Reluctant Warriors

by Jon Stafford

  He left coordination with Mineola and the zigzag movement to the executive officer, Lieutenant Samuel P. Cashion, an Academy man from the ’34 class. Rodgers had chatted with Cashion for only about ten minutes. He had only set the direction and the speed to be whatever the tanker could make. Within twenty-four hours, the new captain had met every person on board.

  By daylight on the third day, the two ships were making about ten knots, about eighty miles south and west of Guadalcanal. Within four hours of dawn, Mackson’s SG radar reported a contact about eight miles distant.

  Rodgers went down and looked at the screen himself. He then returned to the bridge and motioned for Cashion to come over.

  “Sam, that is obviously a search plane. He’s made no move to attack, and he appears to be shadowing us. We’ve been seen for sure.”

  “Looks like it, sir.”

  “I see from intelligence reports that there are several Japanese bases within striking distance of us in the Solomons, like Buka.”

  Cashion nodded.

  “I know it’s early, but let’s make sure that every man in this command has his lunch as soon as possible,” Rodgers said. “We won’t have time for it later, and we’ll all be needing it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Cashion hurried off.

  About 1300, on a somewhat overcast day, the radar began to pick up a number of bogeys to the northwest, about twenty miles off.

  Rodgers took immediate action. Speaking with only a trace of a Southern accent, the Alabaman nodded to Cashion. “Sam, it looks like what we thought. I suspect they’re going to stage against us now. I want you to get on the horn [TBS voice system] to Mineola. Ask Captain Bennings to head for that squall to the west. Tell Freddie to stay in there—if he can—until it gets dark, about six hours from now. They’ve seen him, no question. But if we keep the enemy busy for a while, maybe they won’t be able to wait him out, and he can sneak in to the ‘Canal tonight. Order him in my name not to turn back, no matter what happens to us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s wait as long as possible to go to ‘Boots and Saddles.’” That was the term Rodgers liked to use for General Quarters. “Then we can go to Battle Stations. That way, the men will be as relaxed as possible for as long as possible.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rodgers turned to the helmsman. “Mr. Raguzzi, there will probably be a lot going on here in a few minutes. But I want you to watch me very closely. I’m not going to say much, but you watch my hands and turn this thing just as fast as you can in whatever direction I indicate.”

  He held each arm up at various angles. “This will mean two points to starboard, this to port. This means four, and this means eight. Now, I want you to head toward that sunshine two points to starboard.” Rodgers pointed.

  “Yes, sir,” Raguzzi replied.

  “Mr. Hodges,” Rodgers told the signalman, “get through to Noumeo. Say this in plain language. There’s no time for code: ‘We are confronting a large force of enemy aircraft. Request immediate air support.’ Give our position. Make sure they acknowledge.”

  Rodgers stood up from the captain’s chair and spoke to the men on the bridge, his voice calm and reassuring. “Men, you report to me what is happening, what you see, nothing more. When you see planes, tell me where they are and how many, the direction they are heading, and what kind of planes they are. There’s no reason to get excited. If you say it in a calm voice, that will help me quite a bit. Let’s do the best we can. Let’s put on a good show for these people.”

  By 1330, planes began appearing to the northeast as well. It was growing apparent that this would indeed be a major attack. By 1415, the planes began their moves, with two distinct flights, one from the west and one from the east.

  An anvil attack, Rodgers thought to himself, judging from what the lookouts reported. “Mr. Farrow, ask Chief Clark to give us all the speed he can. Let’s see what she’ll do!” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  Ten minutes later, “Guns” opened fire at extreme range with the four five-inch, .38-caliber main guns. Fitted with the new high proximity fuse, these fifty-four-pound shells had an immediate effect. They drove off the first wave, shooting one plane down and sending another heading away trailing smoke.

  The second wave came closer. Clearly visible but out of range, the anvil attack commenced with a flight of eight “Kate” torpedo bombers to the west and ten “Val” dive bombers to the east, paralleling Mackson until they were several miles ahead. Then, abruptly, they turned in toward the little ship at the same time, so that whatever direction the destroyer turned, she would be hit. With the thirty-five-knot speed of the warship, this too came to nothing, and a second aircraft was brought down.

  Under a patch of brilliant sunlight, the 1,500-ton Craven class destroyer opposed some thirty Japanese planes, weaving and twisting like a contortionist, guns blazing. In the next twenty minutes, they beat back a third attack. Another aircraft sputtered away, smoking.

  Rodgers sat calmly on the bridge as though nothing were happening, chain-smoking his beloved Camel cigarettes. Only once did he rise, curious to see if “B” turret would finally bring down a Kate that he’d watched aim directly at the bridge from several miles out. It passed not thirty feet above the mast and made its way off to the northwest. Rodgers shrugged, surprised that her torpedo had missed.

