At four minutes, I had Combat send out a message to all the gunboats saying that we were expecting an attack very soon and confirming the bearing we expected it to come from. Admittedly, that was a big assumption on my part, but you had to start somewhere.
Of course, as it turned out, I was wrong.
One minute later, a blob appeared on the inside edge of the chaff cloud at 330, thirty degrees to the left of where I had thought they’d come from. Well, no, twenty degrees. Was it worth it to try to reform our two-column formation? I made a quick decision: Stick with what we had. If there’d been a division of destroyers out there, then I might have tried it, but the slow, clumsy-handling amphib support ships would have turned the maneuver into a cluster-fuck at the worst possible moment.
“Composition?” I asked, staring down at the radarscope.
“One,” the operator said. “One large, from the size of the video, but one.”
All right then, I decided. So tonight the bomber was coming. Perfect target for the five-inch. The two remaining LCSs each had a five-inch, but they were not radar-controlled. I’d instructed them to open fire upon my command at a predesignated range, elevation, and bearing, if only to add volume to the ack-ack barrage. I didn’t care who shot this guy down, so long as he went down.
“Sky One reports lock-on, single target, opening fire in thirty seconds at max range.”
Opening fire with one twin five-inch mount, I realized. If I turned the ship, I could get two mounts to bear and double the firepower. If I did that, though, we’d be running over gators within ninety seconds. Holes in the plan? Here was one, a big one. Had I outsmarted myself? And just one suicider? All that chaff, for one suicider?
Mount fifty-three opened up in rapid-continuous fire, and I could dimly hear some other five-inch guns firing on either side of us.
“Main Battery Plot says this thing’s coming in at three hundred fifty knots,” Jimmy reported. “Big target.”
I tried to remember which of the Jap bombers could make that kind of speed. Our time margin to decide was dwindling rapidly, but it was clearly one plane. Surely they could—
“Sky One reports fireball, but Plot says it’s still coming!”
The forties opened up then, and with a burning target in sight they ought to be able to tear it up pretty good. The five-inch were still cooking. I wanted desperately to turn the ship and bring the whole battery to bear, but I’d trapped myself by putting the gunboats on either side. The good news was they had opened up now, and, even from within CIC, the noise level outside was rising satisfactorily.
I left Combat and hurried out to the bridge and then to the port bridge wing. I could see our portside gunners all looking aft, and then I saw a fire in the sky, bright red and yellow flames trailing something big as it bored in at us. The closer it got, the more lines of tracers converged on it, and I could see pieces coming off. A second later it roared overhead, a big gray four-engined bomber, big as an American B-17, three engines aflame but the fourth howling at redline, the red meatballs on its wings visible from the light of its own flames. I caught no more than an instantaneous look, but I could see the nose had been torn to pieces. It looked like there were human remains dangling out of the wreckage of its front end, flopping in the slipstream as it went over at just above masthead height and then nosed down into the sea about a half mile ahead of us.
The guns stopped. My God, that was too close, and much too big.
“That was a Liz, Skipper,” Marty called down from Sky One. “Long-range land-based bomber.”
“Good shooting, Marty,” I called back. I looked out at the gator fleet, and they were all there, no doubt whooping and hollering at shooting down such a big plane. I realized then that if we’d turned, we’d have plowed over half of them.
“Bridge, Combat, bogeys, bogeys, five, maybe six, inbound, fast, low, bearing three four zero, range twenty-eight miles. Line formation!”
“Bosun mate,” I yelled, “sound the ship’s whistle.”
Our steam whistle, which had been remounted to the mast after we lost the top of the forward stack, sounded a series of urgent blasts as director fifty-one wheeled around to look out over our starboard quarter and then began nutating urgently, looking for that lead kami. I was dimly aware of the sound of thudding feet as the designated people cleared out of Sky One, the signal bridge, the midships gun nests, and finally CIC itself. The director stopped, twitched a couple of times, and then stopped again, locked on. A moment later, mount fifty-three opened up again. Ninety seconds. That was all the good they could do.
