Sentinels of Fire

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  This book is dedicated to the memory of the nearly 5,000 navy men who lost their lives at the battle for Okinawa.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Author’s Note

  Also by P. T. Deutermann

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ONE

  On my very first day aboard USS Malloy, a Jap fighter plane came within fifteen feet of taking my head right off before it exploded just above the water on the opposite side of the ship. The captain looked down at me from the bridge wing once all the shooting stopped, shot me a lopsided grin, and said, “Welcome aboard, XO. How do you like your coffee?”

  An hour later I thought of a truly smartass reply, but at that very moment, I was speechless and a bit deaf, too. I had literally just come aboard. The bridge messenger, a young seaman who looked to be no more than twelve years old, led me forward along the starboard side through all the guntubs to ascend the weather-deck ladders up to the bridge. We’d gotten halfway up the first ladder when that kamikaze came in out of nowhere, its screaming engine audible above the sudden burst of fire from the midships forties, joined immediately by all the twenty-millimeter mounts. I had been standing underneath a four-barreled forty-millimeter gun mount when the gunners first spotted him. Every gun on that side opened fire. The messenger and I dropped back down to the main deck and huddled under the ladder to avoid the shower of brass cartridges raining down on our heads. The muzzle blasts were so powerful that I couldn’t catch my breath, but that was nothing compared to seeing that Jap plane diving right at us, right at me, with that big, ugly bomb slung under its fuselage, even as pieces of its wings, tail, and undercarriage were being torn off by the gunfire from Malloy’s massed batteries. At the last moment, the pilot lost either his nerve or his head, because the plane pitched up, rolled, and then kited right over the ship before crashing down into the sea, pursued by a sheet of flaming gasoline. A moment later there was a stupendous blast when its bomb went off just a few feet underwater, giving what was left of its pilot one last flight experience and raising a waterspout a hundred feet into the air.

  Only thirty minutes earlier, Malloy had finished taking on fuel and transferring personnel by midships highline alongside the fleet oiler, Monongahela. Once I landed on Malloy’s main deck, shed my life jacket, and collected my seabags, I headed forward as the bosun’s mates retrieved the highline rig and the ship pulled away from the oiler, accelerating to 27 knots to get clear of the cumbersome and vulnerable underway replenishment formation. It had been a gray, drizzly day, with enough wind to bat the tops off of the waves as Malloy threaded her way through all the carriers, battleships, and cruisers of Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet. Spruance had been conducting air strikes against Formosa and the Japanese home islands for the past three days, trying to reduce what was left of the Jap air forces before the invasion of Okinawa began. The Japs had reacted by throwing kamikazes at the fleet formations, with some success, unfortunately. I’d transferred over to the oiler from the aircraft carrier Franklin—the Big Ben, as she was known—where I’d been the gunnery officer, on my way to take over as executive officer in the destroyer Malloy. Career-wise, it was a pretty big step. Two days after I’d transferred to the oiler, the Big Ben lost over eight hundred men in a kamikaze bombing attack and was so badly damaged that she had to retire to Pearl and, ultimately, to retirement status in the Atlantic Reserve Fleet.

  The captain was back inside the pilothouse by the time I got to the bridge, talking to the ship’s Combat Information Center, known as the CIC or Combat, on the tactical intercom, or the bitch-box. He acknowledged my presence with a casual wave, finished his conversation, and then got out of his chair to come shake hands. I introduced myself.

  “I’m Connie Miles, Captain,” I said. “Reporting aboard for duty, sir.”

  “Pudge Tallmadge,” he said as we shook hands. “Welcome aboard. I’m sorry your predecessor isn’t here to do a proper turnover, but he was yanked off to go to command, and that does take precedence.”

  “Amen to that,” I said. “I’ll try to hit the deck running.”

