Sentinels of Fire (27 page)

“This morning was pretty bad,” the commodore said, once we'd settled in my cabin. “We got the first indication that the Japs have been holding back some veteran fighter pilots during this kamikaze campaign. Our pilots had become used to shooting newbies out of the sky with one arm tied behind their back, but this morning we lost a fair number of CAP, and then came the kamis.”

“I think we lost
Daniels,
” I said. Then I told him about the high-flying Bettys, the pincer attack, and their new vertical dive tactic.

“Bastards
will
not quit,” he said. “The only good news is that the Army's reporting cracks in the Shuri line. The Japs are running out of ammo and troops, and our guys are making some progress, finally. The bad news is that somebody told the Jap
army
about kamikaze tactics.”

“Oh, great,” I said.

“They're determined to bleed us. If it were me, I'd stop right where we are, consolidate the front lines, and starve the bastards out.”

“Well, I, for one, am glad you're here.”

He gave me a knowing look. “Getting a feel for what Pudge was going through?” he asked.

I nodded. “I've had it easier than he did. I wasn't there for swim call at Guadalcanal or Savo. I think I have more reserves than he did, but…”

“That's why I came up,” he said. “It made all the management sense in the world for me to coordinate logistics, repair, replacements—ships, people, five-inch mounts—from a tender in KR for eight ships, but the real fight is up here. Finally I went to CTF 58 and told the admiral I didn't have anything to do because all my ships were getting picked off one at a time.”

“If you could have seen that Betty coming straight down on us this morning,” I said, “you might want to rethink that. There was no way we could even shoot at it.”

“But you made him miss,” he said. “Tell me about that.”

I did, and then he wanted the story on a submarine launching bakas. Apparently that report had met with some incredulity at the fleet staff level.

“They need to talk to the aviators who saw it, then,” I said. “We never saw more than a red flare out there on the horizon and then the bastard was on top of us. The pilots saw a sub, which they told our Freddies was a really big sub. Unfortunately there wasn't much they could do to it at night, and one of them actually crashed trying.”

“Right,” the commodore said. “New tactics, though. That's worrisome. I got your message about changing the loadout on some night-fighters, but the fleet staff said no. There are too few of them, and…”

“And the carrier defense comes first, yes, I know.”

He shrugged. “How useful are the gator gunships up here in terms of adding to the defense?” he asked.

“Not very, in my opinion, except in the performance of their
un
official mission.”

“As pallbearers, you mean?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A most unfortunate choice of terms, isn't it,” he said with a sigh. “Halsey heard about it and had a fit.”

“How nice for him,” I said. “We have a different perspective up here on the picket line.”

He raised a finger. “Don't get uppity, Connie. As Halsey himself would tell you, for every kami that comes against the picket line, twenty come after him and his carrier.”

“Him and his
fifteen
carriers, plus his several dozen battleships, cruisers, AA cruisers, destroyers, and, what, five hundred fighters to protect them? We have … armed landing craft and two CAP, if any? Maybe that's why we're down to two pickets, Commodore.”

He raised his hands. “I know, I know. One of the reasons I came up here. I need to see for myself, and try to help formulate some better tactics, like you've been doing. Figure-eights, circles, backing down, shooting star at them—all unheard-of, but they worked.” He changed the subject. “So there's still no sign of
Daniels
?”

I shook my head. “They apparently didn't go for
Westfall,
so it's just the two of us.”

“Okay, let's go over to
Daniels
's station right now, twenty-seven knots. We owe her that much. In the meantime, my staffies and I are going up to Combat and talk to your radar people and the Freddies.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” I said, getting up. “I'm still glad you're here.”

He grinned. “You're just saying that because you think I brought my Scotch bottle with me.”

“Did you, sir?”

“Hell, yes.”

“There is a God.”

