Once There Was a War

by John Steinbeck

  The moon lay close to the water at last. In a few minutes it would be dark, deliciously dark, safe and dark. The men stirred about nervously on the silent boat.

  And then across the moon a dark shape moved and then another. “Good God,” the captain said, “there’s a convoy. That’s what the E-boats were for.” A large dark hull moved across the moon. “We’ve got to get to them,” the captain said excitedly.

  “They’ll get us sure,” said the First.

  “No they won’t.” (Three lines deleted by censor.)

  He called his orders softly. The torpedo men moved to their places. The 412 turned silently and slipped toward the passing convoy. There seemed to be ships of all sizes, and the 412 could see them against the sinking moon and they could not see the 412. “That big one,” the captain said. “She must be at least five thousand tons.” He issued his orders and took the wheel himself. Then he swung the boat and called softly, “Fire!” There was a sharp explosive whisk of sound and a splash, and the torpedo was away. He swung again and fired another. And his mouth moved as though he were counting.

  Then without warning the sea and the sky tore to pieces in a vomit of light and a moment later the 412 nearly jumped out of the water. “Run,” the captain shouted. “Run!” And the 412 leaped up on its fantail again and pushed its bow into the air.

  The explosion was gone almost the moment it had started. There wasn’t much of any fire. It just subsided and the water closed over it.

  “Ammunition,” the captain shouted. “Ammunition or high-test gasoline.”

  But the rest of the fleet was not silent. The tracers reached out for the sea, and the rockets, even the flak rockets. The crossfire reached to sea and combed the sea and searched the sea. (One line deleted by censor.) Some time later the captain touched his First’s arm and the First pulled down the boat again. In the distance, as the moon went down, the E-boats were probably beating the ocean looking for the 412 or the submarine or whatever had hit their ship. But the 412 had got away. (One line deleted by censor.) The pitch blackness lay on the water after the moon had gone. Ocean and land and boat were blotted out.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said the captain. “Let’s get on back.”

  A Destroyer

  November 24, 1943—A destroyer is a lovely ship, probably the nicest fighting ship of all. Battleships are a little like steel cities or great factories of destruction. Aircraft carriers are floating flying fields. Even cruisers are big pieces of machinery, but a destroyer is all boat. In the beautiful clean lines of her, in her speed and roughness, in her curious gallantry, she is completely a ship, in the old sense.

  For one thing, a destroyer is small enough so that her captain knows his whole crew personally, knows all about each one as a person, his first name and his children and the trouble he has been in and is capable of getting into. There is an ease on a destroyer that is good and a good relationship among the men. Then if she has a good captain you have something really worth serving on.

  The battleships are held back for a killing blow, and such a blow sometimes happens only once in a war. The cruisers go in second, but the destroyers work all the time. They are probably the busiest ships of a fleet. In a major engagement, they do the scouting and make the first contact. They convoy, they run to every fight. Wherever there is a mess, the destroyers run first. They are not lordly like the battleships, nor episcopal like the cruisers. Most of all they are ships and the men who work them are seamen. In rough weather they are rough, honestly and violently rough.

  A destroyerman is never bored in wartime, for a destroyer is a seaman’s ship. She can get under way at the drop of a hat. The water under a fantail boils like Niagara. She will go rippling along at thirty-five knots with the spray sheeting over her and she will turn and fight and run, drop depth charges, bombard, and ram. She is expendable and dangerous. And because she is all these things, a destroyer’s crew is passionately possessive. Every man knows his ship, every inch of it, not just his own station.

  The destroyer X is just such a ship. She has done many thousands of miles since the war started. She has been bombed and torpedoes have gone under her bow. She has convoyed and fought. Her captain is a young, dark-haired man and his executive officer looks like a blond undergraduate. The ship is immaculate. The engines are polished and painted and shined.

  She is a fairly new ship, the X, commissioned fifteen months ago. She bombarded at Casablanca and Gela and Salerno and she has captured islands. Her officers naturally would like to go to larger ships because there is more rank to be had on them, but no destroyerman would rather sail on anything else.

  The destroyer X is a personal ship and a personality. She is worked quietly. No one ever raises his voice. The captain is soft-spoken and so is everyone else. Orders are given in the same low tone as requests for salt in the wardroom. The discipline is exact and punctilious but it seems to be almost mutually enforced, not from above. The captain will say, “So many men have shore leave. The first man who comes back drunk removes shore liberty for everyone.” It is very simple. The crew would discipline anyone who jeopardized the liberty of the whole ship. So they come back in good shape and on time. The X has very few brig cases.

  When the X is in a combat area she never relaxes. The men sleep in their clothes. The irritating blatting sound which means “action stations” is designed to break through sleep. It sounds like the braying of some metallic mule, and the reaction to it is instant. There is a scurrying of feet in the passageways and the clatter of feet on the ladders and in a few seconds the X is bristling with manned and waiting guns, AAs that peer at the sky and the five-inch guns which can fire at the sky too.

