Sentinels of Fire (3 page)

My parents retired to a nice house up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside the District line. I tried once to ask them about what they'd been doing all those years, and all my mother would say was “Typing, Connie, lots and lots of typing.” My father just puffed on his pipe and nodded sagely. That was that, and I didn't figure out that they were the principal means by which I got my appointment to the Naval Academy in 1931 until well after I'd graduated. I, of course, thought it was because I was so damned handsome, smart, and, well … you know.

The captain had been right—I was addressed as XO right from the start, and there was a subtle but palpable shift in how the enlisted people in this ship interacted with me. As the gunnery officer in the Big Ben I'd been a department head, but not a very important department head, as compared to the air operations officer or the chief engineer. Aircraft carriers had two complements: the ship's company, which ran the actual ship, and the carrier air wing, made up of many squadrons and almost a hundred airplanes that did the business of an aircraft carrier: air strikes, reconnaissance missions, close support of troops ashore, and formation defense. My job had been to manage twelve five-inch caliber guns, sixty of the smaller but still lethal four-barreled forty-millimeter Bofors guns, and 76 Oerlikon twenty-millimeter electric machine guns, most of which were arrayed in guntubs stretching up and down both sides of the 860-foot-long flight deck.

If the pilots did their job, my people stood idle, watching the air show as dozens of our fighters pursued and splashed attacking Jap bombers and suiciders all over the formation, while our escorts, ranging from sixty-thousand-ton battleships to twenty-five-hundred-ton destroyers, filled the sky with black spots of ack-ack and, we hoped, flaming Jap planes. When one did get through all that and head directly for us, my guys could put up a pretty good curtain of ack-ack themselves, and, although it was unnerving to watch one of those planes get bigger and bigger, sometimes already on fire or streaming gasoline vapor from punctured wing tanks, the Big Ben was 860 feet long. If they hit us, supposedly we could take it.

Being the exec in a destroyer, however, meant that things were very different. The executive officer of a warship was next in line for command of the ship if something happened to the captain. The exec went around the ship wearing the mantle of command, all the while knowing that if he ran into a situation that baffled him, he could slip topside for a quiet word with the captain. As a department head, I'd been one of many. As the exec, I was one of two, with the other guy being the commanding officer, as close to a god as was still possible in the twentieth century. Luckily for me, Captain Tallmadge was special. The department heads told me of the first time the captain had, right after the change of command, watched a shiphandling evolution go off the tracks, with the officer in charge of the maneuver royally screwing things up.
Malloy
's previous skipper would have had a flaming temper tantrum right there on the bridge. Tallmadge had watched things go to hell with obvious but silent dismay. As everyone waited for the explosion, the captain had taken off his hat and thrown it down on the deck in the pilothouse. Then, to everyone's amazement, he got out of his chair and began to chew out—the hat. Called it names, told it how disappointed he was in it, how it had to do better the next time, that this maneuver wasn't that hard, and that there'd be no liberty for that hat until things improved. Then he'd gotten back into his captain's chair, visibly shunning the thoroughly shamed hat, and announced that they were going to try that maneuver again.

It had been theater, and everyone on the bridge recognized that, but it had been most effective. This guy wasn't going to call
you
an idiot—he was going to address the problem, not on the basis of whose fault it was but rather by figuring out how to fix it. As they later learned, the new captain's reaction to any kind of screwup was to tie the incident to insufficient training. Any time he
did
lose his temper, it was the hat that caught hell. People relaxed and began to pay attention to the training, now that no one was chewing their asses as if they'd done something wrong on purpose. It became standard procedure for the junior officers to reveal that they'd made a hash out of something by saying, “I lit off a Hat Dance this morning, all by myself.” When I heard that story, I recognized there was a certain genius to it and took aboard the underlying message: Blame the problem, not the people. With rare exceptions, the officers, chiefs, and crew were always trying to do their best.

