Trial by Fire Page 10
And then they waited. The fireroom was sealed in by watertight hatches two levels up. Ventilation had been secured throughout the ship except in the main holes, where men would die of heat stroke in about twenty minutes without it. The exhaust system blowers were set on high, while the supply blowers were on low. That way if a fire erupted, the vent system would begin vacuuming the smoke out of the space, assuming the vent motors still worked. The chief joined Gary in his corner by the DA tank. The fireroom crew basically had nothing more to do, since both boilers were already on the line, other than to watch for problems and monitor speed-change orders from the bridge.
“I’m getting tired of that damned GQ alarm,” the chief said, lighting up a cigarette. Smoking was forbidden during GQ, but the snipes figured that with eight oil-fired boilers blazing away, a cigarette didn’t pose much of a hazard. Gary didn’t smoke, although he enjoyed the smell of good tobacco.
“Apparently the Japs just keep coming,” Gary said. They both had to shout a bit to be heard over all the machinery noise. “And if they don’t make an actual attack, if they even turn toward us, the whole task force goes to GQ.”
“Good way to tire your enemy out,” the chief observed. “Make sure he doesn’t get any sleep.”
“Well, I heard we’ve got these night-fighters now,” Gary said. “They’ve got a radar. Creep up on ’em from below and flame their asses before they even know our guy is there. But I gotta say: whoever predicted they were running out of planes was flat-ass wrong. Word is we’ve shot down over two hundred planes in the past two days, but the CIC officer said you’d never know it, looking at the radar screens.”
They both heard the engine order telegraph repeater jingle. Twenty-seven knots being ordered up. The chief got up and walked to the steel alley between the two boilers to make sure the crew responded to the increased steam flow demand from the engine rooms. As the engine rooms opened their turbine throttles, the steam pressure in the boilers would begin to drop. The boiler techs would then open up the fuel regulator valves to regain pressure. The chief was watching to make sure they didn’t go overboard with that effort and cause the boilers to overpressure and lift their safety valves.
Gary could feel the hull begin to tremble as the carrier came up in speed, its four enormous propellers churning the sea and leaving a wake that stretched out for two miles behind the ship, probably visible even in the dark. There was a rudder-angle repeater next to the engine order telegraph dial, and he watched as the rudder swung left five degrees to put the ship into a port turn. Gary couldn’t really feel the turn down here in the bowels of the ship, unlike on his destroyer, where even a five-degree rudder order at twenty-seven knots would heel the ship fifteen degrees and send coffee mugs flying.
He also couldn’t hear the ship’s guns way down here unless the five-inchers got into it, and then only as distant double-thumps. Either way, there was nothing he could do about what might be going on topside. It was the Heroes’ time to shine. The snipes wouldn’t really fear bombs, being this far below the armored hangar bay deck. Jap torpedoes, on the other hand, were a whole different story. They were monsters, even the air-dropped variety. There was a steel honeycomb of tanks and voids built along the sides of the ship, placed there to absorb torpedoes, but those Jap Type-93s came in at almost fifty miles an hour, packing nearly a half ton of explosive and time-delayed fuses. They were fully capable of smashing into the sides of a big ship and penetrating all the way into a vital space, such as a fireroom, and then going off. It just didn’t bear thinking about.
The thump of the five-inchers finally did penetrate the machinery noise. Gary decided to loosely don his life jacket, and then picked up his OBA and began to strap it on. He wouldn’t activate the cannister unless something actually happened, but he wanted it ready to hand. If Franklin’s own guns were in action, that meant something had gotten by all those night-fighters, CAP stations, the cruiser line, and their own escorts. There still wasn’t anything for the eight-man crew to do other than to watch gauges and adjust steam throttles on the bigger pumps. He saw men hand-oiling bearings and tightening valve handles that were weeping steam. All probably unnecessary, Gary thought, but it was important to keep busy when the ship was maneuvering and the guns were speaking. He would have almost preferred to be out on one of the gun galleries, blasting away at an incoming suicider, than sitting here waiting for the unknown. Almost; there was some comfort in knowing that the armored deck was above him. He shifted his perch to get directly under a vent and tried to stay awake.