  The captain’s nickname, Pudge, must have been strictly an academy thing, because he was anything but pudgy now. Gaunt would have been a better description, with gray hair, light blue eyes with dark pouches underneath, medium height, and a face that looked ten years older than his forty-one years of age. His real name was Commander Carson R. R. Tallmadge III, USN, and he was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland and the Annapolis class of 1929. He’d been in command of Malloy, one of the new Gearing-class destroyers, since taking over from her commissioning CO right after that officer had suffered a heart attack in mid-1944.

  “Let’s go below,” he said. He told the OOD—officer of the deck—that we’d be in his inport cabin and to keep the ship at modified GQ, or general quarters, until we got back out to our assigned station, escorting a three-carrier formation. The captain’s cabin was just on the other side of the wardroom. Once there he buzzed the duty wardroom steward for some coffee, lit up a cigarette, and then asked me to give him my background.

  “Class of ’thirty-five,” I recited. “Served in the West Virginia for my makee-learn tour, then in Chester as main propulsion assistant. Postgrad school back in Annapolis, then back to sea in Houston out of Norfolk as the assistant gunnery officer. A year and a half of shore duty at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, where the EDOs tried to convert me to engineering duty officer. That looked pretty boring to me, so I turned ’em down, which apparently hurt their feelings, because I was sent back to sea midtour to the Big E, again as assistant gunnery officer, right after Pearl.”

  “You were aboard for Midway, then?”

  “Yes, sir. Actually, I was supposed to have gone to Yorktown, but that got changed at the last minute.”

  “That was lucky,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, I thought so, especially after she went down. Went to Franklin from Enterprise, this time as the gunnery officer. Got off her to come here only days before the Japs got her.”

  “Lucky again,” he said. “That’s good. I firmly subscribe to what Napoleon said when he was asked if he preferred brilliant generals or lucky ones. Lucky, every time, he said. Are you married?”

  “No, sir, I am not. Almost, once, but then she got cold feet after one of the wives at a wardroom dinner party told her what married life with a naval officer was like: the constant separations; a lot of responsibility but really low pay; the stagnant promotion system; and then some more about the endless separations. She was a bit tipsy, but she was pretty convincing. My fiancée asked me later if that was all true, and I had to admit that it was. That, as they say, was that.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” the captain said. “All of those things are true, or were, I guess. My wife’s one of those special women who can live their own lives when I’m gone, and yet make mine worth living when I’m home. About the
only thing that’s changed is the promotion opportunity: You know, enough people die, the survivors get promoted. You’re lucky you and she explored the truth before you got hitched.”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “She was a lovely young lady, but she was pretty clear on what she wanted out of marriage: kids, a nice home, a nice car, and an expanding horizon. This was about the time we were all taking a fifteen percent pay cut if we wanted to stay on active duty.”

  “Remember it well,” he said, nodding. “And we were glad to hand it over, as I remember. It beat going on the bread lines or shoveling dirt for the WPA.”

  “I wavered,” I said. “Almost got out. Madge, that was her name, Madge Warrren, got her father into it. He tried to convince me that a career in banking was a whole lot better than a naval career. Having watched most of the banks fail when I was still at the academy, I wasn’t convinced.”

  “What happened to her, may I ask?”

  “She married a banker and became an alcoholic. I guess I was lucky to have dodged a bullet. In a manner of speaking.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Well, speaking of luck, we’re going to need as much of that as we can get, and all because we have one of the newer air-search radars.”

  That was interesting—we’d had two air-search radars on Big Ben, but he was talking as if Malloy’s having one was unusual. “Sir?” I said.

  “L-day for the Okinawa campaign has been set of the first of April. Operation Iceberg, they’re calling it. Gonna be a really big deal, Connie. Upwards of fifteen hundred ships and amphibious craft. A four-division assault, two Army, two Marine, almost 120,000 men, with the entire Big Blue Fleet in support. That’s where we and our air-search radar come in. Spruance has ordered up a radar picket line, north and west of the main island of Okinawa. Six destroyers, augmented with some modified landing craft for additional close-in gun support, stationed in a big arc across the top of the island chain.”

