We’re eating up fuel at a prodigious rate, he realized. The tin cans will be dry by this time tomorrow if we keep it up. How could our peacetime calculations have been so wrong? Still, this is war. Move quickly or die. Keep the task force together or die. If we go slow we stay in range, and with only two flight-worthy fighters that would be suicidal. It is time to run.
From the corner of his eye he saw the signals officer stepping out on the bridge, and he knew by the man’s face what was coming.
“Sir, radar reports forty-plus aircraft, inbound, sixty miles out, bearing 290 degrees. They’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
General quarters was again sounding, crews working on repairs dropping tools, running to their battle stations.
“Order the remaining planes to launch as well.”
“Sir?” McCloskey asked.
“Launch now, damn it!”
“We’re not into the wind, sir.”
“Don’t you think I know that!” and he pointed to the squall line of clouds on the horizon to the southeast.
“If I turn into the wind, we might lose that cover. Launch now!”
His air boss stood silent and then saluted, turning away. Leaning over the railing he pulled out of its socket the signal flag for “hold” and replaced it with “launch!”
Deck crews, sensing something was coming with the call to general quarters, leapt to their duties, and less than a minute later the engine of the lead Wildcat powered up. The second followed suit, engine stuttering, a balky cylinder not firing, exhaust black, but it had to go.
Halsey could see the hesitation on the part of the launch director on the deck. The man actually looked back up to the bridge. Enterprise was not turning into the wind… It was to be a crosswind takeoff, minus the extra lift provided by the trade winds blowing straight down the deck.
McCloskey signaled for a go. The launch director waved his hand over his head, signaling the pilot to throttle up to full power. There was a momentary glance from the pilot to the bridge. Was it anger? Halsey wondered. The man snapped off a salute, which Halsey returned.
At full throttle the Wildcat’s twelve-hundred-horse engine was screaming, jets of blue flame flashing from its exhaust stacks. Wheel chocks were pulled, and it lumbered forward, tail beginning to rise, right rudder to compensate for torque, left aileron over to fight against the fifteen-knot crosswind.
Rimming the flight deck, antiaircraft guns were being cranked up, turning to face aft, gunnery chiefs patched into the CIC to get the latest radar read on altitude and range—though chances were there could be torpedo planes coming in low, under the radar.
The tension was electric, engine room pushing rpms to the max, Enterprise up to nearly thirty-three knots, helmsmen ready for the first order to maneuver once the attack started. The destroyer to port cut a magnificent wake of white foam as it sliced through the ocean at nearly forty miles an hour, five-inch guns pointed heavenward in anticipation of hell.
“Report from blue team one,” the loudspeaker on the bridge crackled. “Forty-plus planes inbound, thirty miles out, bearing 290. Closing to engage.”
“God damn!”
It was McCloskey. Halsey turned to look forward. The first Wildcat had lifted off and even now was banking around off the port quarter, having turned straight into the wind, but the second plane with the balky engine was skidding. On a land airbase it would have been called a ground loop, a pilot losing it in a crosswind takeoff or landing—once started, it was damn near impossible to get out of. The Wildcat weathervaned to port, turning into the wind. There was no room to compensate on a carrier deck, and it skidded off the landing deck, portside, fifty yards aft of the bow, wheel catching in a forty-millimeter gun mount, crushing the crew as it collapsed, wing tanks rupturing, spilling out two hundred gallons of 100 octane av gas over the gun crew as the plane upended, hung for several seconds inverted, the gas now spilling into the still howling radial engine, igniting in a fireball… The landing gear snapped off. The plane went over the side, as fire spread along the gun deck.
Enterprise was empty… It had shot its bolt.
All he could do now was stand back, wait, take the blow, and pray that his ship survived.
He did not have long to wait. The first report of a visual sighting came in, and seconds later he was jolted as the aft five-inch guns fired the first salvo of antiaircraft shells.
