Sentinels of Fire (10 page)

I wondered how many of the ship's officers had been lost. The captain, watching the gun boss conduct the landing maneuver from his chair, noted that neither the Union Jack nor the American flag was flying anywhere on the ship, which meant they were going to simply scrap her. “They'll salvage whatever they can in the way of critical parts,” he said, “then tow her out of here and open all four main spaces to the sea.”

Just like that, I thought. An entire ship. I wondered who'd made that decision.

Jimmy Enright made an interesting point. “There's a waveguide on that mast over there,” he said. “We only need about ten, fifteen feet of good metal. We need to tell the ServRon Ten people that, before they…”

“Good call, Jimmy,” the captain said. “Take that for action.”

Once the ship was moored alongside the tender, a gangway was lifted by one of her cranes down to the forward camel between the ships and then positioned on
Malloy
's starboard side. Then our accommodation ladder was lowered to the camel as well. The camel, a fifty-foot-long bundle of telephone poles wrapped in old rubber tires, was tied up between the ships to prevent them from rubbing against each other. A small parade of men came down from the tender, across the planks on top of the camel, and then up the accommodation ladder to our main deck. These were the repair superintendents and the various shop planners who would meet with the ship's department heads to determine what work would actually be done.
Malloy
wasn't alongside for a normal, two-week-long repair availability, just long enough to get our radar working again and the base of the mast reinforced. That didn't mean that
Malloy
's department heads wouldn't be trying to cadge as much other repair work on balky pumps, shorted electric motors, leaking steam valves, etc., as they could. Beyond the formal repair requests, individual sailors from
Malloy
's divisions would be sent on board the tender to cumshaw whatever goodies they could from trade-minded crew members. Apparently, a brass five-inch powder case, which could be cut down on a lathe to make a fine ashtray, would “buy” the most amazing things aboard a tender.

I assembled the department heads in the wardroom for the initial meeting with the senior repair superintendent, who was known as the ship's supe. The captain joined us once everyone was there.

“Captain Tallmadge, I'm Lieutenant Commander Weems from ServRon Ten,” the supe said. “Our orders are to get your waveguide repaired, the mast stabilized, and then to get you out of here as soon as possible and back on station. Admiral Chase wants all of that done in twenty-four hours.”

“Understood,” the captain said. “Do you have a replacement waveguide?”

“We do now,” the supe said.

“
Waltham
's?”

“Yes, sir,” the supe said. “She's been struck. We have a stripping crew on board, and it looks like there's about thirty feet of good waveguide left. We'll make a splice onto your system. We need to inspect the base of your mast to see how much shipfitter work needs to be done.”

“Okay,” the captain said. “Does that mean no emergent work?”

The supe smiled. “Your guys can try, Skipper. Officially, no, but…” Our department heads all knew the game, and apparently, the less said, the better.

“Then we're done here,” the captain said. “My department heads will help your people make it all happen.”

“My shop supervisors are already on board,” the supe said. “They're waiting outside.”

The captain nodded at the four department heads, who got up and filed out. The ship's supe remained at the table.

“How bad was it on
Waltham
?” the captain asked.

“Very,” Weems said. “CO, XO, three of four department heads, nine other officers killed, and fifty-seven others missing and presumed lost. A hundred more wounded. Two kamis came at the same time. One did the front end, the other got into the after fire room. Both were carrying bombs, from the look of it. The after-fire-room hit broke main steam lines in both engine rooms. Basically, all the main-hole snipes except for One Fire Room are gone. She's well and truly wrecked, so she's worth more as a spare-parts locker than a fighting ship. Plus, that crew will have to be disbanded—the ones who can are all walking around in shock. There are an unknown number of bodies down in the main spaces, and they're going to go down with her.”

“Great God,” the captain said, his face ashen. “I guess we were just lucky.”

“They told us you pulled the bomb off with a sea anchor?”

The captain told the story. Then I asked if twenty-four hours was a reasonable objective.

