Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Beast McCarty, as I live and breathe,” he said. “Welcome to the Untouchables.”

  Mick recognized him at once. He’d been the offensive fullback for Navy when Mick had played his first season as a youngster back at Annapolis. His name was Maximo Campofino, and he’d been two classes ahead of Mick. He was wearing a lieutenant commander’s oak leaves.

  “Mad Max, how the hell are you? You the skipper here?”

  “For my sins. What’d you do—punch out the admiral’s aide or something? C’mon, get your bag, and let’s get inside the house before these deck-apes start throwing bananas at us.”

  Mick expected to step through the sponson hatch into the hangar bay, but instead it was just a passageway. Max took him to the ready room and introduced him as the latest exile from the big-deck Navy. Everyone seemed friendly enough, and they even had a flight suit already hanging for him.

  “Where the hell’s the hangar bay?” Mick asked after he’d shifted into more familiar working attire.

  “We only have half a hangar on this boat,” Max said. “Half an island, half a flight deck, one slingshot, two ’vators, and thass it, partner. Supposed to have twenty-four planes, but usually we have eighteen, nineteen, and maybe twelve of those reporting full up on any given day. The doughboys love us just the same, though.”

  “Missions?”

  “We launch, we loiter, get a call from a FAC, go down to treetop level, and shoot the place up. Great fun, most of the time.”

  “I did some of that on the ’Canal,” Mick said. “It wasn’t like Midway, but you’re right. The guys on the ground loved our asses.”

  “They still do, man. You were at Midway? Bag anything big?”

  Mick told them of his experiences and then described the Philippine Sea engagement. He kept it fairly low-key, not wanting to sound like too much of a braggart his first day. The pilots around him were pretty junior, though, and several looked like downright nuggets.

  “Are you an ace?” one of them asked.

  “I’m a bomber guy, but I have shot down some Jap aircraft. That whole ace business is more of a fighter thing, you know?”

  “Well, we’re by God happy to have you with us,” Max said. “C’mon, lemme show you around the boat. Won’t take five minutes, actually.”

  Mick found that it took longer, but not much longer. Max explained that the CVEs were being mass-produced as cheaply and quickly as possible. “They’re not very capable, but there’s lots of them. All together this formation can put up an aluminum overcast if we have to. It ain’t glorious, but it’s ordnance in the air that counts with the ground-pounders. So: What’s with the glove on your right hand?”

  Mick hadn’t been aware that he was favoring his hand again, but it did hurt, and the color sometimes went very dark, especially at night. He explained how he’d been injured and that the choice had been to go back to the States to see a specialist or quit flying.

  “Good choice,” Max said. “Let our flight surgeon take a look-see. He’s pretty good.”

  “This thing rates a flight surgeon?”

  “Yeah, there’s one for every three jeeps. This one happens to be embarked here for the moment, but they rotate ’em. Lemme show you the planes.”

  Max took him through the hangar bay and then up to the flight deck to see all the planes. Mick noticed that some of them had distinctive decorations—teeth on the nose, funny names on the cockpit side panels, or decorative decals. He asked if he could put his white horse emblem on one of the barges. Max told him to talk to one of the aviation bosuns, who did all the artwork. Mick noticed that Max didn’t bother to ask about the significance of the white horse. Mick told himself that it was as much for Jimmy Sykes as for his own fleet reputation.

  After the noon meal, Mick went to sick bay and met with the flight surgeon, a weary-looking, middle-aged lieutenant commander with really thick glasses named Lowenstein. Mick explained how his hand had been damaged.

  “Wow,” the doc said. “I’da been out of my ever-lovin’ mind, buried like that.”

  “I was getting there. So, what do you think?”

  “You’re gonna lose it, is what I think. Not right away, but the circulation system has been badly compromised. One fine day you’ll have to have it amputated. I’m surprised you can grip a stick.”

  “You shitting me?”

  “Not a pound, Lieutenant. How bad’s it hurt?”

