Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Combat, aye,” Marsh answered, as one of the phone talkers passed the word back to the fantail. Now the question was: Would the sub turn as he tried to evade deep? And if he did, which way? Their one-plane air force made the call for them. The slick was beginning to drift right. Marsh checked the true wind. It was coming from the other direction. Right drift meant the sub was turning right.

  “Conn, Combat, range to contact is five hundred yards. Come right in a slow five-degree rudder turn, now.”

  “Conn, aye, coming right.”

  “Roll one!”

  Evans laid down a standard pattern and then made a sharp evasive turn. Marsh marked the plot where they made that turn because their rudders would create what was called a knuckle, a tight whirlpool in the water that the sonar could see and confuse with a real contact. The charges started going off, deep and satisfying. It felt good to be doing something about Hodson, even if they didn’t get him on this pass.

  The ship swung around in a big circle and slowed to fifteen knots, trying to get back in contact. The plane still circled above them at a few thousand feet. If anything came up from the sub, he’d be the first to see it. Then they waited, constantly changing course to defeat another torpedo attack. The plotters fed constant estimated range and bearing data to the sonar operators down below, trying to focus their search, but the cluster of depth charges had so badly disturbed the water that all the sonar could see was a cloud of turbulence.

  They waited some more, weaving this way and that just like the aviators did. Fly straight and level in a dogfight, someone will kill you. Marsh decided once more to go back up onto the bridge.

  Everyone who had binoculars was looking hard for any signs of debris or other indications they’d hit him. The sea was picking up out here, and the relative wind blew a gust of stack gas back onto the bridge wing.

  Suddenly the signal bridge called down, “Our plane’s diving astern of us, one seven zero relative!”

  They looked aft from the port bridge wing in time to see the SBD strafing something back in their wake, and then the sub broached right into a hail of gunfire. Without being told, the after five-inch guns began to fire as the plane cleared out, shooting over at first and then punching five-inch shells into the black mass of the sub as she wallowed in their wake about a half mile behind them, her front half sticking out of the water as if she were stuck in ice. The captain turned the ship to open an arc of fire for the forward guns, and then all five got into it, along with one of the after forty-millimeter mounts. The noise was terrific, but no one was complaining. A cloud of gun smoke blew back over the bridge wing, filled with sulphurous confetti from the powder-can wads.

  The sub’s bow began rising straight up into the air, and then she hung there. Marsh couldn’t tell if it was an I-boat, but he did see at least three direct hits from their main battery on that black, now almost perpendicular shape. Then she began to slide backward, spewing air and sheets of shiny diesel oil into the sea. The SBD kept well clear now to avoid getting shot down by the hail of gunfire that was still exploding all around where the sub was collapsing back into the sea. Marsh ran back down to CIC, knowing what they had to do next. The captain was ahead of him on the intercom.

  “All stations, cease firing, cease firing. Combat, conduct an urgent attack on the sink point, bearing zero eight five, range six hundred yards.”

  The captain drove them over the point where the sub had sunk, and they rolled a short pattern, again set deep. Then they drove away from that point, slowed down, and waited while the sonar went into the passive mode and listened. They had a speaker in Combat that allowed them to hear the actual sounds of the sonar and any returning echoes. Their depth charge attack had created a long acoustic waterfall of white noise, but then came the sound they’d been waiting for, a sound they’d only heard before on training tapes: the rumble and crump of a hull collapse as the sub sank below its crush depth on its way to the bottom, some twelve thousand feet down.

  Marsh called the plane and asked him to verify a large oil slick and debris field that should be coming up shortly. The SBD was already skimming the scene at about two hundred feet. He reported that he could already see it and that there appeared to be bodies in the slick. That was as good a confirmation as they’d ever get. Subs sometimes released oil and trash to make pursuing destroyers think it was all over, but not crewmen.

  “Combat, conn, secure from GQ. I believe we got ourselves a kill there.”

  “Combat, aye, plotting a course back to the EP of Hodson’s people in the water.”

