Red Sky in Morning A Novel of World War II

by Patrick Culhane

  * * *

  Cover

  Untitled

  Contents

  A U T H O R ’ S N O T E

  Chapter 1. J U N E 6 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 2. J U N E 6 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 3. J U N E 2 0 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 4. J U N E 2 1 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 5. J U L Y 1 7 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 6. J U L Y 1 7 , 1 9 4 4 – A U G U S T 1 1 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 7. A U G U S T 1 1 – 1 4 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 8. A U G U S T 2 6 – 2 8 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 9. A U G U S T 2 8 – 2 9 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 10. A U G U S T 3 1 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 11. A U G U S T 3 1 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 12. A U G U S T 3 1 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 13. A U G U S T 3 1 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 14. S E P T E M B E R 1 , 1 9 4 4

  Chapter 15. A U G U S T 2 7 , 1 9 8 9

  A T I P O F T H E C A P

  About the Author

  ALSO BY PATRICK CULHANE

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  P A T R I C K CUL H A NE IN M E M O R Y OF M Y F A T H E R , WH O LI V E D TH E T A LE

  Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor take warning.

  ITALIAN PROVERB

  I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans.

  HERMAN WOUK

  on his Na vy service during World War II

  Chapter 1

  JUNE 6, 1944

  Ensign Peter Maxwell came slowly awake, teased by the expanse of ocean shimmering with morning sun out the bay window of the studio apartment. On a beachhead in Normandy, a battle had been raging for nine hours now; but this was San Diego, California, where Maxwell’s war had been a quiet one so far.

  The Murphy bed creaked as he turned onto his left side, away from the sun, to face Kay who, despite the creak of the bedsprings, had not stirred. His wife’s easy, even breathing tried to lull him back to sleep and, though suddenly wide awake, he somehow couldn’t manage to throw back the covers and climb out onto the cool wooden floor. Instead, he just lay there contentedly staring at her.

  Like Pete, Kay was twenty-two, a brunette whose hair tickled the tops of her shoulders, with an oval face, wide-set blue eyes (concealed now behind long-lashed lids), a cute pug nose, and bee-stung lips. She was a petite five feet but curvy, possessed of the kind of Betty Grable figure that made a war worth fighting.

  Kay had first come to Pete’s attention when they were both sophomores in high school back in Liberty Hill, Iowa. A new girl in town (her father managed a chain grocery store out of Des Moines), she’d become instantly popular, thanks to her bubbly personality and fresh good looks. Soon she was head cheerleader to his captain of the football team, the couple well on their way to a King and Queen of the Senior Prom destiny.

  But at first Kay had resisted that fate; at six foot, the brown-haired, dark-blue-eyed Pete towered over her, and she professed to find him obnoxious and pushy and just “too darn full of himself.” Pete had persisted, teasing her in the high school hallways, and playing up to her girl friends, getting them on his side—always a key tactic in the battle of the sexes.

  “You know,” Kay said, in the sultry alto that didn’t quite fit her all-American good girl looks, “we really can’t go together. It’s completely out of the question.”

  They were on their third date, seated in one of half a dozen jalopies parked out at Miller’s Grove. Clouds were drifting across the full moon’s face like wispy smoke, Kay looking pretty and pale in the ivory light, the bright red of her lipstick a dab of Technicolor in this black-and-white night.

  Pete had his arm around her. “Why is going together out of the question?”

  She put her head on his shoulder. “Because we are the complete cliché, you goofus.”

  “I may be a goofus—”

  “No ‘may’ about it.”

  “Fine. Make it a complete goofus, far as I care. But we’re not the complete cliché.”

  It should be noted that during their sophomore year at Liberty Hill High, everybody was using the words “complete” and “completely” a lot.

  “Why aren’t we the complete cliché, you big goof?”

  He grinned. “Because I’m an end.”

  “What does that have to do with the price of beans?”

