Tales of the South Pacific (47 page)

"Time's up!" I said. Tony closed the book and looked at me.

"Bus!" Latouche said softly. "Get me one flower for my hair." I picked her a flamboyant. It was too big. "I take one piece of that green and yellow grass," she said. She wore it at a cocky angle.

"The ship's in," I said.

"Well," she replied. "It got to come some time."

"I'll go pack," Tony said. Latouche shrugged her shoulders and followed him across the garden. In her evanescent clothes she was a dream, not a girl at all. She was the symbol of what men think about in lonely places. Her buttocks did not bounce like those of tramps in Scollay Square, nor heave like those of fat and virtuous dowagers. Her shoulders stayed in a straight line as she walked. Her black hair blew lightly over her shoulder. Her legs were slim and resolute, an anchorage in the ocean of any guy's despair. She disappeared into the tiny house.

Well, you know what happened. We moved up to Santo and waited there a while. It always makes me laugh when I see a war movie. The hero and his buddy get on a ship in Frisco and right away land on the beachhead, where the buddy gets killed and the hero wipes out four Jap emplacements. You get on the ship at Frisco, all right. But you get off at Luana Pori. You wait there a couple of months. You move up to Santo and wait some more. At Guadal you wait, and in the Russells. But the day finally comes when even a moron can see that the next move...

THE STRIKE

IT was now midsummer. The sun blazed directly overhead, and at times it seemed as if we could stand the heat no longer. But we had to work, for a strike was in progress. Upon us depended the success of Alligator, the great Kuralei operation.

So all through the steaming hell of January and February we worked on. Each day a few men would find their prickly heat unbearable and would have to be hospitalized. Or fungus would break out in their ears. Or athlete's foot would incapacitate them. Incessant glare of sun on coral sent some to the hospital until their eyes recovered, and once or twice men keeled over for no reason. We sluiced them off with cold water and sent them to bed for the day. But mostly we worked on.

I was in a strange Navy. I saw two major strikes, and yet I never set foot upon what you would call a real warship. I was as true a naval officer as circumstances would permit, and yet I never saw a battleship except from a considerable distance. I never even visited a carrier, or a cruiser, or a destroyer. I never saw a submarine. I was a new type of naval officer. I was the man who messed around with aircraft, PT boats, landing barges, and the vast shore establishment.

For a long period prior to the actual landing on Kuralei and before the attack on Konora, I served as Admiral Kester's representative at the Naval Supply Depot which was to provision the fleet serving in those operations. I left Noumea with trepidation, for I had never before worked with the men who labor in silence behind the front, hauling, shoving, and bickering among themselves. It now became my duty to help the housekeepers of the Navy.

The Depot to which I was thus attached was located along the southern edge of an extensive channel. Much of the fleet could have been stationed there, but we got only the supply boats and small craft that provision larger units. At times we would have as many as one hundred and twenty ships in our channel, ships from all over the world. They brought our Depot a massive supply of goods of war. Some of the cargoes they carried were strange, and illustrated better than words the nature of modern war. Three ships came in one week loaded mostly with paper. We built a special warehouse for it, two hundred feet long and sixty-five feet wide! In it we had a wilderness of paper. One man did nothing but take care of brown manila envelopes! That was all he did for twenty-one months! Yet into those envelopes went the plans, the records, the resumes of the world's greatest fleet. We had another man whose sole responsibility was pens, ink, paper clips, and colored pencils. This man came to his tropical job from Minnesota. He had sores in his armpits for almost eighteen months. Then he went back to Minnesota.

SeaBees had constructed the Depot. It consisted of an area two miles long, a mile deep. Two hundred odd quonset huts were laid out in neat rows along the shoreline of the channel. Three thousand men worked at the Depot. One entire company of SeaBees did nothing but oil the coral to keep dust down. Ten men had no responsibility but to mend watches as they arrived from ship and aircraft navigators. Sixteen men were bakers, and all night long, every night, for two years, they made bread, and sometimes cake.

