Sentinels of Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Captain has the conn,” I shouted. “All back full, emergency!”

  The lee helmsman jumped to it, pulling the two arms of the engine-order telegraph straight to back full from ahead flank, then all the way forward, and then all the way to back full. The snipes got the message and opened the astern throttles at the same time as they closed the ahead throttles. The ship began to tremble as the turbines and their massive reduction gears were dragged down to stop in one direction and then began to spin in the opposite direction. I now knew what we were facing, incredible as it seemed: A Jap submarine was firing baka rocket planes at us.

  There was nothing the guns could do. From twelve miles out, a baka could be on us in just over sixty seconds. It was a piloted rocket, though. Surely they had been taught to lead their targets, which would usually be moving ahead at 27 knots during an engagement. I was counting on that, and I hoped that by backing down hard, we’d make the pilot of this 600 mph flying bomb miss ahead, especially if he was having trouble seeing us. We also weren’t helping him see us by firing every gun we could at him, because it would have been pointless.

  Seconds later, another roar of escaping steam flashed over us, in front of us, actually, and then came a tremendous explosion in the water off to starboard as the baka went in and its warhead torched off. By now Malloy was gathering speed in the astern direction, kicking big sheets of white spray over the fantail. The gun crews must be thinking the bridge had gone nuts. So what? It had worked—but how were these things seeing us? Then I realized what the answer was: They’d been fired by the submarine down the bearing of our own radars. The baka pilot didn’t have to see us: He simply had to fly his rocket-propelled bomb in whatever direction his mother ship had fired him.

  “All stop,” I ordered. “All ahead standard. Make turns for fifteen knots.”

  The forced-draft blowers wound down and then immediately back up as the snipes reversed the throttles once again.

  “Bridge, Combat. Crowder Two-Niner reports another launch flare. They’re going in for a strafing run, but they can’t see the sea surface.”

  “Break ’em off, then,” I ordered. “They’re kidding themselves.”

  A third baka. A piloted rocket plane, going so fast our gun system couldn’t even compute a solution even if it did manage to lock on. Some young pilot, vintage three weeks of training, had his hands on two primitive controls: direction and elevation. He was coming at us at 10 miles per minute from only twelve miles away. There wasn’t any way we could fire at him, but maybe we could blind him.

  “Sky One, commence firing star on bearing zero one zero. Rapid continuous. Burst at five thousand yards.”

  Marty must have been thinking the same thing, because mount fifty-three way back on the stern opened immediately, blasting out successive two-gun salvos as fast as its crew could load them. Five thousand yards was short range for star shells, which meant their parachutes would probably be ripped right off when the bursting charge let go. Star shells were meant to be fired high and long, with the projectile arcing over and then slanting down as it blew off its end-cap, deployed the chute, and then ignited its white-phosphorous load. With luck the star would burn for almost thirty seconds as it descended, by which time the next shell was bursting above it. My hope was that the pilot, with night-adapted vision, would be blinded by all the pyrotechnics exploding above him as he came screaming toward us. The downside was that we would be perfectly illuminated by our own star shells.

  The first four stars burst just as I thought they would, streaming out into the darkness trailing white-phosphorous sparks and a burning chute in the direction of the incoming baka. Half the crew was trying to see this thing when we heard that frightful sound of the rocket engine blasting right in front of the bridge windows, so close that its right wing struck the port corner of our pilothouse and tore out every porthole from left to right in a whirlwind of flying glass and ruptured steel. Moments later, a big boom from way off on the starboard side indicated that the baka had gone into the sea.

  “Bridge, Combat. One of the Crowders hit the water. His wingman is reporting that they were trying to strafe that sub. He doesn’t know if they hit him or not. We’ve lost the surface contact.”

  “Captain, aye,” I said mechanically. “Do we need to initiate search and rescue?”

  “Sir, the other pilot said his wingman flew it right into the water at three hundred knots. Not survivable.”

