Sentinels of Fire (6 page)

I felt the same way. Sick was a good word for it. I wanted to recite the litany of reasons that there was nothing
Malloy
could have done, but the captain already knew all that. As to the Japanese, they were simply barbarians.

“What do you want to say to CTF 58?” I prompted, remembering we were on the hook to answer the admiral's message.

“What I want to say and what I will say are two very different things,” the captain said. “I want to say, send more destroyers. Leave those helpless little gator-freighters at the beach where they belong. Hell, send a battleship or six. What else do those overblown tubs have to do, except carry admirals around in grand style? It's not like the Japs have anything left worthy of a sixteen-inch salvo.”

Open sarcasm was something new from the captain. In the two months I'd been aboard he'd been Mr. Steady Eddy, the wardroom's stable element when the rest of the officers started bitching and moaning about how the tin cans were being thrown away up on the picket line while entire squadrons of battleships and aircraft carriers steamed back and forth in grand fleet dispositions, ready to refight the Battle of Midway at a moment's notice, even though the great bulk of the Jap fleet already littered the bottom of the Pacific.

“I recommend we tell it like it happened, then,” I said. “His message didn't ask for advice, just the facts as we know them. I can gen up a draft pretty quick.”

The captain waved his acquiescence. He was obviously in a black mood and just wanted me to go do my job. The sound-powered phone set squeaked.

“Captain.” He listened for a moment and then said, “Very well. I'll come up.”

He hung up and spoke to me again. “Belay the message—there's a big raid coming in. Radar shows two formations, a big one for Okinawa and a smaller one splitting off and breaking up into pairs.”

Those pairs were headed for the picket line, I thought. Here we go again.

I put away my notebook as the GQ alarm went off. I looked at my watch; it was only nine fifteen. It felt like we'd been through a whole day already. I glanced at the captain as I opened the door to go up to the bridge and CIC. He was still sitting there, staring at absolutely nothing. I closed the door gently, so as not to disturb him, which was a bit silly since the passageway was full of men scrambling to their GQ stations outside the wardroom.

I joined the stream of men thumping up the ladder toward the bridge and my GQ station, the Combat Information Center, which was right behind the bridge. I could hear the engine-order telegraph ringing as the ship increased her speed and the OOD initiated evasive maneuvers. Below I heard the sounds of steel hatches being slammed down and repair parties laying out their firefighting gear.
Malloy
's crew was fully trained, so there were no orders being shouted. Everyone knew what to do and where to go, and the ship would be buttoned up in under three minutes, ready for whatever might be headed our way.

The exec's traditional GQ station was aft, at a place called secondary conn, the theory being that if the bridge command team got wiped out, the exec, second in command, would be able to take over from a station a hundred fifty feet aft. Since the advent of the Combat Information Center, however, most execs took station in Combat, where all the tactical information was concentrated and displayed. Some captains were even starting to fight their ships from Combat, although most clung to the tradition of being on the bridge. Our skipper was one of those, trusting his own eyes over what might or might not be true on a radarscope.

“Combat manned and ready, XO,” LTJG Lanny King, the CIC officer, reported as I stepped into the dark and crowded space. “We have many bogeys, but none headed directly our way.”

“Yet,” I said, speaking out loud what everybody else was thinking. Combat spanned almost the entire width of the upper superstructure. There were two vertical, six-foot-high Plexiglas status boards along the back bulkhead, showing what was called the air picture. The boards had a five-foot-diameter compass rose etched into them, with concentric ten-mile range rings expanding from the center, which marked where we were. Contact information on bogeys detected by radar were passed via sound-powered phones to men standing behind the lighted boards, who then marked the range, bearing, course, speed, and altitude of all air contacts within fifty miles of the ship using yellow grease pencils. Because they stood behind the boards, they'd all had to learn to write backward, so that the officers positioned in front of the boards could interpret what they were seeing.