  “If we were the complete cliché, I’d have to be the quarterback. And you’d have to be beautiful. Not just completely pretty.”

  She’d started laughing halfway through that, and now she slapped at his chest, and then she didn’t stop him when he tried to kiss her. He got to second base that night, matter of fact.

  The couple had been joined at the hip throughout the rest of high school. Their only brief separations came when Pete would travel one weekend a month to Des Moines for his training with the Navy Reserves.

  Even then, war had been in the air and Pete (and his pop) had known that waiting for the inevitable draft meant Pete would wind up in the Army, which would put his future in the hands of Uncle Sam. And as much as he might love his country, Pete was prepared to keep his future in his own hands, thank you very much.

  So by joining the Navy Reserves, he’d managed some small part in choosing his own destiny; and to Pete, somebody taking potshots at a ship he was on was a better bet than the hellish trench warfare he’d heard about from his pop and his uncles, who’d fought in the last worldwide conflict, “The War to End All Wars.”

  Till this one.

  He had been at the home of his Simpson College band professor, in Indianola, Iowa, Sunday morning, after church, rehearsing with the brass quartet, when they heard about Pearl Harbor.

  They were playing along with Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” on the radio when the song abruptly stopped and the quartet came to a ragged halt as a newscaster broke in.

  “This is Jonathan Manning with a WHO special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Few details are available at this time. Stay tuned to WHO. . . .”

  Pete was then in his second year at Simpson on a joint music and athletic scholarship, a rare jock (football, baseball, basketball) majoring in music (vocal and trumpet). Kay had followed him to Indianola but not as a coed: she was living with an aunt in nearby Des Moines and working for the phone company, saving up money for their marriage, after Pete graduated.

  They’d gone together for over three years by then, and had done a lot of fooling around, heavy-duty smooching and petting; but that night of December 7, 1941, they’d taken a motel room in Des Moines and gone all the way. Neither enjoyed it much, and a lot of crying had gone on, little of it having to do with the sex and a lot of it having to do with their

  certainty that Pete would soon be called up.

  “Let’s get married,” Kay said.

  They were under skimpy covers and December wind was howling out the motel-room windows, rattling glass and wood.

  “Well of course we’re getting married,” Pete said.

  “Right away, I mean. Run off somewhere. Elope.”

  “Can’t. They won’t allow it.”

  She frowned. “Who won’t?”

  “The Navy. I’m going after my commission and you can’t get your commission if you’re married.”

  “But afterwards . . . ?”

  “Right after. I promise.”

  The unkept promise of that commission dangled tauntingly before both Pete and Kay for what seemed an eternity. Pete started out an apprentice seaman, lowest rung on the Naval ladder. He was sent to Portsmouth, Virginia, by Norfolk, an
d on his first day he peeled potatoes until his hands were raw and then he peeled them some more; and on the second day, he cleaned latrines until his hands achieved a further rawness previously unknown to humankind.

  That night Pete went to the chaplain’s office, to seek some advice or solace or whatever he might find there that involved neither potato peeler nor toilet-bowl brush, and noticed a sign on the bulletin board seeking members for the Norfolk Navy Center choir.

  He went right over and signed up, and got in the choir, and a quartet to boot, and sang in both for several months— at churches and grade schools and junior highs and high schools and even on the radio for NBC and the BBC.

  “That’s wonderful,” Kay had said over the long-distance telephone, when he reported his good luck.

  “Beats the hell outa peeling potatoes and cleaning the can.”

  “What’s next for you?”

  “Columbia University.”

  “. . . What a wonderful opportunity!”

  He knew, from her pause, that she was experiencing a pang of jealousy or envy or maybe worry, at not being with him. Or maybe the long distance crackle was just lending a brittleness to her voice that couldn’t be held against her.

  In full support swing now, she was saying, “Studying in New York . . . I know it’s rough sometimes, darling, but the Navy really is doing a lot for you.”