Off to port and aft the guns on the destroyers and cruisers opened up as well.
The fight was on.
As admiral in command, it was no longer his place to give tactical orders. Again he was a bystander, watching. Glimpses of the Japanese dive bombers were visible through the fifty percent cover of cumulus clouds that dotted over the ocean. Almost directly astern he could make out approaching aircraft, one of them on fire, the torpedo planes bearing in.
It was going to be bad this time.
Five miles aft of Enterprise
STRIKE LEADER UGETSU, flying off of Hiryu, unbuckled his harness and half rose out of his seat, struggling to fix his binoculars on the American ship. It was hard work; the late morning air was turbulent, and the Kate surged, rose, and plummeted down in the moist tropical air.
Was this the same ship?
There was a fire on its port side forward. Damage from a previous hit? He could see a slick of fire trailing aft—perhaps a crash on takeoff?
They had spotted a vast oil slick, wreckage, and three American destroyers now sixty kilometers back to the northwest, near where the first attack had taken place. It must have been one of their carriers. This had to be the second one.
“Sir!”
His pilot was signaling to look down and banked the Kate slightly to port.
Excellent. The torpedo bombers were going in. There would be no escape for this American carrier.
He slipped back down in his seat, refastening his harness. Ahead and low, a black puff of smoke: the first of their antiaircraft guns opening up.
Nowhere near as bad as yesterday during the final strike at Pearl.
“Attack now!”
Akagi
THE VOICE, SOUNDING remote, crackled on the loudspeaker: “Attack now!”
All were tense, waiting. Was this the second American carrier? Should Yamamoto have sent in planes to support Hiryu and Soryu?
It was too late now to change that; the range was too great.
He stood expectant, waiting.
Enterprise
HEELING OVER, ENTERPRISE turned hard to starboard, cutting a curving wake, the sky overhead and to the northwest black with bursting flak. The first wave of Japanese dive bombers, six attacking in pairs spaced five to ten seconds apart, were coming in. The nearest bomb burst, a close one, rocked the ship less than fifty yards off the port bow. If they had continued on their course but a few more seconds it would have been a hit.
Halsey braced against the railing, feet spread wide, thrilling to the roar of the gunnery, the sharp crack of the five-inch guns, the staccato of the 1.1-inchers and light twenty-millimeters, tracers crisscrossing the sky.
Now aft, the wall of flak was increasing, the torpedo bombers well into range, spread out as they approached. One squadron was making a wide, sweeping turn to the west, to set them up for the classic anvil attack, simultaneous drops from two directions so that no matter which way they turned, something would hit.
It was going to be tight.
Their port side escort, the cruiser Northampton, was tucked in close, barely two hundred yards out, her captain expertly turning with them, even though in peacetime he’d have gotten his ass chewed for being this close in.
Enterprise straightened out from its starboard turn only for an instant. Then orders were shouted inside the bridge, and she started to cut to port, turning away from the torpedo strike to the west, but presenting a broadside to the torpedo planes coming in from the north. At nearly the same instant, the next wave of dive bombers was on them, then pulling out. The first bomb detonated two hundred yards forw
ard of the bow; the next one walked in closer, a hundred yards, kicking up spray. A Val, trailing smoke, apparently came straight down at them, then went into a spin. A wing sheared off, and the plane crashed into the ocean nearly amidships.
He caught a quick glimpse of the pilot. It was obvious he had been trying to ram them, dying in flames… He felt an instant of pity for him, going out like a warrior.
“We’re gonna get one!”
He looked up, tightened his grip. A shudder ran through Enterprise as the fourth bomb of the second wave struck square on the forward elevator, piercing the deck, blowing up below on the hangar deck. The elevator, dismounted from its hydraulic lifts, pitched up twenty feet, then slammed back down, tilted drunkenly.
