Sentinels of Fire (23 page)

I stopped to let them think about that.

“Most of you have known me as XO. That's a special position in a warship, the guy with all the authority of the captain, but lacking that final degree of ownership, of
ultimate
authority. You're going to have to make that jump. I'm the captain now. Jimmy Enright is the XO.”

I paused to think about what I'd just said. “
I'm
going to have to make that same jump.
I'm
the captain now, not the XO. I didn't ask for this. I kept waiting for them to send in a new skipper. They didn't. They made me skipper, so now I'm going to act differently. I'm going to distance myself from the day-to-day camaraderie in the wardroom. Jimmy is taking over as XO.” I paused for another moment. This was harder than I'd expected.

“This will sound a bit conceited, but I have to say it. You could kid around with the XO. You don't kid around with the CO unless he starts it. There's a reason for that: When extremis arises, there has to be one officer whose orders are executed without question. If he happens to be your buddy, then you might question what he says. If he's the captain, you do what he says. That's why officers eat separately in the wardroom, and why we don't call the enlisted men by their first names. Truth is, this separation, however artificial, makes things easier once the serious trouble starts.

“That said, the truth is we're all in this lovely little fire pit together. At some point, the Japs over there on Okinawa are going to give up, do their ritual suicides, and maybe some of them might even surrender. Once the home islands cease to hear from the defenders of Okinawa, they're gonna know it's over. Here. That's when I think the kamis will stop coming here, if only because they'll be saving them up for the really big show.

“Our objective is to stay alive until that moment when they write off Okinawa, as they've had to write off Iwo, Saipan, Guam, Tarawa, Truk, Guadalcanal … After that, we'll see.

“The other night we opened a blind barrage on the bearing of where that controller aircraft was and killed three out of four kamis who were coming specifically for us. We need to do more of that kind of thing, and we need,
I
need, everybody thinking about tactics. What can we do to screw them up? We all feel we're in a desperate position up there on the picket line because we're effectively tethered, but I think the Japs, for all their
banzai
bullshit, are feeling the same thing. They
know
it's almost over. They know goddamned Halsey actually is going to ride the emperor's white horse down the main drag in Tokyo. They know they're finished, in China, Southeast Asia, everywhere. Their fleet is gone. Our bombers have begun burning their cities to cinders. They
know.
They
have
to know. Which means we are dealing with a cornered animal. A
fierce
cornered animal, which means they are at their most lethal, and if we know anything about the Japanese, lethal is absolutely their stock-in-trade.

“So you guys have to help me to help you to stay alive. We can't retreat or otherwise run away, so we have to outthink them. We have to outwit them. We need to stay up late and get up early, every day, until this business is over. Any questions?”

“Still two sugars?” Jimmy Enright asked.

“Absolutely,” I said with a grin, “XO.”

He tried to grin back but didn't quite pull it off. I made a mental note to formally split out his responsibilities as navigation officer with the next-senior guy in his department, Lanny King, the CIC officer. How? Hell, I'd tell the XO to make it happen, that's how.

*   *   *

Our new quad-forty gun mount was a hand-me-down from the USS
Pawley,
a tin can that'd been running with the carriers until a kami missed one of the flattops and careened lengthwise down
Pawley
's port side, cleaning house in a spectacular fashion. Her hull was intact, as was her main plant, so she was bound for one of the larger anchorages in the rear just as soon as the tender's shipfitters could build her a temporary bridge and pilothouse. We were going to scavenge her starboard-quarter quad forty, one of the few guns left intact along her superstructure. The tender's welding gang cut the mount off the 01 level aft on
Pawley,
and then one of the tender's large cranes lifted the entire mount up and over the back of the tender and down onto our forecastle, where the same welding team fastened it to our main deck in a fiery display of sparks right over the roller path of the late departed mount fifty-one.

