Tommy

by William Illsey Atkinson

  The man presented here is fictional. That’s not to say he isn’t genuine: he’s as real as Falstaff. The first time I typed his name he woke up, grinned at me, and took off. I couldn’t corral him; I could hardly keep up with him. Halfway through first draft, I was tempted to call my book Feathers & Tom. This situation is familiar to all writers and is one of the transcendent joys of fiction. It makes a story less invention than discovery.

  Feathers represents what we don’t, can’t, and never will know about those close to us, however deeply we think we understand them. If the cliché is true and everyone has (going down through psychic strata) a public life, a private life, and deepest of all a secret life, then Feathers holds court in the third category. We all hide things we take with us to the grave. Most of us nurture a Feathers or two.

  My story blends fact and fiction in several places. Regarding Captain Valentine Schaeffer: Dad admired this commander as much as I indicate. However, Schaeffer led Bataan only till summer 1944, when he was replaced by (in order) Captains Heath and Gilbert. I have kept him aboard because I could not bear to part with him. The Jim Ball portrait is as good as Tommy says.

  Ensign Ander, like Tommy, Feathers, and Captains Cassidy and Schaeffer, is also a historical personage, who after the war rose to be a Colonel of Marines. At the time of this novel’s first writing, he was ninety-two and counting, his youthful twang polished to the soft murmur of a classic southern gentleman. He died in June 2012.

  Late in his life, I asked my father, “What was Eugene Victor Illsey like?” He thought deeply, then said, “He was an asshole.” Yet there’s a cartoon of Eugene Victor done about 1910, when he was in his late twenties, wearing a tank-top swimsuit and playing a piano that’s covered with photos of good-looking girls. A caption reads: banking isn’t his only hobby. So there was more to the man than the martinet Dad saw. Mabel certainly loved her Gene, and she was one of the best and sweetest women I ever knew. Of human personality there is no end.

  I have posited one key technical hypothesis in my novel: the ballistic discrepancies in shipboard ordnance that Tommy discusses with Captain Cassidy in Part 2. I am convinced that something more than lack of training and outmoded technology lay behind the U.S. Navy’s initial defeats in World War II. Employing a science writer’s informed speculation, I offer as a possible explanation for the tragic start of U.S. war operations what Tommy suggests to Captain Cassidy.

  That ice cream was used as currency among U.S. ships in the Pacific Theater is a fact. It was told to me in August 2011 by a National Parks Service guide aboard USS Cassin Young in Charleston Yard, MA. The ship, a destroyer, survived the last kamikaze hit of Operation Iceberg and is on permanent display.

  Elsewhere in the novel, when Tommy is being taken on his initial tour of Bataan, he asks how the ship gets its turbine water. In answer, he’s told the fish guts story. This bit is also factual: it was told to me by a retired usn boilerman aboard Cassin Young. Also accurate is the letter Tommy writes to Puget Sound Power News on March 9, 1945, which is presented verbatim. The letters to my mother are imagined, but all the information in them is true.

  Tommy would have conducted his classes on Bataan using nautical miles of 6,080 feet. I have nonetheless used geographical (land) miles of 5,280 feet in his class calculations, as most of my readers will be more familiar with the latter unit.

  In the novel, I present a number of impressive facts about the USS Bataan once she’s docked for good. The statistics come from a commemorative book printed in 1945, compiled by shipboard crew and titled simply USS Bataan.

  While this novel is grounded in historical reality, restructuring events into a readable narrative required changes in the sequence of action. For example, the first recorded kamikaze attacks took place near the Philippines in November 1944 rather than five months later at Okinawa. Ten-Go was, however, as hellish as I portray. Furthermore, the action I present here as occurring entirely on April 1, 1945 took place at three distinct times. USS Benjamin Franklin was indeed hit as I show, with my father’s ship immediately adjacent. His outrage at Big Ben’s storage belowdecks of a fully armed and fueled combat air patrol is solidly documented. Yet this occurred not on April 1 but on March 19, as Task Force 58 closed in on Okinawa. Likewise, the Judy near-miss took place a month later, on April 17, 1945, and the friendly-fire mishap still later, on May 14. I have combined these incidents to convey the intensity of battle.