We’re out of action now, he thought. As if it mattered: he had no planes left to fight with, other than the few Wildcats still aloft and rapidly running out of fuel. They’d most likely have to ditch. The bridge loudspeaker crackled with their excited reports:
“I’m on him, got him… got him, you son of a bitch …”
“This is blue two, closing on torpedo bombers to the north… Come on, tighten it up!”
“Vince… He’s on your six… He’s on your six …!”
The loudspeaker crackled off for a moment, carrier wave lost, and he could see a plane, sky blue belly, a Wildcat, breaking up, a second one diving straight down, Zero on its tail.
He swung his binoculars aft, caught a glimpse of a Wildcat trying to intersect the torpedo bombers, Zeroes from above pouncing.
“Another!”
Men around him ducked. He instinctively followed suit. He felt a damn hard slap. A geyser of water erupted directly abeam the bridge. He stood back up, water cascading down around him, wiped his face, raised binoculars, scanning to port. Nearly every gunner on the port side had lowered their barrels, was now pouring it into the wave of Jap torpedo bombers. It was hard to see with the smoke—six, maybe seven, one of them on fire, going in.
They were pressing in faster, a lot faster than Devastators.
Enterprise started to turn again heeling back over. He kept the torpedo bombers in focus, four at least still boring in, one after another releasing, but still coming straight in after dropping, not exposing their bellies, skimming low, so low that gunners could no longer depress their barrels to hit them. At the last instant they pulled up, skimming right over the deck of Enterprise. Damn, they were good, one pilot actually saluting the bridge as he roared past, but the tail gunner, with a far different attitude, had his 7.7-millimeter machine gun depressed, aiming at the bridge, firing. Several shots flashed off the steel siding.
The torpedoes?
He could see two wakes, tracking in.
The blows from the two torpedoes striking starboard amidships, spaced a hundred feet apart, were stunning. It felt as if the 27,000 tons of Enterprise had been physically lifted half out of the water by the explosion of half a ton of high explosive in each one. In those first few milliseconds of detonation, the expanding blast actually pushed hundreds of tons of water back and away from the hull, creating a near vacuum. The detonation at nineteen feet below the water line ignited an upward rush, a column of water over two hundred feet high, a geyser weighing a thousand or more tons, until finally gravity brought it back down in a crushing shower that could knock a man flat. Some of the explosion blew in the bulkhead, rupturing through a fuel tank filled with fuel oil, designed that way to actually serve as an outer shield of armor. The blast was so intense, though, that the shockwave burst through the fuel oil, cracking open the main hull.
Less than half a second after detonation, the outward push of the explosion was finally overcome by the weight of water, which now slammed back inward, filling the vacuum created. A tidal wall burst into the initial hole cut by the explosion itself, tearing aside steel plates as if they were sheets of paper, smashing in through the oil bunker and then into the bowels of the ship. Less than a second later the lives of forty men were snuffed out seven decks below Halsey, crushed by the thousands of tons of water that tore apart dividing bulkheads, watertight doors… thousands of tons of water in less than thirty seconds added its mass to that of the Enterprise, initiating a list that if unchecked could eventually cause the ship to roll over and turtle.
Halsey stood silent, watching the flight deck relative to the horizon, saying nothing as with each passing minute the list increased.
Enterprise seemed to be dying.
Chapter Eight
The White House
December 8, 1941
18:30 hrs EST
THIS HOME OF the President was steeped in history, FDR thought, and never did he feel the weight of it press down as heavily as it did at this moment.
As his Secret Service agent pushed the wheelchair toward the closed doors of the conference room in the basement of the White House, he allowed a moment of thought beyond the present crises.
Is this how Lincoln felt when word came of First Bull Run, the bloodbath at Antietam, or the futile charges at Fredericksburg? He remembered how Lincoln was moved to tears when reading the casualty reports after yet another failed battle lamenting, My God, what do I tell the people?