*   *   *

One of the benefits of having the commodore embarked was that we could leave station without asking for permission. As it turned out, it was worth the trip. We discovered 185 survivors of
Daniels
drifting in seven life rafts and six floats, nearly eight miles east of her assigned station. Why they'd been so far off station remained to be discovered. The survivors had seen our two Corsairs searching west of them, but, as too often was the case, the Corsairs never saw them, probably because of their huge engines. Corsair pilots were the first to have to depend utterly on the landing signal officer when coming aboard a carrier because, at the critical moment of catching the arresting gear, they could no longer see the flight deck.
Daniels
's skipper had survived the sinking; her exec, who'd been headed aft to look into a problem with the after forty-millimeters' power, went down with the ship, along with most of the people who'd been below decks.

They pieced together what had happened while floating around in their rafts, waiting for someone besides sharks to show up. Their CAP had mixed it up with a single Betty and reported downing it almost immediately. They'd missed three others, because fifteen minutes later, while
Daniels
was in the process of shooting down another pair of Zekes coming in on the deck together, just like ours, the two Bettys had hit her amidships doing a vertical power dive from eight thousand feet and cut her right in half. The forward section of the ship, with its high mast, the bridge, director, radars, and heavy gun mounts up on the 01 level, had capsized immediately, turned upside down, and gone out of sight in less than a minute. The back half, from just forward of the after stack to the stern, had floated until the third and final Betty hit her on the after forty-millimeter gun platform and cut what was left of her in half again. Everything was gone in under two minutes. Bizarrely, because there'd been no bombs going off, just the pure impact of a ten-ton plane hitting the unarmored decks of a destroyer at 400 miles per hour, there'd been no fire or other explosions, so if you'd survived the planes' impact, you were able to go over the side and into a raft. There were almost no injuries among the survivors. They were either okay, albeit still in shock, or gone to the bottom with the pieces of their ship.

By then it was nearing sundown, so the commodore directed his new flagship to take
Daniels
's survivors to Kerama Retto, where we could also rearm and refuel. The skipper of the
Daniels
was one of the people still in a state of shock. He sat on the couch in the commodore's cabin and kept saying, “we never even saw them,” over and over again. I didn't envy what he would have to undergo in the weeks ahead. He was so upset that he'd even refused the offer of “medicinal” Scotch from the commodore. Who could blame him: He had lost nearly half his crew in the blink of an eye. In accordance with the stark traditions of naval command, “lost” was the operative word. His professional peers would always see him as the captain who lost his ship and half his crew. There were times when Captain Tallmadge had implied that if we were sunk, he planned to sink along with the ship. That seemed to be the only way a captain could erase the sin of losing one's ship. I said something along those lines to the commodore as we hustled down to KR.

“That shouldn't be news, Connie,” he said quietly from his chair on the port side of the pilothouse.

Gulp.

*   *   *

Refueled, rearmed, and having transferred
Daniels
's survivors to the tender, we steamed back to our station north of Okinawa right after sundown. I heard from Jimmy that Rear Admiral Chase, the fleet air-defense commander, had fanged the commodore over the radio for leaving station without permission. The commodore had referenced a UNODIR message he'd sent upon recovering the
Daniels
's survivors and then hung up the radio handset.

“What priority did he use on that UNODIR?” I asked.

“Routine,” Jimmy said, and we both smiled. That message would eventually get to Admiral Chase, but probably not for a few more days. Word was circulating on the sound-powered phone circuits that the commodore had muttered, “Screw 'em if they can't take a joke,” before leaving Combat. The crew was beginning to warm up to Dutch Van Arnhem, and so was I.

Our station had been changed because there were now only two radar pickets,
Malloy
and the
Westfall.
I still could hardly believe that Halsey's enormous Third Fleet, which had begun Operation Iceberg with seventy-seven destroyers, couldn't spare one lone tin can to bolster his early warning radar coverage by 33 percent, but apparently they couldn't. I didn't voice these sentiments to the commodore, however. I knew his thoughts on the matter, but I also knew that there were limits as to what could be voiced aloud. Fair enough. I was a very junior commander, USN; William Halsey was a very senior fleet admiral with five stars. Still, we were depending on the Japs' continuing to attack from the north and northwest. Based on some of their tactics the previous night, I thought we were relying overmuch on assumptions.