Down each side of Combat were the radar operators, both air search and surface search, sitting at bulky consoles where the green video displays flickered. The entire space was kept in constant semidarkness to make it easier for the radar operators to see their displays. Standing behind the console operators were the two fighter direction officers. The Freddies were fighter pilots who were being given a break from flight duties and who'd been trained to control other fighters by radio and radar. Each morning, all the destroyers would be assigned a section or even two of CAP: carrier fighter planes sent up from the carriers steaming off Okinawa to destroy as many of the incoming Jap planes as possible before they could reach their bomb-release or suicide-dive points over the American fleet.

I stood in the middle of the space, right next to a lighted table where the surface picture was plotted. The table, called a dead-reckoning tracer or DRT, contained a small light projector underneath its glass top. The projector was slaved to the ship's gyro, and thus whenever the ship moved, the projector moved with it under the glass, projecting a yellow circle of light with a compass rose etched onto it. That way we saw a true picture of what the ship was doing. Plotters, men standing around the table wearing sound-powered phones, would then plot the positions of surface contacts, both friendly and enemy, onto a very thin sheet of tracing paper taped to the glass top. The result was the so-called surface picture: what we were doing, where our escorting ships were and what they were doing, and where any bad guys were within range of our guns.

The air and surface plots meant that there were lots of men speaking quietly into sound-powered phones, both making and getting reports, but to my ears it was all just a routine hum. After three years of war, my brain had learned to tune out the routine and repetitive reporting and listen instead for the sounds of immediate danger, indicated by words such as “closing fast” or “inbound” or “multiple bogeys,” or that great catchall “oh shit.” Combat was the nerve center of the ship in terms of war-fighting. In addition to the surface and air pictures, the sonar operators had a console in one corner, meaning that all three dimensions of what we might encounter, air, surface, and underwater, were displayed in this one space.

If Combat was the brain, then the gun directors and their associated weapons represented the fist.
Malloy
had three twin-barreled five-inch gun mounts, all of them controlled by a large analog computer down below the waterline in a space called Main Battery Plot. There were two gun directors, one that looked like a five-inch gun mount without any guns, mounted one level above the bridge, and a second, much smaller one, at the after end of the ship's superstructure right behind the after stack. The forward director had its own radar, which would feed range and bearing information down to the computer, which in turn would drive the five-inch gun mounts to train and point at the computed future position of incoming targets. The after director was a one-man machine, without a radar, but it could be optically locked on to incoming targets as long as they were very close. It could control the lesser guns, the multibarreled forty- and twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft batteries.

In practice, however, these smaller guns were usually controlled by human pointers and trainers, who concentrated on keeping the stream of projectiles being fired by their guns streaming just ahead of and slightly above an incoming plane. The five-inch could reach out nine miles under director control, but by the time the forties and twenties got into it, the Mark One eyeball was the director of choice. The forties and twenties were for the close-in work, the last ditches of defense. Earlier in the war, Jap bombers would only have to get within a few vertical miles to release their bombs and then turn away. Nowadays, however, the Jap planes
were
the bombs, so there wasn't much of a fire-control problem when a kamikaze came, because he came straight at you. It was simply a matter of how much steel-clad high explosive you could put in his way that determined whether or not he arrived in one piece and killed the ship or did a flaming cartwheel into the sea.

“Station Six-Fox reports she's taking bogeys under fire,” Lanny announced.

“Distance?” I asked. I scanned the plotting boards. Six-Fox was the
Waltham,
another radar picket ship. She was an older, Fletcher-class destroyer, with five single-barrel five-inch guns.

“Fifteen miles southwest, XO,” Lanny said. He pointed down at the plotting table. “Right here.”

“Our radars are not picking up Six-Fox's bogeys,” one of the Freddies said. “Our CAP says the Japs're coming in on the deck this time. Zeros, it looks like.”