17
J.R. waited out the first nighttime GQ in the secondary Damage Control Central station up at the very front of the hangar deck. It was a mini version of the main DC Central, with the same charts and sound-powered phone terminals, but with none of the records and admin spaces. J.R. was in charge of a crew of four phone-talkers, who were in communication with the repair parties, the conflagration control station, DC Central, and Main Control. J.R. personally manned a sound-powered phone circuit connected to the bridge and the captain’s phone-talker. He, too, was dressed out in his GQ uniform, as were the phone-talkers. Everyone had an OBA on. The main Damage Control Central station was called simply, Central, on the phones. J.R.’s station was called Central Two. Their mission was to back up the main station in case it got cut off for any reason.
Actual damage control was performed by eight repair parties, which consisted of twenty men each with a chief petty officer in charge. They were stationed next to their repair lockers, which contained all the firefighting, de-flooding, and smoke control equipment, as well as emergency electrical power cables, axes, sledgehammers, portable lanterns, portable fire pumps and generators, extra hoses, five-gallon cans of firefighting foam concentrate, and lockers full of OBAs and backup cannisters. The members of a repair party were dressed out in fire-resistant overalls, anti-flashburn hoods, and asbestos-lined gauntlets. Their OBAs were strapped on, with only the mask dangling loose. The repair lockers were spread out throughout the ship, including the two crash-crew lockers on the flight deck itself, embedded into the island.
J.R. had been spending his time during all the GQ sessions correcting his Damage Control diagrams. It was tedious work to be sure, but there wasn’t anything else to do. The ship was buttoned up, all the guns and radars manned, flight deck fuel lines in safe mode, and the repair parties sitting and sweating side by side in their hot passageways. There were no air ops in progress and all the planes down in the hangar bays would have been defueled. The air group’s pilots had gone to their ready-rooms for GQ, but they had reclining chairs and air-conditioning so they could sleep. J.R. had wondered about the wisdom of so many of the pilots being concentrated on the gallery deck, which lay between the flight deck and the hangar deck. If anything really big got going on the hangar deck, those spaces on the gallery deck would become ovens. On the other hand, berthing compartments above the waterline were not especially secure against fire, smoke, or flooding, either, so in a way, it was kind of a toss-up.
At least they weren’t doing drills. The captain had called GQ constantly during the transit out from Guam, which meant that the repair parties had to leave their lockers and go fight imaginary fires throughout the ship. It was good and, indeed, vital training, but after a while, it became hard to generate the go-get-it enthusiasm and aggressiveness needed for effective firefighting. He subscribed to the rule that there was no such thing as too much training, as the captain never tired of pointing out. He also knew the bleary-eyed crewmen who had to hump all that firefighting gear might have taken issue with that.
The five-inchers began to boom and some loose fittings in the overhead shook and danced in approval of each salvo. The five-inchers could shoot effectively at a target range of nine miles, J.R. remembered. It still wasn’t personal at nine miles, and with this new radio-fused ammo, their five-inch shells only had to fly close to the target in order to go off. He’d been proudly explaining that while trying to reassure one of his new f
iremen one day when a passing gunnery officer pointed out that nine miles slant range was only about five miles horizontal distance. “Time is what’s important,” he’d said. “A suicider five miles away diving at three hundred knots will be here in one minute, which isn’t much time for the smaller guns to do any good.” Fortunately, the fireman hadn’t understood a word of it; if his lieutenant was confident, then so was he.