The commodore and his two staff officers, one an operations specialist and the other an air-defense expert, met with me and the four department heads after dinner in the wardroom. There'd been no more raids that day after the morning's activity, so we all expected it to be an interesting night. As we sat down, the bridge called and said that a small flotilla of fifteen LCSs and LSMRs was approaching from Okinawa. They were asking for stationing instructions. I was about to instruct them when I remembered I wasn't the senior officer here anymore. I passed the news to the commodore, who said to order them into a protective ring around Malloy at a distance of two thousand yards.

The commodore's operations officer, Lieutenant Commander Al Canning, had an interesting idea. “For the whole time the picket line's been up here, it's been in the same place. Ships might occupy different stations, but the Japs know where those stations are. Why don't we move them tonight?”

“First tell me how you guys think they're locating our ships at night,” the commodore said.

“We think they home in on our air-search radars,” Jimmy said, echoing my theory. “And we can't turn them off because that's why we're here in the first place.”

“So they take a passive bearing on a radar beam and fly down that bearing?”

“Yes, sir, like when they came at us out of the east. They can come from any direction, because they know where we are. If they come in on the deck, the air search can't see them, but they can still home in on that radar signal like a beacon.”

“You think the individual planes are equipped with this kind of gear?”

“If they're flying a section of two or three, which is usual, then only one has to be equipped,” I pointed out. “The other two just have to keep station on him.”

The commodore turned to his operations officer. “So if we somehow could move the ring of stations
and
bring the ships together, maybe we could do the same thing: leave one air-search radar up to suck 'em in, silence the other ones, and maybe we could surprise
them
for a change.”

“Even better,” Marty said, “bring each ship's radar up at odd times, but between those times, move the ships whose radars are off. If they've got something out there, say, a submarine or a controller aircraft, who builds the picture of where the pickets are and then sends that dope to the incoming kamis, we could get them to fire kamis at vacant stations at night. They only have enough fuel for one-way trips, which means they'd go into the sea instead of us.”

“I like the sound of that,” the commodore said. “We'll never convince the big dogs to let us leave station, but they didn't say anything about moving ships around within the stations, even if we're down to only three.”

“Two,” I interjected.

The commodore blinked, then nodded. “Two, right.”

“It's possible,” I continued, “that some of these suicider planes have their own radar. It wouldn't have to be too sophisticated if they're given the initial bearing to their targets. I've heard our own submariners talk about Jap antisub planes having radar, but they're usually multiengine jobs, not fighters.”

The commodore threw up his hands. “If that's true, then what're we doing here?”

“Well,” I said, “let's suppose one or more of them does have a functional radar that'll tell 'em how far we are in front of them. What if we take
all
the pallbearers that CTF 58 just sent up and assign them to one destroyer. Make him the one who has his radar on. As they approach, their radar sees thirteen targets, not one lone destroyer. Then when they get here, they run into thirteen floating gun batteries instead of one. They never said anything about not moving the gators, either…”

The commodore nodded. “Concur,” he said. “Al, put a plan together. We'll send it off to CTF 58, but not until we get the ships in place.”

“Routine precedence, Commodore?” Canning asked, innocently. Everyone grinned.

“Carrier pigeon, Al. With a busted wing.”

*   *   *

There were four small kamikaze raids between sundown and midnight, aimed at Kerama Retto for a change. Because of our warnings, nine kamis in all arrived to a basin obscured by artificial smoke and a warm welcome from the gun emplacements on the hills surrounding the anchorage, as well as from the assembled logistics ships and the smaller amphib gunships. Night-fighters had cut the original eighteen-plane raiding force in half again, based on warnings from the picket destroyers, but they had to break off once they approached the defensive gun circles the Army and the Marines had put up on those hills. All nine who made it to KR were shot down without achieving anything. Congratulations all around, but, as the commodore noted, this was yet another tactical change. Someone in Tokyo had finally recognized that it was the American seaborne logistics train that was going to defeat them.