The Commodore Read online

  When the exec knocked on his door to tell him that everyone was assembled, Sluff showed him the second message. The exec whistled softly. “Two-to-one odds in a night fight against the masters of that game,” he said.

  “Well, yes,” Sluff said. “But now that we know how they do it, I plan to hand it right back to them.”

  When they came into the wardroom all the officers stood up as custom required. Sluff went to the head of the table, sat down, looked around the room, and said, “Okay, seats.”

  Everyone sat down.

  “It’s late,” Sluff began. “It’s also hot and dark, and everyone’s tired, so I’ll keep this short.” He paused for effect. “Tonight we watched a destroyer succumb to her damage. That was not a pleasant sight. Fortunately, we’re pretty sure all her people got off safely ashore. The people in Gary were not so lucky. You saw the survivors today. They have my sympathy, but we did warn them that an attack was coming and somebody pretty senior dropped the ball. There will be an investigation of her loss, so I want each of you who were on the bridge or in CIC to write down what you remember about the minutes leading up to the actual attack and hand it in to the XO.

  “Now: You may have heard that I’ve been designated as ComDesDiv Two-Twelve. That is a temporary expediency. The system needed a landing place for all of the division’s message traffic.”

  That produced some tired smiles.

  “The operational reason for that expediency is that six Jap destroyers are going to show up off Cape Esperance tomorrow night to land supplies and reinforcements for the Nips over on Cactus. We’ve been told to break that up.”

  “Who’s ‘we,’ Captain?” Billy Chandler, the gunnery officer, asked.

  Sluff smiled. “Yeah, Billy,” he said. “We started out as a three-ship division, but now we’re down to one. Actually, two more tin cans, the Carter and the Evans, are showing up tomorrow morning to join the fight. I plan to meet with their skippers as soon as they get in and refuel, and then we’ll go out there tomorrow at sundown and kick some Jap ass. I need you to get the word out to your people that another night fight’s coming. Once we have a plan of attack, we’ll meet again so everyone’s up to speed. Now: Go write down what you remember in your wheel books and then get some rest.”

  Sluff was up on the bridge by sunrise as the harbor waited for the morning air raid from Rabaul. This time the Cactus fighters had been able to get up to intercept the raid, and nothing much came of it. The casualties of yesterday appeared to have taken the fight out of today’s Betty squadron. The destroyers Carter and Evans, both Benson-classes, came steaming into Tulagi at 0830 and were assigned anchorages near J. B. King. They were both fairly new, sporting five single five-inch guns and ten torpedo tubes. Tugs pushing fuel barges came chugging out shortly thereafter, and then each ship launched a boat to bring its captain aboard J. B. King. The day had opened as every other day in the Solomons, hot, humid, with growing squall lines already assembling to the west over Savo Island. The oil slick from the late departed Westin was no longer in evidence.

  Each of the captains had brought along his navigation officer, who in some destroyers were beginning to be called the operations officer. Sluff was waiting for them in King’s wardroom with the exec and his own navigation/operations officer, Lieutenant Tim McCarthy. The two skippers were both from the class one year behind Sluff, and both called him commodore. Sluff went through his usual disclaimer about that, sat everyone down, and then laid out what he planned to do that night. As he began talking he was struck by the fact that both of the other COs had immediately assumed their roles as his tactical subordinates. He was the senior CO, and they were here to learn the plan and then go execute it. It was one of the Navy’s better aspects: Lay out who’s who, and then everyone falls in line and gets to work. They were all three-stripers and commanding officers of a destroyer. Sluff Harmon was the senior officer, and therefore the boss. No hurt feelings, no quibbling, no discussion. He found it heartening.

  Sluff began with a question. “Have either of you fought a surface action with the Japs?” he asked.

  They both shook their heads. Both of them had done carrier escort duty and had been through some air attacks, but that was it.

  “There’s six of them and three of us,” he said. “But: They’re going to be loaded with troops and supplies, and we are going to be loaded for bear. Doesn’t mean they can’t fight, but they’ll be encumbered by their mission, which is to get into coastal waters along Cape Esperance and get all those soldiers and rice bags ashore.