We were going to be one funny-looking destroyer, I thought as I watched the welders burning steel. Still, a quad forty was better than nothing. Its rounds were one-third the size of the five-inch, but there were four barrels, it had a higher rate of fire, and that mount could flat create a cloud of metal fragments close in, which was where the kamis finally had to quit jinking and turning and settle into that final, lethal glide path. I was glad to get it. We could store forty-millimeter ammo down in fifty-one's magazine spaces, but we'd have to figure a way to get it up to the actual gun crew. All the ammo-handling machinery for mount fifty-one had been extracted from the handling rooms like the root of an excised tooth when the mount went over the side. I was thinking about that until I saw the gun boss arrive on the forecastle to examine the installation.

No longer my problem, I reluctantly told myself. Technically, anyway. This was Marty Randolph's problem, and he was fully capable of solving it.
My
problem was making sure that we didn't forget to ask for more forty-millimeter ammo, now that we had a third mount. I'd already asked the commodore for some more people to make up our losses, but he'd come up empty. He said the carriers were sucking up all the replacements coming out from Pearl. I'd said something silly like “How do they think we're going to defend them if we can't man our own guns?” He'd replied that the carrier people didn't think about us at all. Period.

I realized I knew that. When I'd been gun boss in Big Ben, destroyers were simply little gray things out there on the horizon, zipping here and there and either shooting at something or coming alongside for fuel and begging for ice cream.

In the end we did get more forty-millimeter ammo craned down to us from the tender, but in turn, we had to relinquish most of mount fifty-one's ammo. Marty tried to hang onto mount fifty-one's VT frag ammo, but those VT frag rounds were still in short supply and some bean-counter knew where every one of them was hiding, even after the chief gunner's mate had told the tender's people that we'd shot it all up. That declaration had produced a wizened warrant officer with zero sense of humor who said he would need to come aboard and take a physical inventory, if we pleased. I quickly dispatched Marty to put out that incipient fire, because I did not want the tender's people to know what
we
had been stashing in the other two five-inch magazines. Sometimes the damned bean-counters were as big a threat as the Japs. The warrant came to see me to complain that my people were fudging the ammo logs. I told him he was welcome to come up to the picket line and count the brass. I'd even speak to his skipper about it. He seemed to lose interest after that.

They got a fuel barge alongside at 1530, and while the fuel was being loaded on board, Marty and I joined the tender's chaplain and wardroom in holding a memorial service for everyone who'd perished that morning when
Billingham
suddenly sank alongside. The commodore and his small staff also attended. The tender had lost eighteen people, and nobody seemed to know how many of
Billingham
's crew had still been aboard helping the tender's engineers when she gave up the ghost. Both her captain and the exec had been killed during the attack. There'd been no one picked up out of the water alongside, alive or dead, and there was still a large oil slick streaming to the surface not far from the tender. If that continued, the tender would have to shift anchorage to keep her own main condenser inductions free of Navy special fuel oil.

As I listened to the chaplain's words, I realized I'd become numb to the loss of so many people. I suppose it was because I knew, once we had completed refueling, that
we
were going back up there. I would never have said that I didn't care about the tender's losses or
Billingham
's dead, but the simple fact was that I cared only about
my
people and
my
ship. I still felt somewhat out of place with my new, if borrowed, brass hat and those silver oak leaves on my shirt collar, but it had been interesting to observe the transition that had begun in how my own officers and men acted around me. When the service was over, I asked the commodore for permission to shove off and return to station. He took my hand and said he'd pray for our safe return. He meant it, too. The commodore and Pudge Tallmadge were cut from the same cloth. Now Tallmadge was on his way home, his good and generous mind wrecked. The commodore had gone up to his cabin to weep for what he'd just witnessed. I think that disturbed me more than anything else up to that point in our Okinawa experience.

