“How about right here, Captain?’ I’ll be right back…gotta get some food in me before I faint…No coffee, though! This is almost my bedtime!”
When she returns, they sit facing each other on what you’d call a picnic table back home. They talk in the way two strangers of opposite sex do, drawn together by chemical attraction and circumstance, desperately trying to get to know everything about each other as quickly as possible. Children only yesterday, their entry to adulthood is shaped only by war.
“So you’ve got a Purple Heart?’ Marge asked.
“Yeah…two, actually. Nothing serious.” There was that matter-of-fact, almost apologetic tone again.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Well…the first one was from ground fire…flak…over New Guinea. My plane got a little messed up…shattered the canopy…I think I had more plexiglass in me than metal.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t bleed to death up there,” Marge says, her green eyes wide and serious.
“I think I would have run out of gas before bleeding to death. It really wasn’t that bad, just very noisy.”
“And the second time?”
“Actually, the second one was on the ground in the Philippines. Our airfield near Lingayan got attacked… some Jap fighters managed to get through and shot the place up pretty good…got the fuel farm…big explosion, big fire…a lot of guys got burned real bad. I just got hit with some flying debris.”
“Thank god you’re OK,” Marge says. Then she adds: “I was in the Philippines, too. Our hospital unit was at Leyte. That was our first post overseas. We got there December, last year… Too bad we didn’t meet there…although that wouldn’t have been very likely. We were sequestered like prisoners.”
“Big place, bigger war...I guess I just wasn’t that lucky back then,” John says, managing to sound ironic and smitten at the same time.
Marge smiles back. “I’m feeling pretty lucky myself lately. Got any other medals?”
“Just a bunch of Air Medals.”
“What did you get them for?”
“Flying a lot.”
After a quiet, contented moment, they finish eating and go back to discussing the history of each other. They already knew each other’s home towns; they had performed that ritual yesterday at the dispensary.
“Des Moines, huh? Did you live in the city itself?”
“Nah… On a farm, about 20 miles out.”
“A Farm Boy! I’ll bet you’re from a real big family, too.”
“I’m the oldest of five boys and two girls,” John says.
“Yeah…I figured you for the big brother type.” Then Marge starts to giggle, enjoying a private joke. “Oh, gosh! Farm Boy… Farmer John!” she says.
“Oh, please… not Farmer John! That was the name of my first airplane. I didn’t choose it, though… the other guys in the squadron did, the old timers. I was the new green kid… the minute they heard my life story one of the ground crew painted it on my plane… I never liked that name.”
“OK, Farm Boy, I promise I’ll never call you Farmer John again!”
“You’ve got a deal. So tell me about growing up in Chicago.”
“It was great! We actually live in Highland Park… that’s just north of Chicago…”
“I know where it is,” he says. “I’ve been to Chicago a bunch of times.”
“Oh, good! Anyway, my dad is a lawyer, my mom’s an English teacher… and my older brother is a naval officer. His destroyer was in the Atlantic but we don’t know where he’s going now… and I’ve got a kid sister still in high school.”
“Highland Park, huh? Daddy a lawyer? All right… your new name is “Rich Girl!”
Her smile vanishes. “Oh, no, John. We really aren’t rich. Please don’t call me that.”
“Well, richer than my family, that’s for sure...but OK, fair’s fair. I’ll ditch the nickname. But tell me, how did your folks feel about you joining up?”
“They weren’t very happy, but then again, they weren’t happy when I chose nursing school over college, either. They knew they couldn’t stop me, though.
OK, Farm Boy, now tell me about your family. Hmm… from Iowa, I’ll bet you’re Methodist… or Lutheran.”
“Actually, Marge, no. I’m Catholic.”
“Really! I didn’t think there were any Catholics in Iowa! Are you devout?”
“Hardly. Consider me lapsed. What about you?”
“We were brought up Episcopalian like my daddy, but I’m hardly devout. More like disinterested. I’ve got a streak of my Tennessee Baptist mother in me… she’s from Knoxville.”