My second week aboard produced my first lesson in command. The carrier formations were operating to the north and west of Okinawa, sending softening-up missions in against the Japs' aboveground installations on the island. While this was going on, a large air raid appeared midmorning out of densely clouded skies. The CAP fighters—Combat Air Patrol—had been up for an hour, flaming as many of the incoming bombers as they could find, but one of the carriers had been hit and was dealing with a spectacularly big flight-deck fire. We'd shot at some of the raiders, but for some reason our two carriers were not targets that morning. While the raid was still in progress, one of our carrier's Corsairs came past the ship at low altitude trailing a deadly white cloud of leaking avgas. I'd come out to the bridge from my GQ station in Combat when the lookouts first spotted him.

“He's gonna bail out or ditch,” the captain said, tracking the wobbly airplane though his binoculars. Combat reported they had no comms with him. Our gunners had recognized the distinctive gull-wing silhouette and held their fire, but everyone was still pretty nervous and scanning the skies for Japs.

The Corsair banked left and then came back toward the ship in a wide circle. He put his flaps down and leveled off ahead of the ship, going away from us as he settled down close to the sea surface.

“Shall I call away the pilot rescue detail?” I asked.

“No,” the captain said. “We're not stopping with an air raid going on. Any kami who sees a ship with no wake will head right for it. Combat will mark and report his position. The carrier who owns him will send some covering planes. Then one of the destroyers will come, but no one is stopping now, XO. Not right now.”

At that moment the Corsair hit the water, throwing up a large sheet of white spray, dipping its nose and then settling back on an even keel. Seconds later the weight of that enormous engine tipped it forward again and the plane began to sink. We were perhaps five hundred yards away and closing in on him at 25 knots. I was still dealing with what the Captain had said. Were we just going to drive by and do nothing? Then I saw some of mount fifty-one's gun crew pop out of their mount, wrestling some kind of package over to the port bow.

“Slow to ten knots,” the captain ordered. The lee helmsman reset the engine-order telegraph handles, and the ship immediately began to slow down. Destroyers were handy little ships. The Big Ben would have taken a half hour to slow down that much from 25 knots.

The captain walked out to the port bridge wing as we came past the Corsair, whose tail was now sticking up at a sixty-degree angle. The canopy was open and the pilot was sitting astride the after fuselage, waving at us. The gun crew on the bow heaved an inflatable life raft over the side, smacking it down into the water not ten feet from the sinking plane. The captain waved from the bridge wing, and then we drove right on by. I couldn't quite make out the pilot's expression, but I could only imagine what he was thinking. Two minutes later, a Jap Zeke took aim at us from about eight thousand feet, and it took every gun we had to knock him down, and none too soon, either. A second Zeke turned back when we started blasting away at the first one and then apparently saw the pilot bobbing around in his raft two miles behind us. He leveled off and strafed the pilot, reducing the raft to bloody shreds.

When our guns went silent, everyone seemed to be avoiding eye contact with everyone else. The captain had returned to his chair and was staring out the front portholes. I went back into CIC.

Half an hour later, the task force commander declared the air raid over, and we resumed our assigned station and reset our modified GQ condition of readiness. I went back out to the bridge to speak to the skipper, but he had disappeared into his sea cabin. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. There was no response. Maybe he'd gone down below? I knocked again and opened the door.

The captain was sitting in his chair with his head in his hands. I excused myself and started to back out, but he told me to come in. There was barely room for both of us in the tiny cubicle.

“I was going to tell you that you got tunnel vision out there,” he said. “That's understandable, especially since you've just come from a bird farm. Pilots are everything on a carrier. But if you're the skipper, the
ship's
everything. You must always ask yourself this: Is what I'm about to do or order going to keep my ship safe or put her in unnecessary danger?” He paused to take a deep breath. His red face and shaking hands mirrored my own emotions about leaving that guy out there. “I'm devastated at what happened to that pilot,” he continued. “Don't forget, I've been that man in the water, all by myself.”

