by War
"You're to be commended on the Northampton's small loss of life.
"It's nothing I ever hoped to be commended for."
"We're going to be able to repair those other three CAs."
"Good. I wish I could have made port, too, Admiral. I tried."
"What went wrong in the battle, exactly?"
"Sir, we found ourselves in torpedo water after we'd opened fire at twelve thousand yards. That was supposed to be beyond torpedo range. Now, either we were ambushed by submarines-which seems unlikely in view of our sizable destroyer screen-or else the Japs have a destroyer torpedo that far outranges ours. We've had intelligence about such a weapon.
"I recall your memo to BuShips about that, and your recommendation on the battleship blisters."
Victor Henry allowed himself a short thankful smile.
"Well, Admiral, now I've been on the business end of a couple of those things. They exist."
"Then combat doctrine should be modified accordingly."
The large eyes scrutinized Pug. The stand-up desk served the purpose of keeping conversations short, Pug thought. He v making an effort not to shift from foot to foot, and he decided, if ever his time became valuable-again, to have a stand-up desk, too. "A word with Admiral Nimitz might be in order," Spruance said. "Let's go."
Hurrying to keep up, Victor Henry followed Spruance down the corridor to tall royal-blue double doors with four affixed gold stars.
Admiral Kimmel had received him in such an office in the old building, he remembered, all brave smiles and good humor, as his blasted fleet smoked in the sunshine beyond the windows. Pug had walked in to see Kimmel with calm confidence. He felt very shaky now.
Why? He was now more or less in Kimmel's shoes, that was why.
Another loser They went straight in. Nimitz stood alone, arms folded, at a window. To all appearances he was sunning himself. His handshake was cordial, his square-tanned face pleasant; but the. direct blue eyes under the thatch of sunlit white hair had a slaty look. That kindly, almost gentle face with those hard eyes, half in sunshine and half in shadow, made Victor Henry yet more nervous.
"Captain Henry says the Japs have a destroyer torpedo Of very long range," Spruance said. "that's how he explains Tassafaronga.
"How long is very long?" Nimitz asked Pug.
"Possibly as much as twenty thousand yards, Admiral."
"What do'we do about it?"
Forcing words through a tight throat, Pug replied, "In future engagements, Admiral, once our destroyers have made their torpedo attack, the battle line should open fire at much longer range, and make radical evasive turns during the action."
"Did you make radical evasive turns after you saw the other CAs get hit?" Nimitz spoke in an easy Texas-tinged drawl, but there was nothing easy in his look or manner.
"No, sir' "
"Why didn't you?"
Victor Henry now had to answer, face to face with Cincpac, the question on which his career hung. He had already tried to handle this question in a fifteen-page action report.
"Admiral, it was a mistake made in the heat of battle. All my guns were bearing. I was straddling the enemy. I wanted vengeance for the three cruisers he had set afire."
"Did you get your vengeance?"
"I don't know. My gunnery officer claimed two hits on two cruisers."
"Confirmed?"
"No, sir. We'll have to aw;lit the task force report. Even then I'll have my doubts. Gunnery officers are troubled with creative eyesight."
Nimitz's eyes glinted at Spruance. "Any other observations?"
"I've listed a few in my report, sir."
"For example?"
"Admiral, flashless powder was a BuOrd project way back in '37 when I was there. We still don't have it. The enemy does. We discourage use of searchlights in night action, so as not to show where we are. Then we fire a few salvos and disclose our bearing, target angle, and speed of advance. Our battle line that night looked like four erupting volcanoes. It was a glorious sight, sir, very soul-satisfying. It also gave the Japs their torpedo solution."
Nimitz turned to Spruance. "Get off a dispatch to BuOrd today, and a personal follow-up letter to Spike Blandy on the flashless powder."
"Yes, sir."
Rubbing a stringy hand, which was missing a finger, across his square chin, Nimitz said, "Why the devil was our own destroyer attack a total failure? They achieved surprise with radar, didn't they? They had the drop on the other fellow."
Pug felt himself - so to say - back in torpedo water. This question might well become the crux of a court of inquiry on Tassafaronga. "Admiral, it was a reverse action, forces moving on opposed courses. Relative closing speed fifty knots or better. The torpedo problem developed very fast. When the destroyer commander requested permission to attack with torpedoes, Admiral Wright preferred to close first. I enemy was abaft the beam before he let him go. So it became an up-the-kilt shot at extreme range. That's how it looked in the Northampton plot."
"Yet the enemy had the identical problem, and he got an excellent solution."
"They won the torpedo duel hands down, Admiral.
After an excruciating pause Nimitz said, "Very well." He moved away from the window and offered Fug his hand. "I understand you lost an aviator son at Midway, who distinguished himself in combat. And that you've got another son serving in submarines." He bent his head toward the dolphins on his own khaki blouse.
"Yes, Admiral."
Holding Pug's hand in a lingering clasp, looking deep in his eyes, Chester Nimitz said, "Good luck, Henry," in a sad personal tone.