We had two docks at the Depot, and a special road paralleling the shoreline up and down which rolled trucks day and night, seven days a week, month upon month. The drivers were all colored men, and their commanding officer permitted them to paint their trucks with fanciful names: The Dixie Flyer, The Mississippi Cannonball, Harlem Hot Spot, and Coconut Express.

More gear lay on the hot coral than ever we got into the buildings. Twelve men walked among this gear day after day, endlessly, from one pile to another. They checked it to see that rain water was not seeping through the tarpaulins. They also guarded against mosquitoes that might breed in stagnant pools behind the stacks.

There were no days at the Depot. Sunday was not observed. Nor was there day itself. As many men worked at night as did during daylight hours. In this work strange things happened. Two truckloads of jewelers' gear would be lost! Completely lost! Trucks, invaluable watches, hair springs, all records. Gone! Then, three months later the gear would be found at some place like Noumea or San Diego. It was futile even to guess at what had happened. All you knew was that one night, about 0300, that jewelers' gear was in the Depot. You saw it there! Now it was in San Diego!

Constantly, in a stream that varied only in size, officers and men from the fleet came to the Depot. They came with chits, signed always by some nebulous authority whom they considered sound but whom the men at the Depot had never heard of. "We got to have two thousand feet of Grade A wire," a seaman would plead urgently. "Give him 1200 feet!" There was no appeal. "We need four more gas stoves."

"Give him three."

"Skipper says we got to have two more Aldis lamps."

"Where you headed?"

"North."

"OK. Give him two."

In two weeks you heard every possible excuse for getting equipment. You became calloused and looked at everyone as if he were a crook. At church, if you went, you wondered, "What's he saying that for? What is it he wants?" Suspicious, charged with heavy responsibility, eager to see the fleet go forth well armed but knowing the men of the fleet were a gang of robbers, you worked yourself dizzy and knocked off twenty-five percent from each request.

If to the above characteristics you added a capacity to do twice as much work as other naval officers, a willingness to connive and battle endlessly for what you wanted, and an absolute love of red tape, you were a real Supply Officer!

Captain Samuel Kelley, 54 years old, five feet four, 149 pounds, native of Madison, Wisconsin, graduate of Annapolis, was a Supply Officer. He was a small man of tireless energy and brilliant mind. He would have succeeded in anything he tried. Had he stayed in the regular line of the Navy, he would surely have become an admiral in command of a task force. Slightly defective hearing made such a career impossible. It was a good bet, however, that he would one day be admiral in charge of the Supply Corps.

It was Captain Kelley that I came north to work with. I was taller than he, so that when I reported, I tended to stoop a bit in his presence. His first words to me were, "Stand at attention. Put your hat under your left arm. And never wear an aviator's cap in this Depot."

Captain Kelley had a mania against aviators' baseball caps. Men in the air arm of the Navy loved the tight-fitting, comfortable little caps. And when Marc Mitscher started wearing one, it was difficult to keep the entire Navy from following suit. But no men serving under Captain Kelley wore baseball caps. He issued the order on the day he arrived to take charge of the Depot. Next day he put two enlisted men in the brig. The day following he confined an officer to quarters for four days. After that, we learned our lesson.

Captain Kelley instituted other innovations, as well. The Depot was a supply activity. Quickly officers of the regular line found themselves ousted from good jobs and relegated to minor routine posts. Several of the line officers thus demoted were civilians at heart and had no concern with their naval future. They protested the captain's decision. Within three days they received orders elsewhere and took with them unsatisfactory recommendations that would forever prevent them from being promoted in the Navy.

The captain's principal innovations, however, concerned free time, entertainment, and recreation. Each morning we would see him outside his quarters doing ten pushups, twenty stomach bends. He was in much better physical condition than his junior officers, a fact which gave point to his subsequent actions. First he lengthened the working day. Daytime hands reported to work at 0700. They worked till 1200. After one hour off, they worked until 1700. One night in eight they worked all night and had the next day to sleep. This meant a sixty-three hour week, with the thermometer at 95 or more. Two officers made formal protests. Unfortunately, they were line officers and were transferred.