  That was true as far as it went; but the greater truth was that officers and ensigns were getting killed off with an alarming rapidity in this new war. And any guy like Pete, with some college under his belt, was a good bet for cannon fodder. . . .

  Yet even for that questionable privilege, a would-be Navy man had to struggle. Columbia had been a challenge for Pete, who as a music major had taken little math; piled with Navigation, Seamanship, Damage Control and all sorts of engineering courses, he’d faced a test at the beginning of class every day. And of the sixteen hundred in Pete’s class, four hundred would not be there at the end.

  Pete had not washed out. He divided his time equally between each class and did his best, staying right in the middle, grade-wise, knowing that if you were low in any one class on the weekend, you didn’t get liberty—and Pete Maxwell never lost a liberty.

  And once again, a notice on a bulletin board had come along, if not to his rescue, then to save his sanity: volunteers were being sought for the Midshipmen’s Band. And Pete had broken the solemn Naval rule of never volunteering, and got right in.

  “What does it mean?” Kay asked on the phone.

  “Well, we practice twice a week, and play for the march in review, and everybody Navy in New York comes and watches on Saturdays.”

  “How exciting!”

  But he could hear the longing in her voice.

  So he tried to play it down. “It’s not bad.”

  “Where do you play?”

  “Oh, all around the New York area.”

  “And you looking so cute in your uniform. . . . Don’t let those New York girls get any ideas!”

  “They can get all the ideas they want, ’cause . . .” He crooned the finish: “. . . I only have eyes for you.”

  She laughed. “You musical goof.”

  “And get this, honey—they’re looking for a director. I’m one of seven who gets to try out. And if I make it, I’ll be an officer. A two-striper.”

  “Oh, Pete, I know you can do it!”

  And Pete had. After calling his pop for some advice, he’d gone to the music library and picked out a hard piece that he played in high school for the state music competition; he’d won in high school, and he won now. He got his two stripes and the punishment of the hard courses was eased by the joy of playing music.

  Then, after graduation, newly minted Ensign Maxwell had gone back to Iowa for two weeks’ leave, and he and Kay had had a big church wedding in Liberty Hill. Not many their age were there, just old people and little kids, but it had been nice to be home, even though Pete knew his lucky streak had run out: he’d been assigned to Amphibious Duty.

  To get away from relatives, he and Kay shacked up in the Fort Des Moines Hotel and, after tears and lovemaking to last a lifetime (but still not enough), he’d left Kay in Des Moines and gone out to San Diego, or specifically Del Coronado.

  He was assigned to an APA unit that would hit the beach on an invasion—each small boat would include a single ensign like Pete and a Navy coxswain and the troops they’d be taking ashore. During the thirteen weeks of training, an ominous statistic hung over the heads of all the ensigns in the program: to date, in that unit, 85 percent of their rank had been killed.

  The day before Pete’s training was set to end, at 8 a.m., another ensign came up to him and asked, “Are you Ensign Maxwell?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m relieving you of your duty.”

  “For how long?”

  “Permanently. Report to Lieutenant Elder.”

  Wondering what he’d done, Pete reported to the lieutenant, a big good-looking Jewish guy, who said, “Ensign Maxwell, you’re being assigned to Ship’s Company for ten to twelve months.”

  Which meant Pete would stay on the base, that he wouldn’t be going overseas, at least for now.

  “Would you . . . mind if I called my wife and told her?”

  The lieutenant had been amused by that, saying, “Go right ahead. But aren’t you interested in why this change of duty?”

  “I’m from Iowa, sir. We know all about gift horses.”

  Elder laughed again. “We need somebody to conduct the base choir. And your record speaks highly of your skills in that regard. How does that sound, Ensign?”

  “Just fine, sir.”

