Tommy

by William Illsey Atkinson

  My love to everyone (but especially you).

  Your affectionate Tommy

  Much better than the other letters, he thinks, licking the envelope. Much closer to the truth. Though he still can’t tell all — Ensign Ander’s quip last week, for example: Gals out here get whiter ever’day.

  March 18, 1945

  Feathers returns as he departed, deadheading in the navigator’s seat of a torpedo bomber. The tbm hits sloppily, bounces once, is caught, stays down, and comes to a stop. The canopy slides back and the downy-faced pilot and Feathers descend. Feathers is unshaven and bedraggled, a state that Tommy has never imagined, let alone seen. He also seems less brisk than usual.

  Tommy takes Feathers’ duffel bag. How was your flight?

  Comme ci comme ça, Thomas. Like four hours in a cold tub on a train. How our kids do it twice a day for weeks is beyond me.

  Youth, Tommy says. Don’t hold it against them. How do you feel? Are you all right?

  Mother, you mean? Feathers nods. She had a good life. Wouldn’t surprise me if she got to heaven and said to God, Get out of the way, you’re doing it wrong.

  You’re a rich man now, Feathers. You’ll stop talking to me.

  I’ve always been rich, if by that you mean frivolous and inconvenient. Didn’t stop me from talking to you back when.

  Tommy grins. It’s good to have you back. Incidentally, the captain wants to see you as soon as convenient, which is Navy for yesterday. Go shave and change, you have a reputation to uphold. I’ll stall the old man.

  Hang on, says Feathers, two fingers on Tommy’s sleeve stripes. I want to watch this.

  They dodge the fitters tugging Feathers’ tbm to the elevator, and stand tight to the island to watch a cap of ten Corsairs launch. The Hellcats are terrific planes, fast, solid and stylish. Next to them the new f4u Corsairs waddle toward catapult hookup like crippled hens.

  What a bizarre design, Tommy says.

  Like a bagful of assholes, Feathers says. Like a duck with a crutch.

  It’s true. The cabin on a Corsair is so far aft that pilot visibility at launch and landing is nearly nil. David Ander says it’s like driving a truck while sitting on the tailgate. In response to an overabundance of initial crashes, the designers stuck a window in the floor, which literally lets pilots land by the seat of their pants. Corsairs’ engine cowls can leak oil at landing, spattering the canopy with opaque brown gunk. Earlier models had weirder hazards — the port wing would stall while the starboard still had lift, for example — but cincpac swears such inconveniences have been overcome. One fact remains: the sweet recoveries that are routine for Hellcats are rare for Corsairs. Tommy has pitied Bataan’s pilots more times than he can count.

  Aesthetically the Corsairs are as much of a visual atrocity as Feathers says. The wings leave the fuselage thirty degrees down from horizontal, then lurch back level. The main wheels cant outward so far they seem half folded up at full extension. A Corsair at rest looks herniated. The things aren’t even all metal, like Hellcats: their upper wings are painted fabric, like boys’ models or the Red Baron’s triplane. Feathers says f4u stands for something really vulgar. Tommy can’t disagree.

  But though the Corsair is an ugly duckling on deck, the instant it’s launched it transforms into a swan. The splayed wheels fold back, a brawny powerplant blurs the weird three-bladed propeller, and the thing is matchless in the air. It’s faster than a Hellcat: four hundred miles per hour at wavetop level, five hundred and fifty miles per hour in a dive. That’s two-thirds the speed of sound. Nothing comes close to it. Against Zeroes, Hellcats have a kill rate of seven to one; Corsairs are racking up eleven to one. David Ander told Tommy that last month a Corsair came up behind a Kawasaki Nick at high altitude and when the U.S. pilot’s guns jammed in the frigid air, he throttled forward and gnawed the Nick’s ass off with his propeller. It cost him five inches from his prop tips, but the Nick went down and the Corsair landed without incident. Tommy has to admit the Corsair meets the Mexican criteria for a good man: ugly, strong, and competent.

  Feathers emerges from Captain Schaeffer’s cabin his usual immaculate self: uniform crisp, buttons glowing, chin shaved blue. Tommy feels a sudden pang — not envy exactly, but a deep, sad certainty that Feathers is on loan from a higher plane. Sometimes a glance at his friend makes Tommy think his shoes are caked in cowshit. He stuffs the feeling down as they climb up to the bridge.