"Thank you, sir."
Spruance took him to the crowded smoky operations rooM.
"There's your battle," he said, pointing to a heavily marked chart of Guadalcanal on the wall, "as we've reconstructed it."
They passed into a small anteroom, where they sat down together on a sofa. "The Northampton was a beautiful ship," Spruance said. "But there were stability problems."
"I can't fault my damage control people, Admiral. We were unlucky. We took two torpedoes aft of the armor belt. I should have turned away. Gotten the hell out of there, the way the Honolulu did.
Maybe I'd still have my ship."
"Well, the rage of battle is a factor. Your blood was up.
You tried to reverse a rout."
Victor Henry made no comment, but it was as though Spruance had cut ropes holding a heavy burden on his back.
He took a deep breath and audibly sighed.
Spruance went on, "Where to next?"
"I have orders back to Bupers for reassignment, Admiral."
"Last time around you were fighting shy of staff duty. I need a deputy chief of staff for planning and operations."
Unable to help it, Victor Henry blurted take a boy, "Me?"
"If you're interested."
"Good God." Pug involuntarily put a hand to his eyes. In the light of the huge growth of the Pacific Fleet, Spruance was offering him a golden prize; a long leap toward flag rank, toward responsibility on the scale of great men; precisely the second chance he had told Janice he could not expect. Victor Henry was not three weeks away from splashing naked through black oil toward a crowded raft, with his ship afire and sinking behind him. After a moment he said hoarsely, "You've achieved surprise, Admiral. I'm interested."
"Well, let's hope Bupers will go along. We've got some fine battle problems ahead, Pug. You should start thinking about them.
Come."
Dazed, Victor Henry followed Spruance back into the operations room, to a large yellow and blue table chart of the Pacific. Spruance began to talk with a curious enthusiasm, half-pedantic and half-martial. "At the College, did you get in on the old problem, the recapture of the Philippines after Orange invades and occupies? That's more or less the war we've got."
"No, sir, in my tour we did the Wake Island problem."
"Oh, yes. Well, the thing boils down to two lines of attack.
The geography dictates that. A
drive across the Central Pacific, reducing the Jap island strong points, and consolidating in the Marianas for the jump to Luzon." Spruance's right hand moved over the chart as he talked, traversing thousands of ocean miles to pantomime a sweep through the Marshalls, the Marianas, and the Carolines to the Philippines.
"And a campaign northward from Australia-New Guinea, Morotai, Mindanao, Luzon." His left hand passed from Australia across New Guinea, with the fingers doing a slow crawl as though to suggest - as they vividly did to Pug - armies slogging over tropical mountains.
"General MacArthur naturally is hot for that second strategy.
Land fighter. But in the water route you've got a mobile flank attack on the enemy supply lines that keeps him guessing. He can't be sure where you'll hop next. Makes him scatter his strength. The other is a frontal assault overland through mountainous jungle. J fleet on your flank, alert Jap armies opposing you." Spruan shot Pug a puckish look.
"To be sure, the general would strongly desire to lick some Jap armies." Spruance's right index finger now stabbed at an island off New Guinea. "Still, even he concedes that the way is barred by Rabaul.
That's what he saw in the Guadalcanal operation, a stepping-stone toward Rabaul. In any case, we're tooling up here for the Central Pacific. It'll be a big effort. Meantime MacArthur will pursue his drive, of course."
For Victor Henry, still shaken by this turn in his life, the unfolding horizons were magnificent. From command of a cruiser, a cramping task, he foresaw passing to the planning of gigantic sea campaigns. Ideas boiled up in his mind from War College problems and studies of Pacific war. Thin abstractions they had then seemed, algebraic toying with forces and situations that would never exist.
Now they were materializing in thick and flaming realities.
There surged in him a reviving sense of global combat as his own job to do, in an anonymous slot; all he could ask for.
Spruance tapped the chart at Guadalcanal. "You know, Tassafaronga was a pretty sour note for Admiral Halsey, after the magnificent way he turned that campaign around. Did you see him at all?"
"Yes, sir, when I passed through Noum a
6 he sent for me."
"How is he?"
"On top of the world. He's got everybody in SoPac on their toes, I'll say that. When I got to his office he was roaring mad about something or other. Everybody is sight was quailing.
Next minute with me he was gentle as a parson. Very sympathetic about the Northampton." Pug hesitated and added, "Said at least I went after the bastards."
"How is Warren's wife?"
"I've just seen her." Pug's voice roughened. "She's all right.
She's working for the Military Government."
"What about your submariner's wife? Did she ever get out of Europe?"
"I'm hoping there'll be news of her at home, sir."
"Warren was an outstanding fighting man." Spruance shook hands. "I'll never forget him."