  Marsh sent the plane home, telling him they’d take the survivors of Hodson back to Pearl and then, unless otherwise directed, rejoin the task force. The pilot said he’d relay the message and report that they’d sunk the sub. Marsh thanked him for equalizing the odds.

  It would take the ship about a half hour to get back to the estimated position of Hodson’s survivors. Marsh went below to the officers’ head, where his bowels testified explosively to his compelling fear. Then he went to his cabin, shut the door, and lay down on his bed. He pulled a pillow over his face and began taking deep, difficult breaths, forcing himself to blank out the horrific images of the morning. Hodson without her bow. Then that fiery pall on the water, surrounded by fragments of the ship and her crew. The raucous scream of the Jap torpedoes clearly audible over the sonar speakers. The boil of bodies and oil coming up from the depths as the submarine imploded in the absolute blackness of the deep.

  There was a quick knock on the door, and then the captain was standing next to his rack. He was still in full battle dress, and he had a white china mug in his hand, which he handed to Marsh. The mug contained an inch of bourbon whiskey.

  Marsh, hugely embarrassed, tried to scramble out of his rack, but the captain put a firm hand on his shoulder and forced him to take the mug.

  “If it’s any comfort,” the captain said, “I’ve already had one. Knock it down, XO, and then get yourself back on the line. This happens to all of us.”

  Then he was gone, ducking through the door but still banging his helmet on the frame. Marsh gulped the whiskey down and promptly choked on it.

  This happens to all of us.

  All right, then.

  He took some more deep breaths, washed his mouth out so that he didn’t smell of booze, and went back topside to take charge of picking up the survivors.

  It took them an hour to round up the life rafts. When they arrived, there were only about three dozen or so men visible in the water, and some of them were not moving. That was a sobering head count. Hodson had had a crew of at least three hundred. The Jap torpedo, sub- or ship-launched, was still one of the most potent weapons in the war. Evans put down her motor whaleboat to corral the life rafts so as to minimize the time the ship spent stopped in the water. There was always the chance that the sub had had a partner on this bold mission, and everyone topside could hear the sonar going out at full power, searching all around them. Once they recovered the rafts and what was left of Hodson’s crew, they set course back to Pearl. It seemed to Marsh that the only way he got into Pearl Harbor was on a mission to get people to the naval hospital.

  * * *

  The entire evolution in port took six hours, and then they were steaming back out of Pearl and headed west to find the carrier group, which by now was more than three hundred miles west and opening. There’d been a line of ambulances waiting on the pier to shuttle the wounded over to Hospital Point. Evans had recovered thirty-seven alive and twelve dead. They’d hoped for more, but a magazine explosion takes the whole ship at once, as anyone who’d seen the Arizona knew firsthand.

  Marsh watched the unloading of the survivors from the starboard bridge wing. The train of ambulances headed off to the hospital. For a moment he fantasized about going with them, just to see Glory. Then reality intruded. The chief engineer asked if he could take an hour to on-load some fuel oil before they left. Marsh told him to set it up and then forgot about seeing Glory. He sent for
the gunnery officer to see if he could rustle up some more depth charges, too. Fuel they could get from the carrier; depth charges had to come by Higgins boat from the depot.

  Just before sailing, a truck arrived and unloaded six aviators who needed a ride out to the Lexington, along with several bags of mail. Killing a Jap sub had been satisfying; getting mail was truly important. Marsh was busy filling out the after-action incident report on Hodson’s sinking and their successful fight with the Jap sub, so he didn’t get to meet the flyboys until the ship was clear of the minefields and on her way west again. One of them was none other than his academy roommate Mick McCarty, known back then as Beast.

  Mick still looked like the dashing football star he’d been at Annapolis, tall, handsome, extremely fit, and full to the brim with Irish charm and bullshit. It was a little bit awkward when Marsh saw that he was still wearing lieutenant’s railroad tracks while Marsh, his classmate, was already a lieutenant commander. He shook hands with the other flyers, had an ensign show them where they’d be bunking, and then sat down in the wardroom with Mick. That’s when Marsh noticed Mick’s right hand was encased in a leather glove.

