Trial by Fire Read online

  The 21MC, the command intercom, squawked to life in the pilothouse. “Bridge, Flag Plot.”

  The captain leaned forward and pushed the talk switch down. “Bridge, Captain,” he said, calmly.

  “From the admiral, sir. Warning red, set condition one. Multiple raids inbound.”

  “Bridge, aye,” the captain answered and then nodded at the boatswain mate of the watch, who twisted the red handle to sound the general quarters alarm. George hurried off the bridge, grabbing his steel helmet and life jacket as he passed by the GQ gear rack. His GQ station was at a place called secondary conn, which was a much smaller version of the ship’s main pilothouse. That way if the bridge got hit and the captain was disabled or killed, the second-in-command in the ship could take over from his station 250 feet back from the bridge.

  George hated being back there on what was essentially just an open-air platform, surrounded by four phone-talkers, a single lieutenant junior grade, a light steel gun-tub-style railing, and a gale. There was a small combination steering wheel and engine-order telegraph stand, a radio-handset panel, a sound-powered telephone switch box, and a first-aid box. Directly behind the platform was the top of the upper mount of the after five-inch gun battery. The island towered directly in front of the platform, so if they ever had to actually steer the ship from secondary conn, they would be able to see both sides and the stern, but nothing forward. It sounded like a dumb design except for the fact that any ships operating near an aircraft carrier would be doing everything in their power to stay out of its way, especially if she was damaged and possibly out of control. It was axiomatic in the fleet: an aircraft carrier always had the right of way, even if by maritime rules she didn’t. The axiom was reputedly based on the unwritten Law of Gross Tonnage.

  His team was on station by the time he got there. The lieutenant, provided by the ship’s operations department, was there to act as relief officer of the deck. The four phone-talkers were connected to the major sound-powered phone circuits dealing with maneuvering the ship. One circuit was connected to the bridge, the signal bridge, PriFly, and the Combat Information Center. Another talked to Main Control, the central station for the engineering department, controlling the boiler rooms, emergency diesel generators, and the engine rooms. A third talked to Damage Control Central down in the Log Room. The final circuit connected with a space called after-steering, where a team of twelve men were stationed who could position the ship’s rudders by hand if steering control from the bridge was lost due to battle damage. George had exercised the secondary conn system during the ship’s workup after the yard. It seemed crude, but it was obviously a vital station if things went off the tracks. Plus, crude equaled simple, which was always an asset when a ship got hit.

  The ship began a wide, slow turn to starboard. Her clutch of escorts turned with her, bristling with guns, carefully maintaining their assigned stations. The prevailing winds had had the ship headed northeast, away from Japan, to maximize wind over the deck for takeoffs. Now that the launch was complete, she was turning around, headed back toward the target area in order to shorten the flight for returning strike aircraft. Turning through the wind momentarily enveloped the ship in her own eye-watering stack gases. Eddies of boiler smoke whipped down from the top of the island. Behind and below the secondary conn station the train-warning bells started to ring on the two after twin five-inch gun mounts as the gunners made transmission checks with main battery plot down on the third deck.

  There were still men working down on the flight deck, moving some parked aircraft to different spot positions. Damage control teams were verifying that the flight deck aircraft refueling stations had been drained down and refilled with CO2 gas as a fire prevention measure in case of damage. Literally hundreds of men were manning up the gallery gun-tubs, where 40 mm and 20 mm anti-aircraft guns bristled down both sides of the flight deck, along with four more five-inch single open mounts. The ship’s four radar-controlled twin five-inchers could reach out nine miles, but if an attacker made it through that barrage, he’d be met by a hail of hot steel all the way in to the ship from the packed gun galleries.