He felt the ship start into another turn and begin to increase speed. He recalled all the tactical lectures conducted during the outbound transit. A destroyer at twenty-seven knots could whip through a complete reversal of course in under a minute. A 36,000-ton carrier took a lot longer to make a 180-degree turn unless it was willing to shed all the planes up on the flight deck, but a carrier executing a big circle was a lot harder to hit from the air. He heard the word “flares” over his phones. There was no telling who’d said it, but that meant that the attacking Japs were close enough to begin lighting up the carrier task force with air-dropped magnesium parachute flares. The rattle and bang of the shorter-range guns began, including the two quad-mounted 40 mm’s right up under the forward end of the flight deck, just ahead of his station. That meant there was something coming from dead ahead and low on the water, because those guns couldn’t shoot up. The five-inchers also stopped shooting, because they couldn’t shoot down.
The ship steadied up for a moment before tilting ponderously in the other direction as the conn put her into a narrow sinuous weave. Everyone in the space tensed for a long minute; attacks from dead ahead usually meant torpedoes. The Japs would come in from thirty degrees on either side of the bow and drop those fearsome Type-93 fish; either way the carrier turned, one or the other should get a hit. The only tactic that could be used against that was to steer straight between them, allowing the target ship to thread those fifty-knot monsters.
The forward-pointing forties went quiet and everyone held his breath and then finally relaxed when nothing happened. The ship began turning again and the five-inchers resumed their steel-thumping cadence. J.R. wondered if everyone locked up within the ship’s hundreds of compartments felt as trapped and helpless as he did. He tried to imagine the scene topside: the huge, fully darkened ship twisting and turning in the dead of night while being illuminated by long vertical tentacles of burning magnesium descending on parachutes out of the clouds; the night sky shredded by hundreds of white and red tracers coming from dozens of ships, all urgently seeking airborne metal; and, hopefully, the spiraling orange flames of kamikazes or bombers tumbling out of the sky, shedding burning wings and other debris on the way to their all-important honorable death, followed by a soundless splash and then the roar of its bomb going off underwater. He looked around his crowded little space as the lights flickered in time to the deadly rhythms of the massed gunfire. Everyone seemed to be avoiding eye contact, as if to conceal how afraid they all were.
Then all the noise died out. The ship stopped turning. It felt as if she was steadying up for a change. One of his phone-talkers spoke up.
“They’re calling for more ammo topside,” he said. “CIC says three more raids are inbound.”
Great, J.R. thought, we’re gonna be here all damn night. He passed the good news on to his little crew of phone-talkers. When the ammo resupply party came through, his talkers each took turns going up to the open forecastle deck and urinating over the downwind side.
18
The following morning, George sat at the wardroom table stabbing disinterestedly with his fork at his powdered eggs and slippery tinned sausages. General quarters had been sounded a total of four times through the night and his eyes were sandy with fatigue. The wardroom was fairly full, even though it was almost 0500 because there was a major strike launch planned for 0600. He knew he needed food and he was painfully aware that a lot of the crew hadn’t had a chance at hot chow for almost thirty hours with all these constant probes and attacks. He planned to talk to the captain this morning about maybe staging people through the messdecks all day and night instead of sticking to rigidly fixed meal hours. He expected the usual gruff no, not regulation, but he thought it worth a try. The captain would declare that fighting off Jap planes was more important than full bellies right now. George would have loved to point out that he, the captain, had a personal steward who managed to keep him fed, whether he was in his stateroom or up on the bridge, and the admiral had a whole herd of stewards doing the same thing for him.
His fork failed to penetrate one of the rock-hard sausages. He’d been eating so slowly that his breakfast was now cold. He gave up. Billy-B Perkins came by his table carrying what looked like a fried Spam and ketchup sandwich that was barely contained in some greasy paper napkins.
“You gonna die, you eat that mess,” George observed.
“Probably,” Billy responded. “But at least it’s portable.”
“Big deal today?” George asked him, reaching for the coffee pitcher.
“Yes, sir, we’re throwing the whole damn air group at ’em this time. I think all the carriers are. Spruance is getting tired of these all-nighters.”
“Me, too,” George said. “I’m dead on my ass, and I’m afraid the whole crew is, too.”
“We’re sending so many planes today that we’ve had to arm and fuel some of them in the hangar bay ’cause there’s no room on the roof. I hate to do that, but—”
“If you have to, you have to,” George said. “Captain’s not gonna want to hear about any delays in the launch.”