  What’d the old man say? he asks.

  Thanks, Feathers says.

  You’re welcome. What for?

  I mean the captain thanked me, sir. I knew more than he did, so I did most of the talking.

  And?

  Sorry sir, can’t say. Top secret, triple-A, apply in triplicate to the Pentagon.

  Oh! Sorry. Didn’t mean to pump you, Lieutenant. I understand.

  Of course I’m going to tell you, you moron. Sir. Just keep it to yourself.

  Feathers, it turns out, is more than a met officer: he’s fleet liaison for cincpac Intelligence. Tommy rolls his eyes at the revelation. Feathers widens his grin.

  Too much, hmmm? Stout, resolute, fine family, best schools? Don’t get the whammy, sir, most intel is bullshit. Sorting through data at four in the morning till something jumps out that should have been obvious all along. By the way, I gave you full credit to the captain for demystifying my stats. Anyway: something’s come out of the encryptions we’ve cracked from Imperial Japanese hq. They’re readying a new weapon, strategic code Ten-Go. cincpac’s worried, and they should be. This is big and bad.

  Feathers stops in the companionway. You’ve heard of Operation Iceberg?

  Tommy nods. It’s common knowledge something’s up.

  We’re taking Okinawa, Feathers says. We turn north tomorrow, D-day’s April first. ijhq knows we know, we know they know, et cetera, so no harm telling you. Schaeffer’s giving a general briefing at 2130 tonight.

  You have my full attention, Lieutenant.

  Remember Iwo Jima? Tough ground resistance, no surrender, hard on the Marines? But no IJ Navy support, so a piece of cake for us yachtsmen? ijhq are still smarting from that one. They want to erase the insult. They’re going to throw everything they have at us at Okinawa.

  Including that weapon you mentioned?

  Feathers nods. It’s suicide bombers. Strap a teenager onto a tub of high explosive and rig it to detonate on impact. Train him to take off but not to land. All for the emperor, may he live a thousand years! After a sweet and honorable death, our souls will rendezvous at the Kyoto Gate!

  Jesus, Tommy says. The sun is strong but he feels cold.

  ijhq tactical code for it is kamikaze, sir. Wind of Heaven, after the storm that shattered Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet. They’re looking to do the same thing to us.

  No, says Tommy, they’re going to try.

  For the — Look. Sir. One, just one of these things gets through our defenses and we’re steak on the grill. We’re used to some level of caution in attackers, right? They’re courageous, they brave our flak to drop their bombs, but they sheer off the second they can. God knows it isn’t cowardice: they know they’re precious, pilots are in short supply, they’re under orders to return. But what if they’re under orders not to return? They won’t flinch at a thousand yards, or a hundred, or ten. They’ll drill straight in. And that fanaticism, sir, that crazy hate, will be terrible to face. Our defenses, first our cap and then our aa, will have to be perfect. No more “durn-I-missed-the sleeve-let’s-try-again.” You miss once, once, you die.

  I still say we can take them, Mr. Mason. Nothing’s touched us so far.

  Feathers’ eyes clench shut. Fuck me, sir, you still don’t understand. We’re not talking two of these things per week: they’re going to rain on us. That strategic term, Ten-Go? Literally it means floating chrysanthemums, but its nuance is tougher to translate. It may mean hail of death. J
apan values Okinawa more than Iwo Jima. It’s one of the Home Islands, like Hokkaido or Honshu. Every single Japanese will fight to the death to keep it. This place is part of their communal soul.

  Well, Christ, Feathers. We can take a hit or two.

  Feathers looks about him. Sir, this thing we’re on . . . what is Bataan?

  Tommy stares at him. She’s a ship, Lieutenant.

  Feathers shakes his head. No, sir, that’s just what it looks like. What is its function? What does it do?

  Tommy considers. She’s a mobile landing strip. A floating airport.

  Guess again. No idea? Sir, Bataan is a gigantic explosive device. A single enormous bomb.

  Tommy shakes his head. Stays silent, baffled.

  Feathers ticks off fingers. First there’s fuel. Aviation kerosene, highest-octane hydrocarbon there is. Bunker oil for boilers and generators. Then there’s armament. Rockets — Starbursts and Tiny Tims. Shells and bullets for the fighters, thirty tons of them when we’re provisioned. aa shells, twenty and forty millimeter, another fifty tons. Depth charges and five-hundred pound fragmentation bombs for the abms, torpedoes for the tbas. In sum, fifty billion btus or so. One single Judy hits that and your carrier’s gone. Cooked, literally.