  The crouched and helmeted men can get to their stations in less than a minute. There is no hurry or fuss. They have done it hundreds of times. And then a soft-spoken word from the bridge into a telephone will turn the X into a fire-breathing dragon. She can throw tons of steel in a very short time.

  One of the strangest things is to see her big guns when they go on automatic control. They are aimed and fired from the bridge. The turret and the guns have been heavy dead metal and suddenly they become alive. The turret whips around but it is the guns themselves that seem to live. They balance and quiver almost as though they were sniffing the air. They tremble like the antennae of an insect, listening or smelling the target. Suddenly they set and instantly there is a belch of sound and the shells float away. The tracers seem to float interminably before they hit. And before the shells have struck, the guns are trembling and reaching again. They are like rattlesnakes poising to strike, and they really do seem to be alive. It is a frightening thing to see.

  A Ragged Crew

  December 1, 1943—When the plans were being made to capture a German radar station on an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, forty American paratroopers were assigned to do the job, forty men and three officers. They came to the naval station from somewhere in Africa. They didn’t say where. They came in the night sometime, and in the morning they were bedded down in a Nissen hut, a hard and ragged crew. Their uniforms were not the new and delightful affairs of the posters. The jackets, with all the pockets, and the coarse canvas trousers had been washed so often and dried in the hot sun that they had turned nearly white, and they were ragged at the edges.

  The officers, two lieutenants and a captain, were dressed in no way different from their men, and they had been months without their insignia of rank. The captain had two strips of adhesive tape stuck on his shoulders, to show that he was a captain at all, and one of his lieutenants had one strip of adhesive, while the second lieutenant had sewed a piece of yellow cloth on his shoulders for his rank. They had been ten months in the desert, and there was no place to buy the pretty little bars to wear on their shoulders. They had not jumped from a plane since they had finished their training in the United States, but the rigid, hard training of their bodies had gone right on in the desert.

  There had been no luxuries for these me
n, either. Sometimes the cigarettes ran out, and they just didn’t have any. They had often lived on field rations for weeks at a time, and they had long forgotten what it was like to sleep in a bed, even a cot. They had all looked somewhat alike, and perhaps this is the characteristic look of the paratrooper. The eyes were very wide set, and mostly they were either gray or blue. The hair was cropped, almost shaved, giving their heads a curious egg look. Their ears seemed to stick straight out from their heads, perhaps because all their hair was cut off. Their skins were burned almost black by the desert sun, which made their eyes and their teeth seem very light, and their lips were ragged and rough from months of the sun.

  The strangest thing about them was their quietness and their almost shy good manners. Their voices were so soft that you could barely hear them, and they were extremely courteous. The officers gave their orders almost under their breaths, and there was none of the stiffness of ordinary military discipline. It was almost as though they all thought alike so that few orders were necessary at all. When something was to be done, the moving or loading of their own supplies, for instance, they worked like parts of a machine, and no one seemed to move quickly, but there was no waste movement and the work was done with incredible speed. They did not waste time saluting. A man saluted his officer only when he spoke to him or was spoken to.

  These paratroopers had as little equipment as you can imagine. There were some rifles, some tommy guns, and the officers had the new carbines. In addition, each man had a knife and four hand grenades, painted yellow, but they had had their grenades so long that the yellow paint was just about worn off. The rifles had been polished and cleaned so long and so often that the black coating was worn off in places and the bright metal shone through. The little American flags they wore on their shoulders were pale from sunburn and from the washing of their clothes. There was no excess equipment of any kind. They had what they wore, and they could carry. And for some reason they gave the impression of great efficiency.

  In the morning their officers came into the conference to be instructed in the nature of the action. They filed in shyly and took their places at the long, rough table. The naval men distributed maps and the action was described in detail, part of it on a large blackboard that was set up against a wall.

  The island was Ventotene, and there was a radar station on it which searched the whole ocean north and south of Naples. The radar was German, but it was thought that there were very few Germans. There were two or three hundred carabinieri there, however, and it was not known whether they would fight or not. Also, there were a number of political prisoners on the island who were to be released, and the island was to be held by these same paratroopers until a body of troops could be put ashore.

  The three officers regarded the blackboard with their wide-set eyes, and now and then they glanced quietly at one another. When the discussion was finished the naval captain said, “Do you understand? Are there any questions?”

  The captain of paratroopers studied the board with the map of the island, and he asked softly, “Any artillery?”

  “Yes, there are some coastal guns, but if they use them we’ll get them with naval guns.”

  “Oh! Yes, I see. Well, I hope the Italians don’t do anything bad. I mean I hope they don’t shoot at us.” His voice was very shy.

  A naval officer said jokingly, “Don’t your men want to fight?”

  “It isn’t that,” the captain said. “We’ve been a long time in the desert. My men are pretty trigger happy. They might be very rough if anybody shoots at them.”

  The meeting broke up and the Navy invited the paratroopers to lunch in the Navy mess.

