Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  For Midway's land planes could search an arc of seven hundred miles, while Yamamoto's carrier craft could at best patrol three hundred miles. Also, Nimitz could receive patrol reports in Hawaii by underwater cable from Midway, so that no increase of broadcast traffic from the atoll would warn Yamamoto that the Americans were alerted.

  From Hawaii, Nimitz could then broadcast the patrol reports in code to. his carriers, while Yamamoto's forces plodded within range, oblivious am unseeing.

  Such was Nimitz's ambush. Yamamoto's fleet steamed right into it.

  Yet not all ambuscades succeed. Surprise is a great but fleeting advantage. Yamamoto's powerful and battle-toughened forces Ak, quickly rallied from Nimitz's surprise, and in its opening phase the Battle of Midway took shape as a smashing Japanese victory.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Feet Admiral Nimitz was a quiet man of broad vision, with a good sense of humor. Shortly before he died he read in manuscript my translation of this chapter. At Roon's usage of "vOn Nimitz" he enjoyed a hearty laugh, but he remarked that the details of his genealogy were accurate.

  A New adage runs, "if it works you're a hero, if it doesn't you're a bum." Actually there was much guesswork in the Midway intelligence break. Clues had to be teased out of the Japanese by deceptive signals. Admiral Nimitzs decision to act on this inconclusive "dope', was daring. He did not khow the Japanese plan. Rather, he had a fair indication of what might be going on. He proceeded-on hunches thatproved brilliantly right.

  The Wehrmacht coding Precautions were not all that adequate. At this writing I can say no more, but the fact is that German communications were deeply penetrated. - V. H. from Oahu to join the departing

  THE AIR squadrons flew out carriers in clear calm weather! On its approach, the leading Enterprise torpedo plane went into a spin, crashed, and tumbled overboard with pieces flying. To Warren, circling high above in a new dive-bomber, it looked like a toy breaking up. The plane guard destroyer rushed to the wreckage, boiling smoke like a locomotive and streaking the sea white. The plane crew was rescued, as he learned on landing. Such accidents were not uncommon, yet this one struck him as a bad omen.

  TASK FORCE SIXTEEN IS PROCEEDING TO INTERCEPT A JAP LANDING ATTEmpr AT MIDWAY Flashing across the teletype screens shortly after the pilots landed aboard, the words generated cheery excitement in the ready rooms. But in a long, long, dull week of northward zigzagging at standard speed, the excitement faded into an uncomfortable mix of boredom and mounting tension. The Enterprise and the Hornet, ringed by cruisers and destroyers, slowly moved from sunny tropical seas to gray swells, gray skies, and cool winds. Under the umbrella of the Hawaiian air patrol, there was nothing for the fliers to do. The newcomers, three-year Academy men or reserve ensigns, gloried in their prima-donna freedom from ship routine: sleeping late, playing acey-deucey and cards, fogging the ready rooms with tobacco smoke, drinking gallons of coffee and lemonade, eating big meals and great mounds of ice cream, killing time between drills and lectures with chatter of sex, shore leave airplane mishaps, and the like, perpetrating ham-handed practical jokes; and generally mimicking, in their green self-consciousness, the Hollywood picture of combat fliers.

  Usually Warren enjoyed the ready-room camaraderie play, but not this time out. Too many of the squadron mates with whom he had started the war were dead, missing, or transferred. The high-spirited recruits, mostly unmarried, made him feel old and irritable. The protracted idleness ate at him. He was flight operations officer, third in command, and he tried to keep busy reviewing tactics manuals, devising navigation problems and blackboard combat drills, exercising violently on the flight deck, and haunting the hangar deck to check and recheck the squadron's aircraft.

  Idleness breeds gossip. Idleness plus tension is a bad brew.

  As the slow days passed, the talk in the ready rooms.drifted to the topic of Rear Admiral Spruance. Word was trickling down from'flag country that Halsey's staff was not cottoning to him. Halsey had built up the former screen commander, his old friend, to them as a brilliant intellectual. The staff was finding him a damned queer fish: cool, quiet, inaccessible, the Old Man's absolute opposite. He was content at meals to sit almost mum. He depressed Halsey's loyal and ebullient subordinates, who had absorbed their style from the rollicking Old Man.

