Tommy

by William Illsey Atkinson

  One thing, Tommy tells his crews. One big thing. If you forget everything else, remember this. We’re here to kill Japs, not Americans. A Judy comes in low, you sight it, track it, hammer the hell out of it. But watch what’s behind it. Okay? The instant it flies in front of a U.S. plane or a U.S. ship, you cease firing. You hit only what’s moving in clear sky. Got it?

  They get it. Not all aa crews do.

  Look here, Feathers. About your suggestion for naming the new flagship. Captain Schaeffer waves a folded paper in the air.

  It won, sir? Excellent! I’m so proud!

  You know damn well it didn’t win. I can’t even submit it. They’d break you. They’d probably break me.

  Feathers looks downcast. But sir, it’s so memorable. In a long and proud tradition of insolence toward the enemy — real, past, and/or putative.

  Captain Schaeffer regards him steadily. Explain, he says.

  Feathers ticks off fingers. HMS Dreadnought: fearing nothing! HMS Defiant: insolent and rebellious! HMS Dauntless: resolute and determined! HMS Intrepid: fearless! I ask you, sir, is not my suggestion a worthy addendum to that list?

  Schaeffer unfolds the ballot. USS AintaFraidaFuckinNuttin, he reads.

  Exactly, sir. You will note that in addition to its admirable unforgettableness, it pays homage to the enlisted men upon whose sturdy backs the U.S. Navy so triumphantly sails.

  Get the hell out of here, Feathers.

  Sir! Feathers snaps a flawless salute, spins, stamps, exits. Captain Schaeffer puffs out his cheeks, sinks back in his chair, and shakes his head. That man, he thinks. Some officers skate on thin ice. LJG Mason skates on water.

  Bataan leaves to join the southern task force on April 4, 1944. Tommy thinks the date’s a lucky one, but Feathers is skeptical.

  Could be, sir, he says.

  But the coincidence! Four-four-forty-four! What are the odds? Tommy, like many brilliant people, has a vast vein of superstition.

  Death, says Feathers. And to Tommy’s silent shock: The number four is a homonym for death in certain Asian languages, sir.

  Even more significant, Tommy says. Death to the Japs!

  So today is Death Death Deathity Death Day? Let’s hope you’re right, sir.

  Death for them, Mr. Mason.

  Of course, sir. That’s what I meant.

  The ship’s bubbling with excitement, especially on the bridge. Tommy switches hats from Assistant Gunnery Officer [2icaa] to Chief Navigator [icnav], gets fleet co-ordinates, and takes station on his flagship bearing south-southeast half east, range three miles. He signals ready to the xo, the xo glances at the captain, the captain nods, the xo lifts his mike and punches up the engine room, radios crackle with ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore, flag packets fly up halyards and burst in color, and Tommy and his shipmates steam away to war.

  We mean to make the cockeyed world take off it’s [sic] hat

  To a fighting ship whose top is long and flat

  We mean to see that when the Captain gives commands

  He’s going to find that right behind him stand all hands

  It takes a first-class fighting man

  To man a ship that’s called Bataan . . .

  It’s a literary travesty, but Tommy’s got the new ship’s song in his brain. Worse, it chokes him up. Y1C Crooker and PhoM2Cl Eby have written a demonic masterpiece.

  An hour later he feels something more than sentiment when ten other ships join Bataan and together steam southwest at twenty knots. Till now Bataan has fitted, drilled, and provisioned solo. Now she’s doing what all her drill was for: augmenting the greatest navy in the world.

  Five days later comes a greater epiphany. Bataan and her Oahu colleagues, which Tommy has naïvely considered a fleet, join the real thing: Navy Task Force 58, at anchor off Majuro Atoll. Task group after task group appears: transports and destroyers, refuelers and provisioners, corvettes and light carriers, battleships and cruisers, fast cvls and vast cvs, patrol-torpedo boats and surfaced submarines. Five hundred warships and a buzzing cloud of planes dot sea and sky to the horizon. When they left Pearl, Tommy felt like the Pudding River meeting the Columbia. Now he feels like the Columbia meeting the Pacific.

