* * *
The day of the Punchbowl ceremony dawned bright and clear. They were all bused out from downtown Honolulu in those familiar gray Navy buses, and once there, the wheelchair brigade got front row seats. Because the president was going to be there, all of them had to be on deck one hour early. Nobody seemed to mind very much. The Punchbowl, which actually he’d never seen in all his years there in Hawaii, was gorgeous. The ancient Hawaiians had thought so, too, because the name of the crater translated roughly to “hill of honor or sacrifice.” In many ways, some of them pretty old, it was already consecrated ground. He wondered as they waited if, by taking it over for a cemetery, the haoles weren’t breaking some more big kapus.
Sally must have known that he would have a hard time with what was coming, because she held his hand from the moment they sat down to listen to the Pacific Fleet band play. Marsh kept his eyes straight ahead and tried to just listen to the music. A few minutes before the official party was scheduled to arrive, a Navy captain went up to the podium and explained the protocol for the presidential visit. The band would play ruffles and flourishes appropriate for the president and then “Hail to the Chief.” Everyone would be requested to stand for the honors. Then he looked down at the line of wheelchairs. “If you can, that is,” he said with a smile. “If not, I’m very sure the president will understand.”
After the official party was seated there would be an invocation, followed by the president’s remarks. Then, he said, there would be a brief awards ceremony.
That surprised Marsh. Most of the vets present were already wearing their medals and decorations, especially among the wheelchair-bound. Marsh hadn’t brought any of his since he was going to be in civvies. He looked around at the battered crowd and wondered who was going to get a medal. Then the band sounded off, the guns banged out the salute to the head of state, and there he was, his back ramrod straight, wearing a white suit with his trademark bow tie and those round glasses twinkling in the sunlight. Behind him came Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz himself. Marsh smiled. For the Navy people attending, it was an honor to be present at a ceremony that included the president of the United States, but Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz? That was like a god stopping by.
Truman’s speech was short and utterly to the point. If ever they had a president who did not indulge in BS, here he was, Marsh thought. When he was finished they all gave him a big hand, although some of them, like Marsh, had to settle for banging claws on their wheelchairs. He’d said the right things, and he’d obviously meant them. Marsh was proud of him.
Then Admiral Nimitz got up and took the podium. He looked unchanged since the war, at least from the pictures Marsh had seen of him both during and afterward. I never did get that personal audience with him, he reminded himself. A silence built as Nimitz stood there and rustled some papers on the podium as if he were waiting for something. Then he looked behind the audience and nodded. At what? Marsh wondered. Sally gripped his hand harder. Then two very large Marines appeared in front of Marsh, came to attention, saluted him, and asked if they could move his chair.
“Oh, of course,” Marsh said, anxious to get out of the way of whoever was going center stage. He looked left to Sally, whose eyes were for some reason brimming. Then the Marines took charge, as is their wont, and now Marsh was being rolled across the front row and then up onto the stage itself, where the principals were all getting up. Even then, he had no idea of what was coming. He looked anxiously for Sally but couldn’t see her, and suddenly he was afraid again. One of the Marines must have sensed it, because a big warm paw landed discreetly on his left shoulder and patted it twice.
They parked him in front of Mr. Truman, who was already standing. The stage and the audience became still. He could hear the flags fluttering and a tropic breeze swishing through the grass along the sides of the Punchbowl. Mr. Truman was looking down at him with a strangely sympathetic gaze. He had a black box in his hand, and finally Marsh understood what was coming. He felt the blood drain out of his face, and only that big warm hand on his shoulder kept him steady in the chair. Now he understood why Sally had insisted they come back to Hawaii. She’d been told.
“In the name of the Congress of the United States of America and a grateful nation,” Truman began, “I hereby present the Congressional Medal of Honor to Commander Marshall Stearns Vincent, United States Navy, Retired, for heroic service and personal valor above and beyond the call of duty as set forth in the following citation.”
As he read out the citation Marsh’s ears began to hum. He didn’t hear a word of it. What he could hear was the cries of his sailors in the dark as the sharks bore in. Once again he saw the rabbi, kneeling on the 01 level on broken legs as the ship began her death roll, his eyes bleeding down his face like Indian war paint, ministering to a man who was already dead. Or the torpedo officer and his talker, who he had thought were still alive, when in fact they had been nailed to the pilothouse bulkhead by a fourteen-inch shell. Or Beast McCarty in his plane with the rearing white horse on the side, turning lazily, almost casually back toward that cruiser that was shooting his Dauntless to pieces and then swooping down like Nemesis herself to break that ship in half. Or Glory Lewis, the bright light of despair in those beautiful eyes, sitting on the front porch of the nurses’ quarters, ashamed of herself as a woman could ever be.
Then Harry Truman was bending down, talking to him. Marsh shook his head, trying to silence all those ghosts and clear his eyes.
“I know exactly what you are seeing,” he said, so quietly Marsh didn’t think anyone but the two Marines holding him up could hear him.