  “Sometimes it’s really painful, especially when it goes dark on me. Other times it just aches.”

  “Well, if we were back stateside, I’d have to med-down you right here and now. But we’re not. The invasion starts sometime in the next ten days, and as long as you can grip the stick and fly your barge, I’ll clear you. But be prepared, young man.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Not like you did this in a bar fight, Lieutenant. You’ve been wounded, like a million other guys in this goddamned war. How’s the rest of you?”

  The doc gave him a quick physical and then put him on a light aspirin regimen. He gave him some massage techniques to use on his hand and told him to sleep with it elevated as much as he could.

  “How will I know when it’s time to, uh—”

  “You’ll smell it.”

  Mick blinked at that. “Terrific,” he said.

  “You asked, Lieutenant. Like I said, they should have downed you right there on the island.”

  “They were busy, Doc. You have no idea what a horror show the ’Canal was.”

  The doctor gave him a lopsided grin and then raised his shirt, displaying two deeply dimpled bullet wound scars on his chest. “Yeah, I do, Lieutenant. I went in with the Breed in August ’forty-two. I was doing surgery in a bomb crater, water up to my knees, body parts floating around, when a sniper got me. Shot me right through my red cross, the little fuck.”

  “A flight surgeon, sent to Guadalcanal?”

  “I was just a journeyman cutter then. Did aeromedical cert while recuperating in Oakland. The regular ones are all out on the big-decks. Oh, almost forgot. How’s about you drop your skivs and we’ll do the finger-wave, shall we?”

  * * *

  A-day was scheduled for October 20, with preliminary landings to be conducted by Army Rangers to sanitize some vital islands on the flanks of the entrance to Leyte Gulf. Evans had arrived on the twelfth, and Marsh and all the other officers were immediately immersed in reviewing new operation orders, because the original invasion target had been Mindanao, not Leyte Island.

  They also ground through the paperwork of the JAG-manual investigation into Captain Hughes’s death. The facts, of course, were pretty straightforward. The background leading up to the incident was a more delicate matter, and Marsh took that part of it for action. They sent the package off via one of the jeeps to their distant commodore, who was still out there in the Philippine Sea with Halsey and the big-deck carriers. If it was anything like every other JAG-manual investigation report, it would come back with questions, procedural corrections, and directions to change wording, etc. Such an investigation would have been done regardless of who or how senior the person was who managed to kill himself accidentally. Since it was the CO in this case, the nuances of the wording would receive much more attention from the senior officers reviewing it. Marsh was just glad to have it off his back for a while.

  One day he received a personal-for message from the commodore, informing him that a commander by the name of L. J. Benson, from CincPacFleet’s staff, was making his way across the Pacific logistics chain to take command of Evans. Marsh felt a momentary pang of disappointment, but then reality reasserted itself. He was a junior lieutenant commander. Even in wartime, he was probably two, maybe three years from a command of his own, assuming that the Navy Department wanted him in command at all. The message, however, set in motion preparations for yet another change of command. This time the poor navigation officer, John Hennessy, became the stuckee who had to honcho the paperwork, with Marsh’s help, of course.

  Marsh f
ound it interesting to watch the crew try to decide what to call him—XO or Captain. With Commander Benson officially designated as the next commanding officer, he told them all to keep calling him XO. Some of them managed it, some of them did not. Anyone who approached him with business when he was sitting in the captain’s chair called him Captain. If he was just walking about deck, they called him XO.

  The Evans spent two days before A-day supporting the frogmen units that were doing clearance operations along the two main objective beaches. Jap snipers harassed the UDT boats but were quickly driven off by Evans’s five-inch gunfire. They couldn’t actually see the snipers, so they simply clear-cut the jungle. They also had some fun blowing up mines that had been swept from the entrance to Leyte Gulf itself. They were large round black casings complete with contact horns, and their thousand pounds of explosives made for some spectacular explosions and pictures. They had help spotting the mines from the jeeps’ aircraft, and one day an SBD with a rearing white horse painted on the side came by for a low pass. The canopy was back, and the bomber came down close and bridge-wing low. Marsh saw that it was Beast, waving casually as the noisy barge grumbled by. His goggles were up on the back of his head, and he had a big cigar sticking out of the side of his mouth. The crew loved it. Beast in his element at last, Marsh thought.

