“Well, he has to take over as acting XO. You can’t be both. And one more thing—it’ll be your responsibility to take care of you. By that I mean eating and sleeping. Take naps if you have to, but insist that when you’re flat exhausted, you get some sleep time. No one else will do that for you when you’re in command. Now, get me a signalman.”
Once the commodore had given the good news to the Cogswell, we set the modified GQ condition watch and steamed southeast to Kerama Retto anchorage. Due to an anomaly in the atmosphere, our air-search radar was able to pick up the large carrier formations to the west of Okinawa at almost sixty miles distance. Sunset was approaching, so I had the ship set general quarters for the last hour of the approach to Kerama Retto. There were no air contacts other than the ever-present CAP, and that was worrisome. The kamis had been coming pretty much nonstop every day for the past month. We wondered if those Jap bombers lurking at the outer ring of the fleet’s defenses presaged night attacks, with kamis being vectored under radar control from bombers who stayed out of the fight.
“What’s the moon?” I asked the quartermaster.
“Waxing, three-quarters,” he said promptly.
That meant good night visibility for night pilots, of both persuasions. The picket line might be a very dangerous place tonight. I hoped Cogswell was up to the task; as ever, dusk and dawn were prime attack windows.
We entered the anchorage and went alongside the tender USS Dixie, a different ship from the one we’d tied up to before. The Piedmont had gone around to another anchorage on the eastern side of Okinawa. We were the outboard ship in a nest of three destroyers, two of which were in pretty bad shape. With our makeshift forward stack and a few dozen twenty-millimeter “portholes” stuffed with rags and monkey shit, we fit right in. The engineers were summoned topside to hump two long black fuel hoses from the tender across the two other ships to Malloy’s hungry fuel risers. An ammo barge came alongside during the refueling evolution, and the gun crews spent another hour lifting pallets of five-inch and forty-millimeter projectiles up from the barge, while other teams sent cargo nets full of empty brass cartridges to the barge for return to ammo dumps stateside, where they’d be reloaded. It was almost 2000 before the logistics effort ended.
The captain had been carried off on a stretcher by hospital orderlies from the tender’s sick bay, his face concealed by a carefully arranged bedsheet. The commodore had gone with him, after telling me to get Malloy back on station as soon as we had our supplies on board. Cogswell has an older and less effective radar than Malloy, he told me; she was to return to her patrol station outside Kerama Retto upon our arrival on station. I saluted, and he left the ship, without any bell ringing this time. Everyone was too busy moving food, oil, and ammo. All the ship’s officers were out and about, acting as safety observers. The crewmen humping the heavy ammo were tired, and this was no time for someone to drop a five-inch shell.
We cast off from the destroyer nest and stood out to sea at 2200. The Chop had broken off some of the cooks from the store-handling party and told them to get some chow going, which allowed us to feed the crew before we got back on station two hours later. Cogswell was positively delighted to see us return and left station with all the speed the Fletcher class was capable of, disappearing over the horizon in thirty minutes flat. I envied them.
The radar picture that night remained foreboding. Once every two hours a single blip could be seen way out on the defensive perimeter. Our air-search radar could not determine height, but the Freddies figured that a contact detected out at sixty or seventy miles had to be a high-flier, and also a pretty good-sized plane. Other picket ships were reporting the same thing, a distant shadow contact. None of the pickets had CAP assigned now that it was dark, but at least one carrier down in the task force operating area had night-fighters on Alert Fifteen. We watched and we waited for something to happen.
I met with the department heads after we’d settled in on our picket station. They briefed me on the stores, ammo, and fuel loadout, and I told them I would remain in temporary command of Malloy until such time as a new CO was ordered in.
“That going to happen sooner or later, XO?” Jimmy asked.
“Gosh, you trying to hurt my feelings already?”
There were tired grins all around, but I understood the awkwardness of the situation. Temporary command arrangements were always unsettling. If I was “in command,” then why weren’t they supposed to call me Captain? The term “chain of command” implies clarity and rigidity. A temporary CO was neither fish nor fowl, not that anyone was going to challenge my orders.