“You don't want to be here any longer than necessary, XO,” Weems said. “The kamis still attack this anchorage—we're all sitting ducks, when you think about it. All our gun mounts are manned day and night, and we'll need you to keep your forties and at least one five-inch mount ready at all times. Besides, your damage is minor, so they want that radar fixed and then you back on station. Oh, and the commodores will expect a call.”

Commodores, plural? Weems saw my expression. “The ServRon Ten commodore, Captain McMichaels, is embarked here in
Piedmont,
and your own squad dog, Captain Van Arnhem, is also embarked. Our poor skipper is camping out in his sea cabin for the moment. I believe your squadron commander is going to shift his burgee to the
Dixie
as soon as she arrives from Pearl. In the meantime, we've got ourselves a great sufficiency of four-stripers.”

“Right,” the captain said. “XO, I guess we'll need to make two calls. ServRon Ten is senior, so he's first. Then we'll go see Dutch Van Arnhem, my boss. He'll understand. Mister Weems, thank you, and we'll let you get going. Any hiccups, don't hesitate to come straight to me or the XO here.”

“Thank you, sir. One more thing—if any of your people can spare some blood, we're in short supply on the hospital deck. It's a bloody mess over there on the main island. If half the stories we're hearing are true, it's black-flag time over there.”

Kerama Retto was about twelve miles away from Okinawa, but even now, here in the wardroom, we could all could hear the thump of bombs, the thud of artillery, and the occasional deep rumble of battleship salvos.

There was a knock on the wardroom door. The quarterdeck messenger, a deck seaman, came in, escorting a chief petty officer. “Chief Winant from the EOD to see the captain, sir,” the messenger announced.

“Sorry, Skipper,” the chief said. “I can come back if you're in a meeting.”

“Come on in, Chief,” the captain said. “We're just swapping scuttlebutt here. Coffee's over there, and then come have a seat.”

The chief's face didn't look to be more than thirty, but his hair was entirely gray and he moved with the care of a man who does dangerous work, in his case explosive ordnance disposal. He got himself a cup, and sat down at the junior end of the wardroom table.

“I heard a pretty interesting story this morning, Skipper,” the chief said. “Something about using a sea-anchor to pull a Jap 250 off your signal bridge?”

“We did ask for EOD assist,” I said, “but apparently your team had bigger fish to fry down here.”

The chief grunted. “You might say that, XO,” he said. “Yesterday was about as bad as the day the
Franklin
got it, and I was onboard for that ordeal.”

Mention of the
Franklin
holocaust was jarring, even more so because I'd been serving in her for over eighteen months, and I'd never seen this chief's face.

“Yeah, we heard about that one,” the captain said. “Were there really seven hundred
killed
?”

“They'll be revising that number all the way home, sir,” the chief said. “We hear there are still parts of the ship they haven't been able to get into yet. Personally, I think she's headed for the scrapyard. Then yesterday, we went aboard the new
Yorktown
to defuse two five-hundred-pounders.”

“Well, that certainly qualifies as a bigger fish,” the captain said. “Our gun boss had had a class on how aircraft bombs are armed.” He went on to tell the chief how they'd “safed” the bomb before yanking it off the 03 level. The chief smiled when he heard the story about the monkey shit.

“You guys were lucky beyond belief,” he said. “Your gun boss was correct about the little propellers, but those bombs were never meant to be dropped. They were supposed to hit the ship at the same time as the kami.”

“Which means?” I asked.

“Which means those kamikaze bombs are fully armed in flight. The arming lanyard had been pulled out manually somewhere south of Kyushu. I can't imagine why it didn't go off, especially when you shocked it again with the sea anchor.”

That revelation produced a chilled moment of silence in the wardroom.

“But they said there was no firing pin visible on the front end,” I said.

“There isn't one for the kami bombs. They're fired by setback. The pin's inside a tube. The bomb experiences a gazillion-g deceleration when it hits the side of a ship. That little pin slams forward in its tube to complete an electrical circuit, which fires the initiator, which fires the main explosive charge, all in about one heartbeat. Like I said, lucky beyond belief.”