“Disinterested?”
“Yeah… I guess it started when I was 15. I was always kind of a skeptic, but during a summer trip to Tennessee, some Baptist pastor tried to proposition my mom. That did it. Religion seemed like such a joke after that. Imagine, a man of god trying to pick up women…”
“Well, can’t say I blame you.”
“Wait, John, there’s more. After Mom told him to get lost, he started sniffing after me.”
“Oh, no! He didn’t try to…”
Of course he tried! But I slapped him one real good. Kind of knocked him on his ass, actually.”
John laughs with relief. “So let me get this straight. You’re smart, you’re beautiful…and you’re a real tough cookie.”
“I’m not so sure about the beautiful part… but you better believe the other two, Farm Boy!”
“Trust me on the beautiful, OK?” he says with a big smile.
“If that’s your opinion,” she says, smiling back.
Chapter Nine
Professor Inaba had been caught by surprise. Until this moment, he had no idea the San Francisco plan was dead. Now he was told the Army would deploy his device and he was being commanded to have it ready for transport within 24 hours. Military personnel were swarming all over his facility in preparation for the move.
The Professor was disheartened the military no longer planned to submerge his device; his plan to sabotage the weapon had been rendered irrelevant and there was no time or opportunity to implement another. He and his staff watched, dejectedly, as the 10 ton weapon--resembling a very large beer barrel--was hoisted onto a flatbed rail car. Once dockside, it would be loaded onto the deck of an Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer, one of the few left afloat. Inaba’s only hope was that the Americans would send this destroyer to the bottom of the Sea of Japan, taking his device with it.
The crossing of the Sea of Japan to Fukuoka, Kyushu, some 300 miles distant, would be made over the course of 3 nights, preferably in poor weather. While no US Navy surface ships had yet to enter the Sea of Japan, US submarines and aircraft roamed there with little opposition. Poor visibility and rough seas would improve the odds against the American threat. The 24 hour deadline was timed to coincide with just such a forecast.
The first two nights of this journey, following the western Korean coast, passed without incident. On the third night, as the destroyer with its deadly cargo departed the southern Korean coast for the final, 100 mile leg of its journey, the American submarine USS Sturgeon had just surfaced and was making its way north through the Tsushima Strait near Shimonoseki. On the conning tower’s small deck, in the veiled moonlight, the captain, Lieutenant Commander Bradley Stark, was discussing the deteriorating weather with his executive officer (XO), Lieutenant Ward Grayson. Sheets of rain were falling all around them on the roiling sea. This weather had just foiled their chance to attack some merchant ships.
“How’s the battery charge coming?” Captain Stark asks his XO.
“Full charge should be in another 2 hours, sir,” Grayson responds.
“That’s a long time on the surface in this crappy weather. We’ll be rolling all over the place. We can’t afford another torpedo falling off its rails… and I don’t want to be burying anyone else at sea if I can help it.”
After a solemn pause, Captain Stark says, “Let’s reverse course… mayb
e stay out of the really rough stuff for the next couple of hours…go back towards Nagasaki…sun will be up in about 4 hours, and I want to be able to dive without worrying about the batteries. I can’t believe we chased those tubs for so long and never got a shot! Turn left to course 210.”
“Aye aye, sir”
The Japanese destroyer captain, Commander Ito Fuchida, estimated the final leg of this voyage would take six hours. That would put them into Fukuoka about 0500, long before sunrise. The storm had whipped up the sea quite a bit, but they were still making satisfactory headway. He was concerned that if the sea got too rough, the deck would be awash and he might lose this mysterious object lashed to it, that thing that looked like a gigantic beer barrel. The Army Colonel in charge of it steadfastly refused to tell him what it was; he only referred to it as a “secret Army project.”
Just before 0300, Captain Fuchida sensed the problem even before he was summoned by the intercom from the engine room. One of the two diesel engines was pulled back; they were losing speed rapidly.
“Captain,” a voice from the intercom barks, “the port engine is overheating. The cooling inlet line has ruptured. There is some flooding in the engine room, but it has been brought under control.”
