Sentinels of Fire (37 page)

That's how I ended up spending the rest of my life in the wilds of middle Georgia. Okay, semiwild, although the farther one gets from Atlanta, the thinner becomes the veneer of civilization in the biggest state east of the Mississippi.

I stayed the next three days there at the farm as their guest, during which Livy and I spent almost all our waking hours together. I'd read about things like that, but never, especially after the nightmare of Okinawa, expected it to happen to me. Livy had not been born blind; her affliction was the result of a riding accident when she was sixteen, involving a fairly serious head injury. She was very functional around the house and adept at getting around the grounds, since she'd grown up on the family plantation. I once commented to Livy that it must be interesting to be a member of one of the first families of Georgia. She'd laughed at me. She did that a lot, but it was always a sweet laugh. “The so-called first families of Georgia were all snuffed out in the Civil War,” she explained. “We're all descendants of the Carpetbaggers.”

The point was, she was as secure and mobile as she could ever be right there at home, and, like her mother and unlike her sister, she was probably never going to leave it. By that time, of course, I was madly in love, so this posed a decision for me. It took me a good five minutes, and we were married after a “suitable” courtship of six months, to prove, as I later found out, that there was no whiff of scandal in the form of early babies in the offing. Not that Livy would have cared; nothing frightened that woman, not even when I would have a bad night and wake up shouting unintelligible orders to a bunch of ghosts.

I have not forgotten, nor will I ever forget, those ghosts, those brave souls and small fighting ships whose lives and futures were so harshly extinguished in that crucible called the Okinawa picket line. The ghosts—from the white hats to the commodores, and even those demented and much-damned young Japanese pilots, the kamikazes—have long since been transmuted into a variety of glorious life forms at the bottom of the deepest sea. The ships, broken, burned, shredded, and mangled, are finally at peace, as the cold dark heart of the Pacific rusts them back into the elements from which they were created.

We did the best we could. From time to time I find myself missing the smell of fresh coffee on the bridge, or Mooky's fat-pills. The rest of it has gone down in my memory like the ships of the picket line. That saddens me, until I look over at Livy. Then it's sunrise at sea again, the very best time of the day.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

My father was a division commander (commodore) of destroyers at Okinawa in 1945. I wish I could say that he told me all about it. He did not. He wouldn't speak of it. It was simply that bad.

The Navy had suffered casualties during the island-hopping campaigns leading up to Okinawa, but nothing like what happened there. In fact, the Navy killed-in-action (KIA) casualties exceeded the ground-troop KIA numbers. Considering the meat-grinder nature of the Okinawa land battle, with hundreds of thousands engaged, that is truly significant.

Navy losses were driven by the ferocious Japanese kamikaze assault. The Americans knew the kamikazes were coming, but drastically underestimated the scale of the impending attacks. Allied and naval Intelligence had estimated that there were no more than five hundred or so aircraft available to the Japanese for kamikaze attacks. The real number was closer to five thousand, resulting in Navy losses of 34 ships sunk and 368 damaged out of a combined Allied fleet of approximately one thousand five hundred ships and other craft.

As usual, I've taken some liberties with the historical sequence of actual events in order to simplify the story, but, for the most part, what I've written fairly accurately describes the horror of the radar picket line and the quiet heroism of the destroyermen who stood their ground. The fifteen to twenty minutes warning they gave the fleet at sea and the logistics ships at Kerama Retto was crucial. The proof of that came when the Japanese decided that they needed to make the radar picket line itself a priority target.

I've long believed that the Okinawa campaign played a significant part in the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. The sheer scale of the fighting, the horrific casualties, and the ferocity with which the Japanese defended what they considered to be Japanese territory gave a clear indication of what would happen if the Allies invaded the home islands. The B-29 campaign and the atomic bombs marked a shift in the Pacific war strategy, with bloody amphibious assaults being replaced wherever possible by machines and brand-new technologies. The Japanese high command knew they could not hold Okinawa, but they were determined to make the Americans bleed for it, and perhaps think twice about an invasion of the home islands. Ironically, I think they succeeded with that.

 

BOOKS BY P. T. DEUTERMANN

THE CAM RICHTER NOVELS

The Cat Dancers

Spider Mountain

The Moonpool

Nightwalkers

THRILLERS

The Last Man

The Firefly

Darkside

Hunting Season

Train Man

Zero Option

Sweepers

Official Privilege

SEA STORIES

Ghosts of Bungo Suido

Pacific Glory

The Edge of Honor

Scorpion in the Sea

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P. T. Deutermann is the author of sixteen previous novels, including
Ghosts of Bungo Suido
and
Pacific Glory,
which won the W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction. He spent twenty-six years in military and government service, which included a Pearl Harbor tour of duty; his father was a commodore on the Okinawa picket line; and Deutermann's uncle, both of his brothers, and both of his children were naval officers. He lives with his wife in North Carolina.

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

SENTINELS OF FIRE.
Copyright © 2014 by P. T. Deutermann. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

 

www.stmartins.com

 

Cover designed by Young Lim

 

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

 

Deutermann, Peter T., 1941–

    Sentinels of fire: a novel / P. T. Deutermann.

          p. cm.

    ISBN 978-1-250-04118-0 (hardcover)

    ISBN 978-1-4668-3733-1 (e-book)

1.  World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American—Fiction.   2.  United States. Navy—Officers—Fiction.   3.  World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, Japanese—Fiction.   I.  Title.

  PS3554.E887S47 2014

  813'.54—dc23

2014008540

 

e-ISBN 9781466837331

 

First Edition: July 2014