  Why had Halsey pushed forward this taciturn nonflyer to fight a carrier battle, when red-hot aviators like John Towers had oeen available? Out of friendship? At lunch on the first day out, so rumor ran, Spruance had opened up after a long boring silence by saying, "Gentlemen, I want you to know that I'm not worried about any of you.

  If you weren't any good, Bill Halsey wouldn't have you." He seemed unaware that he himself was under worried scrutiny.

  His ways were altogether odd. He tramped the flight deck alone by the hour, but otherwise he seemed rather lazy. He went to bed early and slept long and well. During an alarm over a night surface contact he had not turned out, merely ordered an evasive maneuver and gone back to sleep. Each day he ate an unvarying breakfast of toast and canned peaches, and drank only one cup of morning coffee; which he made himself, with the fussiness of an old maid, from special beans he had brought aboard. When it rained or blew hard topside, he sat in the flag mess reading old books from the ship's library. Almost, he seemed to be along for the ride.

  Halsey's chief of staff, Captain Browning, was running the task force, and Spruance was just initialling Browning's orders.

  All in all, the staff was counting on Spruance for very little.

  Browning would fight the battle, and if the patched-up Yorktown got to the scene in time, Frank Jack Fletcher would take charge, since he was senior to Spruance. Fletcher had not done so well in the Coral Sea, but at least he had been blooded in carrier combat. Thus-went the idle talk in the ready room; which irked Warren and troubled him too.

  Arriving on station, a spot in the trackless sea designated "Point Luck," Task Force Sixteen steamed back and forth through two more tedious days, waiting for the Yorktown.

  This was the place of ambush, some three hundred twenty-five miles from the atoll; beyond the range of enemy carrier planes, yet close enough for a quick attack once Midway aircraft espied the foe.

  Dolphins frisking among the slow moving ships found no scraps to eat; the crews were forbidden to throw so much as a paper cup overboard.

  At last, making full speed, with no outward mark of its Coral Sea battering, the Yorktown hove into view. Like the ship, its decimated air squadrons were a palch job of Coral Sea survivors and Saratoga aviators hastily thrown together; but another flattop, patched or not, was mighty welcome.

  With Fletcher now in tactical command, more fleet alarms began to break out. Yorktown warnings about enemy submarines or aircraft touched off the old frenzied routines time and again: sharp turns of all ships, flight decks crazily canting, crews scurrying to man and train guns, destroyers foaming and crisscrossing; then would come the bored wait, the stand down, the recovery of aircraft, and the resumed plan of the day. None of the alarms proved genuine. The two task forces milled around and around Point Luck: the Yorktown

  .AL with its own screen of cruisers and destroyers called Task Force Seventeen, the Hornet and the Enterprise still designated Task Force Sixteen, under Spruance as subordinate to Fletcher.

  Warren scheduled himself out on the first dawn search.

  When his new Dauntless bounded forward between lines of hooded yellow guide lights on the deck and roared off into the cold night toward the crowded stars and the Milky Way, his spirit lifted too. The new fliers had looked grave during the ready-room briefing when told of the absolute radio silence orders; carrier would send out no homing signals and if they had to make emergency water landings, distress calls were forbidden. Thus the chilly reality of the approaching enemy was thrust on them. Not having patrolled in an SBD-3 before, Warren too was uneasy at these tough rules. But the new machine purred out two hundred miles; then, in a soft lilac dawn'and a beautiful _sunrise, its new electronic homin
g device returned him dead on POint Option. A pleasant sight, those two carrier islands nicking the horizon! He landed with a clean catch of the number three wire. A great airplane, sure enough: improved navigation gear, a sweet engine, selfsealing tanks, extra guns, thicker armor. Even his gunner, a gloomy Kentucky mountain boy named Cornett, who seldom spoke and seemed to be using a foreign language when he did, climbed smiling out of the rear seat.