  Twice, when planes made strafing runs on the bridge, he sat unaffected as bullets came close to his head and other personnel hit the deck. He joked with the helmsman and signalman, seemingly completely unconcerned about the chaos and desperate circumstances that surrounded them. Only a keen observer would have noticed his left hand in his pocket. He was running his thumb over a coin his mother had given him when his father had been killed, and which was engraved with part of the Rosary:

  Holy Mary Mother of God

  Pray for us sinners now

  And at the hour of our death

  The power and coordination of the fourth attack doomed the little warship. There were just too many planes and not enough guns. Rodgers managed to comb the wakes of several torpedoes, but he could not avoid both the bombs and the torpedoes.

  Four five-hundred-pound armor-piercing bombs struck Mackson within a very few seconds. The first hit in front of the bridge, just missing “A” turret, and went all the way through the ship and out the bottom without exploding.

  Mackson was not so lucky with the others. The second bomb struck near the fantail and exploded above the engine room. The third hit amidships near the funnel, heeling the ship over almost forty degrees.

  As the ship was beginning to right herself, the fourth bomb hit within a few feet of the bridge.

  One moment, Rodgers and the other bridge personnel were secure at their stations. The next moment, he was in the water, his ears ringing and the breath knocked out of him by the force of the explosion.

  Gasping, chin-deep in seawater, he looked around. There was a huge hole in Mackson, gouts of fire and oily smoke boiling out of it. All the bridge personnel, and the debris of everything on the bridge itself, had been blown into the sea and were floating around him. He spotted Hodges, who looked badly hurt, Cashion, and three others clinging to wreckage near him.
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br />   Mackson settled almost instantly and began to sink. Rodgers grabbed the nearest piece of wreckage and floated, dazed, in the water among perhaps two hundred other men. They watched as the destroyer went down not far from them, in some nine hundred fathoms of water. Several rafts were in sight, but none of the ship’s whaleboats. Many of the men were crawling aboard debris of one kind or another as they watched the Japanese disappear to the north, looking for Mineola.

  The breeze slackened and the sea turned relatively calm. The men were able to stick together in small groups, but there were not places on rafts or debris for all. The water began to blacken as thousands of gallons of Navy Standard Fuel Oil (NSFO) escaped the ship and rose to the surface, coating the surface of the water and the men as well.

  There was little in the world as slippery and foul-smelling as NSFO. Rodgers could hear the men swearing and spitting as it burned their eyes and got in their mouths. He winced in sympathy. Swallowing NSFO could be fatal. Some of the unlucky men treading water were probably getting a lethal dose of the stuff. He hung on to the debris, keeping the upper half of his body out of the fuel. The fumes still stung his eyes and made him cough. He looked down at his arms, peppered with tiny fragments of metal from the explosion. His left leg hurt an awful lot too. Trying to move it only made the pain worse.

  Darkness fell within a few hours. Providentially, two-foot seas and a stiff breeze out of the northwest dissipated much of the NSFO. Despite his pain, Rodgers began to swim among the groups, making sure the weakest were maintaining their handholds and being looked after.

  This went on most of the very black night, through intermittent rain. When he heard a man cry out, Rodgers would swim in that direction. When he found men in the dark—usually fuel-stained, bloodied, or both, and always panicked—he comforted them as best he could.

  “Help is on the way, men; help will be here soon. Hold on now. Hold on. It won’t be long, not long.”

  Twice, he came up to figures who turned out to be corpses: his signalman, Hodges, and Raguzzi, both draped limply over floating debris from the bridge.

  Occasionally, in the blackness, he could see nothing and had to call out. Invariably voices came back from the void: “Over here, sir.” It pleased Rodgers that they knew his voice.

  He rested when he could and tried to wipe oil away or move to ease the pain in his leg. He thought of his wife, Cari Lynn. They had met at a Christmas dance at the Academy in 1923, when he was a junior. The ballroom music played in his head. She thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen. She was a high society type from Silver Springs, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. Her father had served as ambassador to both Belgium and Italy. She was 97 pounds of black hair and sparkling eyes, and had enough ambition for both of them. She saw in him the strength that was to make him into a great officer, and had not let go of his hand all evening. When he was a senior, once she kissed him, he knew she had fallen for him. So, they married, and neither ever regreted it.

  Even twenty years later as he lay in Bethesda Naval Hospital in bitter pain, dying of throat cancer, a shell of his former self, she was there doting over him. She complained a lot and made trouble for everyone, but toward the end stayed in the room for almost ninety hours straight. Anyone whom she perceived to delay his treatment or get in the way, whether nurse or doctor, orderly or naval personnel, or even a congressman, rued the day they appeared in her sights! As a reporter would say of the pair, “Together they’re invincible. Separate they are not bad either.”