“You’re seeing everyone who never came back and who will never come back,” he said, “and that’s what you should be seeing. You do not ‘win’ the Medal of Honor. You hold it, and you hold it sacred to the memory of everyone who was with you, the quick and the dead. If you did not weep, you would not be human. If it’s any comfort, I still grieve, for all of them, and for all of you. From the United States Congress, and from a grateful nation, our profound thanks.”
These kind words from a man who had implacably loosed the fires of the sun itself against two Japanese cities, and who reportedly did not agonize over making that decision for more than ten minutes.
“Yes, sir,” Marsh whispered. “I understand. Thank you.”
Truman nodded once, then draped the medal pendant over Marsh’s head and down onto his chest. Then he stood back and held his hand over his heart as the Navy band broke into “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” The only thing Marsh was conscious of for the next few minutes was that Marine’s strong hand, without which, he felt, he would have dissolved into thin air.
It was only much later he realized that he still never did get to meet Chester Nimitz. Sally told him that was all right. It had been Nimitz who’d put him up for the Medal of Honor, she said, and he was never one to intrude on someone else’s moment in the limelight.
* * *
Nautical twilight was just ending when I finished my tale. My son who was not my son sat in his deck chair, his eyes owl-like and unfathomable. Over on the naval station, a destroyer tested its whistle in preparation for getting under way. The sound carried across the harbor, stirring the sleeping pelicans on their begrimed battleship moorings.
“Got any coffee in there?” I asked, mostly to break the silence.
He nodded absently, then realized that I wanted him to brew some.
“Right,” he said. “Coming right up.”
He stood up, stretched, and then looked back at me. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I feel like—oh, hell, I don’t know what I feel like.”
“You go make us some coffee,” I said. “I’ll get us under way. We have one last thing to do.”
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see,” I said. He frowned again.
“It’ll be okay,” I said.
I clumped up into the bridge area, air-purged the engine compartment, and then lit off the mains. Onc
e they were rumbling happily, I began to bring up the anchor. The boat eased out in the direction of the hook. Across the harbor, that destroyer let out one long and then three short blasts on her whistle as she began to back away from the pier. There were a dozen gray shapes over there on the destroyer piers, all topped with red aviation warning lights, but one suddenly began to separate from the others.
After a few minutes my son brought up two mugs of coffee, one for me and one for himself.
“Where to?” he said.
“Over there,” I said, pointing with my chin at the Arizona Memorial. “There’s something I have to do. We have to do.”
“I’ve brought countless visitors to that memorial,” he said. “Everyone who comes out here wants to see it. Now you’re telling me that my mother is buried there?”
I nodded. The anchor broke ground with a shudder in the chain, and I slipped the boat into forward drive. Since the sun had not yet risen, my son reached over and switched on the running lights.
We drove forward in silence at idle speed toward the white, bridge-like memorial. I could feel his apprehension, but I had none. I’d done my duty and told him the story. It was all so very long ago and well burned out of me, or so I told myself, anyway. Sally knew that my coming out here now, after all these years, to tell our son the truth was being done as much for my sake as his. I thanked God she had the strength to let me do this, even as I told myself that it was all for him.
We drew abreast of the landing on the harbor side of the memorial. The water still shone with the surrounding shore lights. There was nothing to be seen of the sleeping battleship. She’d settled over the years as her bones, both human and steel, disintegrated. I put the boat in neutral, and we coasted along what would have been her port side. The gates to the memorial were closed at the top of the pontoon ramp. The two obstruction buoys winked at us in their measured sequence: Something’s here, something’s here. Bear away.
I turned to face the memorial, took my son’s hand, and recited the following words as we drifted by her tomb:
Full fathom five thy mother lies;
Of her bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were her eyes;
Nothing of her that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring her knell.
Our wake caught up to one of the buoys and set it in motion. Its bell complained, allowing me to finish.
Hark! now I hear them.
I turned to him with brimming eyes and squeezed his hand.
“And her name was Glory,” I said.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
I first heard the story of the destroyer fight at Leyte Gulf from my father, who was a destroyer division commander in Halsey’s fast carrier task force when the battle occurred. He was Naval Academy class of 1927 and rose to the rank of vice admiral before retiring after forty-two years’ service. Like many officers of his vintage, he had strong opinions about the battle, and the debates about Leyte probably go on until this day.
As a midshipman I studied the battle in my first-class (senior) year at the Naval Academy in 1963. I can remember voicing some of my father’s opinions on what happened to our professor, E. B Potter (professor emeritus of history at the academy and biographer of Nimitz, Halsey, and Burke) and being taken to task by him for uttering various heresies. The way I saw it, though, Pop had been out there when it happened, so I thought his version was more likely to be accurate.
When my first destroyer visited San Francisco in 1964, I learned that Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz lived in the big quarters up on the hill on Treasure Island, where my ship was tied up. My dad had told me that if I ever got the chance to meet him, make sure I did. So I called the quarters and told his aide that I was Ensign Deutermann and that I’d like to make a formal five-minute call and that Admiral Nimitz might remember my father. The aide was probably so astonished by this request that he forgot to say no. An hour later I showed up in my best uniform, calling cards in hand, to pay my respects to the admiral who had overseen victory in the Pacific.