“I understand, sir,” I said. “Besides, you were right. Two kamis did come, and they might have sunk us instead of the pilot. It's just, I don't know, a really rotten deal.”

“It is, indeed,” he said patiently. “That's the difference between being XO and being the CO. You, the exec, get to observe and learn; I, the CO, get to make decisions like that. My head tells me it was the right decision; my heart is sick about it, and not for the first time. I think I'm getting too old for this stuff, XO, so pay attention. You might be in my shoes sooner than you think.”

I had no answer to that, and then he waved me away. He wanted to be alone, and I could well understand that, too. I felt sick.

That night, after we'd secured sundown GQ with no bogeys, I was up in Combat, going over the day's reports with the navigation officer, Jimmy Enright. The navigation officer was in charge of navigating the ship, and also responsible for all the electronic divisions—the Combat Information Center, Sonar, Radio Central. As the Navy stuffed more and more electronic gear into its ships, the second half of his job was rapidly eclipsing the first part. I made some comment about leaving that pilot in the water.

“He probably understood, XO,” Jimmy said. “He was safer in that life raft than in some tin can that might be blown in two by a kamikaze. Begging your pardon, but your carrier background is showing.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “Still—a guy in the water? And we drive by?”

“This'll sound like bullshit, XO, but the tin can Navy is at the sharp end of the fleet spear. The Japs have to get through us to get a shot at the heavies, and the heavies expect us to keep that from happening. You've read the after-action reports. This carrier was damaged, that carrier was torpedoed, this battleship had two near misses, this cruiser took a kami on the bridge. And, oh, by the way, two destroyers were sunk.”

“Like we don't count?”

“We count, all right, because when the heavies lose one of their tin cans, they're just a little more vulnerable than they were before that tin can went down.”

“That's a little cynical, don't you think, Jimmy?”

“Maybe, but wait until you see where we're going next.”

“The captain mentioned something about a picket line, up north and west of Okinawa?”

“Yes, sir, and I'm thinking it'll take the Japs about one day to figure out who's sounding the alarm when they head down from Japan to strike the amphibs or the supporting fleet units off Okinawa. You've seen what an air raid looks like when the whole carrier fleet is attacked. Now, take that same number of Jap planes and focus it on five or six single-ship picket stations.”

“Sounds like a real party,” I said. “I talked to the captain after what happened today. He's a lot more upset than he let on out on the bridge.”

“He's been a great skipper,” Jimmy said, “but there are times I think it's starting to get to him. We were the first ship on the scene after the
Littell
broke in half and went down from a two-plane kami strike. We stopped to look for survivors, and the admiral himself got on the radio and ordered us back to our assigned AA (antiaircraft) station immediately. The skipper got a personal-for blast later, pointing out that he had created a hole in the AA screen by stopping, when there was obviously nothing that could be done for
Littell.
I think they recovered twenty-two out of three-hundred-plus once someone did go back. He was stone-faced for three days after that.”

I was appalled at that story, mostly because I'd never heard about the
Littell.
I realized now that my carrier background was showing—every destroyerman out here had heard the
Littell
story.

*   *   *

The following day I had both Chief Lamont and Chief Bobby Walker, the chief hospital corpsman, accompany me on my daily messing and berthing inspection. This was one of the exec's principal duties, a daily inspection of all the berthing spaces, where the crew slept, and the messdecks, where the enlisted took all their meals. Each morning, after dawn GQ and morning quarters, each division assigned two men to compartment cleaning; they swept, swabbed, picked up the trash, hauled full laundry bags to the ship's laundry, polished any brightwork, and generally cleaned up the crowded compartments. My job was to come around at ten thirty in the morning and make sure that that had all been done. Same thing for the crew's dining area, called the messdecks, the galley, and the scullery, where trays and silverware were washed and sanitized for the next meal. Chief Lamont came along as my enforcer. If I saw problems I'd point them out to Lamont, and he would have a quiet word with the compartment cleaners as I headed for the next berthing space.