Sentinels of Fire (22 page)

I stopped running. There was nothing I could do but watch. The kamikazes fell out of the sky like so many demons, dropping straight down like the German Stukas had done in those newsreels from back in 1939 over Warsaw, engines howling as they hit their red lines and beyond, five-inch flak bursting all around them, sometimes near them, then
in
them, through them, converting the kiting planes into bright fireballs, and then a sudden slash of green water, followed by a dirty explosion as their underslung bombs went off.

Malloy,
anchored, was spouting flame from one end to the other, five-inch, forties, twenties, and probably even some potatoes. The rate of fire was so heavy that the ship literally disappeared from view.

I felt the tender take a hit, forward somewhere, lurching heavily, not like a destroyer but with a soggy response to the nasty insult of a five-thousand-pound kami crashing into a seventeen-thousand-ton ship.

I sat down on a set of bitts, my face in my hands. The world had gone berserk. I was beyond being scared. I was just … there. The sound and the fury all around me, guns blasting, planes crashing, the sea erupting on every side,
things
flying through the air all around me, spattering the decks and whining through the air like hot steel hornets, and I just sat there.

It was quite a show, I'm sure, but I think I missed it. And then it was over.

I dimly heard the tender's
1
MC summoning damage control parties to the forecastle, and then the dismaying urgent calls for medics. I looked over at
Malloy,
still anchored right where I'd last seen her. She'd stopped shooting. I could see Marty up on Sky One, talking frantically into his sound-powered phones. There were people out on deck, calmly policing brass. I waved at them. They did not see me.

I'm going mad, I thought.

Just like the captain?

Oh, shit, I thought.

No. No. No. It was just an air raid, and apparently it's over. My ship would gather herself, light off her main engines, and come back alongside as if nothing had happened. If she was still there, well, then, nothing
had
happened.

Me? I still owed the commodore my arrival call.

As the tender's GQ repair parties swept past me, headed for the forecastle to deal with whatever had happened up there, I stood up, pulled myself together, and went to find the commodore. I hoped he had some coffee, or maybe even some whisky.

Captain Tallmadge had admired the commodore. He'd told me that Captain Van Arnhem was married to a Southern lady who had inherited a large plantation in central Georgia. They'd met at a midshipmen's ball in Savannah, fallen in love, and married as soon as he had met the statutory two-year wait following graduation, during which new ensigns were forbidden by law to take a wife. They apparently had an arrangement: She would live on the plantation while he pursued his naval career. She would raise their two daughters there, and he was free to come home as often as he could. She would travel occasionally to see him, but she'd made it clear from the outset that her primary duty was to the preservation of their thousand-acre farm. I remembered thinking at the time that this was an odd setup for a marriage, but Captain Tallmadge had informed me that it was not that uncommon, especially once the Depression set in with a vengeance. Naval officers were hanging on to their jobs by their teeth, enduring pay cuts just to stay on active duty, dodging “hump” boards, where the Navy convened committees to decide who had to go so that the Navy stayed within dwindling force-level limits, and generally keeping their heads down. The farm must have been a pleasant refuge from all of that whenever the Van Arnhems could manage time together there. I knew from personal experience in four wardrooms that married middle-grade officers in the Navy had a tough time. Van Arnhem seemed to have found a practical way of handling it. I was looking forward to getting to know him better.

*   *   *

“You left station?” the commodore asked.

“I did,” I said. “I wasn't just going to sit there and wait for that bastard to collect a new set of kamis and send them at us. Think of it this way, Commodore: The kamis are coming out of Kyushu in southern Japan and Formosa. That's a long trip, especially at night. They get there, with just enough gas to do their one-way mission, expecting to check in with a controller. He's not there. Now what? Turn south in the darkness and hope to find something? More likely they ran out of fuel and died in the ocean. Besides, there was no fleet formation to warn. Just us targets. We went balls-to-the-wall for ninety minutes, lit off the radar, found that bastard, killed him, then hustled back to station.”

