aim just over it, must not lob their shells far above it, must adjust their sights not with ratchets or wrenches but with setscrews.
By the end of April, To
mmy has devised a training regimen to put his equations into practice. He takes this hands-on work seriously and makes sure his crews do, too. They hate him for it: they curse him as their buddies tell off for shore leave and roar away in whaleboats to Honolulu’s whiskey and whores. The gun crews stay behind aboard Bataan and train and train and train. Shore leave becomes a memory.
Yet while the crews are tough to manage, they’re a litter of kittens compared to the senior ranks. Metal men, Feathers calls them — gold braid and shoulder brass, silver in the hair and lead in the ass. One morning, Tommy gets a nasty letter from the fleet quartermaster, complaining about the boatload of shells he burns through daily. He ignores it. The following week he gets another letter. He tears it up and throws the pieces overside. The quartermaster sends his third letter directly to Captain Schaeffer, who calls Tommy on the carpet and lectures him for a quarter of an hour.
Lieutenant Commander? the captain says at last. Do you hear me?
Yes, sir, Tommy says, unruffled.
Do you understand me?
Tommy nods.
Well, Mr. Atkinson? This guy’s bitten half my ass off. Do you have anything to say?
No, sir. Flat calm.
Tommy, says the captain, assuming Tommy’s mild tone as a strange thought strikes him. Do you intend to do anything about this?
Tommy shakes his head.
Captain Schaeffer stares at him, then stands up and shakes his hand. Good for you. Imagine this moron, ragging us for using shells in wartime. I’ll cover for you. Now get the hell out of here and train those crews.
Tommy does. He works them till the sweat pours off them and they blaze with sunburn. But sometime during the fourth week of fourteen-hour days, a strange thing occurs. The crews get good. They start hitting keyholes in the sky. They ace the target sleeve so many times that they start a contest to see how close to the tow plane they can shoot. Finally Czerny, a chief gunner’s mate, takes off the line all the way to the gimbal in the tow plane’s tail. The pilot’s mad as hell and skims the island; then he turns, accelerates, and buzzes Czerny’s crew so close they dive behind their turret shielding, scared shitless but laughing till they hurt. That merits another letter, this time from the base admiral. Next day, the captain rakes Tommy over the coals for half an hour. Then he shakes his hand again.
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