I yelled at everyone on the bridge to lay below. I didn’t have to say it twice: We were going to catch hell, no matter how well the after five-inch did, and they all knew it. There was no panic. They knew the plan, and they hustled out of the topside spaces quickly but efficiently. Once everybody bailed out, the bridge was suddenly very quiet. Except for the continuous blamming of the after five-inch mount, we were suddenly the Mary Celeste, plodding through the dark Pacific Ocean, while six suicidal harpies screamed through the night thirsting for our blood.
I went back out to the starboard bridge wing this time, to watch the show. The muzzle blasts from mount fifty-three were a comforting sight, yellow-orange spouts of flame followed by actual smoke rings. Out to starboard, our remaining LCS was shooting its five-inch in the general direction of the incoming kamis. The LCS hadn’t been issued the new VT frag rounds, so they were setting fuzes by hand and hoping for the best. The range was still too far out for me to see any ack-ack detonations, but I knew that wouldn’t last. Composition five to six. We’d get a few, but …
Finally I saw a fireball, a big one, as the VT frag tore one out of the sky. Then a second one. Those down-spots were working.
Marty’s voice floated down from Sky One. “Fifty-three is abandoning the guns,” he yelled. “Kamis are at six thousand yards.”
Six thousand yards, three miles. Be here in thirty seconds. Right. Get out of there.
“Lay below, Marty,” I yelled back over the sound of the nearby LCS’s five-inch. The poor gators had no idea how close the Japs were, but there they were, blasting faithfully away into the night.
“I’ll go when you do, Skipper,” he shouted back, as his director crew scrambled out of their steel box and scampered down the ladders to safety.
Fifty-three fell silent. I thought about running but then decided not to. If my plan worked, the kamis would wreck our superstructure, but our hull would remain relatively intact. As long as Malloy floated, however much our top hampers had been savaged, we could make it back to KR. We, or whoever was left alive.
Something nudged my arm. It was Lamont, holding two mugs of coffee. “Two sugars, I’m told.”
We never heard them. One moment there was silence on the bridge except for that lone LCS banging away in the general direction of trouble. The next moment the ship lurched as a suicider crashed down on the fantail and slammed into mount fifty-three before exploding in a ball of flame. The next one did the same thing, skidding up against the after forty-millimeter gun platforms before flipping sideways and off the ship into the sea. In one surreal instant, I got a clear view of that lone LCS, blasting away into the night at targets that had long flown through the notch she was shooting at.
The third one missed, amazingly, howling past the starboard side, straight and level, turning hard to starboard, catching a wing in the sea, and then cartwheeling into the water in a huge explosion.
The fourth one came in from a little higher, hitting us at the base of the number two stack and exploding literally all over the ship, with pieces of the plane slicing the air near my face with a murderous hissing sound. I saw the ship’s boats go flying off the 01 level as if they were made of balsa wood, just before the plane’s engine smashed into the pilothouse. Then his bomb went off. I think. I wasn’t there anymore.
SIXTEEN
When I was a little kid, my family would go down to the Mall in Washington and watch the Four
th of July fireworks from the Capitol lawn whenever we were back in town. I can remember grudgingly watching the show while waiting for the big finale, because that’s when the sky really lit up, the whole sky, bang, bang, bang, going on seemingly forever, with me cheering it all on from between my father’s knees.
Bang, bang, bang. Then voices, which I could barely hear through my sticky-feeling ears. One of my eyes didn’t seem to work. I opened the other eye and saw flashes of light, then closed it right back up again. It felt much better closed.
Bang, bang, bang. “Anyone in there?”
Opened that eye again. More flashes of light, more banging. I was flat on my back in what I immediately dubbed a captain sandwich. There were flat plates of steel beneath me and more on top, squashing my nose sideways, and so close to my one operational eye that I could see striations in the blackened paint from a long-ago paintbrush. My arms were spread out on either side, and they both, I suddenly realized, were probably broken.