  The sea became a little rougher. He thought of his time at Annapolis. As with men since the beginning of time, the call of the sea had been strong in him since childhood. It had been so for his father as well. His father had been killed at sea in 1912. He had saved several crewmen from a fire, and he had been awarded the Navy Cross posthumously. Rodgers had been nine at the time. Rodgers’ little sister, Faye, had been only four.

  His father’s distinguished service had practically guaranteed Rodgers an appointment to Annapolis, if he decided he wanted it. While his mother must have expected it, it had nearly broken her heart when he announced, during his junior year of high school, that he would like to go. He had heard the sea breezes bring her sobs in through the screens many of those summer nights in Mobile in 1921, after she thought he was asleep. So, he had gone reluctantly. They’d had very little money. With one less mouth to feed, he knew his mother could get by with Faye to help her. He’d felt powerless when his mother was forced to go to work in a bank.

  But everything had changed in his freshman year at the Academy. His mother married the bank’s president, which relieved Rodgers’ mind no end. And he went out for football. There, assistant coach Lieutenant Lakeland W. Wells was waiting to change his life! Rodgers had been drawn to him immediately as a father figure.

  Wells had made him into a good man, a Navy man. Wells had taught him and his teammates the ancient “Soldier’s Elegy,” which Rodgers had taken as his life’s motto and thought about every day. Its refrain came to him now as he floated in the Coral Sea, hurt and approaching exhaustion:

  Here lies the last of all my friends.

  He fought by me in all the Great Wars

  And against all of the mighty foes

  Now unnumbered by the years.

  And always was on time with people,

  And lightly brought he the word of others.

  All know he was not great, but of long service.

  But I have not seen better and will not.

  Even among the Picts his name was known as of a Chief,

  And that was his fate, to die here in this dismal place

  For no value, and with no calm word by a fair voice.

  Wells had taught them that the soldier’s life was a life of service to others, of sacrificing and suffering without expectation of reward, to always do one’s duty and be a good lieutenant.

  As the early morning hours passed, Rodgers became weaker and weaker. He could no longer feel his injured leg, and the hours of swimming in the sea had taken their toll. He barely made it to the next raft. It was all he could do to cling to it, his strength gone.

  Quietly, the life essence ebbed out of him. He could no longer speak when Sam Cashion happened upon him just before dawn. Cashion had also been swimming among the rafts and boats most of the night.

  “It’s the captain, men. It’s the captain!”

  Hands reached out and pulled Rodgers onto the raft. Two badly hurt men gave their places, slipped off the raft. They had heard him come and go all night. Despite having him as their commander only seventy-two hours, they were devoted to him, a captain who would speak to them personally.

  They had known him by reputation long before. Everyone in the Navy knew of his heroism at Pearl Harbor as the executive officer of the heavy cruiser San Francisco, calmly standing on the bridge directing fire at the attacking Japanese planes, ducking as they made their strafing runs. They had accounted for five of the twenty-four enemy planes brought down that day. The men knew that they needed a man like him in their country’s struggle against great enemies. Here was a man who could win the Navy Cross before war was even declared. Grips loosened, and in a few minutes they drifted away.

  As dawn lightened the sky, Rodgers began to regain his senses. Sam Cashion was there
when he awoke.

  “You okay, sir?” Cashion asked.

  “How are the men doing?” Rodgers responded, not answering the question.

  “From what little we can tell, the men are hanging on as best they can.”

  “No count of the men?”

  “No, we’re pretty spread out.”

  “Let me get back into the water,” Rodgers said.

  “Sir, don’t you think you should stay put?”

  Rodgers slid in. Almost immediately, Cashion had to grab him. “Men, it’s the captain. Get him up!”

  Again, hands reached down and pulled Rodgers back on the debris. Luckily, the sea was still calm.

  Rodgers lay limp on the raft, drifting into thoughts of his football days at Annapolis. “The Middies are strong up the middle,” the eastern newspapers had said. Wells and the others had made him into a good player. At six-foot-two and 200 pounds, he had played tackle both ways on a very good team. He and Lonnie Betcher from Saddle River, New Jersey, had been the tackles. As a senior, only the center from Notre Dame, All-American Benny Hyerson, who was to become a lifelong friend, had outplayed him. His roommate and best friend, Tommy Ransom, had been the quarterback and safety.

  He almost managed a smile, thinking of these things, and closed his eyes. He felt guilty, but for the first time in his life he really could not get up. In a few more seconds, he passed out.

  By midmorning, some of the men began to see smoke to the east. Soon the silhouette of Clarkson, one of the new Fletcher-class destroyers that were to prove part of the backbone of the march to Tokyo, came into view.

  Rodgers was awakened by the sound of the men whooping and hollering. He lifted his head just long enough to see Clarkson’s silhouette looming over them. They were saved!