The Commodore Page 24

  “That’s interesting,” she said. “That they’d send a flag selectee to interview you.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Debrief. Flag selectee. You’re talking like you’re Navy yourself, I mean, besides as a superintendent nurse?”

  She smiled, but now it was a sad smile. “My husband was chief engineer on the Juneau,” she said.

  “Juneau,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I was one of the nurses in charge of the main surgical recovery unit at the naval hospital in San Diego when it happened. I requested a transfer out here. They said no. I didn’t take no for an answer, and they finally relented.”

  “Why did you want to come out here to the ends of the earth?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  He thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Poor Juneau. That was terrible.”

  “Seven hundred souls on board,” she said, her voice so low he almost couldn’t hear her. “Ten came back, I’m told.”

  He remembered the story: After the melee of November 13, cruisers Helena, Juneau, and San Francisco, all seriously damaged, had been making their way to the American repair base at Espiritu Santo when a Jap submarine had attempted to torpedo San Francisco. She missed the heavy cruiser, but one of her torpedoes hit Juneau, which disappeared in a thunderclap of flying metal and sank in thirty seconds. Then, adding insult to injury, the stragglers elected to keep going on to the distant base, wrongly assuming that no one could have survived such an explosion. One hundred or more men did, but only ten were alive when search planes finally went back to look days later.

  “Well,” he said. “I think I lost about as many men. Four destroyers sunk, a light cruiser sunk, an admiral killed. That’s why Hollis was here. I think they’re looking for someone to hang.”

  “Nobody was hanged for what happened to Juneau,” she pointed out. She stood up and smoothed her skirt over her legs. “It’s war, Captain, or Commodore—the Japs are just a lot better than everyone thought.”

  “You have no idea,” he said.

  “Actually,” she said, with a wan smile.

  He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m—”

  “Exhausted and badly hurt,” she said. “Water, rest, more water. I’ll check on you in the morning.” She pulled up the light blue cotton cover.

  “I’d like that,” he mumbled as the shadows drew around him. He found himself embracing them.

  THIRTY

  Nouméa Field Hospital

  The next morning Sluff was asked if he could wheel himself to the hospital cafeteria, as the orderlies were really busy just then. He said he thought he could just walk if someone could maybe get him a cane. They did and he did, although halfway there he wondered if this had been such a good idea. Fortunately there were benches placed strategically all along the corridors.

  The hospital staff was obviously pushing him to make the transition from invalid to walking wounded, and for good reason: they had more seriously injured patients to take care of. Lots more, apparently. The meat grinder that was Guadalcanal, plus the incessant bloody sea fights over Ironbottom Sound, kept the field hospitals on Tulagi going overtime all the time. His head injury was not trivial, but with the plate in and no infection or obvious cognitive impairment, he was apparently as “fixed” as anyone could expect, and we need that bed, please, sir. The only thing remaining was what one corpsman vaguely referred to as some routine skin grafts. Sluff had heard about skin grafts and wasn’t looking forward to that.

  After a real breakfast of canned bacon, powdered scrambled eggs, and fresh bread and butter, he felt much better and was able to find his way back to his room, where he found the same diminutive superintendent nurse waiting for him, along with one of the junior nurses. This time she was in an all-white dress uniform, with the two stripes of a Navy Nurse Corps lieutenant showing on her white cap.

  “You’re walking,” she said. “That’s good. I think. How’s your balance?”

  “Cane was useful,” he admitted. “But getting some mostly real food helped.”

  They ushered him back into bed, where the younger nurse took vitals, updated his chart, and then hustled out to the next room.

  “May I know your name?” Sluff asked.

  “I’m Tina Danfield,” she said. “My husband was Walter Danfield, class of thirty.”

  “I was twenty-six,” Sluff said. “Just missed each other. I guess. Will the docs be back this morning?”

  “They’re operating right now. Been going all night. You feel ready to talk to Captain Hollis?”

