As he began his dive, he noticed something strange: The battleship seemed to have another ship close aboard on her port side. Dropping through the layers of light cloud, he could see his target and then he couldn’t, but he would have sworn the little ship was firing at the big ship, reminiscent of the days when sailing ships went muzzle to muzzle at a hundred yards. Was that an American tin can? He focused on the big boy. He began to see some tracers coming his way from encased AA guns mounted right under that huge pagoda structure, but they had miscalculated his dive speed. He was flying with his left hand now. He’d balled what was left of his right hand around the sodden glove, holding the mess in his lap.
Finally he began the pullout, and started shooting when his gun sight crossed that enormous gilded chrysanthemum sculpture welded across the battleship’s bullnose. He saw his own tracers ricocheting off the slabbed steel sides of the forward gun turrets, then the base of the pagoda, and then, as he pulled harder, into the lower-level bridge windows and then on up toward the director before he busted the stick hard left and slid by the towering pagoda, going so fast that he nearly rolled a three-sixty.
Two guns, shooting seven hundred and fifty rounds per minute, two dozen rounds per second, and he’d probably been on target for three, maybe four seconds. So, what did that make it: seventy rounds of fifty-caliber armor-piercing incendiary tracer blasting around the confines of the bridge levels. Had to have scared ’em at the very least, he thought.
He zoomed out behind the battleship far enough to get away from the stern twenty-five-millimeter mounts and then was surprised to see three enormous explosions blossom about two miles in front of him, low over the water, sending a forest of shell splashes rising through the smoke cloud.
My God, he thought, they’re shooting some kind of AA ammo out of their main battery. He jinked hard right and began to climb. He hadn’t seen the telltale you’re-almost-empty solid stream of tracers coming out of his own guns, which meant he still had some rounds left. As he turned to the right he was able to make out the American ship that was still alongside the battlewagon, close enough to refuel, both of them going full bore across the rain-flattened sea in a broad left turn. It was definitely an American destroyer, its topsides shot all to hell, one stack gone, the radar antenna hanging off the yardarm, but most of its guns pointed up at the superstructure of the black giant and blasting away, tearing pieces of steel out of the pagoda and shredding whole AA gun mounts along the edge of the main deck.
“Get ’em, tiger!” he yelled, watching all the Jap’s portside AA gunners clawing steel for cover what with all that five-inch going off up and down the decks from point-blank range. He turned hard, dropped back down to two hundred feet, and came in from the battlewagon’s port side, leveling off at about the height of the navigation bridge. He bore in to just over a mile and began shooting, this time putting the tracer stream through the bridge compartments. He was actually able to see the tracer rounds ricocheting around inside the pagoda as they hit the centerline armored tower and bounced off. As he blew past the face of the pagoda, he felt multiple hammers on his right wing; a twenty-five AA gun had found his range on the way out. Something bumped his right leg, hard, twice.
It wasn’t coming from the battleship, though. There was a heavy cruiser racing in as if to intercept the big ship’s wake. Mick realized that the little destroyer was about to have company in the form of ten eight-inch guns that would be able to shoot parallel to the battleship’s side and absolutely rake the tin can. As he turned again, weaving in and out of intensifying AA fire, he felt a strange heaviness in his right side and looked down for a moment. He could not quite comprehend what he was seeing.
His right leg was lying on the floor of the cockpit, severed at the knee by a twenty-five-millimeter shell. There were four large holes in the fuselage on the right side and three more exit holes on the left. The blood was coming out of his right femoral artery in small buckets. He realized he’d be unconscious in a minute and dead in two. Then the engine went unstable, coughing twice, quitting, then restarting, but with a violent vibration.
Well, God damn, he thought. Little bastards finally got my ass.
He turned hard again, fighting the wave of unconsciousness that was quietly enveloping his brain as his blood pressure fell toward zero over zero. At least it doesn’t hurt, he mumbled to himself. There was a lot more AA fire now from that cruiser, as well as from a couple of quad batteries on the stern of the big guy.
Doesn’t matter anymore, Mick kept telling himself. Nothing matters anymore.
He felt the right side of his face sagging as he gripped the stick as hard as he could with his good left hand, tugging his wrecked barge through one last turn as his vision tunneled down into a reddish haze.
Maybe I can help that tin can.
More flack hit the Dauntless as he steadied into a shallow dive on the cruiser. The canopy disintegrated in a blizzard of Plexiglas, slashing bits off his helmet. Then the engine positively seized, snapping the prop right off and jerking the nose sideways.
Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Got you now, grape.
He smelled smoke and saw flames rising along the aircraft’s side as more rounds hit.
Bastards, he thought. Tore off my leg and now they want to cook it?
Well, God damn your eyes, eat this.
An instant later he flew eight tons of Dauntless dive bomber into the cruiser’s midships Long Lance torpedo magazine and took them both to glory.