Furious with this sudden bad luck, Fuchida asks, “Can you repair the cooling line?”
“We can make temporary repairs but there will still be sea water leaking into the engine room. The port engine must remain at ‘idle/stop’ until cooling flow is restored. Otherwise, it will seize.”
“How long until the engine can develop power?” the Captain asks, his voice demanding.
“The repair should take about one hour. After that, the engine should cool in about 10 minutes and be ready for full power.”
Captain Fuchida leans over the chart table and calculates that at this agonizingly slow speed for one hour, they would still be in the Genkai Sea off northwest Kyushu at sunrise: easy pickings for American submarines and aircraft.
On the USS Sturgeon, Captain Stark is also receiving bad news.
“Chief says we’ve got a problem with the batteries, Captain…one bank isn’t taking a charge…doesn’t know why yet,” the XO says.
Stark delivers his concise reply through clenched teeth. “Shit!”
With their battery power cut in half, the two electric motors that propel the sub when submerged will have less than an hour of power; hardly enough time to stalk and sink your prey and make an undetected escape. They would be forced to remain on the surface using the two air-breathing diesel engines.
From the lookout post above the conning tower comes the cry: “Contact off starboard beam!”
Captain Stark scans the sea to the west, but he has to wait until his boat rises on a swell again to see anything other than walls of gray ocean on both sides. When it does rise, the Captain, his binoculars pinned to his eyes, says, “Looks like a Jap destroyer, probably… starboard bow, about 1500 yards.”
Then his sub slides back down into a trough. This cycle of rising and falling repeats itself two or three times a minute.
“Is that son of a bitch even moving?” Grayson asks.
“He must be,” Stark replies. “He’s gonna pass behind us. Ready the aft torpedo tubes. Get me a range as soon as we pop back up!”
“Do you think he’s alone, Captain?”
Stark’s impatient reply cuts the cold, wet air like a knife. “I don’t see anybody else, do you?”
The range is proving difficult to estimate, however. After a few abortive attempts, Grayson says, “I swear, Captain, this guy is hardly moving… but he’s going down in a ditch, too. Most times, I can only get the top of his mast. We’re gonna have to change course left to even get a shot with the stern tubes…and I think he’s further away than we first thought. I just can’t get a decent plot in this fucking rain!”
After a few more minutes with no success, Captain Stark calls out: “We’re getting too far away…Helm! Hard left, all ahead one half…come to course 030…let’s get a better angle for a shot with the forward tubes. He’s got to be moving!”
Halfway through the sub’s turn, the men on the conning tower lose sight of the destroyer. When they arrive at the specified course, rather than their prey being dead ahead as they hoped, it is gone.
“What the hell?” Stark says. He pauses in exasperation, then adds, “You know, you’re probably right…this guy must be almost dead in the water…he’s gotta be to the west…he couldn’t have slipped by us, could he?”
“I doubt it, Captain.”
“Forget it,” Captain Stark says with a sigh, giving up the chase for the second time that night. “Come left, back to course 210, all ahead full...Sun will be up soon. Have we figured out the fucking batteries yet?”
As the American sub completes its slow, full circle, still rising and falling with the heavy swells, the Japanese destroyer, its engine repaired and now making normal speed, passes unseen to the south. Almost two hours later, it completes its voyage with the sun rising over its bow. Captain Fuchida proudly enters in the ship’s log: ENGINE REPAIRS COMPLETED UNDERWAY. CROSSING SUCCESSFUL. NO ENEMY VESSELS SIGHTED.
In the early morning light of the clearing skies, as the sub’s lookouts see the smoke from the destroyer’s stacks far to their port stern, Captain Stark is never more painfully aware of the old cliché “...like two ships that pass in the night.”
Chapter Ten
General Takarabe was deeply distressed. He commanded the 57th Army, a force of 150,000 men that would defend southeastern Kyushu against the American invasion. Ariake Bay, the lynchpin of defensive plan Ketsu-Go 6, fell within his zone of responsibility. Takarabe had just received secret orders from the War Council’s emissary. What he was told had left him dumbfounded.