  “My plan’s fairly simple: We’re going to set up a patrol line athwart their most likely course into Guadalcanal. King here has a really good SG radar suite, so we should be able to detect them before they even know we’re there. When they’re in range, I want all three of us to fire five torpedoes each. That’s fifteen fish. We’ll shoot straight up the bearing of the lead Jap. When the torpedoes start going off, we will open fire with everything we’ve got—for one full minute. Then we’ll cease fire, turn diagonally to the northwest or northeast, depending on which way we were headed when it started, run for two minutes at best speed, and then slow and open fire again. For one minute.”

  He paused for a moment. “The reason for this is that they’ll shoot Long Lance at our gun flashes. It’ll take ’em a minute to figure out the attack geometry, and that’s when we douse our gun flashes and maneuver so as to not be there when the Long Lances arrive. We’ll do this for as long as it takes: maneuver at high speed in a great big circle around their formation, opening fire for one minute, cease firing, maneuver again, resume firing. With luck they’ll think they’re surrounded by an entire posse of American ships. Even if they don’t, they’ll be getting hit from a continuously varying sector. Now: This means four-boiler ops, because we need to move, and I mean, move, like they do. As you know, their tin cans routinely go thirty-six knots.”

  “What happens if it all falls apart?” the CO of Evans asked. “Do you intend to control the formation like the cruiser guys do?”

  “Before it starts, I’ll use flashing-light signals as much as possible, and I’d like you two guys to remain radio-silent. I’ll use TBS radio once the shooting starts. King will lead the column, and we’ll pass you range and bearing data. If your radars can see them, great. If they can’t, use our data. If it all turns to crap, then Nelson rules, okay?”

  Both skippers nodded. “Oughta work,” the CO of Carter said.

  “With any luck,” Sluff said. “Now, why don’t all you ops people go up to CIC and work out the charts and formations. Plot out a dry run on a chart. See how it shapes up; look for holes in the plan, and whether or not we need any more comms or special signals. Oh, and the standard distance between ships will be a thousand yards.”

  “Why so long?” the CO of Evans asked.

  “Because they’re used to our being only five hundred yards apart. That makes us a more compact target for their torpedoes. This way, we’re hopefully outside their spread calculations.”

  The two COs nodded. The meeting broke up and Sluff took them to his cabin. He asked them to brief him on their ships’ capabilities, since they were both the class that had preceded the Fletchers. He was especially interested in whether or not they had a CIC and the new surface SG search radars. King was a brand-new ship. Carter and Evans were two years older. Carter had a CIC kludged together in the captain’s sea cabin and the older SC radar. Evans had the earlier-version radar, but no CIC.

  “Okay, then we will probably be sending you targeting data,” Sluff said. “I don’t want another melee like Callaghan fought. I’d like to set the fish to run out to their max ranges at the low speed setting. Oh, and I want torpedo target depth set at five feet.”

  “Five feet?” the Carter’s CO asked. “They’ll broach.”

  “I talked to some sub COs when we came through Pearl,” Sluff said. “They’re all up in arms about their torpedoes not working. They’re being forced to use the magnetic exploder, but
they’re convinced the fish are running too deep. One CO told me to set the depth back to the first pin, five feet, and you might hit something.”

  “I hadn’t heard that, but I’ve read a lot of after-action reports full of torpedo complaints.”

  “The Japs don’t have that problem, do they,” Sluff said. “And the only fix for the Long Lance is to guess when they shoot ’em and then maneuver boldly to get out of their way. I said we’d turn after every firing run, but I want you to know I’ll be playing that by ear. If I see them steady up, even under fire, then I figure they’re turning the big dogs loose, and we’re gonna do something. We may even slow way down. Okay?”

  The Carter’s CO asked Sluff about the battleship action. Sluff asked what they’d heard down in Nouméa.

  “The SOPAC staffers are saying the South Dakota screwed the pooch right in the middle of it and had to withdraw.”