* * *
Marsh couldn’t do anything but watch as Evans’s nemesis emerged from behind the battleship, every one of her guns trained their way. He yelled for everybody else to get down, get down, and was beginning to extricate himself from the captain’s chair when that lone Dauntless dive bomber that had strafed the big guy from ahead appeared out of nowhere, trailing two streams of white smoke, banked clumsily right and down, and flew straight into the approaching cruiser. He hit her just forward of amidships, causing a massive explosion out of all proportion to one eight-ton airplane hitting a thirteen-thousand-ton armored cruiser. Bright white steam immediately erupted out of the cruiser’s stack, and she staggered off to the east, her hull apparently so badly damaged amidships that her masts appeared to be sagging in toward one another. For a moment, anyway, she masked the fire of the other two wolves on Evans’s port quarter. Marsh gasped in relief.
Marsh had forgotten about the Kongo-class battleship, but he hadn’t forgotten about Evans, whose world finally ended as a full salvo of fourteen-inch landed all around and aboard. The ship was whipsawed as the air was filled with an overwhelming roar of fire, smoke, and crashing metal. Evans went way over onto her beam ends with the impacts, coming back upright most reluctantly. To Marsh she felt an awful lot like Winston when she’d decided to give up the ghost. Then something heavy hit him from above and he blacked out.
He awoke to find himself on the buckled deck of the pilothouse, where it was raining. His whole body hurt, and both his eyes were swelling up. He tried hard to figure out this raining-inside-the-pilothouse business, until he realized that the pilothouse overhead was gone, along with Sky One, the primary gun director, the mast, and all the remaining bridge personnel. He tried to get up and then felt a lance of pain flash up his right arm.
Right arm? Can’t be right—it was his foot, not his arm. He spat out a mouthful of saltwater and other things too terrible to comprehend, blinked stinging saltwater out of his eyes several times in order to focus, and realized the deck was no longer level. He looked down at his arm, or what was left of it.
His right hand was gone at the wrist, clipped as clean off as his right foot. This time there was no pharmacist’s mate coming to his aid, and there was plenty of bleeding. His brain told him to tie it off, but, still fuzzy from the shock of the final hits and the morphine, he felt like he was living through a slow-motion nightmare. He finally struggled semiupright and managed to get his web belt off and make a tourniquet. He quickly found out that a
tourniquet is really hard to do with one hand. The bleeding slowed, but he could barely pull the belt tight enough. He wondered how long he’d been out. Then he wondered if it even mattered.
Sitting up now on the battered steel deck of the pilothouse, he could feel the ship getting heavier and heavier. Although she was still on a relatively even keel, she definitely was starting to settle by the stern, and she’d lost most of her forward way. There were no more shells coming in, so he could hear shouts from out on the weather decks. He hadn’t given the order to abandon ship, but apparently someone had, because those who could were going over the side. The sea was probably already lapping at the lifelines.
The interior of the pilothouse was a shambles of bodies, parts of bodies, wrecked steering equipment, fallen cables, steel helmets, and bloody insulation, which the sudden rainsquall was turning into a hideous soup on the deck. Only two men were left standing. Then he looked again. They only appeared to be standing up. They’d both been impaled on the steel ribs of the bridge structure where a big shell had left its entrance hole.
Of all things, his captain’s chair was unscathed, so he pulled himself over, grabbed the footrest with his remaining good hand, and somehow clambered into it. Staring through the gaping row of half-rounds where the bridge windows had been, he could now see the forward part of the ship. “Their” battleship was steaming majestically away, stern pointed at them as her huge guns lofted more monster shells downrange toward the now invisible jeeps. She was still afire aft, though, which gave Marsh some small measure of comfort.
Mount fifty-one, the forward-most five-inch mount, was completely gone, leaving only a round hole where the stump of her barbette protruded a few inches above the forecastle deck. Mount fifty-two was trained almost back at the bridge, with her right side peeled back like a sardine can and her blackened barrel pointing almost straight up. Marsh flinched when he saw the burned, gory wreckage inside the mount. They’d reported running out of ammo as Evans fell out of the shadow of the big battleship, which probably explained why the ship hadn’t been already obliterated by a magazine explosion. Looking at all the damage, Marsh realized that that was a distinction without a difference.
He felt himself leaning back in his chair and then realized that he wasn’t leaning back—the ship was. She was definitely settling by the stern and also beginning to list to port. He took a few deep breaths, rubbed his swollen eyes, and undid the snap on his borrowed battle helmet. He thought about getting out of the chair to see the damage back aft but then asked himself: What did it really matter? In a few minutes Evans and her crew would all be a memory.
He’d felt the hits. Fourteen-inch armor-piercing rounds, they’d gone right through, coming in from astern and some of them ripping their way completely through the ship. They’d torn the life out of Evans. He knew she was a goner. He was very, very tired. With two amputations, there was little point in his going into the water with the remnants of the crew who were going overboard. The ones who did manage to get away wouldn’t need any more bleeding shark bait.
The familiar roar of a boiler’s safety valve opened up as the snipes in two-fireroom dumped steam so that the boilers wouldn’t explode when she went down. Marsh wondered if John Hennessy was still alive. Maybe he’d given the order to abandon ship once he got a look at the pilothouse. I would have, he thought. He no longer had the strength to turn around to see if the passageway down to CIC was still even there. He looked at his remaining hand. Who’s going to take my academy ring back to Sally? he wondered.