  Great, I thought. Now we’d lost a CAP as well as the front of Malloy’s bridge. If the sub had submerged, it was probably over, until the next sub, of course. The Japs had figured out a way to stuff three bakas into some kind of watertight hangar on a submarine’s deck, surface, launch them, and then dive the hell out of there. This would make for an interesting intel report.

  I got down out of my chair, brushing shards of glass and a lapful of metal filings off my trou. There was a fresh breeze blowing in through all the missing portholes. The front bulkhead looked like an open zipper. Air-conditioning on the bridge, at last.

  Would this never end, I wondered. I looked at my watch. It was only 0145, not that the arrival of daylight would mean safety, but at least we could see the sonsabitches. Invisible rocket-bombs coming out of the dark at near the speed of sound was getting on my nerves.

  “Broad weave, OOD,” I said and then went into Combat to help with the reporting. I wasn’t sleepy anymore.

  * * *

  Two hours later, it happened again. This one was scarier than the first three, happening almost in slow motion as I was sitting in the captain’s chair on the bridge. The red flare on the distant dark horizon as some kind of booster lifted a baka into the night, headed straight for us. Everyone on the bridge was trying frantically to spot the incoming suicider. I wanted to get up out of my chair, to grab binoculars and stare into the night sky, to detect anything our gunners could lock onto, but I couldn’t move. Then came the escaping steam sound, rising in intensity as the baka began its dive, actually seeming to slow down as it came in front of the pilothouse windows, from left to right, its right wing slashing a long cut across the front of the bridge, its pilot looking right at me as he went past, bucktoothed, ferociously slanting eyes, just like in all the war bond posters, grinning like a death’s head …

  I sat up in the sea-cabin bunk with a strangled noise in my throat, covered with sweat. My insides churned, and I barely made it to the steel commode in time. As I flushed the pot I wondered if anyone outside in the pilothouse had heard me in there. I’d never had nightmares before, not even bad dreams. This one had been a doozy, and I felt sick for the next fifteen minutes, staying on the commode just in case. I looked at my hands in the dim red light from the pelorus mounted above my fold-down bunk. “Now who has shaking hands,” I muttered. A vision of Pudge Tallmadge holding up his trembling hands flashed through my mind. He had a sympathetic smile on his face.

  What are you scared of, I asked myself: the Japs trying to kill you or making a mistake in front of the crew and everybody?

  Captain Tallmadge had warned me, hadn’t he: I am afraid, he’d said. I didn’t use to do this, shake like this. Forget your career and your promotions and all that stuff: up here it’s life or death, and more often than not, death. Whole destroyers folding in half and going down like a diving sea bird, both ends flashing high and then sliding out of sight with half their crew still inside, wondering what was happening until they heard main bulkheads collapsing and the sea roaring in like Niagara. A destroyer moored safely to a tender suddenly giving out what sounded a lot like a ship-sized death rattle and then sinking right out of sight, with mooring lines popping like gunshots everywhere and crewmen frantically spilling out of her like so many drowning bugs, unaware of the depth charges at the back end counting the pounds per inch of sea pressure before …

  “Stop it, for Chrissakes,” I said out loud. You can’t do this. Think about your crew, the nearly three hundred high school graduates of last year’s class. You don’t think their
guts aren’t churning when they’re out there, on deck, face-to-face with these vampire aircraft coming straight at them, on purpose? Just stop it.

  I got up off the commode and washed up. I checked the time: 0410. I’d gotten two hours, which was more than a lot of people in the ship. I picked up the phone and called the OOD, who was only about ten feet away.

  “I’m up, and I’m going below for a shower and clean clothes. Tell the Japs to stand down for the next half hour.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Will do.”

  “And get ahold of Mooky; see if he can make fat-pills for breakfast.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  ELEVEN

  By daylight the damage to the front of the pilothouse didn’t look that bad. There was a slash in the metal, as if some giant had taken a paring knife to the horizontal row of portholes across the front. The shipfitters actually found the wingtip from the baka bomb in a twenty-millimeter guntub on the starboard side. They were able to weld some plate over the gash, so now there was no reason for us to make a trip back down to the duty destroyer tender. Not that they would have let us leave station anyway.