  The actual A-day invasion was somewhat anticlimactic. It began with a thunderous predawn bombardment by a line of elderly battleships, a few of which had been raised from the ignominious mud of Pearl Harbor. It was satisfying to see them hurling their fourteen- and sixteen-inch shells into the jungles near and then beyond the beaches, although a bit unnerving when said shells came rumbling over Evans’s gunfire support position further inshore. The sixteen-inchers in particular, weighing nearly three thousand pounds each, made a deep wa-wa-wa sound as they sailed overhead in search of Jap pillboxes, spider holes, and hardened gun emplacements. Once the troops swept ashore, they encountered very light and disorganized resistance. Apparently the Japs had withdrawn their main army forces, estimated at twenty thousand, from the likely invasion beach areas up into a long, densely forested ridgeline that defined the geographical spine of Leyte Island. The inshore fire support destroyers were jumped by a few Jap planes that appeared out of nowhere. They were driven off by the ships’ AA fire and the quick response of some fighters from the Taffy carriers offshore. Marsh recalled Mick’s comments about the Turkey Shoot: These Japs weren’t very aggressive.

  On the twenty-fourth, all the gunline battleships and most of the destroyers assigned to the invasion turned south, heading down the east coast of Leyte for the Surigao Strait, a passage of water between Leyte and the next big island, Mindanao. Initially none of the other ships were told why, but later in the evening they learned from listening to the TBS radio that a Jap battleship force was headed their way to attack the invasion logistics shipping. Obviously no one wanted that, although by that time, and probably unknown to the Japanese, almost all the supplies had been landed ashore and most of the invasion transports were sitting there empty. Three other tin cans and Evans were left behind to protect the close-in Taffy Three escort carriers. Marsh suspected Evans was chosen to stay behind because she had an acting CO. Listening to the tactical radios as the hastily formed battle force went over the horizon, it sounded more like a hunting party than any kind of emergency to the south. As usual, they were mostly in the dark about the tactical situation beyond their own line of sight.

  That night they secured from evening general quarters and prepared to go alongside one of the jeeps for fuel. At the last minute the refueling was canceled because of a steering problem aboard the escort carrier. That made Marsh a little bit nervous. One thing every destroyer captain monitors constantly is his ship’s fuel state. The twenty-two-hundred-tonners were not exactly fuel efficient, which was not helped by the fact that their commanders expected them to execute every signal at top speed with as much seagoing verve and dash as they could muster. Evans was approaching the magic number of 50 percent, below which it was mandatory fleet policy that the ship refuel. The escort carrier, USS Gambier Bay, told them to come back tomorrow. They sheered off and headed back to their fire support station off a tiny village called Palo, where the army was encountering stiffening resistance as they moved inland.

  Once on station in their fire support area, Marsh took a cup of coffee up to the signal bridge, where there was a little bit of a breeze on an otherwise stultifying evening. The rabbi joined him. Morgenstern had become a welcome addition to the ship’s company. He made friends easily, liked people, and was always willing to lend a hand with paperwork or other admin matters if an officer needed some relief. He told corny jokes constantly, and the men always listened and laughed dutifully even if they’d heard it a hundred times. He also managed to find his way to the captain once a day to report on the pulse of the crew and any problems that had become ensnared in the chain of command.

  “Rabbi, how’s it going today?” Marsh asked, glad to see him.

  “Suspiciously well,” Morgenstern said, stirring his coffee with a pocketknife. “Seems quiet for a major invasion.”

  “We’ll get some fire missions tonight,” Marsh said. “The army likes us to shoot some H and I rounds at night forward of the front lines.”

  “H and I?”

