Sentinels of Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  At this point I really wanted to get out of that chair, get out to the bridge wing to urge on the massed barrels of Malloy’s broadside as the twenties joined in, and then I saw it, a black dot, no, a real silhouette now, stubby wings, pieces being chewed off by our guns, that big, ugly bomb seeming to wiggle from side to side as we tore the plane to pieces, until finally one of our shells found the bomb itself. The plane and its bomb dissolved in a white flash, close, so very close, and then came a clatter of debris flaying the sides of the ship, followed by a thunderclap that shook the bridge. It was strong enough to break windows, if we’d still had any.

  The guns stopped shooting. Unfortunately my ears did not stop ringing. I was dimly aware that the bitch-box was trying to tell me something.

  “Say again, Combat?”

  “High-altitude bogeys, possibly bombers, two seven zero, range thirty-seven miles, composition four. We’ve just received CAP and we’re vectoring them to engage, but the plot shows these guys’re on a course to overfly our station.”

  “Captain, aye,” I said. “Officer of the Deck, right three degrees rudder and increase speed to twenty-five knots.”

  I heard the director slewing around to the west, looking for the incoming Japs. As we began to execute a wide circle, the director would have to keep moving in its effort to achieve a lock-on. If they were high-altitude bombers, a circle was the best maneuver. If they were kamis, well, it was anybody’s guess. As I thought about it, I realized the Japs would probably not employ conventional high-altitude bombing tactics against a destroyer-sized target. A carrier, maybe, but a tin can? The chances of their getting a hit were minimal.

  So what, then? Overfly your target at eighteen thousand feet and then execute a vertical dive? A conventional dive bomber would allow room for a pullout, but a kami? He’d come straight down, and that would make for another impossible fire-control problem, with us having to shoot straight up. Four Jap carriers had learned that the hard way, at Midway.

  I keyed the bitch-box. “Combat, Captain. Lay out a five mile wide figure eight on the DRT and issue conning instructions to the bridge to maintain that track.”

  “Combat, aye.”

  I then called Marty up on Sky One and explained to him what I thought they were going to try. He confirmed my own intuition—there was no way that we could engage a vertical diver.

  “So we have to make him miss, Marty,” I said. “He’ll be coming down so fast he’ll be skinning his paint off, but that won’t allow him any time for reacting to a sudden maneuver. Here’s what I want: You guys start looking low for the usual kami low-flier tactics. You can’t do anything about the vertical divers, but they may also be a distraction. Sector searches, coordinate with Combat, and let me worry about the high-fliers.”

  “Sky One, aye,” Marty said. For once, he sounded a bit uncertain. I was glad he couldn’t see how uncertain I was about any of this.

  Then I got on the 1MC. “This is the captain speaking. We have a high-altitude raid inbound. Our CAP is after them. They’re either conventional bombers or kamis. If they’re kamis, they’re going to try a vertical dive attack. You’ll see we’ve gone into a figure-eight pattern to make it really hard for them to hit us, but here’s the thing: I think they’re a diversion. While we’re all looking up, the real kamis are going to attack from low level, right on the water, just like they always do. So everybody topside look low. Let the CAP take care of the guys way up there, but let’s not get caught by some low-flying sneaky bastard. That is all.”

  “Bridge, Sky One.”

  “Captain, aye.”

  “We could take those high-fliers under fire, Captain. They’re in our computer’s range.”

  “We’ve got CAP up there, Marty,” I said. “Let’s not go shooting down any Corsairs.”

  “Sky One, aye.”

  “Look down, look flat. Bring your director radar down flat on the sea surface.”

  “Sky One.”

  The officer of the deck turned in my direction and surprised me. “Thanks for telling us what’s going in, Captain,” he said, his voice tight with fear. “It helps.”

  I nodded. What I didn’t want to tell him or anyone else was that this looked like a pincer effort: high-fliers coming in from the west doing suicide dives while low-fliers came boring in from the east or the north, on the deck, skimming the waves, hiding in the sea return of our own radar displays. I felt that familiar coil deep down in my belly. My steel throne beckoned, but I shut it out of my consciousness. The ship heeled as we reversed the constant turn to start the other leg of the figure-eight.