  Though I describe Big Ben’s elevator as being blown into the sky, the ship so hit was actually another full-sized carrier, USS Enterprise. I have a photo of the elevator’s flight taken by Joe Midolla, a Photographer’s Mate Third Class aboard Bataan. In one of those incredible situations so frequent in war, the hunk of elevator came down intact, floated on the surface of the sea, and was used as a life raft by Navy personnel who had abandoned ship. The incident occurred on May 14, 1945. Further, Franklin was revenged exactly as I portray. Bataan’s Lt. Locke Trigg pursued the Myrt for twenty miles and shot it down. His all-metal Hellcat helped him survive what the Bataan commemorative book calls “flak thick enough to walk on.”

  That Navy personnel endured such things for years at a time is hardly fathomable. Yet they did, and returned home to rebuild. World War II veterans rarely talk in detail about what they went through; they did what they had to, then filed it away. It was not till I researched and wrote this book that I understood the achievement of my father’s generation. You and I — in fact the whole world, including the enemies they conquered and then raised up to democracy and prosperity — owe them a debt beyond calculation.

  William Illsey Atkinson

  Pearl Harbor Day 2012

  Notes

  PART 1

  1913

  Democrat: A light one-horse buggy.

  1930

  • Nemo me impune crisscrossit ‘Nobody crosses me.’ Dr. Gibb is riffing on Scotland’s motto, Nemo me impune lacessit: ‘No one grasps me without punishment.’

  • Okanagan north of the border, Okanogan in the States.

  • Captain Kidd and Edward Teach [Blackbeard] were seventeenth-century pirates.

  1934

  • Alfred P. Sloan, president of General Motors Corporation An amazing man, a true captain of U.S. industry. Also a laughable reactionary, the model for General Bullmoose in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner. Sloan really did use a public forum to praise horse-drawn vehicles. He really did say, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

  • Arma virumque cane ‘[I command you to] sing of arms and the man.’ A riff on Arma virumque cano, the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Of arms and the man I sing.’ Stentor was an Achaean herald in Homer’s Iliad “whose voice was as the voice of fifty men.”

  February 26, 1935

  • Emery J. San Souci Dad visited Mr. San Souci frequently in 1934–35 and was virtually an adopted grandson till the governor died on August 10, 1936.

  • What butterfly ever held up a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars? Feathers is referring to a line taken from American poet Carl Sandburg’s “Prayers of Steel”: “Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.”

  • Mr. San Souci was not re-nominated by the Republican Committee because he had called out the state militia in a strike Dad attested to this version of the militia incident, completely at odds with nga history.

  • Iosef Vissarionovitch Joseph Stalin.

  • Four Hundred Yankee élite c. 1880–1950.

  • Res commisum est audace Latin ‘The bold thing has been done.’

  August 20, 1935

  Forty-first, up near the El The El was New York City’s elevated urban rail line, now an elevated urban park.

  1937

  a young woman walking Mom was still a bombshell long after her twenties. When she was fifty-eight, I took her to my press club and was treated to the spectacl
e of drink-sodden, foul-mouthed, sexist newshounds not just self-censoring their language but also catapulting off their bar stools to light her cigarette.

  PART 2

  1943

  • Codex Asinorum Book of fools. Feathers is spoofing Pons Asinorum [Latin ‘bridge of fools’], a Euclidian theorem supposedly insoluble by the stupid.

  • ninety-day wonders Demand for Navy officers in World War II was so great that their training was compressed from four years to less than one year.

  • Dugout Doug A sobriquet for General Douglas MacArthur who lurked in bomb shelters for months after he fumbled away the Philippines.

  • I shot our position If Kraweski were correct, Bataan would be aground in Delaware.

  • Interlocutor sum pro bono publico Latin ‘I speak to promote the public good.’

  • argumentum ad hominem Latin. A rhetorical attack not against an argument but against the character of the person making that argument.