  Damn the Zekes, he thinks. I’m not afraid of them anymore. Bring ’em on.

  To: Puget Sound Power News

  From: Lieutenant Commander A.H. Atkinson

  Location: At sea aboard USS Bataan

  Date: March 9, 1945

  Our sole expertise is climbing ladders. I love it so much I intend to build a house with no upper floors. It will take me a month of Sundays to return to normalcy (as per Seattle) and be capable of climbing the hills with the rest of the natives . . .

  Everyone aboard dreams of returning to the States and yet we are all willing to stay in the Pacific for we know only thus can we knock the Japanese out quickly. Give the rascal (polite for a change) a chance and he would be right after us again. Frankly, I want to come home, to take up the work I dropped so quickly after Pearl Harbor, to live with my family in a decent home, and actually construct our dreams into realities — and as much as anything to get on with the business of being in business. However, I do not wish to see the States prior to the end of the Pacific war. I have hopes that we can see the end ahead by Christmas time. And to that hopeful day of peace all of us are dedicated.

  To a man we are proud of our ship. Its name, Bataan, has a great background. We think we are carrying it on in a fitting fashion. When I was assigned a carrier, I was very disappointed for I wanted destroyer duty. Now I would not change for anything — but don’t tell the Navy; that is just the time they give you the bounce. The work aboard is continuous and extremely interesting for the time I’m in the Service. However, I’ll still choose a private concern to work for any day of the year.

  Sincerely

  A.H. Atkinson

  lcdr-usn

  Sailors who wish to be a hero

  They are practically zero

  But sailors who wish to be civilians

  Jesus! They run into the millions

  At sea aboard USS Bataan

  March 12, 1945

  My dearest Bet,

  You’re probably wondering about the return address on this letter. No, James Joyce hasn’t moved to New York, nor has he written you a letter. That’s just the cover for a cloak and dagger operation. Feathers’ mother passed away last week and cincpac gave him compassionate leave to go to her funeral. Feathers was attached to her and I expect I’ll have to console him when he returns. Of course he’ll have other consolations. His mom was richer than Croesus and a widow to boot, and he was her only child. He never seemed short of boodle but now he’ll be able to buy a cvl of his own, plus a Diesel yacht or two. The Park Avenue apartment alone must be worth a quarter-million. Not that I expect Feathers will lose his head — he’ll still be the same screwball friend we love. I don’t think he’ll ever change, at least I hope he won’t. He’ll probably use his enormous wealth to pull off even more outrageous pranks.

  This letter is one example; he’s agreed to courier it for me. As soon as I finish it, I’ll seal it. Whereupon Feathers will sew it into the lining of his Navy greatcoat — blast the guy, he sews as well as he does everything else — and smuggle it into New York. Capt. Schaeffer is sending him via tbm to Tinian with a permission slip that lets him deadhead on military craft to San Diego. He’ll put this note in the U.S. mail at a Manhattan post office. That way it will reach you without going through the censors. (I should have told you that a tbm is a torpedo bomber. We carry ten or twelve.)

  I’m risking a lot by writing you like this. I’d be in major trouble if the authorities found out I’d bypassed official routes. But I wanted to tell you everything this time. My notes to you so far have been heartfelt, the truth and nothing but, but not the whole truth. This is! But I ask you as your ve
ry loving husband not to show this letter to anyone, not even your Mother or your best friend. Nor to let slip to anyone, anywhere, ever, the things I’m telling you. Not even let them know I’ve written to you! Mr. J. Joyce, Esq. can be a friend from grade school. If you’re in a room with anyone else right now, then casually pick up this letter (including the envelope) without saying anything to anyone, go to your room, and lock yourself in immediately. What did I tell you, cloak and dagger!

  I’m convinced that none of this will imperil the Allied cause. The likelihood of a Japanese spy randomly opening one of the Post Office’s 100,000,000 daily letters and lucking into this one is, well, one in a hundred million. I’m good at math, remember, so my conscience is clear — those are pretty good odds. Of course, even though I’m alone in my cabin with the door locked right now, I’m looking over my shoulder all the time to make sure I’m undiscovered!