  Think, I told myself. What else should we be doing? The figure-eight maneuver would make the vertical-dive planes strain really hard to get a hit. If they did hit us, we’d be finished. They’d punch right through our unarmored ship, from the 01 level right down through the keel, and we’d be open to the sea and gone in minutes.

  Don’t think about that, I told myself. What else should we be doing?

  “Bridge, Combat. Our CAP is engaging. Two Corsairs, reporting four Bettys. They’ve flamed one, and now it’s a furball.”

  “Captain, aye. Watch your surface-search radar, Jimmy. Watch it hard.”

  “Combat, aye, and now two Bettys flamed.”

  Then I heard director fifty-one stop its rumbling search and steady on a bearing to the north. Moments later both five-inch gun mounts swung out and began firing. I felt a momentary surge of elation. I’d been right. Then it hit me: The figure-eight might help with a high-diver, but it would mask our own batteries if we got skimmers.

  “Bridge, Combat. Third Betty flamed, but number four has disappeared. They’re looking.”

  “Captain, aye.” They’re looking, but probably not in the right place. This was either going to work or it wasn’t. I got out of my chair and went out to the engaged side, where clouds of gun smoke and bits of burned wadding were streaming over the bridge wing as mount fifty-two blasted away at some unseen target. I wanted to look out to the north, where the guns were firing, but instead, I looked straight up, and, great God Almighty, there he was. I think my heart stopped. The OOD looked up when I did and yelled, “Oh, shit!”

  Black circle, glinting windscreen, knife-thin wings, two engines, in a slow spiral but a screaming dive, coming right for us, coming right for me, and there was nothing I could do about it but watch in morbid fascination. A moment later he slashed into the sea not a hundred yards from our port side, unable to turn tightly enough to intercept our figure-eight, and leaving nothing but a small line of white froth where he went in. I held my breath, waiting for a close-aboard bomb blast, but nothing happened, and then I lifted my head to see what the guns were working on.

  Two black dots were coming in low, not twenty feet off the sea surface, jinking from side to side through a virtual hail of tracers and a forest of shell-splashes and VT-frag detonations from the five-inch, forties, and twenties, raising white and green waterspouts all around them.

  “Steady as she goes,” I yelled into the pilothouse so that the guns wouldn’t have to be constantly training because of the figure-eight.

  Then, by God, the two kamis collided. One jinked right, the other left, and they smashed into each other and then both went into the sea at several hundred miles an hour, cartwheeling for nearly a quarter mile before all the wreckage stopped splashing down. The guns quit, and I could hear cheers and jeers from the nearby guntubs. I heard a second sound and looked over to see our Dartmouth scholar feeding the fishes over the port bullrail. He’d been that scared, and I wanted to tell him I knew exactly how he felt. I wasn’t sure how many people had actually seen that Betty go in. I turned away and relaxed my hands, which had been gripping my binoculars so hard that they were cramping.

  “Bridge, Combat. Sonar’s reporting a wide noise-spoke abaft the beam, possible deep explosion?”

  “Tell ’em it’s okay; that was the missing Betty.”

  “It was?”

  “He came straight down, just
barely missed us. You can call off your CAP search now.”

  “Combat, aye,” Jimmy answered, his voice sounding just a bit weak. Then I saw something ominous to the northeast of our station: a rising column of dense black smoke blooming up over the eastern horizon. I called Combat and confirmed the bearing matched the station of the next picket destroyer over, USS Daniels. Combat tried to raise them but received no reply. I asked if they’d been attacked by high-fliers, but Combat had no information; Daniels’s CAP was being controlled on a different radio circuit to avoid mutual interference. I told Combat to keep trying, but it sure didn’t look good. We also tried to raise the Westfall, who’d been stationed farther east, but received no response from her, either.

  Will this never end? I wondered. Again.