The bellow of the dying boiler drowned out whatever noises the men were making now in getting off the ship. He closed his eyes. His right foot throbbed, even though it wasn’t there anymore. His right forearm hurt like hell. He wondered idly if he shouldn’t just relax the tourniquet and be done with this mess. Then he fished out a relatively clean handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped the stump, tying it off with his watchband. The warm rain pelting down on his face felt good, and for the moment it was probably hiding them from those two heavy cruisers. The handkerchief quickly turned bright red.
Part of his exhausted brain was chiding him to do something.
You’re the captain.
No, I’m not. I’m the XO.
You’re supposed to be giving orders and telling people what to do next.
Like what? Come back aboard and keep her afloat?
The simple truth was that there was no need for further orders. Much as in battle itself, if the officers and men had been properly trained, they would know what to do. A loss of communications between the Sky One director and a gun mount didn’t mean the gun mount stopped shooting. Can you see a Jap ship? Shoot at it.
What was it Nelson said back in 1805? No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy. Something like that. Lord Nelson would have approved of Evans this morning. Now that it was over, though, nobody needed captaining.
Suddenly he sensed a shadow to his left. He opened his eyes. The rainsquall was lifting south. One of the Jap heavy cruisers was sliding by, close aboard to port, her alien-looking pagoda superstructure momentarily blotting out the sudden sun.
She was really close, and she was rolling slowly in the underlying deep Pacific swell. One moment he could see her starboard side, the next he could see all the way across her decks. Her topside AA gun crews in their bulky battle dress were pointing at Evans and at the men in the water, now sandwiched between the two ships. Some of them were cheering and probably shouting banzais, although the steam plume was still drowning out all sound. Every one of her eight-inch guns was pointed right at Evans. Marsh winced when he visualized what was about to happen. He could see several of his people down in the water between the two ships trying to get out of the way of the salvo that had to be coming.
Then he noticed something else. Way up on the multilevel pagoda, a single officer was standing out on his starboard bridge wing. He had a battle helmet on and binoculars hanging from his neck, and, of all things, he was wearing white gloves. Marsh tried to sit up in his chair and almost rolled out of it. With Evans’s pilothouse roof ripped completely off, they could look right at each other.
To his amazement, the Japanese officer lifted one of those gloved hands in a formal salute and held it. After a few seconds, Marsh lifted the stump of his right arm and tried to return his salute. A pulse of pain made him drop his arm almost immediately, but Marsh was pretty sure the Japanese officer had seen that bloody handkerchief. The officer followed suit, dropping his hand, nodded or maybe even bowed once, turned around, and went back into his own pilothouse. Then that big black beast settled by the stern and accelerated away, a bright white foaming wake enveloping her fantail as her eight-inch turrets lifted their barrels in perfect unison southeast in search of more promising meat.
Marsh sank back in his chair and wondered if they would move off and then send one of those terrible Long Lance torpedoes into Evans, just to make sure—but as he watched, the cruiser’s side decks erupted into a barrage of antiaircraft gunfire. A flight of planes from one of the jeeps fell out of the sun and swooped down on her. The flow of steam from the after fireroom ebbed suddenly and then stopped with a wet gasp. Marsh could now hear the racket of the Jap cruiser’s secondary battery, thumping away and filling the sky overhead with black puffs, out of which more and more planes seemed to be descending. She was a few thousand yards away and starting to twist and turn as the attack strengthened. He watched in fascination as she went off toward the horizon, trailing some black smoke now and still enveloped in a swarm of attacking planes.
The other Taffy groups must have joined the fight, he thought. Twelve jeep carriers could field over a hundred aircraft of all types. Hopefully the Japs would think Halsey’s big-decks had gotten into the game, not that it was going to make any difference to Evans.
The list to port was increasing. Once again he felt he should be doing something, but he could not focus his brain through the fog of pain. He looked out over the
port side again, where he could see men in the water, gray life jackets concealing their faces in many cases. Most were upright and swimming away from the ship; some were dragging buddies, and some were motionless. A lot of them were clustered around life rafts, which meant that the abandon-ship order had been given in time. A sudden stink of bunker oil invaded the wreckage of the pilothouse. Marsh remembered that smell. A warship, bleeding to death. He hoped the depth charges had been safed.
The depth charges.
Now that was something he could do.
He slid out of the chair and tried to lower himself gently onto the torn deckplates. He didn’t do very well, ending up on his belly, trying to get his breath back and blink the tears out of his eyes after whacking his right arm stump on the footrest. It took him another few minutes to clamber through all the wreckage in the pilothouse and out to what was left of the port bridge wing. He went to port because it was downhill, and that was when he finally got a good look at the rest of the ship. There wasn’t much left to see. There was a single, ominous hole in the port bulkhead down where Combat had been. The lifelines stanchions along the port quarter were already getting their feet wet, so if he was going to do any good, he had to hurry. Now he wished he’d let the gunners back aft have their fun, but Evans would have lost her rudders, too.
Pacific Glory Page 32