  “Harassment and interdiction. We shoot randomly into the jungle in a specified area. Japs never know where it’s gonna land, so they worry and dig all night while our guys get some shut-eye.”

  “Lovely. Where’d the battlewagons all go?”

  “Southwest. There’s a rumor the Jap fleet is coming through Surigao Strait, and there’s gonna be an ambush.”

  They talked about a few personnel issues, but tonight the rabbi had no major brushfires from belowdecks. They mostly watched the sun set behind the ridges and pretended that it wasn’t all that hot.

  “How are you enjoying command?” Morgenstern asked.

  “Enjoying is not the right word, I’m afraid,” Marsh said.

  Morgenstern smiled. “I watch all these guys on the make struggling to get command,” he said, “and then I watch them all turn gray over the next six months.”

  “I’ve spent my entire career thinking about how I would do everything differently. Not be so afraid to try something new. Now I’m just like all my bosses before me—very careful.”

  “Because your decisions affect us all, and if you screw up, we face calamity.”

  “Exactly. That was a personal surprise.”

  “At least you’re aware of it,” Morgenstern said. “I’ve seen some who haven’t the sense to recognize the dangers of command at sea.”

  “Well, I’m trying. We have a real CO inbound, and as each day goes by, I’m getting increasingly anxious for him to get here.”

  “For what it’s worth, I think the crew would be happy for you to keep her,” the chaplain said.

  “That’s nice to hear,” Marsh said. “Let’s see what they say if we have to really get into it one day. The Japs will send their first team out to keep the Philippines, and I’ve met those boys.”

  * * *

  At close to midnight they were released from naval gunfire support duties and ordered back out into Leyte Gulf to rejoin the gaggle of Taffys. The senior destroyer captain became the antisubmarine screen commander and sent Evans to a station on the northwest side of the escort carriers’ circular formation. Three other tin cans rounded out the screen formation, which was a compromise between the best antisubmarine defense and the best antiair setup. When there were more “heavies” than escorts, neither formation offered very much defense at all. The other two escort carrier groups were even farther out, beyond Evans’s radar range to the southeast.

  It was October, typhoon season, and the night air was heavy, hot, and very humid, with frequent squall lines sweeping across the outer edges of Leyte Gulf toward the island of Samar to their north. From time to time they would maneuver the ship into one of those rainsquall lines just
to get the caked-on salt washed off the topside areas. If it looked substantial enough they’d pass the word and the off-watch crewmen would rush topside, wrapped in towels, and grab an impromptu freshwater shower.

  At around one in the morning Marsh was called by the CIC watch officer. It seemed that the atmosphere was heavy enough that they could listen in to the radio transmissions coming from what sounded like a major sea battle going on to the south. TBS was usually good for talk only out as far as the visible horizon, but on this night the signals were being ducted by the atmosphere and thus reaching out over a hundred miles. Marsh couldn’t sleep because of the intense heat, so he went to CIC and then out to the bridge, where they patched the southern battle force’s tactical frequency into one of the bridge speakers. The rabbi showed up to listen in, and Marsh explained to him what they were hearing over the radio.

  It was axiomatic in the Navy that the smaller the unit, the more it tended to talk on the radio. What was going on in Surigao Strait that night was no exception. The PT boats were apparently the first to attack, and they gabbed away nearly as much as pilots do, with excited claims about direct hits followed by high-pitched warnings to avoid collision in the pandemonium they had created. They were followed by the destroyer squadrons, which roared down the flanks of the strait firing swarms of torpedoes into a Japanese battleship and cruiser formation. Waiting patiently at the top, or northeastern, exit from the strait were the six old American battleships. Because they had been doing shore bombardment, they were not loaded with their full allowance of the armor-piercing ammunition needed for a battleship fight, so they held fire and waited for the Japanese to run the lethal torpedo gauntlet. Once the Japanese capital ships got within eleven to twelve miles, they opened up with a sixteen- and fourteen-inch gun version of Remember Pearl Harbor.