  He nodded. “I think so,” he said.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “I told them two days and my docs will back me up on that.”

  “It’s time,” Sluff said. “I need to get the story out before I start forgetting stuff.”

  “Do you want a JAG present? That Captain Hollis looked as serious as a heart attack, and that was a court reporter with him.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I got to sit in on some of the after-action proceedings about what happened to Juneau, and watched them ask the skipper of the Helena, the officer in charge of the convoy of cripples headed back to Espiritu Santo, why he didn’t look for survivors. I recognized that machine.”

  “What did he say?” Sluff asked.

  “That no one could have survived the magazine explosion, and that none of his ships was in any condition to fight off a Jap sub.”

  Sluff thought about that. In the cold calculus of naval warfare, the skipper of Helena had probably made the correct if somewhat heartless decision. During World War I, a German submarine had torpedoed one of three British cruisers steaming in a column formation. The other two had stopped to render aid, and the U-boat skipper proceeded to pick them off in a serial mass murder even as they were lowering lifeboats to get the survivors of the first ship hit. Instead of losing one cruiser, the Brits lost all three. Sluff saw from her expression that someone had told her this story. He changed the subject.

  “Hollis told me this was a fact-finding expedition, not some kind of court of inquiry. And, besides, I wasn’t in charge that night—Admiral Tyree was.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You’re a big captain now. I’ll make the call.”

  Hollis and his reporter showed up an hour later from SOPAC headquarters.

  “Shall we?” Hollis said.

  “By all means,” Sluff replied. He’d arranged his pillows so that he could sit upright. Hollis took one chair, the yeoman a second that he’d dragged in from the hallway after first plugging in his transcription machine.

  “Let’s start with your appointment as ComDesRon Twenty-One,” Hollis said. “That happened aboard the flagship, correct?”

  “That’s right. Came as a big surprise, actually, but the admiral laid it all out for me, and there I was.”

  For the next hour and a half Sluff told the story, from getting the news of his promotion and taking over a destroyer squadron to the moment when he and Jennifer Matheson first heard the MTBs prowling down the coast of Kalai Island. When he had finished, Hollis waited for his reporter to catch up and then called a time-out for coffee. The yeoman went out into the corridor to hunt up some coffee, while Hollis sat back in his chair and shook his head.

  “That’s some adventure, Captain,” he said. “Tell me, what was your academy nickname?”

  Sluff told him, and what the letters stood for. Hollis smiled and then asked if Sluff had faced racial animosity during his Navy career.

  “Some,” Sluff said. “I tried out for flight school. Wasn’t very good at it. Got into it with an instructor after he called me a woods nigger.”

  Hollis frowned. “Consequences?”

  “I left naval aviation. He left the second floor for the ground floor through a window.”

  Hollis stared at him, and then cleared his throat. “Oka-a-y,” he said. “Now: Would it be fair to say that the battle plan for the night in question was the admiral’s plan? Or
was it yours?”

  Sluff felt the first tingle of alarm. What could it matter, he thought. The admiral was in charge, so it was his plan, his formation, and his operation. Then he realized that, with the yeoman gone, Hollis was speaking off the record, which meant that this was something he really wanted to know. Why? he wondered.

  “I had told the admiral about the other two engagements and how we’d run a radar ambush followed by the tactic of waiting for the fish to hit, shooting for a minute or so, and then going dark and maneuvering at high speed to stay out of torpedo water. Once I thought we were safe, we’d open fire again, but only for a minute. They could only see us when we were shooting. We could see them the whole time.”

  Hollis nodded. The legal yeoman returned with three cafeteria mugs of coffee, handed them out, and then asked if he should resume the record. Hollis said no, not yet.

  “It seems to me that the Japs went home after getting their asses kicked for a change and compared notes,” Sluff continued.

  “Is it possible that their third sortie down the Slot, almost an exact copy of the first two, one or two heavies wrapped in a clutch of destroyers, was the bait in an ambush of their own?” Hollis asked.