The general was ordered to allow the emplacement of a new, secret weapon inland at Ariake Bay by a “special” unit. He was further instructed, in no uncertain terms, not to interfere with this unit and he was to ensure none of his subordinate commanders did so, either. He felt insulted by this intrusion to his command but he was a soldier and would follow orders.
The general was not told the nature of this weapon. Initially, he feared it was some kind of chemical weapon--a poison gas--but he, like all of Japan’s military leaders, was disinclined to use such weapons. The Americans were similarly disinclined; they had vowed to use chemical and biological weapons only in retaliation for their use by the Axis powers. That was a Pandora’s Box the Japanese did not wish to open: they knew America’s chemical arsenal far outstripped theirs. In the strange code of ethics now governing human conflict, it was acceptable to blow a man to bits but not acceptable to burn his lungs out or decimate his nervous system with gas.
But was the War Council now desperate enough to employ chemical weapons? Takarabe doubted it. He knew the Council was counting on the fanatical, suicidal actions of his inexperienced troops to destroy the invaders. He also knew that no matter how fanatical, you can only die for the Emperor once.
At the Fukuoka docks, it is midmorning of a beautifully clear day. The storms of last night have moved to the northeast, to Honshu and beyond. The nuclear device is being off-loaded from the destroyer that has brought it from Korea. Colonel Minoru Ozawa, the Army officer in charge of the device, is now recovered from the seasickness of the previous night. He watches as the crane lifts the barrel-shaped object, in its steel cradle, off the deck and sets it down on a railroad flatcar. His second in command, Major Hideki Watanabe, bellowing instructions to the loading crew, makes sure the high-explosive triggering device, removed from the weapon for safe transport and weighing slightly less than 100 pounds in its shipping crate, is loaded onto a truck.
Suddenly, to the south, comes the sound of anti-aircraft fire. All eyes turn upward to see a dozen or more B-24 bombers approaching from the southwest at about 10,000 feet, puffs of flak surrounding them. The B-24 has four engines: the noise of 50 or more of these engines seems like the drone of angry hornets as they draw
closer.
The bombers are flying straight for the docks. As they enter the airspace above, the lead bombardier has no trouble at all finding the aiming point on this clear morning. At his command, all aircraft begin releasing their four ton bomb loads on the docks some two miles below.
Colonel Ozawa’s “special” troops scurry to any shelter they can find. None hide under the railroad flatcar now carrying the nuclear weapon.
The American bombs begin to impact, creating a rapidly moving curtain of crushing shock waves and razor sharp fragments of steel, wood, and concrete. For those far enough away, the noise is like the rapid beating of a thousand bass drums. For those too close, they hear nothing but the screaming of their own auditory nerves, for the blast percussion has shattered their eardrums. Blood drips from their ear canals as proof.
A few of the Colonel’s men are torn to shreds, some are bleeding from jagged lacerations but will survive, but all the survivors are, at least temporarily, deaf.
The destroyer has received a direct hit to its superstructure and is now a blazing inferno. Captain Fuchida and most of his crew are killed onboard. Moments before he is killed, the Captain had completed his final entry in the ship’s log: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
The truck onto which the high-explosive triggering device was loaded is torn apart, as are the three soldiers who had taken shelter beneath it. The triggering device, in its mangled shipping crate, lays amongst the rubble, undamaged.
The anti-aircraft gunners have failed to bring down any of the B-24’s.
As Colonel Ozawa and his men stumble about, numb and disoriented, unable to hear anything except the ringing in their ears, no one notices the lone F-5 that streaks overhead several minutes after the bombers have delivered their deadly payloads.
The only thought Ozawa can formulate is Fucking American Pirates! Those words resonate in his disordered mind in perfect English, just like the words of his unspoken rebuttal to Professor Inaba’s lament on that seaside bluff in Korea.
East Wind Returns Page 4