  George scanned the western skies for incoming aircraft. The various combat air patrols should already be thinning them out, beginning at about seventy-five miles distant from the carriers, just as the captain had described. There were three concentric rings of fighters stationed at 25,000 feet at ten-mile intervals to intercept unknown radar contacts. A radar contact was called a bogey. A visible enemy plane was called a bandit. There were also some fighters loitering down low in case the Japs tried to come in on the deck, below the ever-searching American radar beams. Both heavy and light cruisers made up the fourth line of defense, using their own five-inch AA guns and sometimes even their main battery guns of six-inch and eight-inch. The final ship line of defense were the individual destroyers assigned to protect each carrier, stationed close in and packing multiple five-inch and three-inch guns. The whole idea was to make sure no bogey or bandit got close enough to any of the carriers as to require them to use their own guns.

  George remembered his own war experiences in a carrier torpedo bomber earlier in the war. Some missions had been virtual suicide runs because the Navy’s early aircraft-dropped torpedoes had been unreliable, and, worse, required the torpedo bomber to fly straight and level at low altitude and directly at their target for up to a minute before launching. That made them sitting ducks for their target’s AA defense guns. If it got too hot, the pilot had the option of aborting the run and trying again from a different direction or going for a different target. This option assumed the attacking pilots wanted to survive the attack.

  The dawn of the kamikaze had changed all that. A suicide plane had no reason to break off an attack, because its pilot had already committed himself to die. George had seen Jap planes with both wings shot off and trailing sheets of fire keep coming, controlled only by their tail surfaces, to smash into American ships. They carried bombs, too, but they didn’t drop them. The pilots would arm their bomb just before impact, adding the explosive power of a 500-pound bomb to the fiery explosion created by the plane’s own crash.

  “Ack-ack, bearing zero two five, relative,” one of the phone-talkers called out.

  George pointed his binocs off to starboard and saw the tiny black puffs of anti-aircraft fire blossoming in the clear morning air, several miles away. The bogeys were invisible but the outer screen was obviously giving them hell. Occasionally a plume of fiery black smoke spiraled out of the sky. After a minute he began to hear the thumps of the nearer cruisers’ guns, and then both the five-inch mounts right behind his station swung out and lifted their barrels. He grabbed a sound-powered phone headset and clamped it over his ears. Then the close-in destroyers opened up, and now George could see the bandits—lots of bandits—headed in, enveloped in airbursts as hundreds of guns sought them out in a firestorm of anti-aircraft fire. Franklin’s five-inchers finally got into it, blasting away no more than fifty feet behind them, hammering the air so hard that one of the phone-talkers sported a sudden nosebleed. The two-gun mounts spat expended brass powder cans onto the surrounding deck. The air was filled with gun smoke and burnt cork wadding, making it hard to breathe even up on the secondary conn platform in the open air.

  George finally saw what Franklin’s guns were shooting at, a cumbersome-looking twin-engined bomber coming in right on the deck, already trailing smoke but not wavering from its approach. All the gallery guns started in on him now, tearing pieces off the plane until finally, and much too close, he thought, a wing came off and the bomber rolled violently, shed its other wing, and smacked into the sea, followed by the explosion of its bomb load, which was big enough to send a visible shock wave right over the ship.

  Almost immediately, the five-inchers whirled around to a new bearing and began shooting again. The air was so filled with smoke and gun-flashes that George couldn’t see anything, so he gestured for his team to sit down on the deck behind the meager protection o
f the shield wall. He felt a little foolish, but there was nothing he and his team could contribute until all the shooting stopped unless something happened to the bridge. Based on the increasing roar of gunfire, that possibility was getting stronger. The burnt powder-can wadding settled over them like a black snowfall. He felt the ship begin another turn, this time to port, and this one wasn’t all that gentle. He wondered if the captain was trying to avoid a torpedo, because sharp turns had the potential to roll any untethered aircraft right off the flight deck and thus were rarely executed.

  They all felt a large thump from somewhere down on the flight deck. George peered over the shield in time to see a flaming twin-engine Jap bomber screeching across the flight deck and then slanting over the side, where it threw up a tremendous splash, followed a few seconds later by its internal bombload going off underwater. That’ll wake the snipes up, he thought. A firefighting crew was already smothering the trail of avgas flames on the flight deck. He marveled at their coolness. Every gun on the ship seemed to be shooting at something, but the chief in charge of the D/C team was standing there, hands on hips, his steel helmet cocked back on his head, shouting orders to his hosemen as if it was just another drill. And that’s why you drill, over and over, George thought.