  With the air picture quiet after dawn GQ, I met with the department heads. The officers had made short work of the wardroom’s ration of morning fat-pills, otherwise known as hot cinnamon rolls.

  “Close calls last night, gents,” I began. “We got lucky when the first baka couldn’t find us, we backed down on the second so he missed ahead, and we blinded the third one. That almost backfired on us, because we solved his where’s-my-target problem for him.”

  “I can’t believe these things have a man in them,” Peter said. “Flying a rocket?”

  “Even better,” Jimmy Enright said, “we think they launched from a surfaced submarine.”

  “I’m waiting to see if they think we’ve gone looney-tunes up here when that report gets in,” I said. “The question is, what can we do to protect ourselves if they come back?”

  “I vote for learning how to submerge, like that sub did last night,” Marty offered.

  “I think we should request an additional section of CAP,” Jimmy said. “Have them patrol an area ten miles north of us, but at five thousand feet instead of fifteen thousand. Their radars can’t see things on the surface, but they’ll see that red flare. They could drop flares of their own and then go down and strafe that bastard.”

  “Put that in an op-immediate message to the commodore,” I said. “They’ll need time to change out the night-fighters’ weapons load. One problem, though: We let them take the first shot.”

  “Maybe patrol our station in a big circle?” Marty asked. “We can’t generate a firing solution on a baka anyway, and certainly not at night, so it doesn’t much matter if the guns can bear or not, but going that fast, the baka pilot probably can’t turn that thing if his target is constantly turning.”

  I nodded. That, too, would probably work, or at least make it a lot harder for the baka pilot. One thing I’d noticed at dawn GQ was that the cloud cover had blown off. Tonight might be clear, with our mortal enemy, the moon, shining in full splendor. We needed to do something.

  “We’ll try it,” I said. “In fact, maybe start doing it now. There’s nothing to say that sub can’t surface in daylight, shoot one or two, and go back down.”

  Then Chop surprised all of us. “Could we get the task force to send one of the Jeep carriers up here with a couple of destroyers?” he said. “You know, form a hunter-killer group like we did in LantFleet, and go hunt down that sub? He has to be hanging around here somewhere.”

  I’d forgotten Peter had done his first tour in an Atlantic Fleet destroyer, where the problem was the Nazi U-boat, not kamikazes. “So far they haven’t been willing to spare even a fourth tin can for the picket line, Chop, let alone a carrier,” I said. “That could work, though. That has to be a pretty big submarine to be able to carry three bakas. Or maybe even more.”

  What I didn’t say was that Halsey and his staff were less than receptive to suggestions from mere tin cans out on the edge of the huge task force formation. The phone interrupted us.

  “Large raid, many bogeys, Captain. They look to go past us, but…”

  “Do it,” I said, and the GQ alarm sounded seconds later. “We’ll pick this up when the raid’s over,” I said, getting up to go get my battle gear.

  “If we’re still here,” I heard Marty mutter.

  * * *

  I went into Combat to see what was shaping up. All three picket ships had detected the massed formations of Jap bombers and fighters that were coming toward us from their supposedly badly damaged bases in Kyushu. According to the air-raid net, three big-decks were spitting off CAP as fast as they could unfold their wings. The on-station CAP might be able to disrupt the incoming formations, but there looked to be several dozen Jap planes inbound, so this was going to be a three-alarm air battle.

  I got on the 1MC and briefed the crew, telling everyone to be alert for the inevitable low-fliers. Having said that, I realized it had been unnecessary. “You don’t need to be told that,” I said, my voice echoing strangely over the topside speakers. “You guys know your business. Everybody says Malloy’s a lucky ship, but I think you make your own luck because everybody does his job in a superb fashion. Keep it up, and we may just get to sail away from this fire pit. That is all.”