Shortly after this protest the captain made another announcement. All games were canceled. "The men can rise an hour earlier, if they wish. They can do setting-up exercises. All this time off for games is unnecessary. The devil finds work for idle hands." So all games, except crap and poker, were abandoned.

On the night of the day athletic schedules were discarded, some toughies cheered the captain as he entered the moving-picture area. He promptly turned, ordered the lights extinguished and the movie operators to their quarters. We had no shows for a week, and in that time all seats in the movie area were torn out. Coconut logs were strung along the ground for men to sit upon. When the movies were reopened, the same toughies cheered again. The entire Depot was restricted to quarters, and for a month we had no shows. By that time sager counsels prevailed among the men, and when movies were resumed, there were no cheers. From then on, officers and men alike met the captain with stony silence. If he came into the club, all present stood at attention until he was seated. No one spoke above a whisper until he left.

"The Navy ashore is too lenient," the captain told us one day at dinner. "A great movement is on. I have been sent here to bring some kind of discipline into this organization. I propose to do so. We will shortly be faced with responsibilities almost beyond our capacity to perform. At that time there will be no place for weaklings."

That was the first news his subordinates had that a strike was scheduled. It was tremendous news. From then on speculation never ceased as to where the strike would be directed. Men argued until late at night the relative merits of Truk, Rabaul, Kavieng, and Kuralei. Strong spirits advocated Kuralei; weaker men shuddered at all four.

In the course of this discussion I discovered two interesting facts. The first was that most of the Supply Corps officers didn't give a damn about the strike. They never argued about when it would hit or where. Their concern was in how many bolts would be needed, how much gasoline. Yet when the final score was tallied, I repeatedly found that it was these indifferent officers who had made the strike possible. Details entrusted to the agitators and debaters might go awry, but not the fine-spun responsibilities of the dry, uninterested supply men.

My second discovery was much more challenging. I found that I was the only man at the Depot who was sure where the strike was headed! Not even Captain Kelley knew!

I used my discovery as only a mean man would. I sat next to the captain at mess and frequently felt the steel of his impartial goad. He disliked me, but not particularly. I was merely another undisciplined line officer, and what was worse, a reserve. "A mountebank, a huckster, a dry goods salesman!" I once heard Captain Kelley describe a reserve officer who joined the Navy from a large Cleveland store. I had no illusions as to what he thought of me. When he called me to his office and told me that as long as I was attached to his staff I would report to work at 0700 not 0702, he added icily, "Perhaps the training will stand you in good stead when you return to business life."

Therefore, when I found myself with a weapon in my hands, I used it like a bludgeon rather than as a rapier. At least once each day I would refer to some admiral. I'm not sure that Admiral Kester even remembers my name. I was merely his messenger. But at the Depot one would have thought that Admiral Kester and I were... well, that he consulted me before making any decision. Whenever I mentioned him or Admiral Nimitz, whom I saw once, at a distance, or Admiral This or Admiral That, I looked right at Captain Kelley. He knew the game I was playing, but he couldn't tell whether or not I was bluffing. If I really did know some admirals, then later on I might be able to hinder his progress in the Navy. He had to be careful how he handled me! On this battleground Captain Kelley and I arranged a truce. He left me to myself. I did not undermine him with his own officers. It was this armistice that made life bearable for me. And the structure of the armistice was my snide, mean, contemptible insinuation week after week that I knew where the strike was directed and he didn't. I never said as much, but I certainly devised a hundred means of imparting that suggestion to Captain Kelley!

My plan of battle did not endear me with my fellow officers who groaned and sweated under the Captain's saddle. They called me, "Old Me'n'e Admiral!" They were a bit envious. I tried to be a good sport about it and affected never to know what they meant.

I was therefore most pleased when an old friend of mine was assigned to the Depot for additional duty in connection with the strike. Lieut. Bus Adams was older than I and a world roustabout. He was a pilot, and in the recent fighting over Konora had been banged up a bit. As relief from further flying duties, he was sent to the Depot to advise on aviation details. He reported to the captain with a dirty aviation cap under his left arm.