Victor Henry said abruptly, "Thank you, Admiral," and he left. It was less than an hour to his plane time. He turned in the car at the pool office, and caught a cab to the nats terminal. There, at a small newsstand inside the shed, he picked up a Honolulu Advertiser, not having read a newspaper in months. Banner headlines bawled of Allied breakthroughs in Morocco, the flight of Rommel, the encirclement of the Germans at Stalingrad. These things he had seen, put in less bubbling terms, on the Cincpac teletype board. Lower on the page a smaller headline hit him like a blow in the face.
ALISTAIR Tudsbury KILLED AT EL ALAMEIN ALISTAIR Tudsbury's SIXTY-year-old secretary put her white head in through the doorway. "A Mr. Leslie Slote is here, Pamela.
In the tiny old office on Pall Mall, Pamela sat in her father's big swivel chair, crying. A cold wind was rattling the loose windows, purple with December gloom at midday. Even bundled in her gray lambskin coat, with a wool shawl tied over her head and ears, she was chilled. The ancient heater was having little effect in the room; the place smelled hot, so to say, but no more Dabbing her eyes with both hands, Pamela jumped up as Slote came in. He carried a Russian fur-lined greatcoat and a big brown fur hat. He had always been lean, but now his pinstripe suit hung in folds on him, and his eyes burned redly in black sockets.
"Hello, Leslie."
"I'm very sorry about your father, Pam."
"I wasn't weeping over his death. I'm used to that. What brings YOU to London? Are you finished in Bern so soon? Will some whiskey warm you up?"
"God, it'll save me."
She pointed at a typescript on the desk. "That's the last thing he wrote. He didn't quite finish it. The Observer wants it. I'm winding it up, and I'm afraid it brought on the tears."
"What is it? A news dispatch?"
"Oh, no, that would be dead as mutton. It's a battlefield sketch.
He called it 'Sunset on Kidney Ridge."
" She handed him half a tumbler of neat whiskey, and gestured with another. "Cheers. He was dictating it, actually, when Monty's press chap rang to say that the interview was on."
Pamela's careworn countenance, the swollen eyes, the slipshod hair, the flat voice, could be ascribed to grief, Slote was thinking, but she seemed altogether quenched. At her lowest in other days-and Pamela had been very low-she had not lost a certain defiant sparkle, an enticing bravura beneath the quiet surface. Slote was looking now at a dull sad woman past thirty.
"Do you believe in presentiments?" Her voice was hoarse from the whiskey.
"I'm not sure. Why?"
"Talky had one. I know. I was supposed to go in that jeep.
I'd even been cleared by Montgomery's press chap, quite a break for a female. Talky suddenly, mulishly, bumped me.
He was downright nasty about it, and I got nasty too. We parted in anger, and that's why I'm alive, sitting here now, drinking with you." She raised her glass sadly, and drained it.
"I'm an utter skeptic, Leslie, I believe only in things you can see and hear and measure, and all that. Still, he knew. Don't ask me how.
Hitting a land mine is a random accident, I realize, yet he knew.
That piece on Kidney Ridge is a deathbed sort of thing."
"You remember Byron Henry?" Slote asked.
"Why, of course."
"I met him in Lisbon last week. I fear there's more bad news.
The Northhampton's gone down." Slote had been looking forward with sour relish, of which he was slightly ashamed, to making this disclosure.
Not that he wished her ill, or Victor Henry either, but in their romance he had briefly figured as a feeble also-ran, and the bad taste lingered. She showed no emotion. "You're very well connected here, Pam, aren't you? Can you find out whether Captain Henry survived, and cable Byron? The only word he could get in Lisbon, from some Navy people there, was that the ship was sunk in battle."
"What about your naval attache here?"
"He's off in Scotland."
"All right," she said briskly, almost gaily, "let's find out about Captain Henry." It was a peculiar reaction to grave news, Slote thought; mighty peculiar. Merely talking about the man animated her.
She told the secretary to call Air Vice Marshal Burne-Wilke.
"Well!
And what news about Byron?
And Natalie?"
"He found her. Found her, and the baby."
"I'll be damned. Found her! Where?"
"In Marseilles. Told me about it for two hours over dinner.
It's a saga."
"Honestly, that family! How did he do it? Where's Natailie now?"
Slote had just started on Byron's tale when the telephone rang.
It was Burne-Wilke. Pamela told him about Pug Henry and Byron in a quick affectionate way, calling him "darling."
She hung up and said to Slote, "They have a direct line through to Washington. He'll get on it as soon as he can.
Have you ever met my fiance?
"Once. On a receiving line at your embassy in Washington.
You were there, but he wasn't your f
iance then."
"Oh, of course. And Captain Henry was there, and Natalie, too.
Now go on with what happened in Marseilles.
More whiskeys"
"Absolutely, if you can spare it."
"People have been kind. I've bottles and bottles."
Slote told the story of the encounter at some length, and said Byron was still trying to learn his family's fate. On the day the Allies had invaded North Africa, the telephone lines to Marseilles had shut down. Intermittent contact had since been restored, with long delays, but none of his calls had gone through. He had thirty days' leave, and he was spending them hanging around the rescue agencies'offices in Lisbon.