  The carrier steadied up on a new heading, and then immediately began another turn back to starboard. He’s weaving, George thought. Making it harder for the torpedo bombers. The two five-inchers had stopped firing, probably waiting for more ammo to come up the hoists from the deep magazines. He watched as one of their escort destroyers literally tore a Jap plane to flaming pieces behind them and thought he actually saw the pilot cartwheeling through the air until he smacked into the sea along with the remains of his plane.

  Kamikaze, he thought. These people are truly alien beings. Then he realized that all Franklin’s guns had stopped shooting, except for the single pops and bangs as gunners cleared rounds out of red-hot barrels to prevent them from exploding inside the barrel. The five-inch mount down on the flight deck level swung out to seaward and cleared both of its barrels with short rounds, which were powerful enough to blast the live projectiles out of the barrel but only for a few hundred yards. The short rounds were followed by a prolonged blast of 3,000-psi air down each badly charred barrel to sweep out any burning debris.

  George scanned the seas around the close-in formation. There were several columns of black smoke rising from the water where Jap planes had gone in and left a pyre of burning avgas. One of their own escorting destroyers had a pretty big fire going up on her forecastle, of all places. He watched admiringly as the tin can’s skipper put the helm over and steamed directly into Franklin’s huge wake, creating an enormous wave over her own bow, which instantly snuffed out the fire. Otherwise, none of the carriers appeared to have been hit. He felt the ship turning again just as the bridge phone-talker waved his hand at him. George plugged his headset into the brass barrel switch and selected the JA circuit.

  “XO here,” he said.

  “This is the captain; we’re going to secure from GQ for the moment, but I’m setting Condition Two, not Three—our radar picket destroyers say there’s more coming. I want all guns manned and ready, but the crew needs chow.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” George said.

  “And I need that flight deck cleaned up and ready ASAP. We’ve been running southwest to close the returning strike. We’ll have to go back northeast as soon as we get planes in the pattern. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir, got it,” George said. He got a sudden whiff of woodsmoke, which was somewhat incongruous this far out at sea. He looked down at the flight deck and saw a plane tractor making successive passes while pulling a spiked steel mat over the long scorch mark in the wooden deck. The deck hadn’t actually caught fire but the dying bomber had left a blackened furrow across the deck, deep enough to bounce a returning plane high enough to miss the arresting wire. The steel mat was slowly turning the charred furrow into a long, shallow dent. He also saw medics down in the gun galleries, tending to gunners who had been wounded when the plane went over the side. He saw body bags, too, so they hadn’t gotten off scot-free. Back aft the LSO was manning up his platform and he could hear the arresting wires scraping across the deck as they were being tensioned for recovery. He scanned the ship’s wake and imagined he saw black specks way out behind the ship as the first of her strike aircraft made their way back to “Mother.”

  An all-hands call came over the 1MC, which then announced the setting of Condition Two. This meant that half the crew would remain at their GQ stations, while the other half got a chance to get some food, rest, and maybe even some sleep after all the shooting. This also meant that a six hours on, six hours off watch-standing routine was imminent. Set long enough it would slowly exhaust the crew, but with Jap snoopers still out beyond the perimeter of the massive carrier formation it was better to be safe than sorry. Condition Two was a compromise between the maximum security of Condition One, or general quarters, and the relatively minimal protection of Condition Three, where only some of the guns were manned and ready. It was the clearest indication yet that they were well into Injun Country, and yet, almost perversely, they were still headed back toward Japan.