  • nemo contradictans Latin ‘As long as no one argues to the contrary.’

  • dixit amicus curiae: Latin ‘So says this Friend of the Court.’

  • my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure Said by Alfred, Lord Tennyson of Sir Galahad, like Chaucer’s character the “very parfit Knight.”

  PART 3

  1944

  • And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs Taken from Robert Frost’s 1916 poem “Out, Out —.”

  • Newton’s laws of motion I have imagined the textbook, including its footnote. The data are accurate.

  • We mean to make the cockeyed world take off it’s [sic] hat The lyrics are accurate, though here only partial.

  PART 4

  1945

  • Sailors who wish to be a hero The rhyme is contemporary and apocryphal. It was reported by Norman Rosten as a latrine-wall scrawl in his 1946 book, The Big Road. I have substituted Sailors for Soldiers.

  • Tinian An island in the Marianas chain, captured by the U.S. in June 1944. B-29 Enola Gay took off from its airfield to bomb Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

  April 1, 1945

  • The final score [for Ten-Go] in ships was 34 sunk and 368 damaged from the air From Dan Van der Vat’s The Pacific Campaign (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). Mr. Van der Vat’s book has been a priceless resource for me in fleshing out family stories and relating them to historical events. This quotation comes from p. 383, and the volume itself from my father’s library. I remember Dad reading it, then setting it down and gazing into the distance. At such times I would not interrupt. (Quoted by permission.)

  • Gold-vermillion, yes. Who wrote that? It was Gerard Manley Hopkins (as Feathers remembers) in his 1918 poem, “The Windhover.” The final lines are:

  No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

  Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

  • Still under radar control, the cruiser’s guns snap down and left to track it. To the best of my knowledge no responsibility for this friendly fire incident was ever assessed, nor any formal rebuke issued. Besides Feathers, seven people died aboard Bataan that day.

  April 2, 1945

  • The lads in their hundreds Poem by A.E. Houseman in his 1896 collection, A Shropshire Lad. “Hundreds” is not a number but a subdivision of an English county.

  • A war, even the most victorious, is a national misfortune German general Helmuth von Moltke in a letter, 1880.

  August 6, 1945

  • Yamanoue I stayed at this hotel in 2002 while researching a nonfiction book; it’s one of my favorite places in Tokyo.

  • The statistics come from a Bataan commemorative book printed in 1945.

  • Y-poles Dad really did squeak a cvl through the Cape Cod Canal this way.

  • A master plan devised by geniuses for execution by idiots This was written after the war by Herman Wouk in his novel, The Caine Mutiny. I mentioned it to Dad and he responded with what I present as Feathers’ add-on aphorism: i.e., that it was devised by idiots, too.

  THE POST-WAR YEARS

  December 18, 1948

  The train again.

  Ridiculous, Tommy thinks. Corsairs fly fifteen times this fast. Our catapult went zero to sixty in seconds, cvl-29 could hold thirty knots forever, a Flying Fortress could get me where I’m going in nine hours. And I’m stuck behind a slowcoach steam engine for four and a half days.

  The train rattles, rattles. Tommy is the coach car’s only passenger. He glances out his window, but its single pane has frosted up. Tommy scrapes away crystals with his fingernail and feels a vandal’s guilt at damaging the filigree. Bare winter mountains creep by; there is no spark of human light. Up ahead, the locomotive spews black smoke into icy air. It nears a crossing and its whistle wails, once and long.

  Tommy sits back and rubs his eyes. That’s it, then: seven-come-eleven and your money’s gone. Save your country, then return to find the shirkers took your job. Start a business and fail, start a second business and fail. Send your wife and sons back yet again to her father’s house, the man who told her on her wedding day to leave him. Even Tommy’s third-class ticket is a loan from the old man. It will be meticulously added to the revolving balance of Tommy’s financial debt, which in Eugene Victor Illsey’s eyes is moral debt as well. A woman said in the Depression: If you know a banker, look at him closely. He is not what he seems.