“That’s for damn sure,” Billy said. “I guess this is what we get for stirring up the home-islands hornet’s nest. Gotta go.”
George stopped by his office to get a quick read on the morning’s message traffic before heading for the bridge. He half expected the hateful buzzer to go off. He was becoming convinced that the buzzer knew when he came into his office and informed on him to the captain, but apparently the captain had other people to annoy right now. He heard flight quarters being sounded at 0600 and then came a surprising announcement over the 1MC: set Condition Three with the exception of gun batteries, the bridge, and CIC. The messdecks will remain open until all hands have had a chance to get chow. Gun crews authorized to send one-third of their crew to chow on a rotational basis. That is all.
He felt the ship turning into the wind to begin the launch. That order must have come from the captain, who must have been thinking along the same lines as George about the crew not getting fed. He heard the passageway outside his office fill with men hustling down to the messdecks. He felt rather than heard the first of the fighters rolling down the flight deck toward the bow. Tired of paperwork and already getting sleepy in the warm office, he decided to go to the bridge to watch the launch. He actually preferred to watch from PriFly, but the captain would wonder why he wasn’t up there on the bridge. With him.
George grinned mentally at the thought of his self-deception as he threaded his way through the throng of hungry sailors. He decided to go out to the flight deck briefly before heading upstairs. Maybe that cold air streaming across the flight deck would help him wake up.
The noise nearly overwhelmed him as he stepped through the island hatch and into the light-locker leading out to the actual flight deck. Two dozen bombers were packed together back aft with their engines turning and wings drooping with bombs and rockets. Between the engine exhaust smoke and the noise, he wondered how the flight deck crews could even think, much less coordinate the steady movement of planes from their spots to the launch position, all the while prancing about the flight deck almost on their hands and knees to avoid the whirling propellers. The wind was blowing hard. He looked up to the signal halyards, where the Fox flag was two-blocked and standing stiffly in the relative gale. At least forty, maybe even fifty knots of relative wind over the deck. Good, he thought. It would help those overloaded Corsairs waddle off the deck. He, himself, had to hang on to a stanchion to stay upright in that baby gale howling down the deck.
He looked back aft to see what th
e gang was taking to Dai Nippon today. Some of the bombers carried the big stuff internally, with a couple of incendiary 100-pounders strapped to the wings. They’d drop the crowd-pleaser and the fire sticks together. The bomb would create wreckage; the incendiaries would start it on fire. Others had five-inch rockets, three to a wing, instead of bombs. These were the train-chasers, who’d find railroad tracks and fly down them until they found a train and then rocket the engine. With the engine disabled, they’d turn around and fly back down the line, strafing the freight and tank cars to finish the job. Still others had those murderous Tiny Tims, much bigger rockets with large, 500-pound warheads. These were used to smash into big factory buildings like steel mills or aircraft hangars. All the planes, fighters and bombers, also carried guns, and once they dropped their main armament, they’d turn around, get low, and strafe the hell out of whatever was left, especially all the people running for their lives. George had spent more than a few nights at bases in the Solomon Islands subject to Jap bombing raids and even battleship bombardments. This whole picture was immensely satisfying.
Okay, he thought. Time to go face the ogre and make nice. But as he turned to go back into the light-locker, something way above the flight deck caught his eye. His brain at first rejected what he was seeing, but then he realized he was seeing it: a lone Japanese bomber, green-skinned with a greenhouse structure for a cockpit, those big red meatballs staring back at him, flying directly over the carrier, from bow to stern, and going like a bat out of hell. A Judy! He was forming the words WHAT THE HELL, when there was a flash of reddish-white light and he was blown off his feet and all the way forward along the sides of the island, where his body then rolled through the space between the two forward five-inch mounts and right into the lifelines. He was frantically grabbing for something to stop himself from going right over the side and falling eighty feet into the sea when his head hit something truly hard and he blacked out for a moment. When he came to, the end of the world was upon him in all its fiery glory.