Sentinels of Fire (5 page)

“We'll go see,” the captain said. “People survive the damnedest things, but right now we have to get ready for the rest of the bastards.”

Jimmy called out another course change and slowed the ship's speed to 20 knots. I headed aft to the boat deck, where the lifeboat crew would be making ready to lower the ship's whaleboat,
Malloy
's primary motorized lifeboat, to the rail. I knew we wouldn't be putting a manned boat into the water until we
knew
there were no more kamikazes around. Instead we'd drive through the area where the LCS had exploded and kick two inflatable life rafts over the side. If there were any survivors swimming out there, they'd see the rafts. Stopping the
Malloy,
however, was out of the question, as I'd learned that day with the Corsair pilot. This Jap had managed to evade our air-search radar and
two
surface-search radars, most likely by coming in right on the deck. The surface radars should have detected something, which told me that there might be an inversion layer hanging over the ocean, masking incoming contacts. I looked again at the cloud of dirty smoke flattening out over the sea. It was going to be another very long day if this disaster was any indication.

When I reached the boat deck, the lifeboat crew already had the motor whaleboat swung out and ready to launch. I still marveled at the crew's level of training: I'd been aboard for not quite two months now, and everyone in
Malloy
seemed to know his job and when to do it. The chief bosun's mate had come up from Repair Two and was supervising the rigging of two of the ship's canvas-and-wood rafts. Once the captain brought the ship through the area where the LCS had gone down, the deck apes would dump the rafts over the side, but only if the lookouts reported heads in the water. The LCS had been larger than an amphibious landing craft but smaller than a full-sized LST, with a crew of three officers and 150 men. She'd had four rocket launchers, a single five-inch gun, two quad forty-millimeter AA guns, two twenty-millimeter AA guns, and all the ammunition to service that ordnance stowed in deck lockers for quick access. Their original mission had been to provide quick-response naval gunfire support for landings once the big gunships, the heavy cruisers and battleships, had detached from the actual landing operation. They could stay close inshore and deal with all the pop-up targets as the Marines dug the enemy out of their bunkers and caves. When the Japs began to pick off the radar picket destroyers, however, the task force commander had ordered LCSs out to the picket line to augment the line's already slim antiaircraft defenses.

Now that it was full daylight, every man on a topside battle station was scanning the skies for more Japs. There was a layer of thin clouds masking the morning sunlight. I could hear the five-inch gun director training around on its barbette above the bridge, as the director officer examined the indistinct horizon with his optics while down below, in Main Battery Plot, radar operators stared anxiously at their A-scopes, watching for the telltale spike in the shimmering green video display that would indicate a target. Above the gun director, twenty feet higher on the foremast, the bedspring air-search radar antenna made a groaning noise as it, too, scanned the airspace around our assigned station. When the Japs came in a big raid, headed for Okinawa itself or the fleet formations, the radar picket line would usually get plenty of warning. It was the one- and two-plane raids, the ones who were after the radar picket ships themselves, that were much harder to see. I had often wondered why they didn't station the individual picket ships closer together for mutual support.

“What the hell, XO,” the chief bosun said, a pained expression on his face as we stared out at the smoky mess that once been an LCS. The bosun was a profane, cigar-chomping, bulky, black-haired Irishman named Dougherty, ruddy faced from years on the forecastles of more ships than anyone else in the crew. Per tradition, he was called Boats.

“They've learned,” I said, grabbing a stanchion to support myself as the ship made a tight turn. The bosun seemed to be planted into the steel deck as if he had a gyro somewhere in that big paunch. “Big raids mean lots of metal in the sky. We can see 'em and sic the CAP on 'em. Now they're coming out in onesies and twosies, down on the deck for the last twenty miles. They disappear in the radar sea-return.”

“And he went for the LCS?”

“I don't know that, Chief,” I said. The boat crews were back on their gun stations, everyone staring skyward, looking for anything. “He damn near clipped our mast. Maybe overshot, went for the LCS as a consolation prize.”