  First of all, I’m well. I’m not telling you that to reassure you; truly, I haven’t been without so much as a sniffle this long all my life. We’ve known for years that the longer crews stay at sea the healthier they get, and Bataan is no exception. Even our supply ships, the provisioners and refueling tankers, don’t transfer people, just materiel. And to my knowledge the flu can’t lurk in paper forms or bunker oil.

  I keep physically fit by climbing the endless ladderways aboard ship — I’ve mailed another letter to my old boss about this, you’ll get a copy through regular channels — and I keep mentally fit by navigating Bataan. Last week the skipper paid me a pretty compliment, praising my nav skills to the point where Jocko Clark, our rear admiral, agreed to make my radioed calculations part of his daily position summary for the fleet. All this will go to my head!

  So let me tell you where I am. As you must have guessed, we aren’t in cold waters. I’ll have to wait to wear your wonderful sweater. Bataan, along with the rest of its task group, tg58b, is now en route to Ulithi, an atoll in the South Pacific. Go to the Carnegie Library at Main and Hughson Streets and look it up on one of their big maps, it’s too tiny to show up on a home atlas. The scuttlebutt is there’s a battle brewing near there. At which, as the invitations say, the honor of our presence has been requested. It doesn’t surprise me. Bataan has made an excellent account of herself since she arrived last year.

  Here’s the story. In early spring a year ago, after our shakedown — you already know about that — we sailed to Hunter’s Point in California, then on to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. As soon as we left Pearl we were taken directly into tf58, which according to the skipper showed we’d made top team. On 17 April ’44 we steamed southward and crossed the equator. It was a lot of fun. Some of the boys dressed up as King Neptune and his Queen — you can’t imagine the silly costumes, long beards and men in brassieres — and those of us who’d never made the crossing had to run the gauntlet and get bopped with rolled-up newspapers. Then we had a party.

  A week later we helped liberate Hollandia in New Guinea. Our Air Group flew dozens of sorties and every launch and landing went perfectly. Flight Lieutenant Lemmon scored our first two kills, splashing a Judy (a Japanese light bomber) and a Zeke (nickname for a Zero fighter). I’d worried that the Zekes would chew us up but Lt. Lemmon’s Hellcat was more than a match for them. Good old (or rather new) U.S. technology!

  We then made strikes against the Caroline Islands, especially Ponape and Truk. We were doing well until one morning our forward elevator broke down. This is a huge device that’s meant to lift planes, not people, and something jammed in its hydraulics. We tried everything we could think of, but we couldn’t fix it. Since a cvl without an elevator is like a runner in leg irons, we had to turn around and steam three thousand miles back to Oahu (where Pearl is) and let the naval base there take it on. It gave ’em a month-long headache but they finally got it working, so with our elevator reassembled, back we went to join tf58.

  Two weeks later, we ran smack into what the Navy calls the First Battle of the Philippine Sea. At least that’s the term you’ll get from radio and the papers. The name our flyboys gave to it is the Turkey Shoot.

  David Ander is one of our fliers and an engaging lad, not formally educated but smart as a whip, and when I looked blank he explained the term to me. To bag wild turkeys, a group of hunters goes into the woods and half surrounds a spot they think has birds. (They don’t completely surround it or they might shoot each other.) Then they make a lot of noise. When the big birds lurch off the ground and into their sights, they blast ’em out of the sky. If you’re a half-decent shot it’s a slaughter, and that’s just what this air fight was.

  Can you imagine a vast multi-day sea battle where none of the Jap ships sets eyes on ours? And where we see the Jap ships only by radar? That was the Turkey Shoot. The Jap fleet and our task force were three hundred miles apart. Their carriers launched their planes, we launched ours, and the two air fleets duked it out in the middle of the sky. The Japs actually got in the first attack wave, but we were under Admiral Spruance — there’s a great commander, I can’t say enough about him — and as Ander said, “Ol’ Spru were layin’ fer ’em an’ blewd ’em allta hayl.”