  "Not a bad crate at that," said Warren.

  Cornett spat tobacco juice and said something like, "Rakn rat smat new dew."

  "Warren! Warren! It's started. They're bombing Dutch Harbor."

  "Jesus." Warren sat up on his bunk, rubbed his eyes, and seized his trousers. "What do you know! Alaska, hey?

  Screwed again."

  His roommate's eyes shone. Peter Golf was an ensign new to the squadron, a youngster from upstate New York with a red beard like Byron's. He said eagerly, "Maybe we'll head north, cut off their line of retreat, and cream 'em."

  "that's three days' steaming, fella." Warren jumped bare'foot to the cold iron deck.

  When they got to Scouting Six ready room the big reclining chairs were full. Silently the aviators stared at words crawling across the yellow teletype screen: DIVERSION MOVE AT ALASKA EXPECTED MAIN THRUST WILL BE AT MIDWAY DUTCH HARBOR PREPARED AND WELL DEFENDED The commander of Scouting Six, a tough stocky old hand named Earl Gallaher, hung the big Pacific chart over the blackboard to discuss time- and distance problems of a possible dash against the Japs to the north. The younger fliers listened hungrily. This was getting down to business. But Warren noted a new fleet course being chalked up: 120 degrees, southeast, away from the Aleutians, away from Midway, away from the wind. Just another routine turn to hug Point Luck; no action.

  Within the hour words were sliding across the screen again: P.B.Y PATROL PLANE REPORTS QUOTE MANY HEAVY ENEMY SHIPS BEARING 237 DISTANCE 685 FROM MIDWAY UNQUOTE The word "Midway" triggered shouts and rebel yells in the Scouting Six ready room. Everybody started talking at once.

  The C.O jumped to the chart and drew a heavy red crayon ring at the point of the sighting. "Okay, here we go. Range about one thousand miles. They'll be in striking range in sixteen, seventeen hours."

  The fliers were still clustering at the chart, spanning distances with fingers and arguing, when the teletype came to chattering life: FROM CINCPAC URGENT THAT IS NOT THE ENEMY STRIKING FORCE THAT IS THE LANDING FORCE THE STRIKING FORCE WILL arrive FROM THE NORTHWEST AT DAYLIGHT TOMORROW "Son of a bitch!" said Pete Golf at Warren's elbow.

  "How do they know all that in Pearl Harbor?"

  Night fell. Midnight drew on. Few Scouting Six pilots went to their bunks. They were reading, or writing letters, or going on with the everlasting talk about women and flying; but the buzz of words had a different sound, lower and more tense.

  Staff gossip kept drifting in. Spruance was receiving the dispatches not in flag plot, but on a couch in the flag mess where he sat reading a mildewy biography of George Washington, merely initialling the message board. Meanwhile, in a flag plot like an overturned beehive, Caot ain Browning was already making out the preliminary battle orders.

  The teletype now and then clicked out a burst of words about Dutch Harbor, or about the oncoming Jap landing force; Army Air Corps bombers from the atoll claimed to be pounding it and sinking battleships, cruisers, and whatnot in high-level attacks. Nobody placed any stock in that. The dive-bomber pilots had a word for high-level bombing at sea: it was like trying to drop a marble on a scared mouse. "What about the flattops 9 Where are their carriers;l Any dope about the goddamned carriers?" All through the ready rooms that was the restless litany.

  Warren went topside to check the weather again. Moon almost full; stars, light clouds, cold crosswind, the Big Dipper on the starboard quarter. Loud splashing far below of a high-speed run.

  Closing the enemy fast now! On the flight deck aft, moonlight glinted on the wings of jammed-together planes, and here and there the pencil-thin red flashlight beams of repair work barely showed. The enlisted plane captains squatted in small knots, where sailor talk went on and on: about the better torpedo planes coming to the fleet in August, about religion, about sports, about family, about Honolulu whorehouses; not much talk about the subject most on every man's mind, the battle coming with the dawn.