“Christ on a crutch,” the bosun said. “They never knew what hit them.”

“Nor would we,” I said. “Part of the charm of the picket line these days.”

“We oughta have fifty goddamned destroyers up here,” the chief said. “Ain't like there's a shortage.”

“Apparently, there is. The landings at Okinawa are bogged down. They've got one destroyer for every half-mile sector of beach on that miserable island. You know the Japs: they're gonna fight to the death, every last one of 'em.”

We caught a whiff of sulfurous gun smoke as
Malloy
closed in on the last known position of the LCS. The bulk of the smoke cloud had been blown downwind, but the stink of sudden death and diesel oil remained. The sea was littered with sodden lumps of insulation, shattered wooden crates, some clothes, bobbing steel drums, empty and not-so-empty kapok life jackets, and one lonely life raft that was sadly devoid of survivors.

“Look sharp there,” the bosun bellowed to all the men within earshot. “Heads—we're looking for heads. Faces. Anybody swimming, any poor sumbitch raising a hand.”

After a minute of steaming through the area, it was plain to see that there were no survivors. The Japs often slung a large, contact-fuzed bomb under a kamikaze's belly in order to amplify the catastrophe of a five-thousand-pound fighter plane striking a ship at 300 miles per hour. Space demons from Mars, I thought. They're not human.

“Chief!” a man shouted, pointing down into the water on the port side. Fifty feet away there was what looked like a head lolling above a kapok jacket collar. The ship's wake had disturbed the water, and a shoulder appeared briefly. As we looked, a dark gray fin cut through the water and bumped the kapok, which is when we saw that that was all there was—a head and a shoulder. A moment later another shark snagged the remains and pulled them down. A wave of frustrated cursing swept through the guntubs. Sharks were every sailor's nightmare.

I felt the ship accelerating and decided to go back up to the bridge. I signaled the bosun to restow the motor whaleboat. There was nothing more to be done here. A mournful silence settled over the ship. There but for the grace of God …

 

THREE

The captain called a meeting in the wardroom later that morning after the ship had secured from dawn GQ, with me and the four department heads, the navigation officer, gun boss, chief engineer, and supply officer. I waited until everyone was there and then called the captain to report that we were assembled. I was a bit concerned when the skipper stepped out of his inport cabin and into the wardroom, waving a hand at the officers to resume their seats. Captain Tallmadge normally presented himself as a pillar of resilience—calm, energetic, and exuding that quiet authority of the born leader. This morning he seemed different. I couldn't put my finger on it, but there was definitely something …

“Okay, gents,” the Captain began. “What happened this morning was pretty awful. No warning, no radar contact, and a ship and her entire crew gone in the blink of an eye. CTF 58 is asking what the hell happened, and frankly, I don't know what to say. Jimmy—any ideas?”

Jimmy Enright shook his head. The Combat Information Center was under his purview. The CIC contained the radar display consoles, where whatever images the searching radar beams could pick up were displayed as blurry green blobs on a large, circular cathode ray tube. “The ETs tuned the magnetron at twenty-three hundred,” he said. “The scope operators reported a lot less clutter. We held the LCS sharp and clear on the surface search. The midnight-to-eight watch standers thought the radars were better than usual. The Freddies”—fighter direction officers—“thought so, too. Still, nobody saw that thing come in on us.”

“Captain,” Marty Randolph, the gunnery officer, said, “I had the mid-to-eight as the CIC supervisor. We rotated the scope operators every thirty minutes. There was nothing going on. Nothing. The CIC officer and I went over some reporting paperwork, but after zero five hundred everybody tightened up because sunrise was coming. The Freddies were talking to the duty carrier and setting up CAP patrol sectors. The LCS said their search radar was okay, but just okay. They don't have any electronics techs, and we talked about maybe cross-decking one of our guys to sharpen their gear. But it was routine—no indications that a big raid was coming, no reports of a big launch from Kyushu or Formosa. Nothing.”

“Yet,” the captain said. There were sober nods all around. It hadn't been
Malloy
's mission to protect the LCS; in fact, the opposite had been true. Still.