“They can always send a three-striper in from one of the staffs out in the carrier task force,” I said, “but that would mean yet another temporary assignment. I’m guessing they’ll get a seasoned commander from one of the ships that was either lost or disposed of due to battle damage.”
“I can just see it,” Marty said. “Morning staff meeting on Halsey’s flagship. Need a three-striper to volunteer to take command of a destroyer up on the radar picket line. Don’t everyone raise your hands all at once.”
“Prime duty assignment,” the snipe said, continuing the farce. “Destroyer command, lots of gunnery action, tremendous potential to gain major experience in damage control, and maybe even a swim call in the bargain. Anybody?”
“And glory,” Jimmy chimed in. “Don’t forget glory. As in, glory to God in the highest, and a really good chance to meet Him, too.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. Dark as the humor was, it was actually a good sign that they could talk that way. Part of it was that we were closer in age and experience to one another than any of us had been to the captain. That’s when I realized that I might be “in command,” but I was not “the captain.” As it should be, I thought.
“Jimmy, you’re now acting XO,” I said.
Jimmy stared at me. “Wow,” he said. “Didn’t see that coming.”
“Chop, get a steward to change out the linens in the sea cabin.”
“Yes, sir, and how ’bout the inport cabin?”
“Collect the captain’s things, do an inventory, pack everything up for shipment back to the States. Then make it ready for whoever shows up to take over. And if you can find time, paint it. The new CO might not be a smoker.”
The phone squeaked under the wardroom table.
“Yes?” I answered. It was the CIC watch officer.
“Three other pickets are reporting that they can each see a separate snooper, as if the Japs were putting one at the extreme limits of each of our sectors. CTF 58 has ordered the night-fighters to come up as CAP.”
“Thank you, I’ll be up.”
I told the department heads what was being reported. “Get with your division officers and chiefs, sort out any rumors as to why the captain had to leave us, and tell them we can expect a new CO shortly. Remind them that that means a change of command, even up here on the picket line. That means materiel inspections of all four departments, an admin inspection, surveys of custodial gear that’s missing, the whole nine yards.”
“Between raids?” Marty asked.
“Navy Regs, guys. Read chapter eight. It doesn’t say ‘except during wartime.’ Let’s get going; hopefully the Japs aren’t getting ready to initiate night attacks.”
“Why not,” Mario said on a sigh. “Nothing else to do around here.”
SEVEN
I needed sleep. I remembered the commodore’s warning about sleep deprivation and his instruction that it was my responsibility to take care of myself, physically and mentally. Especially mentally, I thought. I still thought there’d been an exhaustion component to what had befallen our skipper, if my own mental fuzziness was any indication, and I still felt bad about all this. Sure, I’d aspired to command at sea—what line officer didn’t? But not this way.
I went into Combat to take a look at the air picture. The long-range snoopers were plotted out at extreme ranges, but there were no contacts other than these mystery plane
s. Comms were good with the picket ships on either side of our station and with the air-raid reporting center down in the carrier formation, and both of the other pickets had some amphibious craft in their area to add extra firepower. I wondered why we didn’t.
I went out to the bridge wing. Coming from the red-lighted CIC I was still a bit night-blind, but there definitely was a moon. To make matters worse, there was phosphorescence in our wake, a phenomenon I hadn’t seen since the Philippines campaign. Nothing like having a green arrow pointing right at you wherever you went. I was tempted to have the OOD just put the rudder over three degrees and cut a big circle in the sea. I’d been told the Japs had done just that at Midway, putting their carriers into a circle to make it impossible for torpedo-bombers to line up a shot. Unfortunately for them, the circling tactic made it easy for a dive bomber to predict where the ship would be in the time it took for the bomb to reach the target—all they had to do was look at the wake. I told the OOD I’d be in the captain’s sea cabin and he shouldn’t wake me unless we caught a raid.