He knew already that his speech delivered little more than six hours ago had served to galvanize a nation and put the world on notice. Where forty-eight hours ago there had still been voices of doubt, of dissent, even of fear, now Americans were a people united with a single goal.
But to reach that goal? He had spoken of the enemy onslaught, but the new reports coming in all afternoon, each one darker than the next… Could the Japanese indeed push us so hard, then keep us off balance for so long that our national will, aroused at this moment, might waver?
Lincoln had faced that wavering during the dark winter of 1862 and the horrid debacles in the spring of 1864, when the North was bleeding out over two thousand casualties a day, and even then, as the national will faltered, he had held the course.
I must do the same. We can be as brave and as determined as Lincoln and his generation. Our losses, appalling as they are, are small compared to the Soviets and British. During the summer and autumn, and even now, the Soviets were enduring a hundred thousand casualties a week. If we have to pay the same price to defeat this enemy, we will do so. He could conceive of no other answer except Yes, if need be, we will pay that price, we must pay that price. His friend Winston was indeed right: this was not just a war about imperialism, or economics, it was a back-to-the-wall stand of Western Christian civilization against the dark forces of totalitarianism. If we lose our will, if we turn aside now, the world will indeed be plunged into a thousand years of darkness.
The increased military presence around the White House was highly noticeable. Though he thought the reaction was extreme, there were rumors of saboteurs targeting the White House or the Capitol, and as in 1861, troops were now positioned nearby to repel any threats. Even the door to the conference room ahead was guarded by two well-armed Secret Service agents, one of them opening it at his approach.
As usual, he preferred to roll himself in rather than be pushed in and took over the wheels of his chair. Waiting for him, in what was already being called “the map room,” were the secretaries of War and Navy and their military counterparts, Admiral Stark and General Marshall. All stood as he came in, and he motioned for them to be seated as he slipped into place at the head of the table.
He paused for a moment, putting a cigarette in its holder, lighting it up, and inhaling deeply.
“Two things,” he began, without any preamble. “I want to know the situation now, as of this moment, and what your projections are for the next few days. Let me add, I have already spoken to Prime Minister Churchill once today. He is all full of enthusiasm, and I will talk with him again after this meeting. Our disaster seems to be his opportunity. I need to know the hard truth of the matter.”
He scanned the room, and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox stirred, clearing his throat.
FDR knew the real repo
rt would come from Admiral Stark, but a sense of protocol indicated the Secretary should speak first. Frank was by no means a heavyweight, though a good man and a solid manager. He was a Republican and had run against the Democrats in the 1936 election as Landon’s vice presidential candidate. He had been brought into the cabinet in 1940 as an attempt to build bipartisan support for the impending war and had turned out to be, at least as an advocate to the Congress, the news media, and the American people, a good choice. Republican but an avowed anti-Nazi who was passionate about preparedness, he was, interestingly, a combat veteran, having fought alongside Cousin Teddy as a Rough Rider in Cuba, back in 1898.
The President nodded for him to begin.
“I’ll leave the operational details to Admiral Stark,” Knox said, “but, sir, it is grim, and getting worse by the minute. There is the distinct prospect that within a week there might not be a single major American warship afloat from the coast of China to Hawaii. Hawaii itself might very well be enduring an invasion. If not Oahu, the Japanese might venture to seize one of the smaller islands in the chain. We must assume that Wake and Midway islands will be attacked as well.”
He stood for a moment, arms folded, looking over at the map of the Pacific Ocean on the north wall of the room. Numerous pins of red and some of blue were affixed to it. He then turned his attention to Admiral Stark, who sat patiently, and motioned for him to start.
Stark stood up, clearing his throat. He held a sheaf of telex printouts in his hand.
“Sir, these are the latest reports from our naval monitoring station at Mare Island and the Army station at the Presidio in San Francisco. They’ve been able to monitor some radio transmissions and have wired them here.”
“Are the cable connections to Hawaii back on line yet?” the President asked.
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