“Commander Miles,” Julia said, coming back into the room, “I’d like to introduce my younger sister, Olivia. Livy, this is Commander Connie Miles, of the United States Navy. He brought back Father’s rings, and the locket.”
On Julia’s arm was a vision, dressed all in white. Olivia was probably late twenties, slim, taller than her sister, with gorgeous blond hair and one of those faces that make perfectly intelligent men walk into lampposts. She was hanging on lightly to Julia’s left arm, and then I saw why: Those gorgeous blue eyes saw nothing at all. Olivia Van Arnhem was blind.
“Olivia,” I said, rising to my feet. “A pleasure to meet you.”
She turned her head in my direction and I tried not to stare at her, then realized, I could if I wanted to—she couldn’t see me. Julia could, though, and she gave me a sympathetic look that seemed to say, A terrible waste, isn’t it? She steered Olivia to the big sofa and sat down beside her, not holding her up, but close enough that Olivia would know she was right there.
“Commander,” Olivia said, in a soft Southern drawl, something Julia had dispensed with. “You did a wonderful thing, bringing that locket. It meant the world to Mother.”
“I was almost afraid to bring it,” I said. “The longer I thought about it, the bigger intrusion it seemed. But…”
“Yes,” Olivia said, “but we’re very grateful you did. I can still remember the day that car came up the drive and those two officers got out. Mother went stiff as a board, and that’s how I knew why they were here. She’d been so confident, you know. He was a senior officer, a commodore, and so less exposed to danger than younger officers. Or so we all thought.”
“He was a little bit safer when he was down in the fleet anchorage,” I said. “Being a commodore. But then he came north to the picket line when things got really tough. I think he knew I needed help, and I was very glad to have him embark. Now I wish he’d stayed at the anchorage.”
“The picket line,” Olivia said. “The anchorage. Commodore. I don’t really know what those words mean, Commander. You must tell me about them.”
Julia looked again at her watch and then stood up. “Livy,” she said, “I’ve got to get to bed. I’m sure the commander can get you back to your room when you tire.”
Olivia smiled at a secret thought. “Come back soon, Jules,” she said.
Julia gave me a little finger wave and went upstairs. Olivia gestured for me to join her on the couch. “Bring one of those cognacs, if you’d be so kind.”
I did, wondering how she knew we’d been having a cognac, and then I remembered the stories of how the other senses of the blind become much more acute. I sat down next to her, steered the glass into her hand, and clinked mine against hers. She smiled again and took a sip.
“When I tire,” she said, repeating Julia’s words and shaking her head. “I’m blind, not a fucking invalid.”
I choked on my cognac, and she started laughing.
“Gotcha,” she said. “Now you must call me Livy.”
* * *
That’s how I ended up spending the rest of my life in the wilds of middle Georgia. Okay, semiwild, although the farther one gets from Atlanta, the thinner becomes the veneer of civilization in the biggest state east of the Mississippi.
I stayed the next three days there at the farm as their guest, during which Livy and I spent almost all our waking hours together. I’d read about things like that, but never, especially after the nightmare of Okinawa, expected it to happen to me. Livy had not been born blind; her affliction was the result of a riding accident when she was sixteen, involving a fairly serious head injury. She was very functional around the house and adept at getting around the grounds, since she’d grown up on the family plantation. I once commented to Livy that it must be interesting to be a member of one of the first families of Georgia. She’d laughed at me. She did that a lot, but it was always a sweet laugh. “The so-called first families of Georgia were all snuffed out in the Civil War,” she explained. “We’re all descendants of the Carpetbaggers.”
The point was, she was as secure and mobile as she could ever be right there at home, and, like her mother and unlike her sister, she was probably never going to leave it. By that time, of course, I was madly in love, so this posed a decision for me. It took me a good five minutes, and we were married after a “suitable” courtship of six months, to prove, as I later found out, that there was no whiff of scandal in the form of early babies in the offing. Not that Livy would have cared; nothing frightened that woman, not even when I would have a bad night and wake up shouting unintelligible orders to a bunch of ghosts.