  16

  Six decks below the flight deck, Gary settled himself onto a steel stool in Main Control. He’d come down from the wardroom mess to the engine room after an early dinner of the Navy’s notorious green-tinted canned ham, reconstituted powdered mashed potatoes, and canned baked beans. He planned to make a quick tour of his boiler rooms before the nightly general alarms started, but first he’d stopped in Main Control to get some decent coffee. The engine rooms had the best coffee in the ship because they made it with low-pressure steam instead of water. The water king had handed him a metal message board with the most recent feedwater reserves and tests from the ship’s eight boilers. Lieutenant Commander Ed Moran, the main propulsion assistant, was the engineering watch officer, in charge of the entire plant for the next six hours.

  Everybody was tired. There’d been two more general quarters alarms after the morning attack as the formation fought off a surprising number of Jap aircraft. The enemy had pretty much ignored Franklin during the early afternoon attack, but then seemed to seek her out during the sundown visitation. Gary had lost track of when his next watch was scheduled, which is why he’d gone below. Between the GQs and the frantic rush to get aircraft struck below from the day’s second strike and then fresh ammo to all the gun stations, Gary felt he’d been lucky to get fifteen minutes to grab some chow. He’d passed J.R. on the way to the ladders leading down to the “main holes”; when he asked him how it was going, J.R. could only shake his head.

  “Every time we go to GQ all the repair-party guys have to suit up and stand by,” he said. “So, nobody’s getting any downtime. And then, when it’s over, we gotta restow all the hoses, pumps, and the breathing gear, and reset the flight deck fuel lines. I’ll tell you what: it’s been a level bitch topside.”

  “Well, for us main-hole snipes, it’s been pretty much business as usual, just like the boss predicted,” Gary said. “Go fast, slow down, go fast again. Hopefully the bastards will take the night off. I’m thinking of finding a quiet corner in one of the firerooms and sleeping there tonight.”

  “Sounds good to me,” J.R. had said over his shoulder. “Sleeping anywhere sounds good.”

  Gary finished reviewing the feedwater reports and signed the forms. Reserve feed was getting a bit low again with all the high-speed land-launch runs, but if things slowed down tonight the ship’s evaporators could catch up. None of the boiler-water tests had indicated salt intrusion. He finished his coffee and then hung his mug up on the coffee board, unwashed. Snipes prided themselves on their coffee, so anyone who stood main-hole watches had an inscribed porcelain mug hanging in their work spaces. It was an engineering department axiom that if you ever washed your coffee mug, you’d ruin it forever. He didn’t take it with him because all of the firerooms and engi
ne rooms were separated by reinforced watertight bulkheads. To get from Main Control to the nearest fireroom he had to climb two decks’ worth of ladders, walk a hundred feet down a hot passageway, and then go back down into the adjacent space via more ladders. There were four firerooms; that meant a whole lot of ladders. Besides, as boilers officer, he had a personal mug in each fireroom, too.

  He made a quick inspection of number one fireroom, then went back up, across, and down into number two fireroom, directly aft of number one. He was talking to the chief on watch when the GQ alarm went off again. Gary’s GQ station was in Main Control with the chief engineer, but there was no way he could get back there before all the watertight hatches would be dogged down. He wasn’t worried about that: as long as he was physically present in one of the main holes, he could direct emergency actions in case there was damage to a fireroom or one of the boilers started to act up. He found a steel stool next to the log desk in a corner of the fireroom, mostly to stay out of the way of the GQ crew that was manning up the space.

  A normal steaming watch would have four men at the boiler-fronts and control stations. At GQ, there were eight. One of them finally brought Gary his steel helmet, gas mask, and a life jacket. He donned the helmet, buttoned down his shirtsleeves, stuffed his khaki trousers into his socks, made sure he had a flashlight, and then hung the life jacket and the gas mask close by—it was much too hot down there to wear either one. The chief boilertender then distributed oxygen breathing apparatus sets, known as OBAs, around the space so that each man could grab one if needed. An OBA could give a man forty-five minutes of breathable air if the compartment suddenly filled with smoke, less if the man had to really exert himself in damage control. Or panicked and started panting.