  “I don’t remember hearing anything about a picket line for Iwo.”

  “We didn’t, because Iwo is six hundred and fifty miles away from the home islands. Okinawa, on the other hand, is only two hundred and twenty miles. Okinawa is considered by the Japs to be Japanese home island territory. They’ve got the entire Jap 32nd Army on that island, and the intel people are predicting a bloodbath.” He sipped some of his coffee. I noticed his hand was trembling.

  “If you were on the Franklin,” he continued, “then you know that the Japs are on the ropes. For all intents and purposes, their fleet’s been destroyed. They’ve resorted to kamikaze tactics pretty much because that’s all they’ve got. Fleet intel estimates that they don’t have all that many airplanes and pilots left, either, especially pilots, so they’re making them count.”

  Well I knew. We’d been the target of all too many kamikazes recently in Franklin, and, being the gunnery officer, I knew all about the horror show they could produce. Fortunately Franklin had been surrounded by a screen of antiaircraft light cruisers and destroyers, together with the side batteries of two battleships, so it was pretty rare that one got through. “Will this picket line be a formation, Captain?”

  “I don’t think so, Connie. It looks like we’re going to be on our own, stationed maybe ten, twenty miles apart, to create the biggest possible radar coverage.”

  “One ship on its own? That’s a recipe for disaster.”

  “Do tell. It’s one thing to defend against a plane trying to bomb or torpedo a moving ship. Quite another when the plane is the bomb. Fleet intel says they’ll soon run out of planes. I’m not so sure. I think they’re holding back until we actually attack Okinawa. Remember, Okinawa Shima is Japan in their evil little minds.”

  I nodded. I’d heard much the same scuttlebutt on board the Big Ben. The carriers were the queen bees of the fleet and often carried flag officers, which meant that officers stationed aboard a carrier knew more about what was happening in the big picture than, say, officers in a destroyer. Since I was the new guy here, however, it wouldn’t do for me to come across as some know-it-all, even if I was to be the second in command.

  “Can you tell me about the department heads, Captain?”

  “Absolutely, and we’re lucky to have four good ones. The whole wardroom is actually way above average. Let’s see. The senior one is Lieutenant Jimmy Enright, the navigation officer, sometimes called the ops officer. UCSD grad, headed for law school but came in after Midway. Did one tour on a light cruiser, then showed up for the precommissioning detail for Malloy. He’s bright, a thinker, loves his electronic toys and knows more about them than some of his people. Married, two little kids. Ask him a complicated question and he’ll think about it first, then come up with an answer you didn’t expect.

  “The gun boss is Marty Randolph. Southerner, another lieutenant, academy, ’forty-two, commissioned right after Pearl, pretends to be a good ol’ boy but actually stood tenth in his class. Championship diver back at the boat school. Loves his guns and his gunners, and they worship him. Also loves to fight Japs, and his men know that and respond accordingly. He can absorb a tactical situation and split out the main battery on the fly. Not married, but I’m told there is a Southern belle somewhere back home, dutifully pining away amongst the magnolias.

  “Chief engineer is Mario Campofino, not an engineer by trade or nature but a very demanding and precise young officer. OCS out of NYU, did one tour in the Indianapolis as a makee-learn and then, like you, fleeted up to main propulsion assistant, which, on a heavy cruiser, says a lot. Again, he was part of the precomm detail for Malloy. Has a great rapport with his chiefs, whom he trusts, as well he should. But when it comes to running the main engineering plant, he’s by the book, all the way. Calm, cool, never loses his temper, unlike the gun boss. Confirmed bachelor, or so he says.