  Afterward, strolling along past low-slung Ingram Plaza, he’d reflected with no little embarrassment on his youthful daydreams, back when he first joined the Naval Reserves— standing on deck, cannon fire raining all around him as he held valiantly to a lashed line with one hand while with the other wielding a cutlass, Tyrone Power-style, against a shadowy enemy, all the while, yelling, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

  If the reality of his wartime service instead meant conducting the base choir at the U.S. Naval Training Station in San Diego, well, that was just fine with him—his hometown, Liberty Hill, had taken an ungodly number of casualties, including a dozen guys from Pete’s senior class, making the various dire statistics hanging over Navy combat duty very real. Playing and directing music on dry sunny San Diego land wasn’t the worst way to serve your country.

  And he had been able to bring Kay out to join him and get a real good start on married life. After a few expensive weeks in a hotel near the El Cortez (its kitchen locked off so the couple could be charged hotel rates), the young couple had gotten these studio digs in the incongruously named I Have an Apartment Hotel.

  The rent was steep, fifty bucks a month, but it had its own bathroom and that big window looking over the bay. Kay had taken a job at the nearby Western Union office as a teletype operator and that eased some of the burden on Pete’s miniscule Navy pay.

  The choir was why Pete had been spared an amphibious fate. They sang at Sunday services on the base, occasional appearances around San Diego, and even the odd bond rally now and then. Within the choir he created a quartet called the Fantail Four—three other officers assigned to base in various capacities—whose antics and mellow singing (their imitations of the Ink Spots and Mills Brothers were legend) found them playing opening act to USO shows coming through.

  As to the choir itself, Pete took pride in the fact that the group of men he had inherited—some of whom, when he met them, couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket—now sounded like a real honest-to-gosh choir. With personal appearances on and off base, building morale and spreading good public relations, this was a legitimate part of fighting the war on the home front. Or so Pete tried to convince himself.

  Anyway, the choir was, officially, a sideline. His real job was under Captain Murray, a four-striper impressed with Pete’s abilities to drill men.
Pete worked with new trainees, getting their drilling up to snuff, and supervised night training, preparing these men to hit the beaches that Pete had been lucky enough to avoid, thanks to his musical skills.

  But before long it had begun to nag at him, not guilty feelings exactly, but . . . he wanted to do more. Here he was enjoying a life with Kay that included swimming in the ocean and afternoons at Mission Beach amusement park and the Balboa Park zoo—not to mention occasional weekends in Los Angeles, Grauman’s Chinese for movies, and out dancing to big-name bands. And here he was directing a choir while preparing other guys to go do and die. . . .

  Studying Kay’s face as she slept, he felt something that came over him on many a morning: he fell in love with her all over again, just as he had in high school, when she was calling him a goofus (she still did), and every time he experienced these feelings, again he wondered what the hell he was thinking, considering leaving her stateside to go and get his ass shot at in the Pacific.

  Absentmindedly, like a painter applying a touch to a seemingly perfect portrait, he brushed a lock of dark hair from her face. Her eyes came open slowly and a smile blossomed. The pajama tops she wore were mostly unbuttoned and revealed the soft alabaster of her cleavage.

  “Morning, glory,” he said quietly.

  “Is it? Morning?” She blinked and half-sat up and confirmed this opinion. Then she gave him a frowny smile. “Why so serious, silly?”

  “I was just thinking.”

  She shook a finger at him. “You’re in the Navy. You’re not supposed to think. . . . What about are you thinking?”

  “Maybe . . . about having my way with you.”

  She fiddled with his hair. “Having your way with me? . . . Ensign Maxwell, is that any way for a Navy man to talk?”

  He grinned and drew her to him. “No. I cleaned it up for you.”

  Kay started to laugh, but the sound was abruptly muffled as he covered her mouth with his.

  She pushed him away. “I have morning breath! At least let me brush my teeth.”

  “Your breath is fine.”

  “Well, yours isn’t!”

  “I’m a man. I’m supposed to smell like this.”

  “Congratulations. Now go brush your teeth!”