Nimitz looked just like every picture I’d ever seen of him except perhaps grayer: I didn’t know the meaning of the word “gravitas” then, but afterward I did. He solemnly bade me sit down. A steward brought coffee, which I tried hard to keep from spilling. The admiral told me a story about my dad that I hadn’t heard and then inquired if I had any questions for him. I asked him what had been the Navy’s most glorious battle of the Pacific war.
Only an ensign would ask such a question, especially the “glorious” part, but he was nothing if not a kind man. He said there were two that came to mind: Midway and Samar, which is another name for what happened that day off Leyte when the destroyers took on the IJN Yamato and her consorts. Midway was almost a given, but I then asked how such a thing as Samar could have happened. His aide, aghast at my impertinence, stiffened in his chair, and I scrambled to take back my question, but Nimitz just waved me silent with an imperial hand.
“Don’t ever make assumptions,” he said, somewhat sadly. “I made an assumption, and that’s how Samar happened.”
He didn’t say: Bill Halsey screwed it up. He was saying: I screwed it up. Such was the moral serenity of C. W. Nimitz, and I never forgot it, or his advice about making assumptions.
I wrote this book because I’ve always wondered what it would have been like to do what they did that day. Having been a destroyer skipper and, later, a destroyer squadron commander, I’ve often wondered what I would have seen, heard, and, most importantly, done when the orders came to go drive off those approaching Japanese battleships, and eighteen-inch shells began to fall around my ship.
I chose in some cases to invent ships’ names, such as Winston, so as not to tread on the ordeals of the real ships and their officers and enlisted men. Once I did that, I then had to take some liberties with the real history in terms of precisely when and where things happened. After refreshing my own knowledge from more recent works than were available in 1963, I concluded that the pilots from the little jeep carriers played just as important a role in making the Japanese admiral blink as the destroyers had. Some historians/authors take the position that the planes were actually the decisive element, leading Admiral Kurita to conclude that Halsey’s fleet-carrier formations, by which his forces had already been savaged while approaching Leyte, were right over the horizon. That might be true, but it wasn’t the airplanes that made Kurita turn his flagship away in the middle of the fight and effectively out of the action—it was the threat of the destroyers’ torpedoes.
Kurita was embarked on the battleship Yamato, sister ship of Musashi. These two behemoths were the biggest battleships ever built. Admiral Kurita had been promised that he would be supported from airfields on Luzon. No such support ever materialized. Having watched American carrier pilots destroy Musashi a day before he came through the San Bernardino Strait to surprise the Taffys, I think he decided to get out of there while he still could once that increasingly hostile aluminum overcast began to form over his head. This persuaded me to write in the character of Mick “Beast” McCarty to tell the story of what the jeep aviators did on that terrifying morning. Beast ended up grabbing a bigger role in this book than I’d anticipated, but that’s the nature of carrier aviators, God love ’em.
For a general appreciation of what happened at Leyte, I recommend four books, two of which are recent. The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, by James D. Hornfischer, is an outstanding blow-by-blow description of what happened to the destroyers. Sea of Thunder, by Evan Thomas, expands on this story by folding in the Japanese view of the battle as well as Admiral Halsey’s. Thomas Cutler’s 1994 book, The Battle of Leyte Gulf, has an extensive bibliography if you want to gain an expert’s understanding of the battle. And, of course, there’s always Theodore Roscoe’s 1953 classic, United States Destroyer Operations in World War II, a book I read and re-read a hundred times as a teenager in a N
avy family.
All that said, I must beg the indulgence of both the professional and amateur historians who will undoubtedly harrumph when they see some of the historical distortions I’ve introduced in this story. For instance, in Pearl I’ve made it sound like the hospital, the base O-club, and the BOQ were all close together. In fact, Hospital Point is part of the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and not really near the O-club or the BOQ. (The hospital is long gone.) I have the Punchbowl cemetery being finished in 1948—that actually happened in 1949. Marsh Vincent’s ship, Evans, I named for the skipper of the USS Johnston, Commander E. E. Evans, USN. USS Johnston was one of the destroyers that went down off Samar after a gun duel with a battleship. Commander Evans was of Cherokee extraction, and he won the Medal of Honor for his gallantry that day. Posthumously. There was no USS Evans in those days, because the last U.S. Navy ship of that name had been “lent” to England at the start of the war under the Lend-Lease program.
It may also interest the reader to know that there are over two dozen Navy vets whose ashes have been interred within the hulk of Arizona since her destruction on December 7, 1941. The Navy has a policy that anyone who survived the attack on that ship may be interred inside her when the time comes. Men who were otherwise veterans of Arizona but not aboard that dreadful Sunday may have their ashes scattered over the sunken hulk.
Having finished the book, I still wonder if I would have had the guts to do what those captains did that day, especially Commander Evans, whose decision to turn again into the fight committed his already crippled ship, his battered crew, and himself to just about certain destruction. I’ve concluded, after twenty-six years in the Navy and three commands, that one simply cannot know until the time comes and the elephant rises over the horizon.
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