  “What else?” Sluff asked. The Carter’s CO cleared his throat. “They said you bailed out of the destroyer line when the big boys started shooting and the Japs started shooting back. That the only reason you weren’t hit was because you weren’t there.”

  “That’s exactly correct,” Sluff said. “I wasn’t there—especially when the Long Lances arrived.”

  The two captains looked at him with incredulous expressions.

  “Look,” Sluff said. “Ching Lee put all four of his tin cans in a line in front of the two battleships. He issued no plan and there was no SOP. He told us to start shooting when they started shooting, and that’s what we did. My CIC reported that the Japs were getting hammered, but then they turned east, steadied up for about a minute, and then turned north. That told me they’d just launched a swarm of torpedoes against our line, and the operational reports from the Savo fights all said the same thing: They aim for the front of the formation, for the van. Basically, I felt like I knew what was coming, and so, yes, I turned out of the formation.”

  “Um,” the Evans CO began, but Sluff held up a hand.

  “Consider this, okay?” he said. “There were eighteen guns of sixteen-inch caliber behind us firing at the Japs. The range was down to ten thousand yards—five miles—and those two battlewagons were throwing eighteen tons of metal at that Jap formation every forty-five seconds. The four destroyers in the van were throwing one half-ton of metal at the same formation. Now I’ll admit that it felt good to light up the night with five-gun salvos, but our contribution to what was happening was insignificant. In my view, that’s the problem with tying destroyers to the main body of heavy-caliber ships. Look: We all keep thinking—guns. But our main battery ought to more properly be the ten torpedoes we can each set loose into the equation. Admittedly, our fish are nowhere near as good as theirs, but ten torpedoes fired from a destroyer equals eight thousand pounds of joy juice, or four tons versus one-half ton from our guns. Basically, when the elephants got into it that night, we became Long Lance sponges. That’s why I bailed, and why King was the ship picking up survivors after the battleships left us all behind to fend for ourselves.”

  The two COs stared down at the deck and said nothing.

  Sluff grinned. “Heresy, yes?”

  Carter’s CO shook his head. “Tomorrow night it’s gonna be just us chickens, so what you’re proposing makes a lot of sense. But if I’m part of a cruiser or even a battleship-cruiser formation, I’m inclined to do what I’m told.”

  Sluff nodded. “I understand that,” he said. “But here’s the thing: Tonight I think King will have the best radar picture, so I’ll want you to do what I tell you to do, even if that sounds a lot like ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ Or did, I guess. We’re gonna be outnumbered by some ships that are pretty damned good at this night-fighting stuff. Our only chance will be to surprise them before they even know we’re there.”

  They nodded again, but Sluff had the feeling he hadn’t convinced them. He knew what the problem was: Admiral Lee had put four destroyers in a column formation ahead of his battleships. He’d had every right to expect them to stay there, perhaps, and this was hard for Sluff to swallow, to soak up the initial salvo of Long Lance torpedoes. Now Sluff was demanding that these two skippers do what he told them to do in the upcoming fight. As he had not. He tried to think of some argument to make that would show why his situation was different from that of the battleship action. He couldn’t.

  Considering further discussion pointless, he stood up, indicating that their meeting was over. The two skippers headed up one level to join their ops people in King’s tiny CIC.

  ELEVEN

  Savo Island

  A half hour after midnight the three destroyers were quietly steaming at fifteen knots on an east-west line across the most likely approach route for the Japanese formation. They were just east of Savo Island, cutting the line between the Slot and the Japanese army sector east of Cape Esperance. The night was dark and steaming hot with not the slightest hint of a cooling breeze. Every time they turned around, the sulfurous gas from their smokestacks hung over each ship like some kind of evil miasma until they steadied back up. J. B. King was in the lead, then Carter, then Evans, all spaced at a distance of half a mile. There was a low overcast and the occasional rainsquall line, but for some reason that seemed to make the talk-between-ships radio circuit even clearer. Sluff had used it sparingly, depending mostly on red-cloaked flashing-light signals to maneuver the formation.