  Tommy stands transfixed as Feathers explains.

  Everyone dies, Feathers says. Sometimes you explode. Sometimes you turn turtle and sink. Sometimes you’re a ghost ship, still floating but devoid of life. cincpac showed me photographs of bombed-out carriers, hollow shells with nothing alive in them, sailing to the horizon glowing white. Hulls, guns, armor, everything hot as a ceramic kiln. Hot as a crematorium, hot as a refiner’s fire. White-hot metal the only substance left. Every bit of organic matter — shoes, clothes, flesh, bones, eyeballs — baked to ash. Pale featherlight ash that swirls in the wind. These photos are never released to the newspapers.

  Christ on the cross, says Tommy.

  It’s happened to them too, sir. We hit one of their carriers off the Philippines last year. Our strike wasn’t fatal and they squelched the fire. But we’d ruptured a main aviation tank. Kerosene vapor mixed with air and infused the ship. When they turned on their fans to clear it away, a switch sparked and the entire ship blew up. Twenty thousand tons: vanished, puréed, kaput in a tenth of a second. Not a scrap left bigger than a shithouse door.

  My God, Feathers. I’ve never seen you scared before.

  You see it now, sir. I respectfully submit that you get on your gun crews’ asses like stink on a skunk, immediately. Captain’s briefing Air Group right now.

  April 1, 1945 — 0520 hours PST

  Operation Iceberg, Japanese-Held Okinawa

  The final score [for Ten-Go] in ships was 34 sunk and 368 damaged from the air, with nearly five thousand sailors killed and almost the same number wounded: a ship casualty rate of one in four. But for years of intense training in damage control, the score would have been significantly higher and would have included at least two and possibly three fleet carriers sunk. It was the worst and most sustained ordeal of the US Fleet in the entire war.

  — Dan van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign

  Easter Day, forty minutes before sunrise. All religious services were held the night before. On the flight deck, it’s a jet-and-crystal morning: the stars are still in riot, bright as fireworks. Try as he will Tommy can’t see any cloud. He waves at a sleepy aa standby crew as he crosses the flight deck. A muscular sailor hosing down the deck moves the stream of saltwater to one side so Tommy won’t sully his uniform.

  Up three ladderways, one after the other. Tommy touches his hat brim as he emerges onto the bridge. He likes to think he’s in trim, but opportunities for exercise on a crowded ship are limited and he’s puffing as he takes his final steps.

  Captain Schaeffer returns salute. Morning, Tommy. Sleep well?

  Like the dead, sir. Looks like Carrington has his forecast pegged.

  Schaeffer nods vigorously, looking at his wristwatch. Call him Feathers, we all do. I make it six and a half hours till noon. You can shoot our latitude then.

  Tommy goes to a side port, glances out. No need sir, there’s Venus. I’ll shoot an altazimuth. Give you our exact position right away.

  The captain stares at him. You can’t do that.

  Did it yesterday, sir. For practice. Tommy takes a sextant from a locker, notes how far the morning star lies above the flat charcoal horizon, jots figures in a notepad, looks at the bridge chronometer, and consults the ephemeris on his chart table. Two minutes later he says, We’re twenty-one point three miles from Okinawa, sir. Main landing beach bears 348.37, that’s east-northeast half east.

  Schaeffer looks at him like he’s grown two heads. That’s impossible, he says.

  Tell it to Venus, sir. Tommy grins and jerks a thumb at the star, which sits like a lemon drop just above the horizon.

  Good Christ. You’re sure? You’re sure. And you’re the man who took a cvl through the Panama Canal at half ahead . . . Stevens!

  A fresh-faced snotty pokes his head up the aft ladderway.

  Get the radio operator. Raise cincpac and tell ’em the fleet’s half an hour closer to Okinawa than we thought. No, dammit, don’t stare! Tell him Tommy says so, that’ll close the matter. And get my exec up here.

  Schaffer removes his hat, runs a hand through thinning hair. You heard my squawk talk, Tommy, but here are the details. We’re going into action right away. Marine III Corps hits Tana Beach in an hour and we launch our support at T-ten. cap 1 is all Corsairs with rockets and frags. Intel says there’s going to be opposition offshore as well as on. If they’re right we’ll be up to our necks in Judys, so make sure your aa crews have lots of shells. You’ve got ’em blasting apple cores at a thousand yards, right?