The sea cabin was no more than a steel closet just behind the pilothouse. It had a fold-down bed, a fold-up steel sink, and a steel toilet, and measured perhaps ten by six feet, all in. There was a single porthole, now patched with tape, a sound-powered handset next to the bed, and a gyro repeater with a magnifying lens at the foot of the bed. That was it. The OOD could step through the pilothouse door and open the sea cabin door if he had to get to me quickly. With only a single bulkhead between the sea cabin and the pilothouse, I could hear everything being said out there, so if there was sudden excitement, I’d probably hear it.
It felt strange, occupying the captain’s sea cabin, but it was necessary. The captain’s inport cabin was too far away in terms of getting to the bridge in seconds. I wasn’t comfortable with moving my living quarters from the XO’s stateroom to the captain’s inport cabin. It just seemed a bit presumptuous. Besides, they’d have a new CO up here within a week or so, and then I’d just have to move again.
I lay down on the bed after slipping off my sea boots. I didn’t bother taking off my clothes. My life jacket and steel helmet were hanging on a hook next to the door, and it took me at least fifteen seconds to fall asleep, all the noises from the bridge watch seeping through the bulkhead notwithstanding.
What seemed like ten minutes later, the phone next to the bed squeaked. I picked it up. “XO,” I said automatically.
“Morning, sir,” the OOD said. “GQ in fifteen minutes.”
“What for?”
“Morning GQ, sir.”
“Good lord—what time is it?”
“Zero six fifteen, sir. Fresh coffee made and waiting.”
I hung up the phone, looked at my watch, and confirmed the time. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had what qualified as a full night’s sleep in the destroyer Navy. There was a knock on the door and the bridge messenger, a young seaman apprentice, stuck a hand in with a mug of coffee. “Two sugars, Cap’n,” he announced.
“It’s still XO, but thanks for the coffee, young man.”
Jimmy Enright came out once GQ had been set throughout the ship. There were no contacts, short or long range, but, as we’d learned to our sorrow, that didn’t mean there was nothing out there. All hands topside were looking. I finally took up residence in the captain’s chair.
“A night with no raids?” I asked Jimmy.
He handed me a yellow sheet off the Fleet Broadcast. He pointed to a news item. Halsey had taken all the carriers to Formosa and struck Jap air bases all over the island. Then they went just south of Kyushu and did more of the same. Japs had been otherwise occupied, apparently. We got some sleep.
“All the carriers?”
“All the big-decks, and the fast battleships, too. Left the escort CVs to do air support over the Okinawa battlefields and the picket line. I guess Halsey got tired of sitting still and taking all this grief from the kamis.”
“That’s our boy,” I said, “but you know they’ll be back.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “I almost couldn’t sleep last night because of those long-range snoopers. That means something.”
“I think it means radar-directed attacks at night on the fleet and the picket line, starting with the picket line. We need to talk tactics.”
“First and foremost, they have to get night-fighters out early so we can take out those control planes.”
“The escort CVs have night-fighters?”
“Probably not,” he said. “So until Uncle Bill gets back…”
“We snuffies are on our own,” I finished for him. “The moon will be even bigger tonight.”
“Even so, XO, you can’t see a black dot in the dark.”
“How much star shell we carry?”
“I’ll have to ask Guns. Probably a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty rounds. You thinking of blinding them?”
“Why not? The search radars can see ’em when they’re high enough. When they drop down and get on the deck for their run in, they go off the scope. So, when they do that, compute an advanced dead-reckoning position and start firing star shells on that bearing. Then follow up with VT frag. It’s worth a try.”
“Damned straight,” he said. “Lemme kick this around with Marty and the fire-control chiefs. Maybe there’s other stuff we can do.”
“Okay, and as acting XO, I want you to organize the day so that the crew gets a break and some decent chow. If Halsey kicked ass over there, they’ll take a day to recover. But tonight, I think we’re in for it.”
“I don’t understand, XO,” Ops said. “The intel report said they had maybe five hundred fighters and bombers left.”
“They lost their last operational big-deck carrier late last year,” I said, “but if they kept building planes anyway, it may be closer to five thousand.”