He gave me a long, authoritative look, which then wilted. “Right,” he said. “This will stay between us Injuns. But explain something: Why didn't he see you coming?”

“I don't think they have an active radar,” I said. “I think they've been homing in on
our
air-search radar beams. They just listen, do a direction-find on our emissions, and establish a bearing. They don't need a range—they know we're forty, fifty miles above Okinawa. So they tell the kamis to fly that bearing and look out the window. We turned all our electronics off and then ran up the last known bearing of the controller aircraft. When we lit off again, there he was, fat, dumb, and happy until we killed his ass. After that, no more problems in our sector.”

“How'd you get the first three?”

“We assumed they were coming directly from the controller aircraft, so I had the five-inch open a hit-the-notch barrage fire on that bearing, pretty close to the surface. Had no idea there would be four aircraft, but they flew right into it. All but one.”

The commodore looked at me. “Pretty damn good,” he said. “You've been around guns, haven't you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I gave him a quick synopsis of my naval career. “And now I need a five-inch mount.”

“Fresh out of those,” he said. “Had one, actually, but it just sank. Besides, there's no way we could do an installation and a battery alignment out here, swinging on the hook. But I think we can get you a quad forty. They're self-contained mounts and all they need is 440 volts. Better than nothing.”

I nodded. One could never have too many quad forties. “We are going back, then?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “We're down to three radar pickets, not including
Malloy.
I think last night convinced even the fleet staff that they need to beef up the CAP protection, especially with this radar-controlled tactic.”

“How's it going ashore?”

“Backward,” he said matter-of-factly. “Three days ago the casualties outnumbered the total number of reserves on the island. That's not sustainable.”

“We have to win it, eventually. Their forces aren't getting any bigger.”

He sat back and lit up a cigarette. “We
will
take Okinawa,” he said. “Like you said, we can resupply, they can only hunker down and die. If it were me, I'd stabilize the front lines and starve them out.”

“So why aren't we doing that?”

“There's a timetable for the invasion of the main islands. We need the Okinawa airfields so that fighters can go all the way with the bombers coming out of other bases. They're already flying some missions from the northern part of the island, but we need the whole thing.”

I thought about that. “If Okinawa is this hard, what's Japan itself going to be like?”

“This, times ten,” he said. “God, it's been a lousy day. I need a drink. Fancy a whisky?”

I very much did. He broke out a bottle from his desk safe and poured a generous measure. We then went through some of the admin details of getting replacements for my losses and the tender's plan for craning over a quad-forty mount the next day.

Finally I mustered up the courage to ask him about the captain.

He sighed. “Pudge is on the way back to the States, and that's going to take a while. My doctor saw him before he went ashore, to be lifted back to Guam.”

“And?”

“Gone,” he said. “No one home. Sits there with a bemused expression on his face, but there's no one home. Doc says he might come out of it, maybe when he's back with his wife and family, stateside. But…”

Now I wanted another drink. Hell, I wanted the whole bottle.

“Someone coming in to replace him?” I asked.

“Ready to be relieved, XO?”

“God, yes, sir.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, young man. In fact—” He got up and went to his desk. He picked up a piece of paper and a small black cardboard box. He stood in front of me and gestured for me to stand.

“I have here your promotion to full commander, date of rank from the day you assumed command of
Malloy,
signed by Bull Halsey himself. Take those collar devices off.”

In a bit of a daze, I reached up and unpinned the gold-colored lieutenant-commander oak leaves from my shirt collar points. He pinned on the silver oak leaves of a full commander. He shook my hand and then went into the bedroom area of his cabin, returning with an officer's cap with scrambled eggs.

“This is my spare,” he said. “You can replace it when, and if, we both survive this ungodly mess. In the meantime, you are now the commanding officer of USS
Malloy.
In other words, there's no one coming to replace Pudge.”