  TWELVE

  Early that afternoon we received a message indicating Commodore Van Arnhem was coming up to the picket line on another one of those high-speed Fletchers. There’d been no more raids after the high-altitude bombers, but Combat was reporting that the big morning raid had done some real damage off Okinawa. Apparently they’d heard from CAP aircraft that when they got back to the carrier formation, many of them had had to go find alternate decks to land on. I wondered if the Fletcher-class destroyer coming up from Kerama Retto would be staying, because we’d been unable to raise the Daniels all morning. We’d vectored two Corsairs over her station, but they could find no sign of her or even of any wreckage. At the least there should have been an oil slick if she’d been sunk. An hour after we first saw the smoke column, Westfall had reported seeing it, too, so we now knew she was still with us.

  I didn’t want to think about the Daniels just disappearing like that. They’d promised us pallbearers, but no small craft had materialized as yet, so if she’d been sunk, there were people in the water and no one to pick them up. I wondered if we really were down to just two ships on the six-station picket line.

  The commodore arrived at 1500 and, since the seas were flat calm, requested a boat transfer. When he and two staff officers came up the sea ladder I found out why: He had luggage; he was going to break his burgee in Malloy. I sent a wardroom steward scurrying up to the unit commander’s stateroom to make sure everything was in order as I took the commodore to my cabin for a quick coffee. The Fletcher class, USS Morrow, took off in a southwesterly direction, back toward her fleet formation station. I wanted to suggest she go east and find Daniels, but she was gone before I had the chance to bring it up to my boss.

  “This morning was pretty bad,” the commodore said, once we’d settled in my cabin. “We got the first indication that the Japs have been holding back some veteran fighter pilots during this kamikaze campaign. Our pilots had become used to shooting newbies out of the sky with one arm tied behind their back, but this morning we lost a fair number of CAP, and then came the kamis.”

  “I think we lost Daniels,” I said. Then I told him about the high-flying Bettys, the pincer attack, and their new vertical dive tactic.

  “Bastards will not quit,” he said. “The only good news is that the Army’s reporting cracks in the Shuri line. The Japs are running out of ammo and troops, and our guys are making some progress, finally. The bad news is that somebody told the Jap army about kamikaze tactics.”

  “Oh, great,” I said.

  “They’re determined to bleed us. If it were me, I’d stop right where we are, consolidate the front lines, and starve the bastards out.”

  “Well, I, for one, am glad you’re here.”

  He gave me a knowing look. “Getting a feel for what Pudge was going through?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I’ve had it easier than he did. I wasn’t there for swim call at Guadalcanal or Savo. I think I have more reserves than he did, but…”

  “That’s why I came up,” he said. “It made all the management sense in the world for me to coordinate logistics, repair, replacements—ships, people, five-inch mounts—from a tender in KR for eight ships, but the real fight is up here. Finally I went to CTF 58 and told the admiral I didn’t have anything to do because all my ships were getting picked off one at a time.”

  “If you could have seen that Betty coming straight down on us this morning,” I said, “you might want to rethink that. There was no way we could even shoot at it.”

  “But you made him miss,” he said. “Tell me about that.”

  I did, and then he wanted the story on a submarine launching bakas. Apparently that report had met with some incredulity at the fleet staff level.

  “They need to talk to the aviators who saw it, then,” I said. “We never saw more than a red flare out there on the horizon and then the bastard was on top of us. The pilots saw a sub, which they told our Freddies was a really big sub. Unfortunately there wasn’t much they could do to it at night, and one of them actually crashed trying.”

  “Right,” the commodore said. “New tactics, though. That’s worrisome. I got your message about changing the loadout on some night-fighters, but the fleet staff said no. There are too few of them, and…”

  “And the carrier defense comes first, yes, I know.”

  He shrugged. “How useful are the gator gunships up here in terms of adding to the defense?” he asked.

  “Not very, in my opinion, except in the performance of their unofficial mission.”

  “As pallbearers, you mean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A most unfortunate choice of terms, isn’t it,” he said with a sigh. “Halsey heard about it and had a fit.”