Just like this morning, I thought. I picked up my own sound-powered phone handset, switched to the combat action circuit, and called the captain at his station on the bridge. The captain's talker, Chief Petty Officer Julio Martinez Smith, answered.

“I need the skipper,” I said.

“Um, we thought he was in there with you,” Smith said. Chief Smith was another CPO who worked for me; as chief yeoman, he was the ship's secretary, or chief administrative petty officer.

Shit,
I thought. “Thank you,” I replied, as if it were perfectly normal for the CO not to be at his station during GQ. I hung up and left Combat, going back down the ladder to the wardroom and through it to his inport cabin. The wardroom was set up as the main battle dressing station, with the chief corpsman and his assistant waiting there with all their medical gear spread out on the table. They were surprised to see me in the wardroom at GQ, but I didn't have time to explain why I was there. I knocked twice on the skipper's door, opened it, and found the captain the way I'd left him, sitting in front of his desk and staring at nothing. He looked up, obviously startled when I poked my head in.

“
Waltham
under attack from low-fliers,” I reported.

“They are?” the captain asked. “Go to GQ. They'll be here next.”

“We
are
at GQ, sir,” I said. “I've been in Combat. I thought you were already out on the bridge.”

The captain appeared to be confused. He shook his head. “Must have fallen asleep,” he said. “
Damn!
I'll be right up. How far away is
Waltham
?”

“Fifteen miles southwest. Our radar doesn't hold her bogeys.”

The captain shook his head again. “Fifteen miles—there's no way we can offer mutual support. They're doing this all wrong, XO. We should be in a loose gaggle, but close enough so that all the pickets can support each other.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir, and we maybe should put that in our message to CTF 58. Right now, though, I'm headed back to Combat.”

“Right, right,” the captain said, getting up. “I'll be up in two shakes.”

I felt the ship leaning into another turn as the OOD made random course changes, forcing me to grab the handrail as I climbed the ladder. If the Divine Wind was blowing, you did not steer a straight course and make it easy for them. But what was going on with the CO? He had never, ever flaked out like that. As I opened the door into Combat I heard raised voices out on the bridge and then the engine-order telegraph ringing up more speed.

“Bogeys, bogeys, composition two, low and fast, three-five-zero, sixteen thousand yards and closing!” one of the radar operators announced.

“Designate to director fifty-one,” Lanny ordered. I heard the director rumbling around on its roller path overhead while the gunfire-control system radar operators down in Main Battery Plot attempted to find and then lock on to the incoming planes. I wondered if I should go out to the bridge until the captain showed up, but then I heard the captain's voice on the intercom. “We're coming to zero eight zero, speed twenty-five to unmask, XO,” he said. “Open fire at five miles.”

“XO, aye,” I responded. That was better, I thought. Much more like it. The guns could shoot a projectile out to eighteen thousand yards, or nine miles, but they were much more effective if we waited until the planes got into five miles, or ten thousand yards.

“XO, Sky One. Director fifty-one is locked on and tracking.”

“All mounts, air action port. Commence firing when they get to ten thousand yards.”

Almost immediately the five-inchers opened up with their familiar double-blam sound as they began hurling fifty-four-pound, five-inch-diameter shells down the bearing. Two of the mounts, fifty-one and fifty-two, were firing shells with mechanical time fuzes, set to explode in front of the approaching aircraft. Mount fifty-three, all the way aft, was shooting some of the new variable-time fragmenting shells. The VT frags were equipped with a miniature radar in the nose that detonated the shell if it detected anything solid coming at it or near it.

“Bearing steady, range eight-oh-double-oh, and still closing.”

Eight thousand yards. Four miles. The guns were blasting away in irregular cadence now, their thumping recoil shaking the superstructure and stirring a light haze of dust out of the overhead cableways. The forties would join in next, but not until the range came down to about two miles, or four thousand yards. The twenties were good for about a mile. The individual gun captains were all experienced hands and would open up as soon as they thought they could do some good.