  Sluff thought about it for a moment. “The way those heavy cruisers appeared right at the critical moment, from the west, from outside the Slot? Yes, I think that’s possible.”

  “Me, too,” Hollis said. “Those bastards are good.”

  “Never doubted that,” Sluff said. “The radar may have seduced us into thinking we could fool ’em forever.”

  Hollis nodded at the legal yeoman, who resumed his duties as court reporter.

  “Captain, why did you choose to drive straight at that formation of heavy cruisers?”

  “I think the cruisers had put up a scout plane because suddenly there were star shells or dropped flares. At that moment, when they could finally see us, we ran out of good choices. If we went north, their destroyers and cruisers could get at us with Long Lances. Same thing if we ran south. By running right at the incoming cruisers, the destroyers to the east couldn’t fire torpedoes without putting their own cruisers in danger, so, basically, I was hoping to cut down the number of torpedoes coming at us.”

  “But apparently their cruisers didn’t offer the same consideration to their own destroyers, right?”

  “I don’t know where the torpedo that broke Barrett in half came from, to tell the truth,” Sluff said. “Our torpedoes essentially bounced off. I think we were so close they didn’t have enough time to arm. I’ll say this, though: Barrett tore up that first cruiser’s superstructure. There were at least four levels of the pagoda on fire.”

  “Well, that probably explains how their admiral and most of his staff died,” Hollis said.

  “How in the world do we know that?” Sluff asked.

  “PacFleet Intel sent out a report. I guess they have spies in Rabaul.”

  “Wow.”

  “And after Barrett was hit by one or more torpedoes, you, personally, were basically out of the game?”

  “Yes. She broke in half amidships. The stern half kept going, while the bow half was pushed a hundred eighty degrees around and then flipped over. I remember trying to hold on but getting thrown off the ship instead. After that…”

  “Who would have assumed command of the squadron once you were incapacitated?”

  “I don’t know,” Sluff had to admit. “But by that time, I think it was everybody for himself once we got into it with those cruisers.”

  “So there was no formal succession plan?”

  “Hell, we barely had time to learn each other’s radio call signs,” Sluff said. “I learned I was the commodore at lunch with the admiral; we discussed tactics for a few minutes, I went back and moved from J. B. King to Barrett, summoned the ships’ captains for a quick meeting, and eight hours later we were toast. Sound familiar?”

  “What do you mean?” Hollis asked.

  “It was a catch team, just like the night Ching Lee picked up four destroyers and led us all into a battleship engagement. He may have had a plan, but he didn’t share it with us. And when South Dakota fell out of the fight, he and Washington went one-on-one with Kirishima. Behind him three of the four destroyers were sinking. Once he’d done in the Jap battleship, he just left.” He paused, yawned, and then said, “One would think our whole mission that night was to soak up Jap torpedoes.”

  Hollis stared at him for a second and then told the yeoman to strike that last comment. Then he said he needed to speak to the captain in private. The yeoman finished typing, gathered up his equipment, and stepped out.

  “I heard a story you left that formation just before the other three destroyers got hit,” Hollis said. “Is that true?”

  “I did. I knew Long Lances were coming, based on the Japs’ maneuvers.”

  “Weren’t you engaging with guns at that point?”

  “We were, but when you think about it, we weren’t contributing very much, not compared to eighteen battleship guns. We were tethered, really. Never allowed to use our biggest weapons, our own torpedoes. When Lee opened fire, the targets were still way out of our torpedo range.”

  “Have you thought that maybe that’s why he kept you tethered, as you put it? If he let you guys haul out and make a torpedo attack, he would have had to wait for you to clear, and thus give away his range advantage?”

  “He could have let us go make a torpedo attack as soon as we gained radar contact. Run out, let the torpedoes fly and then get out of the way so that the big dogs could eat. I did that with cruiser formations a couple of times with pretty good success.”

  “Until they figured it out.”