  “Finally, Peter Fontana, lieutenant jay-gee, the supply officer. I forget his college, some Podunk U in the Midwest. Supply School, of course, then OCS. Everything tends to amaze Peter, so he’s very careful. Going to be an accountant one day if we survive this fight. He’s a natural born bean counter. Didn’t understand what his real mission was when he first came aboard, but he does now, and he’s become really good at it. He oversees the handiest collection of midnight-requisition artists I’ve ever seen. We go alongside a tender and they will rob that ship blind of all the stuff we’re not authorized to have. When they get caught, Peter puts on such a good act of ninety-day-wonder innocence that it is truly amazing to behold. The tender’s people know we’re guilty, but they’re so impressed with this amazingly gullible LTJG Fontana act that they forget to come get their stuff back.”

  “The goat locker?”

  “The chiefs’ mess is strong. There are a couple of chiefs whom I would not have promoted, but that’s just your fleet average situation. Your right-hand man is going to be the chief master at arms, Chief Wallace Lamont, a Scottish-descent bantam rooster with the unlikely nickname of Pinky. Red hair, ruddy face, faintly pink eyes. Even so, he’s one of those guys you recognize immediately as someone you don’t want to piss off. He’s half the size of most of the crew, and yet no one crosses that man under any circumstances. Your predecessor depended on him absolutely. He told me more than once that nothing goes on in this ship that Lamont doesn’t already know about, and if it’s a problem, he’s usually already taken care of it.”

  “Sounds damned useful,” I said. “How do I play him?”

  The captain sat back in his chair with an amused look. He closed his eyes for a moment. Then he surprised me. “What do you think your job is here, as XO?”

  “Run the ship the way you want it run so that you look good.”

  He chuckled. “Who told you that?”

  “Commander Randy Marshal, XO in the Franklin. Unfortunately, I understand he died in the big fire.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s the traditional approach, but these days, out here, it bears no relation to reality, Connie, especially on a destroyer. Let me tell you what’s real. In the old days, fo
ur-stripers got command by staying healthy long enough to outlive their seniors while not getting caught consorting with goats. That took some time, which meant many skippers were graybeards by the time the war started. I was on one of the cruisers sunk at Savo. Our captain was nearly fifty-five years old. We were utterly ignorant of what we should have been doing that night. The Japs had trained and trained for night engagements with torpedoes, star shells, and some of their cruisers carried up to twelve eight-inch guns. We, on the other hand, were past masters at shining brightwork, responding to bugle calls, holystoning teak decks, rigging a taut quarterdeck awning, and steaming in precise formation on any given sunny day. When we got sent to Guadalcanal we stayed up all night, waiting for something to happen. After three nights of that, we were all zombies, and that’s when the Japs came. They tore us to pieces. They sailed by one of our picket destroyers at a range of less than two miles, but everyone on that ship apparently was sound asleep—at their GQ stations.

  “We lost Quincy, Vincennes, Astoria, and the Aussie flagship, Canberra, all shot to pieces in two quick engagements. I was on Quincy, where I learned about swimming at night when the sea itself was on fire. Then I transferred to Juneau, where I learned about the Jap Long Lance torpedo. I’m alive today because I was blown over the side when she got hit the second time and the magazines went. Spent the night and the next thirty-six hours in the waters off Savo.”

  His face reflected some of the horror of those engagements and the trauma he’d experienced. I didn’t know what to say. My war had been on carriers. Even when we had been attacked, it had never seemed quite so personal as what the captain was describing.

  “Your main job here as XO is to run the ship on a day-to-day basis to the standards I demand. You will conduct daily messing and berthing inspections so that the ship stays clean. You will supervise all the paperwork, the training of the officers, chiefs, and enlisted. You will execute the standard Navy daily routine. You will see to it that someone, including you from time to time, takes stars once a day to confirm our position, even if we can see the nearest island. You and Lamont will police the lower decks for minor infractions of naval discipline. You will supervise the department heads in the administration of their departments. You will draft fitness reports for all the officers in the wardroom and ensure the department heads get enlisted evals in on time. And you will spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with all the my-wife-she, my-dog-it personnel problems that three hundred twenty enlisted people can conjure up even when we’re eight thousand miles away from said wives and dogs. And that’s just your day job.