  “Damn, Beauty,” Mick said. “I thought you’d be better-looking by now, but you’re uglier than ever. Congrats on those oak leaves, by the way.”

  “Thanks, Beast,” Marsh said. “What’s that British Army toast? ‘Here’s to a long and bloody war’? How long you been in Pearl?”

  “Two days, two nights, long enough to get a hangover and to see Glory Lewis. Did you know she’s in Pearl?”

  Marsh told him about meeting her and having dinner one night. He observed that she hadn’t recovered very well from Tommy’s death in Arizona.

  “Man, that was obvious,” Mick said. “I had some high hopes that I might comfort the grieving widow, but she made it pretty damn clear that wasn’t on the table. What a waste of a beautiful woman.”

  Mick had been an enthusiastic and apparently successful skirt-chaser the whole time Marsh had known him. Single, engaged, married, widowed, blind, crippled, or crazy, they were all fair game for Mick. Back at the academy, he was forever bragging about his conquests. He had a theory: It took five rejections to get one yes, so all you had to do was talk to six women and you were guaranteed to get some. All except Glory Hawthorne, who’d had a lot of fun teasing Mick to distraction.

  “So what are you flying these days?”

  “SBD-5s,” Mick said. “Tried for fighters, didn’t have the grades at flight school. But Midway was fun.”

  “You were at Midway?”

  “I helped get the Kaga,” Mick said. “Best moment of my life. Better than beating Army. Put a thousand-pounder through her flight deck and watched her burn all the way back to Yorktown.”

  “Now that’s something to talk about,” Marsh said. “I had to go swimming when Winston went down, although we made up for it a little bit today when we got a Jap sub.”

  “There you go,” he said. “Like Halsey says, kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.”

  “We’re headed to join up with his Big Blue Fleet,” Marsh said. “The scuttlebutt around Pearl is that we’re starting to win this thing.”

  “Lemme tell you something, sport,” Mick said, frowning. “The Japs aren’t done by a crock of crocks. Last time I came back to the bird farm my plane was so full of holes that they pushed it over the side once I crawled out. They are the fightingest bastards I’ve ever seen. This is definitely gonna take a while.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Marsh said. “Midway must have been a real kick in the buck teeth, though.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Mick said. “We’re gonna win this war. We’re gonna push and push, and then we’ll drive ’em all the way back to the emperor’s bathroom, and then we’ll blast the little bastards into submission—but it won’t be any cakewalk.”

  “We found that out today,” Marsh said. “We had that sub dead to rights, and yet he still managed to plant one in Hodson’s magazines. We brought in just over ten percent of the crew, and some of them aren’t going to make it.”

  “I was still onboard Yorktown when the Hamman got hit,” Mick said. “She was right alongside, helping Yorktown’s ship’s company fight the fires. One minute she was there, the next she was gone and Yorktown was abandoning ship.”

  “Jap torpedoes. We were lucky today.”

  “What was it Napoleon said? If I have to choose between a smart general and a lucky one, I’ll take lucky every time?”

  For some reason, that made Marsh shiver. He was still seeing those Jap searchlights every time he closed his eyes and thought about Winston. Mick saw his reaction.

  “Oh, hell, Beauty,” he said. “Look at it like an aviator: If it’s your time, it’s your time. In the meantime, always empty your guns and don’t worry about shit you can’t change. Bull Halsey is headed for a horseback ride in downtown Tokyo, and all us snuffies’re gonna ride the whirlwind. Me? I’m looking forward to it, long as I can stay out of any more trouble.”

  “Yeah,” Marsh said. “I suppose you’re right. So where’ve you been since Yorktown?”

  “Would you believe Guadalcanal, and then Darwin?”

  “Darwin? What the hell were you doing there?”

  “Flying with the Aussies and Dugout Doug MacArthur’s Air Force. That’s what happens when you become an orphan.”