  “Until they figured it out, yes, but you know what? On that night with Admiral Lee, my slipping off the leash did not interfere one bit with Lee’s line of fire, and I was able to recover hundreds of our people after Lee sailed away. Even Halsey thought that was a good thing.”

  “You met with Admiral Halsey?”

  “I did. We even had a drink. Captain Browning was outraged, I think.”

  Hollis grunted. “So would you consider yourself a protégé of Admiral Halsey?”

  “Me? Hell, no. I doubt he even remembers my name.”

  “Halsey remembers everything and everyone,” Hollis said. “That’s why he’s the guy in charge now. But that’s not why I asked.”

  Sluff raised his eyebrows in anticipation.

  “I asked because I think, given this background, you are going to need some protection, Captain. You have some enemies on the SOPAC staff. I think they want to take the results of your last night fight and hang you out to dry. They’ll call it your night fight because your boss got killed, or at least that’s how they’ll try to frame it.”

  “Frame,” Sluff said, realizing he was getting really tired now. “Interesting choice of words.”

  “Calling it like I see it,” Hollis said. “Didn’t say it was fair.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, they, whoever ‘they’ are, can’t do anything to me that comes close to the stuff I saw happen that night or on Kalai Island,” Sluff said. “I came within five feet of being eaten alive by a Jap patrol dog. No staff pukes up at SOPAC ever went through something like that.”

  Hollis nodded, sniffed, and stood up. “As a fairly successful ‘staff puke,’” he said, “I need to remind you that they can make life truly miserable for you—but only if you let them.”

  Sluff suddenly realized his mistake: Hollis was a staff officer up at SOPAC. He felt his face getting red.

  Hollis grinned at him. “Relax. You’ve come awfully far, awfully fast. That breeds resentment in the Old Guard. You have to remember, before the Japs hit Pearl, promotion was a matter of living long enough and not blotting your copybook, as the Brits like to say. Upstarts like you—”

  He put up his hand as he saw Sluff’s reaction to the word “upstart.”

  “Upstarts like you are going to win this war,” he continued. “Halsey wants brawlers.
Officers who, when cornered, come out like a mad dog and go right for the face of their tormentors. Here’s my advice: I’ll turn in my ‘informal’ report. Browning and his cronies will indulge in some professional grinding of teeth. They may even ‘lose’ it. You, on the other hand, need to get in front of Halsey and tell your side. He’s in Pearl now, meeting with Nimitz, but he’ll be back in a couple of days.”

  “How in the world can I do that?” Sluff asked.

  “Halsey comes up here to the hospital once a week. He walks the wards in full regalia, talks to the wounded. Tells them he appreciates their sacrifices. That he’s going to make sure they’re well taken care of. All that bluff and bluster, and yet here he is, like their grandfather, giving a shit. It’s magic—a little touch of Harry in the night, so to speak. Find out when he’s coming, and get in front of him.”

  Sluff took a deep breath. “The fact is, Captain Hollis, that it really was my plan, my tactic, that got everyone killed. Maybe I should just give this up and go home.”

  Hollis gave him a strange look. “Your call, Commodore.” Then he left.

  Sluff sat back and wondered if indeed any of this political plotting and scheming was worth it. How many sailors were drowned because he’d been just a bit too sure of himself, a little cocky, maybe, telling the new admiral how to do this thing, how to beat the Japs. Then he realized something: Hollis had called him Commodore.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Nouméa Field Hospital

  The next day his two doctors came by again on their morning rounds. They told him that the large bandage on his head would be coming off, to be replaced with something that looked less like a half turban. They confirmed that he could get around as long as he was having no serious pain from the surgery. As they were leaving, the older doctor told Sluff that yet another captain over at SOPAC headquarters had called, inquiring if he could have visitors.

  “Remember his name?” Sluff asked. “Hollis, maybe?”

  “No. Brown, I think. Browning. Captain Browning. Said he was the chief of staff.”

  “Can’t wait,” Sluff said. The doc caught the sarcasm.