*   *   *

Three hours later we resumed our radar picket station as a glorious sunset spread over the western horizon. There were now only three destroyers stationed north of Okinawa because the fourth had been sucked up unexpectedly by the Big Blue Fleet to replace
Billingham.
The big difference was that the fleet was back, with sixteen carriers operating to the west and north of Okinawa, flooding the skies with CAP. The Freddies reported that night-fighters were going to be launched every four hours throughout the night and that they were going to be stationed way out, for a change—eighty miles instead of forty. The Freddies also reported that they had a new, additional duty: to delouse all aircraft formations coming back toward the fleet from advanced positions. Apparently a Jap fighter had fallen in astern of two Navy fighters and followed them back to their carrier, before then attempting a suicide attack, so now every returning section of CAP would get special scrutiny by the picket station Freddies. I found myself amazed at how electronics were taking over the battle for our survivial.

Radio Central brought me a message forwarded by the commodore summarizing the current situation on the Okinawa battlefield. After reading that, I summoned the department heads and then waited in the captain's cabin for the call from our now formally appointed XO, Jimmy Enright.

“Captain, we're ready.”

I came out of the captain's cabin—my cabin now—went into the wardroom, and sat down at the head of the table. There was no more who's-in-charge scene-setting to be done. The navigation officer was now the exec, and Jimmy had stepped up handsomely to that position.

“Okay, gents,” I began. “There's only three of us left up here on the radar picket station: us, the
Daniels,
and the
Westfall.
The
Thomas
left to join a carrier group. The good news is that we have night-fighters available to go after those controller aircraft, if and when they show up. The bad news is that none of them have shown up, so nobody knows what's coming next.”

“Didn't like that nasty surprise last night, did they,” Marty said.

“I told the commodore about that,” I said. “He was actually pleased. Said we had to do more wildcat stunts like that. But there's a hitch: In the next few days there are going to be some fifty transports and cargo ships arriving at KR to resupply the Okinawa beachheads. More troops, ammo ships, hospital ships, everything. The Jap's 32nd Army lines are holding around something called Shuri Castle, but it's turned into a dark-alley knife fight out there in the weeds. From here on out, the side with the most stuff is going to prevail.”

“Okay, then,” Marty said. “For the Japs, holding is losing.”

“Then the end is in sight,” Mario offered.

“Think of a cobra, run over by a car,” I said. “It's out there in the middle of the road, writhing in agony. Who volunteers to walk right up to it, cut its head off?”

Nobody.

“Right,” I said. “The commodore thinks that, for the next couple of nights, the Japs are gonna throw everything they've got at Okinawa. They've got nothing to lose now, except, of course, the war. At some point, some Jap general staff decision maker is going to say, ‘Enough. Okinawa is lost.' We now need to get ready for what's coming. Until then
we
have to survive long enough for them to make that decision and knock this shit off.

“So here's what I want: Until further notice, Chop, I want food available around the clock. Open galley line. If someone's hungry, I want him to find food at any hour of the day. Marty, every gunner on station until I say otherwise. Guns loaded, crews looking. Sleep when and where you can, head calls as necessary, but I want half of every gun crew awake at all times. Jimmy, I want your CIC people on port and port—night and day, until further notice. They can nap behind the status boards, but I want them right there.

“As I said earlier, there are only three destroyers available for the picket line now. The big dogs are keeping all their destroyers close aboard, but since the fight for Okinawa is all concentrated in the south, there's apparently a sudden surplus of small support ships, so they're gonna send each picket station three amphib support ships—LCS, LSMR, L-whatever's available.”

Marty began to shake his head.

“I know,” I said, “but look: The gators have guns. We keep them close in. The kami who's expecting one target now has four, all of which are shooting at him. Law of averages, gents—enough gun barrels unloading in the kami's direction, we just about have to knock him down.”

Jimmy Enright gave me a look that said, we all know the fallacy in that logic. If the Japs are making their last stand on Okinawa, their commanders back in Japan aren't going to send just one kamikaze. Mercifully, he kept quiet.