  He’d spent the last half hour down in the CIC room. The radar picture was just about perfect. The fringes of Savo Island were visible to the south, and his three-ship formation was clear as a bell. He’d begun to wonder if he shouldn’t take station down here in CIC instead of on the bridge. It was traditional for the captain to be on the bridge to maneuver the ship, especially once an action started and the possibility of collision increased. But now he was, technically, at least, a unit commander. He needed to see the entire picture, not just what was appearing right out in front of the ship. Because he was still the skipper of J. B. King, he’d reluctantly returned to the bridge. He would just have to depend on his exec to translate the radar picture.

  He was also aware of the fact that he was disobeying the standard destroyer rule about where the exec manned up for his battle station. Traditionally, and also by the regulations, the exec was supposed to be stationed at what was called secondary conn, a small and totally exposed GQ station back aft, behind the ship’s second stack. It had a steering console and an engine order telegraph, plus access to all the major sound-powered phone circuits. That way, if the forward half of the ship was disabled and the captain killed, the exec should be able to take command. The advent of radar and the Combat Information Center, however small, had forced COs equipped with the new surface-search radar to make a choice: the second senior officer standing out in the wind and the dark, not to mention exposed to the effects of near misses, shrapnel, or actual hits, or one deck below the bridge overseeing the tracing table and the radar scopes. As far as Sluff was concerned, the technology had clearly outpaced the regulations.

  “Bridge, Combat, radar contact, bearing zero one zero, range thirty thousand yards, composition four to six. Initiating track.”

  Sluff reached forward for the bitch-box talk switch. “Bridge, aye, and alert the other ships by TBS. Keep it short.”

  “Combat, aye.”

  “Officer of the deck,” Sluff called softly. “Alert all GQ stations that the enemy has arrived.”

  The ship had gone to GQ at 2200. Sluff had previously put out the word that everyone was to stand easy on station until contact was made. That meant that even though the entire crew was at their GQ stations, the ones manning guns and torpedo stations or damage-control parties could open hatches, untie their kapok life jackets, lean back against a bulkhead, and nod off until something actually happened. This did not apply, of course, to the engineers down in the four main spaces or the CIC and bridge teams. The hammers could doze off, but the power and the eyes had to stay awake. Sluff could hear hatches closing and power ampli
dynes lighting off all over the ship as the five gun mounts came to life. Three minutes later, Combat had developed a radar track.

  “Bridge, Combat, enemy formation appears to be on course one seven zero, speed three-five.”

  Wow, Sluff thought. Those Jap destroyers could move out when they wanted to. He did the math in his head: they’d be in range of American torpedoes pretty damned quick. He acknowledged the information from CIC and then listened to Bob Frey down in Combat going out over the TBS radio circuit with position, course, and speed data for the enemy formation. The other two destroyers might actually hold the Japs on radar, but they had been ordered to maintain radio silence. Then he heard the torpedo mounts training out to starboard. The American column was driving west on its ambush line. He wondered if he should increase speed, but for launching torpedoes, fifteen knots put much less strain on the weapons when they hit the water sideways than thirty knots would.

  “Bridge, Combat, coming up on time to fire,” Combat said over the bitch-box.

  “XO, you take control of the torpedo mounts,” Sluff ordered. “I’ll keep control of the guns unless I lose the picture. Make sure the other ships are ready to launch when we do.”

  Combat acknowledged. Sluff felt a shiver of concern, now that he’d given control of the torpedo attack to the CIC. Then he rationalized it: A torpedo firing solution was a simple math problem, but it depended on knowing where the target was and where he was headed at the moment of launch. Up here on the darkened bridge, he was relatively blind; CIC was not. The gun director’s radar was being cued onto the oncoming targets by the ship’s search radar until King’s fire-control radar picked them up. Those cues came from CIC. Once the little white spikes of video danced in the range gate of an oscilloscope down in gun plot, the gunnery officer would know when to open fire long before Sluff would. The only rule binding them was that the torpedoes had to start hitting before the Americans revealed themselves to the enemy by opening fire with fifteen guns. He’d still have fifteen torpedoes in reserve if another attack opportunity presented itself.