More banging. I tried to respond but only croaked.
The banging stopped. Again someone called. “Say it again.”
I got out another croak, but that was all I could manage. Arms really hurting now, couldn’t feel my legs at all, other than pins and needles, which in a way was probably a good thing. The lights went from flashing this way and that to steady. I croaked again.
“We hear you,” a voice called out. “Lie still. We’re gonna get this shit off you. Just lie still.”
No problem, I thought. I couldn’t move anything except that one eyelid anyway. There was steel pressing up against my cheek so hard that I couldn’t really make my jaw move. I tried to take a deeper breath. No go. I drifted off for a while.
I woke up to more lights now, the sound of machinery, and then a crackling, buzzing sound from outside the pile. Welding? Was someone welding? I tried to move, and a wave of pain overwhelmed me. I elected to try that drifting maneuver again. When I woke up it was to the fact that some part of the pile of steel had moved, increasing the weight on my left leg to the point where I think I called out. Big mistake. I fainted again. Things were much better in the dark.
When I came to there was water flowing past my pinned body. I didn’t think we were sinking, but I couldn’t really tell. The lights were still there, and there was more machinery noise, machinery I couldn’t recognize. Then there came a veritable wave of water that swept through my little pocket, high enough to wash over my face. It felt good, tasted salty, and, fortunately, immediately subsided before it drowned me.
“You still with us?”
I still couldn’t move my jaw, so I gave it another croak.
“Awright, we’re about to lift this edge. We’re gonna take it up slow. You holler if we’re making it worse, okay?”
Double croak. O. K.
The steel moved. A crack of white light appeared in the direction of where I thought my feet were. It was just a crack, but as they lifted, it grew wider until I could see actual daylight, and then three round faces in total black silhouette peering in at me. I could move my jaw now.
“Thanks,” I said.
One of the faces disappeared, and then I heard him shouting. “The captain!” he yelled. “We found the captain. He’s alive.”
You got it, sunshine. Now get me the hell out of here.
It took another hour of painstaking lifting, rigging, hauling, and rerigging, but finally they were able to rope my feet and begin pulling me out from under what I later found out was the remains of the pilothouse. Bright sunlight greeted me, along with some gasps from the onlookers. I felt a sharp sting in my right thigh. It felt good to be free from all that metal. It was even better to see that we were still afloat, that I wasn’t imagining all this, and that we were surrounded by at least five destroyers. Well, finally, I thought. Fleet’s figured it out.
My head felt like it had changed shape, and my arms wouldn’t work at all. My left leg was one big red bruise from groin to ankle, and my ears were filled with crusted blood. Both my eyes were black, and my nose felt twice its size. I hurt in places I didn’t know I had. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, I asked myself, how’d you enjoy the play? My khakis were soaking wet, and there were a lot of people standing around in that incredibly bright sunlight staring down at me. I finally recognized Doc as he leaned over and asked where it hurt. I was able to grin back at him, if crookedly, but then my friend, that dark curtain of cool oblivion, returned. I don’t think I got to tell Doc much of anything as the shot he’d given me did its work.
It was afternoon when the morphine began to wear off and I came back to the world of the mostly conscious. I could tell that the ship was moving, and pretty well, too. There was a strong smell of stack gas everywhere. That was when I realized I was out on a weather deck and not in my cabin. I discovered Marty sitting next to me, sound asleep. I hoped. His khakis weren’t wet, but they were wrinkled as if he’d been swimming for a while. Doc appeared.
“How you feeling, sir?” he asked.
“Shot at and missed, shit at and hit,” I said, quoting the old CPO expression.
He nodded. “Want more dope?”
“Can I have some water instead?”
His assistant handed him a coffee mug with water in it. I drank it down too fast, choked a little, and wished I hadn’t done that. My ribs all complained at once when I coughed.
“Now you want some more dope?” Doc asked, after seeing the expression on my face.