I have not forgotten, nor will I ever forget, those ghosts, those brave souls and small fighting ships whose lives and futures were so harshly extinguished in that crucible called the Okinawa picket line. The ghosts—from the white hats to the commodores, and even those demented and much-damned young Japanese pilots, the kamikazes—have long since been transmuted into a variety of glorious life forms at the bottom of the deepest sea. The ships, broken, burned, shredded, and mangled, are finally at peace, as the cold dark heart of the Pacific rusts them back into the elements from which they were created.
We did the best we could. From time to time I find myself missing the smell of fresh coffee on the bridge, or Mooky’s fat-pills. The rest of it has gone down in my memory like the ships of the picket line. That saddens me, until I look over at Livy. Then it’s sunrise at sea again, the very best time of the day.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My father was a division commander (commodore) of destroyers at Okinawa in 1945. I wish I could say that he told me all about it. He did not. He wouldn’t speak of it. It was simply that bad.
The Navy had suffered casualties during the island-hopping campaigns leading up to Okinawa, but nothing like what happened there. In fact, the Navy killed-in-action (KIA) casualties exceeded the ground-troop KIA numbers. Considering the meat-grinder nature of the Okinawa land battle, with hundreds of thousands engaged, that is truly significant.
Navy losses were driven by the ferocious Japanese kamikaze assault. The Americans knew the kamikazes were coming, but drastically underestimated the scale of the impending attacks. Allied and naval Intelligence had estimated that there were no more than five hundred or so aircraft available to the Japanese for kamikaze attacks. The real number was closer to five thousand, resulting in Navy losses of 34 ships sunk and 368 damaged out of a combined Allied fleet of approximately one thousand five hundred ships and other craft.
As usual, I’ve taken some liberties with the historical sequence of actual events in order to simplify the story, but, for the most part, what I’ve written fairly accurately describes the horror of the radar picket line and the quiet heroism of the destroyermen who stood their ground. The fifteen to twenty minutes warning they gave the fleet at sea and the logistics ships at Kerama Retto was crucial. The proof of that came when the Japanese decided that they needed to make the radar picket line itself a priority target.
I’ve long believed that the Okinawa campaign played a significant part in the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. The sheer scale of the fighting, the horrific casualties, and the ferocity with which the Japanese defended what they considered to be Japanese territory gave a clear indication of what would happen if the Allies invaded the home islands. The B-29 campaign and the atomic bombs marked a shift in the Pacific war strategy, with bloody amphibious assaults being replaced wherever possible by machines and brand-new technologies. The Japanese high command knew they could not hold Okinawa, but they were determined to make the Americans bleed for it, and perhaps think twice about an invasion of the home islands. Ironically, I think they succeeded with that.
BOOKS BY P. T. DEUTERMANN
THE CAM RICHTER NOVELS
The Cat Dancers
Spider Mountain
The Moonpool
Nightwalkers
THRILLERS
The Last Man
The Firefly
Darkside
Hunting Season
Train Man
Zero Option
Sweepers
Official Privilege
SEA STORIES
Ghosts of Bungo Suido
Pacific Glory
The Edge of Honor
Scorpion in the Sea
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P. T. Deutermann is the author of sixteen previous novels, including Ghosts of Bungo Suido and Pacific Glory, which won the W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction. He spent twenty-six years in military and government service, which included a Pearl Harbor tour of duty; his father was a commodore on the Okinawa picket line; and Deutermann’s uncle, both of his brothers, and both of his children were naval officers. He lives with his wife in North Carolina.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SENTINELS OF FIRE. Copyright © 2014 by P. T. Deutermann. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover designed by Young Lim
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Deutermann, Peter T., 1941–
Sentinels of fire: a novel / P. T. Deutermann.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-04118-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-3733-1 (e-book)
1. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American—Fiction. 2. United States. Navy—Officers—Fiction. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, Japanese—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.E887S47 2014
813'.54—dc23
2014008540
e-ISBN 9781466837331
First Edition: July 2014
Sentinels of Fire Page 28