  “I don’t understand ‘orphan’—you mean after Yorktown you—”

  “Got fired from a big-deck squadron and became a soldier of fortune, so to speak. It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got to get topside,” Marsh told him, “but later—I want to hear it all. You need our doc to take a look at that claw there?”

  Mick raised his gloved right hand and looked at it as if for the first time. “This hand?” he said. “Nope. As long as no one officially knows about it, I can keep flying.”

  EIGHT

  After a bath, Glory slipped into a muumuu and went out to the verandah of the nurses’ quarters. It was just after midnight, and she had brought down one lone cigarette. Everyone she knew at the hospital smoked, but she consumed precisely two a day: one with her first morning coffee, and another before going to bed at night. She smoked in private because her mother had drilled it into her that ladies did not smoke in public. In these days of global war, Glory knew those rules of female propriety were hopelessly old-fashioned, and yet she still abided by them whenever she could.

  The moon was somewhere behind the building, but the night was clear with just a hint of a tropic breeze coming in from Diamond Head. The bougainvillea was in bloom, along with a few stray orchids. It was almost too beautiful, she thought. Sally had said she’d be delighted to write to Glory’s “handsome” lieutenant commander, as long as Glory did, too. Glory had promised to write and then realized she didn’t have his address. She’d have to check with the Fleet Post Office to find out how to send mail to the USS Evans. Or perhaps not, she mused. If Sally struck up a warm correspondence, then she wouldn’t have to.

  She heard voices coming from the darkness of the street. The Pearl Harbor blackout was still being observed, so there were no streetlights. Finally she saw shapes moving up the sidewalk toward the nurses’ quarters. Four nurses in uniform were accompanied by a tall, dark-haired man wearing khakis. The girls were giggling like teenagers surrounding a movie star, and Glory guessed this must be the new surgeon everyone in the nurses’ lounge had been talking about. What was he doing here?

  She rubbed out the cigarette on the rocker of the chair and bent forward to get up and go inside. Then she realized she was naked under the flimsy muumuu, a fact that would be obvious to anyone who saw her in the doorway. She sat back down and adjusted the fabric so that it draped less revealingly.

  The nurses came up the walkway, saw Glory, and happily introduced her to Dr. Stembridge. He was indeed tall, dark, and very handsome, and his voice was soft and refined, with a hint of New York City.

  “Nurse Hawthorne,” he said, taking
her hand and squeezing it gently. He had to bow slightly because Glory had remained seated, and it seemed a movement to which he was accustomed. His hand was soft and rock-hard at the same time, a surgeon’s hand.

  “Doctor,” she replied. “Welcome to Pearl.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Glory,” one of the girls said. “Say aloha—we’re in Hawaii!”

  “I don’t speak Hawaiian,” Glory said. “I think it sounds silly when Americans use their words.”

  There was much rolling of eyes and then several giggling good-nights and thanks-for-walking-us-backs. The verandah emptied out quickly, but Stembridge hesitated. He appeared to be sniffing the air.

  “Is that bougainvillea?” he asked rhetorically. He went to the side of the verandah. “I haven’t smelled that since a trip to the Botanical Gardens. And those look like orchids.”

  “Yes, all of that grows almost wild here,” she said from her rocking chair. “If you like flowers, you’ll love Hawaii.”

  He came back and sat down sideways on the top step. “You’re an OR supervisor, correct?” he asked.

  “Yes, I am. OR Two.”

  “Super,” he said. “I look forward to working with you. Where did you train, if I may ask?”

  “Penn,” she said.

  “Very good,” he said. “That’s a first-rate school. Have you been working since you graduated?”

  “We got married at the Naval Academy after Tommy’s graduation,” she explained, “but then he went to sea right away, and so I went to work. There were a few years where I didn’t work, but mostly I stayed with it. It paid better than the Navy.”

  “Most anything does,” he said with a wry smile. “Is your husband in the Pacific Fleet?”

  “For all eternity,” she said. “He was MPA—assistant engineer—in Arizona.”

  He inhaled and then blew out a long breath before replying. “Wow,” he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t left Hawaii.”