  Tommy fishes in his suitcase and comes up with one of the sandwiches he made two days ago. Cheap cheese, stale bread, ashes in the mouth.

  Betrayal. Exile. The words keep surfacing. He risked his life to save his country and saved only its businessmen. He saw the brutal death of his greatest friend, and when he went to Stone and Webster with his wounds still bleeding, he found they’d filled his prewar position. Had to replace you, new guy’s doing fine, thanks for fighting, God bless America. You still here?

  The crucifixion wasn’t the worst of it, thinks Tommy. That was sharp but short. The worst was the homelessness. The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. That pain lasts a lifetime.

  What can I do? he asks Feathers, but Feathers is silent now. The last of him has followed his body.

  Hamilton, Ontario, is gripped in a winter storm. Four feet of heavy snow have paralyzed the Midwest. Tommy holes up in Buffalo for a day while rail plows struggle against the snowfall and wild winds. His ten-car train has three locomotives and its own plow, yet it still takes thirty hours to toil from Niagara Falls to Hamilton. At eleven p.m. on December 23, 1948, an exhausted, unshaven, unkempt Tommy Atkinson stands on the arrivals platform at Hamilton’s James Street Station and feels it sway beneath him like a carrier’s flight deck. Honolulu heaved the same way when he’d been at sea for months. The buildings around him — rust-red churches, soot-black houses — are islands in an ocean of dull grey. In the thick snow, only Bet’s sweater keeps him warm.

  I trained as a fighter, he thinks. I won my battles and put down my arms. I was born in a farming village but I will not farm. I am a doctor’s child yet I have no skill to heal. What can I do?

  And the answer comes to him: You can build.

  High on its escarpment slope, its back against a limestone cliff, his father-in-law’s house is strangely beautiful. Its kitchen glows merrily and smells of spice; its living room is full of lights and fir boughs. Here are the children, Tom nearly five and frightened by this haggard stranger, Billy two and reserving judgment. Tommy hugs them hard, his eyes closed. Tom howls and struggles to escape.

  It’s not all bad. Mabel remains an ally and even old Eugene Victor, a hundred-proof Presbyterian with a mouth sewn down at the corners, seems not totally vexed to see him. Bet plays carols at the concert grand: I Wonder as I Wander, Good King Wenceslas. Beyond th
e leaded glass, the heavy snow bows the conifers’ necks. And at bedtime, at last, here in his arms is his lady wife. His last thought before sleep is: Life.

  Hamilton is in a boom. Half the world has suffered the all-fire, but what’s escaped has more than it can handle to rebuild the rest. Hamilton is metals, railways, manufacturing; its mills run triple shifts and anyone who fogs a mirror finds a job. The Atkinsons occupy two bedrooms in Eugene Victor Illsey’s house while Tommy scouts local businesses. A firm of architects deigns to hire him, though even this comes via Eugene Victor, whose next-door neighbor is a partner in the firm. The job is dull, the paycheck small, and Tommy has to work to remember he is lcdr A.H. Atkinson, USN (ret.), MIT (Sloan) MBA summa cum laude, and a victor in history’s greatest war. But it’s work, and a step back to dignity.

  Within a month he flees the patriarchal homestead for a place of his own, a two-bedroom rental in a redbrick walkup. Tommy has to walk three miles to his office, but he doesn’t mind. He likes the exercise, and most mornings he arrives at work with the answers to yesterday’s problems laid out clear in his mind. His future’s looking up, too: the old men who own the place have hinted at a partnership.

  And he’s making plans. The apartment is a stopgap. Tommy has no intention of keeping neighbors who have screamfests, eat cabbage boiled in garlic, and bang on their ceiling when the Atkinsons do more than tiptoe and speak in signs. Somewhere, somehow, he will get his family a house.

  In the meantime, city life is not unpleasant. The boys’ big stone school is an easy walk north; his in-laws’ house is the same distance south, close if there’s an emergency but far enough for emotional insulation. And while it’s still a dicey world, where people get polio and a low-speed car crash can kill you, one thing works surprisingly well, and that’s Hamilton.