* * *
After a hot shower and a shave, fresh khakis, and a real breakfast, I summoned the department heads at ten. I asked them to bring me up to speed on where we stood in regard to materiel condition—what equipment was up, what was down, ammo, fuel, people, sick list, walking wounded, unrepaired damage, everything. It took an hour and a half. We were in fairly decent shape, considering.
All the guns were fully operational. In peacetime that had never been the case in any ship I’d served in. Funny what constant suicide attacks could do for equipment readiness. We had a nearly full supply of ammo and lots more of that wonderful VT frag. Our reason for being, the long-range air-search radar, was operating in full beam for a change. Some of that was due to the atmospheric conditions, but most of it was due to the twenty-four-hour-a-day attention of the electronic technicians, who spoke softly to each vacuum tube on an hourly basis, I was sure.
We talked tactics to deal with night attacks. The star-shell gambit looked like it might work to disrupt the kamis on their final drive into the ship. A star shell is filled with a burster charge of magnesium and potassium perchlorate in a perforated steel can, suspended from a small parachute. When it ignites, it produces a blindingly white light akin to welding, especially when it assaults night-adapted eyes. They could be fired on time fuzes to burst wherever you wanted them to.
The CIC radio talkers had come up with the idea of searching the frequency bands for the Jap control circuit and then jamming that with a stronger signal of our own. I asked how they could do that. CW: continuous wave. Set up a Morse-code key on that frequency and simply hold it down. Not wanting to dampen their spirits, I didn’t tell them that CW operated in the HF (high frequency) band, while air control circuits were all in the VHF (very high frequency) or even UHF (ultra high frequency) bands. I’d let them do it, anyway.
The chief bosun had suggested we tow a line of spare life rafts behind the ship, illuminated with life-jacket lights, which were small, single-cell-battery-operated white lights. The idea was to distract the kami pilot into aiming astern of us. I knew that some of this stuff would be minimally useful but decided that we’d try it all.
&
nbsp; Late that afternoon I addressed the crew over the 1MC, introducing myself with “This is the exec speaking.” I told them that the captain had suffered a nervous breakdown, and that I was in temporary command until a new CO could be assigned to the ship. I told them about Halsey’s strikes on the kamikazes’ bases in southern Japan and Formosa. The good news was that Halsey’s strikes had probably seriously hurt the kamis. The bad news was that Halsey and the big-deck carriers, along with their precious night-fighters, were still over a day away from us. I told them about the long-range, standoff snoopers who’d been lurking beyond the normal CAP range.
“I think this means that they’re going to start night attacks. A big plane, equipped with an airborne radar, will vector smaller planes—Zeros, Vals, Zekes—against the picket ships. Once our night-fighters get back into the area, we can send them after those radar controller planes. But tonight? We’re going to have to fight them off on our own. We’re going to try some new tactics, star shells, maneuvers they haven’t seen, and, if we can find them, jamming their control circuits. In the end, it’ll come down to what it always comes down to: See the bastard, fill the sky with hot steel, and pray.
“The thing that’s changed is this: The Japs have figured out that as long as we’re out here on the edge, they’ll never be able to get in and surprise the important ships, the carriers, the amphibs and their support boats, and the merchies, that are going to take Okinawa away from them. Remember this, too: Okinawa is not just another island, like Iwo or Saipan. It’s part of their homeland. They know we’re going to win this thing. Apparently, they’ve all agreed to die to prevent or delay that from happening. Everyone on our side is trying to help them accomplish that. I wish I had better news, but there it is.
“The supply officer informs me there are ten cases of steaks in the reefers. I told him to break ’em all out and to set up charcoal grills on the fantail. I wish I had some beer to go with them, but Cokes will have to do.”
I paused for a moment. “Malloy is a lucky ship. We’ve dodged some big bullets, and that’s because you guys know what you have to do to keep us all alive. Enjoy a steak tonight. Your enemy is eating bugs and razorgrass. We will beat these monsters. That is all.”
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