“First tell me what happened.”
A man began calling out in pain somewhere nearby. I realized I was one of about a dozen men laid out on mattresses on the main deck, forward.
“I got him,” Marty said.
Doc nodded, got up, and hurried over to a man who was very, very badly burned. Doc already had a morphine vial out.
“We made it, I take it,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Marty said, “we did, thanks to you. There’s nothing left of the deckhouse except the front windscreen of the bridge. Forward of that, we’ve still got mount fifty-two and that quad-forty kluge. Aft of that, however, we’re ready to install a flight deck. Everything’s smashed, burned, or gone over the side. We think we took four kamis, but the last one had a crowd-pleaser slung on his belly.”
“Casualties?”
“You’re looking at them, Captain,” he said. “Thirteen. That’s all—thirteen. It’s goddamn amazing, is what it is. Main plant is in pretty good shape, although we’re hand-steering, and the stacks are a problem. We’re headed south to KR and the tender. We have Waddell—she’s a Gearing class—for an escort, and there’s five more tin cans up on the picket line.”
I couldn’t see the extent of the damage because we were all laid out on the forecastle, just under mount fifty-two’s barbette. Behind the gun mount was the facade of the bridge, standing there like one of those ruined monastery churches in England. Behind that, where there should have been the director barbette, the mast, and number one stack, there was only blue sky.
“So it worked,” I said, realizing now that I was very tired and probably about to go back under.
“It absolutely worked,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it. Just seemed wrong, against all naval tradition, but you were right. Worked like a charm, and there’s three hundred or so guys want to thank you for it.”
“You were still up there on Sky One when that last one hit,” I said. “How—?”
“I did the most perfect swan dive I ever made, right off the port side. I was underwater when that big one went off, and I felt it, too, but the gators had my ass drying off in a small boat within five minutes.”
“Where’s Lamont?” I asked.
“Right over here, Skipper,” Lamont called out. He was lying in a Stokes litter, legs bandaged and splinted up to his belt. “I hit the deck, but then it hit me back.”
“Hoboken,” I muttered. He must have heard me.
“What can I say, Captain. Gotta be born somewhere.”
Good, I thought. Lamont was okay
. I was still alive. Malloy was still alive. Good. I’d meant to say that out loud, but apparently it was naptime in the city again.
* * *
The next morning I awoke in what I recognized as Commodore Van Arnhem’s cabin on the tender. I was in a real bed with real linens. Sunlight streamed through several portholes, which still had their glass. I looked around and wondered why they’d put me here. There was a picture of someone I assumed was the commodore’s wife on his desk, a very handsome lady wearing what looked like a costume from a Civil War drama. Behind her stood a younger woman who was a real beauty. His daughter, perhaps? Weren’t there two?
I missed the guy, even though our acquaintance had been all too brief. I still had his rings and that lock of hair back in my safe, assuming my cabin was intact. I wondered if I’d have the nerve to go through with what I told Doc I was going to do when this was all over.
There was a soft knock, and a Negro steward stuck his head around the edge of the door. When he saw that I was awake, he disappeared and then returned with a tray of coffee and a fat-pill. I realized I was really hungry. I sat up and gasped. “Shouldn’t have done that,” I mumbled as my eyes rolled backward and I passed out again. Never got the fat-pill, either.
There was a doctor beside me when I came back to consciousness; the steward was long gone, but the coffee tray was still there. Better yet, so was the fat-pill.
“There you are,” the doctor said.
“Have to stop doing that,” I said.
“You have to learn to move really slow,” he said. “You have no single serious injury, but your whole body was compressed under several thousand pounds of steel, from what your exec tells me. Slow, careful movements, with deep breathing before you move. Got it?”
I nodded, which made my jaw hurt.
He poured some coffee. “Two sugars, they told me.”
I smiled. “Where’s my ship?”
“Right alongside,” he said. “There’s a four-striper from Halsey’s staff waiting to talk to you. You up to it?”
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