  “How nice for him,” I said. “We have a different perspective up here on the picket line.”

  He raised a finger. “Don’t get uppity, Connie. As Halsey himself would tell you, for every kami that comes against the picket line, twenty come after him and his carrier.”

  “Him and his fifteen carriers, plus his several dozen battleships, cruisers, AA cruisers, destroyers, and, what, five hundred fighters to protect them? We have … armed landing craft and two CAP, if any? Maybe that’s why we’re down to two pickets, Commodore.”

  He raised his hands. “I know, I know. One of the reasons I came up here. I need to see for myself, and try to help formulate some better tactics, like you’ve been doing. Figure-eights, circles, backing down, shooting star at them—all unheard-of, but they worked.” He changed the subject. “So there’s still no sign of Daniels?”

  I shook my head. “They apparently didn’t go for Westfall, so it’s just the two of us.”

  “Okay, let’s go over to Daniels’s station right now, twenty-seven knots. We owe her that much. In the meantime, my staffies and I are going up to Combat and talk to your radar people and the Freddies.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” I said, getting up. “I’m still glad you’re here.”

  He grinned. “You’re just saying that because you think I brought my Scotch bottle with me.”

  “Did you, sir?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “There is a God.”

  * * *

  One of the benefits of having the commodore embarked was that we could leave station without asking for permission. As it turned out, it was worth the trip. We discovered 185 survivors of Daniels drifting in seven life rafts and six floats, nearly eight miles east of her assigned station. Why they’d been so far off station remained to be discovered. The survivors had seen our two Corsairs searching west of them, but, as too often was the case, the Corsairs never saw them, probably because of their huge engines. Corsair pilots were the first to have to depend utterly on the landing signal officer when coming aboard a carrier because, at the critical moment of catching the arresting gear, they could no longer see the flight deck. Daniels’s skipper had survived the sinking; her exec, who’d been headed aft to look into a problem with the after forty-millimeters’ power, went down with the ship, along with most of the people who’d been below decks.

  They pieced together what had happened while floating around in their rafts, waiting for someone besides sharks to show up. Their CAP had mi
xed it up with a single Betty and reported downing it almost immediately. They’d missed three others, because fifteen minutes later, while Daniels was in the process of shooting down another pair of Zekes coming in on the deck together, just like ours, the two Bettys had hit her amidships doing a vertical power dive from eight thousand feet and cut her right in half. The forward section of the ship, with its high mast, the bridge, director, radars, and heavy gun mounts up on the 01 level, had capsized immediately, turned upside down, and gone out of sight in less than a minute. The back half, from just forward of the after stack to the stern, had floated until the third and final Betty hit her on the after forty-millimeter gun platform and cut what was left of her in half again. Everything was gone in under two minutes. Bizarrely, because there’d been no bombs going off, just the pure impact of a ten-ton plane hitting the unarmored decks of a destroyer at 400 miles per hour, there’d been no fire or other explosions, so if you’d survived the planes’ impact, you were able to go over the side and into a raft. There were almost no injuries among the survivors. They were either okay, albeit still in shock, or gone to the bottom with the pieces of their ship.

  By then it was nearing sundown, so the commodore directed his new flagship to take Daniels’s survivors to Kerama Retto, where we could also rearm and refuel. The skipper of the Daniels was one of the people still in a state of shock. He sat on the couch in the commodore’s cabin and kept saying, “we never even saw them,” over and over again. I didn’t envy what he would have to undergo in the weeks ahead. He was so upset that he’d even refused the offer of “medicinal” Scotch from the commodore. Who could blame him: He had lost nearly half his crew in the blink of an eye. In accordance with the stark traditions of naval command, “lost” was the operative word. His professional peers would always see him as the captain who lost his ship and half his crew. There were times when Captain Tallmadge had implied that if we were sunk, he planned to sink along with the ship. That seemed to be the only way a captain could erase the sin of losing one’s ship. I said something along those lines to the commodore as we hustled down to KR.