“Yes, sir,” Marty said. “The bastards got one through on us. Maybe they're changing their tactics. They know they can't surprise the big-decks down at the AOA as long as the pickets blow the whistle.” The AOA was the amphibious objective area.

“Jimmy, how tired are your people?” the captain asked.

Jimmy puffed out a long breath. “They're six on, six off, like everyone else in the crew,” he said finally. “We've been up here for just over three weeks, so yes, they're starting to drag their asses. That's why we rotate the scope operators every half hour. You can only stare at that green haze for so long before you start to fall asleep. The men know that, and they're conscientious about it. Somebody sees a guy nod off, we move him.”

“Besides,” I said, “the watch standers know the kamikazes don't fly at night, so for most of the late night, especially on the midnight-to-eight, everyone's just trying to stay awake and alert, right? That's wearying in itself, and fatigue is cumulative.”

The captain raised a hand. “Gents, believe me, I know. I don't think this was a case of our people being asleep at the switch. The Japs are becoming desperate. They fly to Okinawa and see over a thousand ships and amphibious craft. Fifteen hundred, if we can believe our own newsreels. That's more ships than they ever had in their navy. Today they probably have maybe a half-dozen ships of any consequence left and no fuel to run them, which is why they now have pilots willing to crash their planes into
anything
that's American, haze gray, and under way.”

He stopped for a moment and rubbed his eyes. “I'm tired,” he said. “Everyone's tired. When we ran with the big-deck carriers and the Japs came, we were one of twenty escorts shooting their asses down. We've been in on landings before. We do call-for-fire missions, the Marines or the Army take care of the bloodwork ashore, and then we're off to the next shitty little island. This distant picket duty is different.
We've
never been the targets before. It's always been the big boys, the carriers, the battlewagons, but now the Japs have figured out that they have to get by us to even reach the juicy targets.”

“People are scared, too,” Mario Campofino, the chief engineer, said. “It was one thing to be part of a whole fleet, but this…”

“If it's any comfort,” the captain said, “I'm scared, too. Man'd be a fool
not
to be scared. But we're the khaki—we have to set the example. It's only human to be scared of what might happen, like the LCS disappearing like that. On the other hand, we're not exactly helpless. We've got six five-inch, eight forty-millimeter, and ten twenty-millimeter barrels going for us. Our job as the wardroom is to remind the crew of that and then to do everything possible to keep our people sharp and all those guns loaded and ready to fight back. Okay?”

There were nods all around. We recognized the pep talk for what it was, but I thought it was worth doing. I continuously tried to prop people up as I made my daily rounds, inspecting the messdecks and berthing spaces, and sometimes just talking to the men. They needed reassuring, as I did from time to time. I closeted alone with the captain at least twice daily to talk problems and solutions. I would vent my frustrations with our precarious position up here all alone, and he would tell me that we could handle it. Only lately I'd been wondering: Who reassured him? The answer was pretty simple: No one.

The sound-powered phone under the captain's end of the table squealed. The captain picked it up and listened, then told it okay. “The morning CAP is up,” he announced. “So now we have some top cover. Go get 'em.”

I followed the captain back into his inport cabin just forward of the wardroom mess. The space measured nine feet wide by fifteen long, growing narrower as one faced the bow. It had its own tiny bathroom, or head, at the forward end, a desk and bureau set at the after end, and two portholes, which were currently bolted shut. There was a fake-leather couch along the inboard wall that converted into a pullout single bed. I sat on the couch; the captain took the armchair in front of his desk and let out a long sigh.

“You feeling okay, sir?” I asked.

The captain shook his head. “Actually, no,” he said. “I'm sick about what happened to that LCS. I keep thinking we could have done something, even though I know we couldn't. All those people, gone in a flash. And for what? Some Jap pilot dies a ‘glorious' death, but it makes no goddamned difference at all as to how this mess is going to come out. They know it, too. They
have
to know it. What is the
matter
with those people?”