  I climbed up into my chair on the bridge and waited, like everyone else. It was a clear day, with a little haze but not much. My head itched under the straps of my steel helmet liner, but I didn’t even think about taking it off. With sunglasses on I was able to watch surreptitiously the expressions on the bridge watch team’s faces, which ranged from bravado to thinly masked fear. The bosun’s mate of the GQ team was one Robert Hanks, nicknamed Slim Bob, undoubtedly because of his Buddha-sized belly. Slim Bob stood at the back bulkhead of the pilothouse, legs spread in a stance reminiscent of Lord Nelson to accommodate a nonexistent heaving main, one arm behind his back and the other perched on his expansive front porch, that hand firmly gripping his silver bosun’s call, which was slung around his neck with an ornate white lanyard made up of a hundred different sailor knots. His round red face was set in an expression of supreme indifference.

  The officer of the deck was Lieutenant (junior grade) Barry Waddell, six foot three, skinny as a rail, and permanently hunched forward to avoid hitting his head on various objects mounted in the overhead. He was a Dartmouth grad, OCS, and reportedly a serious scholar of English literature. He was the ship’s first lieutenant, in charge of First Division, the bosun’s mates. Chief Dougherty, of course, was the real first lieutenant, having eighteen years of seamanship experience in destroyers, but there had to be a division officer, and Barry was it. He looked like a scholar and nothing at all like what one would expect from that admiring sobriquet “destroyerman.” Here he was, though, out on the Okinawa picket line and very far from Hanover, New Hampshire, watching out the empty portholes through binoculars that were bigger than his scholarly hands as we bored a large, continuous, three-degree right rudder circle in the water while the CIC team vectored fighters toward the approaching Jap formations.

  “Bridge, Combat. Possible low-fliers, bearing zero niner zero, range twenty miles, closing, fast, composition two, maybe three.”

  “Where’s our CAP?”

  “Diverted to the main raid, Captain. We’re on our own until they get more planes up.”

  Situation normal, I thought.

  “Officer of the Deck, steer due north, speed twenty knots, narrow weave.”

  Our circling stopped as Malloy steadied up on a northerly course to present all our guns to the incoming Japs. The main battery director slewed off to starboard and began searching the horizon. Twenty miles, forty thousand yards, two, maybe three planes headed in, 300 miles per hour, 5 miles per minute, we had four minutes to find them, lock on with radar, open fire, and knock them down before they came through the ship and killed us all.

  “Sky One, Captain. Open fire
as soon as you have a solution, even if they’re out of range.”

  “Sky One, aye.”

  A minute later our two remaining five-inch gun mounts slewed out to starboard, slaved their servos to the electronic orders rising from Main Battery Plot, elevated, and began shooting. Their most effective range was six to eight miles, but that was for computed, accurate, killing fire. The guns could actually throw shells farther, out to nine miles. Against a surface target, that would have shells falling all over the place, but with these new VT frag shells, anything that disrupted that little proximity fuze’s cone of radiated energy would trigger a blast, and it only took one to knock a plane out of the sky. That possibility was well worth the expenditure of ammo, especially when the bastards were aiming to to crash on board.

  I felt my insides clenching when the five-inch started up, but I was determined to sit in my chair and let my people do what they did best: fight the ship. I swiveled the chair to starboard and searched the horizon for those black puffs that would indicate that the shells were seeing something worth detonating over. There was more haze now, or more than I had noticed before. I thought about maneuvering, executing a weave or a zigzag to confuse the approaching suiciders, but, being a gun-hand, I knew that the best chances for a hit came from keeping the ship steady on course and speed, reducing the variables of the fire-control solution on those of the approaching targets. Pray there wasn’t an I-boat out there, refining a torpedo firing solution.

  The twin barrels of mount fifty-two continued to hammer away, elevated at about twenty degrees. Hot shell casings were clanging around the forecastle as the crew inside the mount labored to feed those two hungry guns.

  There: black puffs, and then a bright flamer, a black dot careening out of the sky and cartwheeling across the water in a boil of blazing avgas and white water.

  I moved my binoculars right, then left, looking for more black dots, more puffs. Couldn’t see any, but then I could. A whole constellation of black puffs, and then another fireball, this one going straight up into the air, looping over, and sheeting down into the sea, followed by an impressive mountain of white water as its bomb went off. I wanted to cheer, but the guns were still shooting, and now the forties had joined in.