“And if it happens again?” the captain asked.

“Believe it or not, you'd have been better off bringing it down to us,” the chief said. “One of us has to get inside the safing and arming compartment of the bomb, get by the anti-intrusion traps, find and disable the battery bus and
then
immobilize that pin and any backup exploders. Not for the faint of heart, gentlemen.”

“I'll pass that on, Chief,” the captain said. “On the other hand, would you care to go back to the picket line with us?”

“The radar picket line, Captain? Begging your pardon, sir, but hell, no. That's really dangerous duty.”

We all laughed and then set about our day. Marty will shit a brick when I tell him the truth about his great monkey-shit gambit, I thought.

I was grudgingly getting used to the tin can Navy and its propensity to wing it when something had to be done and done right now. That was a trait I'd brought to my first couple of assignments, and more than once it had put me across the breakers with my department head. In the prewar cruiser Navy, appearances were everything, and junior officer initiative not much in demand. It took me some time to conform, and I think my own upbringing had a lot to do with that. My father was one of those parents who let their kids learn the hard way if the opportunity presented itself. He was an intellectual, somewhat aloof, deeply immersed in his work, about which I had no inkling while I was growing up. My mother—very pretty, very sweet, they never saw her coming—would sit down with me to analyze what I'd done to get in so much trouble as a child, and then encourage me to do better the next time but never to quit trying out new things. Now, as a junior lieutenant commander, I was exec in a destroyer, and I knew they'd be very proud. If I lived to tell the tale.

*   *   *

The next morning we sailed out of the fleet anchorage at just past sunrise. The tender repair people had done an amazing job of reconstructing the ship's radar waveguide and reinforcing the mast's foundations.
Malloy
's crew had done an equally amazing job of “midnight requisitioning” aboard the destroyer tender. As we reached the entrance to the anchorage I was surprised to see two large aircraft carriers anchored close by, one of them showing clear signs of having experienced a large fire on her port side aft. Landing craft and small boats were shuttling between a heavily laden ammunition ship and the carriers, while up on the flight decks, fighters were turning up in the still morning air. Columns of smoke in the distance indicated that another horrible day was well under way over on Okinawa Shima.

Motivated by tales of dawn kamikaze attacks on the anchored ships, the captain ordered 25 knots as soon as we cleared the anchorage and headed back northwest. We were bound to a new vacant radar picket station, forty-five miles north and west, named Three-Dog. We had gone out in a modified general quarters condition, with all guns and CIC stations manned but the ship not yet buttoned up. As Okinawa's smoking ridges subsided beneath the southeastern horizon, the captain summoned me out to the bridge.

“Wanted to debrief you on my call with Commodore McMichaels,” he said when I came out from Combat. Captain McMichaels was a senior four-striper, called commodore because he commanded a squadron of ships, in his case, the ships of Service Squadron Ten. The service squadrons had been one of Chester Nimitz's brilliant operational ideas: Gather together as many repair ships, ammunition ships, refrigerated food freighters, oil tankers, gasoline tankers, bulk cargo ships, fleet salvage tugs, and hospital ships, plus all the utility boats, landing craft, floating dry docks, harbor patrol craft, barges, and any other kind of floating support asset that you could find, collect them into a relatively safe anchorage, and thereby create an instant naval base. Ideally they could find an anchorage that was distant enough to be safe from Jap bombers but close enough that damaged ships could get there, one way or another, get fixed, and get back into the fight. If anyone knew what was really going on with the current campaign, in this case, Okinawa, it was the commodore of the service squadron supporting the campaign. The only fly in the ointment for the floating base at Kerama Retto was the fact that they'd failed to stay out of range of Jap bombers. On the other hand, the Navy was discovering what it was going to be like when we hit the main islands of Japan.

The captain told me that our losses were mounting, both out in the main fleet formations and, of course, on the picket line. From the carriers to the amphibious landing craft, the body count was climbing rapidly, all because of the kamikaze tactic. We'd seen that at close hand.