  Wide awake, Warren strode the breezy steady deck. The sea all around danced with moonlight. Passing through the hangar deck below, he had noted with peculiar clarity the quantities of explosive materials all about-bombs, gassedup planes, full ammo racks, oil drums, torpedo warheads.

  The Enterprise was an iron eggshell eight hundred feet long, full of dynamite and human beings. Of this, he was edgily aware as never before. Jap eggshells just like it were probably only a few hundred miles away and closing.

  Who would surprise whom? Suppose an enemy submarine had spotted this force? Far from unlikely! In that case Jap aircraft might strike at sunup. And even if this force did get the jump on the Japs, would the assault come off. In fleet exercises, even with no enemy opposition, a coordinated attack of fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo planes had never yet worked. Some leader had failed to get the word, someone's navigation had gone wrong, or bad weather had scattered the formations.

  Too many Enterprise fliers were green recruits like Pete Golf. The battered Yorktown's aviators were a sandlot team, scraped together off the beach after the Coral Sea losses. What would such a ragtag force do against seasoned Jap airmen who had wrecked Pearl Harbor and driven the British navy out of the Indian Ocean?

  Yet there would be no more rehearsals, no more drills.

  This was it. Unless a surprise attack came off with total success, swift skilled Jap reprisal would explode the Enterprise into a grandiose fireball. He would either burn up in it, or if he was airborne he would fall in the sea when his fuel ran out. These were not fifty-fifty prospects.

  And yet, Warren accepted them as all in the day's work.

  He no more expected to die in the coming battle than does a passenger who buys an air ticket from New York to Los Angeles. He was a professional flying man. He had flown through a lot of enemy fire.

  He thought he knew enough about it to get through the day alive, with any luck. At the after end of the flight deck, aft of the last dark row of planes, with the wind whipping his trousers, he stood and watched the broad moonlit wake rushing away. There was no place he would rather be, he thought, and nothing he would rather do than fly against the Japs tomorrow.

  He wanted a cigarette. Returning to the island to go below he glanced up again at the sky and he halted, his face turned upward, recalling a scene he had not thought of for years. He was a boy of seven, walking at night under just such a sky, on a wharf piled with fresh snow, hand in hand with Dad, who was telling him about the big distances and sizes of the stars.

  "Dad, who put the stars there? God?"

  "Well, Warren, yes, we believe the Lord God did that."

  "You mean Jesus Christ himself stuck the stars up in the sky?"

  The boy was trying to picture the kindly long-haired white-robed man hanging gigantic balls of fire in black space.

  He could recall his father's silence, then the hesitant reply.

  "well, Warren, you sort of get into rocks and shoals there.

  Jesus is our Lord. That's true enough. He's also the son of God, and God created the universe and everything in it.

  You'll understand more about all this when you're older."

  Warren could date the start of his doubts from that talk. In one of their rare arguments about religion, many years later, his father had cited the night sky as his old proof that there must be a God.

  "Dad, I don't want to offend you, but to me those stars look pretty randomly scattered. And think about their size and distance!

  How can anything on this earth matter? We're microbes on a grain of dust. Life is a stupid and insignificant accident, and when it's over we're just dead meat."

  His father had never ag
ain discussed religion with him.

  The stars were majestically rocking over the prickly radar masts.

  They had never seemed so beautiful to Warren Henry.

  But despite the vivid patterns of the constellations, they still looked randomly scattered.

  He lay in the dark in his cabin, chain-smoking. Pete Golf softly snored in another bunk. The third roommate, the squadron exec, was writing in the ready room. Warren yearned for just a couple of hours' sleep. He thought he had better try reading, and switched on the bunk light. Usually his glance passed over the black-bound Bible as though Dad's gift weren't in the book rack. Just the thing to make him drowsy! He propped himself up, and on a fortune-telling impulse opened the book at random. His eyes fell on this verse in the second Book of Kings: Thus saith the Lord, set thy house in order; for thou shall die, and not live.