“Couldn't find any volunteers?” I asked with as straight a face as I could.

He glared and then laughed. We both laughed. It was all we could do. I told him about the little parody around the wardroom table.

“Will I get an exec?” I asked.

“We'll try,” he said. Then we both felt a bump as something came alongside the tender with perhaps a little more force than necessary.
Malloy
was back alongside.

“That would be Marty Randolph,” I said. “He will never make a ship handler.”

“Then go train him some more,” he said. “Captain.”

I blew out a long breath. Captain.

“And for God's sake, stay alive, please. I'm supposed to be a destroyer squadron commodore, but at this rate, I'm down to a division minus.”

“We have a unit commander's cabin in
Malloy,
” I said. “This Injun right here wouldn't mind a little adult supervision.”

“And I'd be honored to come aboard, Connie, but Halsey has other ideas. The theory is that I can do more good down here than I can do floating around up there. Okinawa isn't just an Army-Marine versus dug-in Japs slog anymore. It's mostly about logistics: fuel, bullets, bombs, and beans. The Japs are down to what they had stashed in their tunnels when we got here. We, on the other hand, can keep bringing more stuff to the fight. That's probably not evident to the soldier in his foxhole, but it's certainly evident to Imperial Army HQ back in Tokyo. Beans, bullets, and replacements are what's going to win this thing. That tells me that the kamikaze war is going to intensify.”

“Someone needs to tell the Army to win it soon,” I said. “We're fresh out of foxholes up there on the picket line.”

 

NINE

The crew of a destroyer is a perceptive bunch. The moment the quarterdeck OOD, Ensign McCarthy, spied my brass hat and those silver oak leaves, he said something to the petty officer of the watch. A few seconds later, there were four bells and the words “
Malloy,
arriving” echoing over the ship's topside speakers. That single announcement changed everything, as I knew it would. I was no longer XO. I was
Malloy.

I sent for Jimmy Enright and told him to assemble all officers in the wardroom, where I briefed them on what had happened.

“Look,” I said, “this is kind of unusual. The aviators fleet their execs up to command in their squadrons all the time. If you're an aviator, being selected for XO means you're going to become the CO. The destroyer force rarely does this, but these are unusual times.” I stopped, tried some coffee. I was a full commander after only ten years in the Navy. Somebody either thought very highly of me or realized that I probably wouldn't survive to present a problem later, when regular promotion cycles returned.

“The battle for Okinawa is going … badly. That's the only word for it. Our guys are having to dig them out of their rat holes Jap by Jap, cave by cave. Our guys want to stay alive. Their guys
want
to die with honor for some so-called emperor who started all this shit. Our guys have resorted to using flamethrowers instead of rifles. It's that bad.”

“Sounds like the picket line,” Jimmy Enright said.

“Yes, it does,” I said. “Last night, well, I guess we were lucky, if you can call it that. Four Vals coming in under radar control. Not one—four. We got three of them, but if we hadn't gone after that controller aircraft, I'm not sure we'd be here today.”

“That was your idea, XO,” Marty said. “Sorry, sir. Captain.”

I think that was when it really hit me. I wasn't XO anymore. I really was the owner.

“There are supposedly eight picket stations,” I said. “Last night we had six ships. Now we have only four tin cans left to fill them. You all saw what happened to
Billingham
today.”

I looked out at the ring of extremely sober faces around the wardroom table.

“That was heartbreaking,” I said. “There's no other word for it. But we'll win this battle, if ‘win' is the right word. We will take Okinawa, and all those Japs out there are going to be annihilated. On the grand scale, it's simple math: We can keep bringing more troops, more ammo, more ships, more supplies in every day. The Japs are making do with what they had when we showed up.
Nothing's
getting through to them. No food, medicines, ammo, people. Nothing. They're all going to die, and they're apparently ready to do that. We will prevail, but the cost has every level of command wondering how
we
can keep this up, and we haven't even begun the invasion of Japan itself.”