  “If you’ll excuse us,” the captain said, “I think we’ll get back to the men. They’ll want to know what we’re going to do. I’ll just take this map along and explain it to them.” He paused apologetically and added, “You see, they’ll want to know.” The three officers got up from the table and went out. Their men were in the Nissen hut. The ragged captain and his lieutenants walked across the street, blinding in the white sunlight, and they went inside the Nissen hut and closed the door. They stayed a long time in there, explaining the action to the forty men.

  Ventotene

  December 3, 1943—The units of the naval task force made their rendezvous at sea and at dusk and made up their formation and set off at calculated speed to be at the island of Ventotene at moonset. Their mission was to capture the island and to take the German radar which was there. The moon was very large and it was not desirable that the people on the island should know what force was coming against them, consequently the attack was not to be attempted until the darkness came. The force spread out in its traveling formation and moved slowly over the calm sea.

  On a destroyer of the force, the paratroopers who were to make the assault sat on the deck and watched the moon. They seemed a little uneasy. After being trained to drop in from the sky their first action was to be a seagoing one. Perhaps their sense of fitness was outraged.

  All along the Italian coast the air force was raiding. The naval force could see the flares parachuting down and the burst of explosives and the lines of tracers off to the right. But the coast was kept too busy for anyone to bother with the little naval force heading northward.

  The timing was exact. The moon turned very red before it set, and just as it set the high hump of the island showed against its face. And the moment it had set the darkness was thick so that you could not see the man standing at your shoulder. There were no lights on the island at all. This island had been blacked out for three years. When the naval force had taken its positions a small boat equipped with a loudspeaker crept in toward the beach. From five hundred yards off shore it beamed its loudspeaker on the darkened town and a terrible voice called its proclamation.

  “Italians,” it said, “you must now surrender. We have come in force. Your German ally has deserted you. You have fifteen minutes to surrender. Display three white lights for surrender. At the end of fifteen minutes we will open fire. This will be repeated once more.” The announcement was made once more—“. . . three white lights for surrender.” And then the night was silent.

  On the bridge of a destroyer the officers peered at the darkness in the direction of the island. At the ship’s rails the men looked off into the darkness. The executive officer kept looking at his wrist watch and the night was so dark that the illuminated dial could be seen six feet away. Gun control had the firing data ready. The guns of the whole force were trained on the island. And the minutes went slowly. No one wanted to fire on the town, to turn the concentrated destruction of high explosive on the dark island. But the minutes dragged interminably on, ten— eleven—twelve. The green, glowing hands moved on the face of the wrist watch. The captain spoke a word into his phone, and there was a rustle and the door of the plotting room opened for a moment and then closed.

  And then, as the minute hand crawled over fourteen minutes, three white rockets went up from the island. They flowed upward and curved lazily over and fell back. And then, not content, three more went up. The captain sighed with relief and spoke again into his phone. And the whole ship seemed to relax.

  In the wardroom the commodore of the task force sat at the head of the table. He was dressed in khaki, his shirt open at the throat and his sleeves rolled up. He wore a helmet, and a tommy gun lay on the table in front of him. “I’ll go in and take the surrender, ” he said, and he called the names of five men to go with him. “The paratroopers are to come in as soon as you can get them in the landing boat,” he said to the executive officer. “Lower the whaleboat.”

  The deck was very dark. You had to feel your way along. The boat davits were swung out as they always are in action, and now a crew was lowering the whaleboat. They held it at deck level for the men to get in—a coxswain and an engineer were already in the boat. Five officers, armed with sub-machine guns clambered over the rail and settled themselves. Each man had a drum of bullets on his gun and each one wore a
pouch which carried another drum. The boat lowered away, and just as it touched the water the engineer started the engine. The boat cast off and turned toward the shore. It was pretty much of a job of guess work because you could not see the shore. The commodore said, “We’ve got to get in and disarm them before they change their minds. Can’t tell what they’ll do if we give them time.” And he said to his men, “Don’t take any chances. Open fire if anyone shows the slightest sign of resisting.”

  The boat slipped toward the dark shore, her motors muffled and quiet.

  December 6, 1943—There are times when the element of luck is so sharply involved in an action that a sense of dread sets in afterward. And such was the invasion of the island of Ventotene by five men in a whaleboat. They knew that there was a German radar crew on the island, but they did not know that it numbered eighty-seven men, all heavily armed, and moreover heavily armed with machine guns. They did not know that this crew had ammunition and food stored to last six weeks. All the men in the whaleboat did know was that the Italians had put up three white flares in the night as a token of surrender.

  The main harbor of Ventotene is a narrow inlet that ends against a cliff like an amphitheater, and on this semicircular cliff the town stands high above the water. To the left of this inlet there is a pier and a little breakwater, unconnected with the land and designed to keep the swells from breaking on the pier, and finally to the left of the pier there is another inlet very like the true harbor, which, however, is no harbor at all.

  The whaleboat with the five men in it approached the dark island and when it was close to the shore the commander shone a flashlight quickly and it showed a deep inlet. Naturally, he thought this was a harbor, and the little boat coasted easily into it. Then the light flashed on again and ranged about, only to discover that this was not the true harbor at all but the false inlet.