  To start off, Bataan’s Hellcats joined a tf-cap (sorry — I use these terms without thinking — that’s a Task Force Combat Air Patrol) of three dozen fighters. They ran into a wave of Zeroes coming in from ground bases on Guam, which we hadn’t yet retaken. The Zekes splashed two of us — our destroyers recovered both pilots safe and sound — but we got the better of the dust-up. We shot down (are you ready for this?) three dozen Zekes, one per Hellcat on average. Then the Jap carriers hit our fleet. At least they tried to! They got one bomb on the South Dakota, that’s a battleship, but didn’t sink her. Not one bomb or bullet hit Bataan or any other U.S. carrier. And of sixty or so Jap planes, all but twenty went down. tf-cap Hellcats splashed thirty and our aa fire — sorry, anti-aircraft — got the rest.

  Then the Japanese admiral (Feathers says it was Ozawa) sent in his second wave of planes. Like a bad gambler he went double or nothing and threw in over 120. Nearly 100 of them were destroyed, and again none got through to our carriers! Then came a third wave. It was smaller, as Ozawa was running out of both planes and pilots. We calculate that this time he sent 80-plus planes. He lost nearly all of them.

  The whole battle was like that. By the time it was over the Rising Sun was setting. Hirohito-sama lost 400 planes, a round dozen of them shot down by Hellcats from Bataan. I have to tell you, it was some proud day for us. cincpac Intel — Feathers got the scoop from a fellow he knows there — estimates that Ozawa lost two-thirds of his air force in four hours. (cincpac is Commander-in-Chief, Pacific. Sorry again.)

  That’s not all. Having decimated Ozawa’s air force on 19 June, on 20 June we located his surface fleet and hit it hard. tf-caps sunk three (!) of his carriers, which by itself was another victory nearly as big as Midway. We sank lots of other ships, too. There’s a photo you may have seen, of Ozawa’s craft turning wildly (and vainly) to escape our air strikes. His ships snake this way and that as they’re hammered by our bombs. Several of the Jap ships are on fire. One of our tbm crew took the photo, which is considered one of the best of the war to date.

  But someone defined war as boredom followed by stuff that makes you want more boredom, and that’s what happened to us. Bataan’s caps racked up two dozen more kills on 24 June, a quarter of the Task Group total, and once more no Jap laid a glove on us. But on July 12, that blasted forward elevator failed yet again and we were really out of action. Admiral Jocko ordered us back to Pearl.

  This time even Pearl couldn’t help us. We had to steam back to San Francisco and were there for all August and September. So there I was in the States and I couldn’t even let you know! I’m sorry you spent two months worrying about me when I was safe as houses. Captain Schaeffer even took Feathers and me to dinner at Top of the Mark to thank us for the extra projects we’d taken on. I’m glad I sent you the Captain’s portrait so you ca
n see the kind of man he is. If half the people in the Navy were like him, I’d be here for life. Heck, I’d stay if it were a tenth.

  The ideas I’ve had on aa defense seem to be working out, even though our flyboys have been too efficient to let many targets get close enough to shoot. Maybe I’ll ask Ander to let a few slip by so we can get more practice. (Just kidding, dear — we sharpen our skills by hammering drones and sleeves morning and night, a sleeve being an aa target trailed by a tow plane.) At any rate, what with one bit of luck and another, Bataan has so far come through totally unscathed.

  Even after we steamed back from Frisco to Pearl with what seemed like the whole forward section of the ship brand-new, they didn’t send us back to the thick of things. Air Group 50, who had been with us since shakedown, got topped up with some new personnel and we had to break in twenty greenhorns. That took us till last week. So to sum up, your lazy husband has lived the life of Riley in his blue Pacific paradise for the last seven and a half months while you’ve been worried sick about his safety! But believe me, sweetheart, the worst thing to befall me for the last seven months is a bad case of missing you.

  And I do miss you. I don’t want to write anything that will bring a blush to those beautiful cheeks, but you can imagine the kind of things we’ve done that I hope you miss as much as I do! And I do, every day and every hour. But every week brings us closer to the end of the war. Japan is starving, her strength is ebbing, the Allies are roaring ahead, and it’s only a matter of time till she surrenders. How long that may take I can’t predict, but however long it takes, we’ll see it out. I’d guess we’ll be home by Christmas. That will be the best Christmas of my life.