  Right, sir. Tommy crosses his fingers behind his back.

  Then get on deck and see to it, Lieutenant Commander. And for Christ’s sake wear a helmet and flak jacket this time.

  Tommy pauses on the ladderway, head level with the bridge deck. Sir? Happy Easter.

  Happy Easter, son . . . Goddammit, go!

  Surface radar picks out the first-wave Japanese air strike when it’s a hundred miles away. At 0620 Schaeffer scrambles cap 1 to support the Marines as they storm ashore. The launches go like clockwork, two planes a minute, twice as fast as regs. Fifteen minutes later cap 2 goes up, Hellcats soaring high against the Judys. The lead pilots, hoary old men of twenty-two leading the latest shipment of teenage greenhorns, orbit at twenty thousand feet until the Judys come in, then pounce. By 0740, the sky is filled with flame and smoke as the Japanese bombers fall to the U.S. fighters. There’s not a Zero to be seen, thank God, otherwise the battle might have a different hinge. The Japs are running out of fighters.

  Tommy and Schaeffer don’t know it, but something Feathers told them a week ago is correct. The P-38 Lightning, a twin-hulled U.S. fighter that can climb straight up and touch five hundred and eighty miles per hour in a dive, has devoured Jap planes northward from the Coral Sea for the last two months. It’s land-based because it’s not rugged enough for carriers, but it’s saving the carriers by sweeping Zeroes from the sky. The Lightning fires not machine-gun slugs but explosive shells; a single hit anywhere on a Jap plane rips off cladding or pulps engines. There were twelve hundred Zeroes at the start of the war, twelve thousand of them by early 1943: now there are six hundred left on Earth, three fewer per day on average, and no replacements either of pilots or of planes. Imperial Japan is eight months away from bleeding to death. It will die a hotter, brighter death in half that time.

  Even without Zero escorts, the Judys come. Their pilots are children, teenagers inculcated with the old lie: Apt and sweet it is to die for fatherland. The child pilots learn fast because they don’t need skills like touchdown: they’re under orders not to return. All they have to do is dive on an American ship. If that ship is drilled and ready, both plane and ch
ild are toast. But if that ship is unready, or gets flustered under attack and lets a lone plane through its screen, it’s not just the pilot that’s toast: it’s the U.S. ship that receives the suicide bomb.

  Flattops are the juiciest targets; they’re easy to spot and hard to miss. Each has not two but three Achilles heels, the fore and aft elevators and the tall control island. And while they’re fast, sustaining over thirty knots at flank speed, they aren’t that agile. Destroyers, cruisers, even battlewagons can jink when a kamikaze stoops, but a Judy has time to draw a bead on a carrier. Feathers has told Tommy the consequences of such a strike. It is immolation.

  To avoid this appalling fate, Tommy knows there’s only one solution: shoot down every Jap. Blast him to atoms. Blow him out of the air. Do it with caps if you can; plunk the quarter-ton concussion bombs into the sea twenty miles from your flight deck. But when that first-line defense fails — when something with a red sun on its wings bores down on you at two hundred miles per hour — then you have one option. Your anti-aircraft guns must surround your ship with a web of steel, gutting any Judy that comes within range.

  This is about to happen to Tommy Atkinson and his aa crews.

  At 0755 the rain of kamikazes starts. Tommy watches in horror as hate tumbles from the sky. This was Feathers’ fear, the only thing that Tommy has seen spook the man, and he now sees why. The kamikazes don’t swerve, don’t try to save themselves. They fall like fate. Most are slaughtered by the caps: ninety percent, ninety-five. But some get close.

  And some get through.

  For the last year, Tommy has sweated his aa crews to exhaustion, and at times they’ve hated him. Now they’re muttering about him again, but this time they’re blessing the pot he pisses in. He’s made them superlative, then amazing, then perfect: he’s made them sitting death. Now death is what they’re dealing.

  A mile to the north, a wounded Judy breaks away from a Hellcat that’s made a clumsy pass. It’s already a flamer, trailing a long torch of kerosene ignited by the Hellcat’s fire. But while it’s got seconds to live, a lot can happen in seconds. Whether by luck or skill, the Judy exits its turn aimed straight at the Bataan.