Tales of the South Pacific (12 page)

But it was strange. As the tenseness on Tulagi grew, as word seeped down the line that the Japs were going to have one last mighty effort at driving us out of the Solomons, more and more of the PT skippers started to slip quietly into the cave. They went to talk with Tony. Behind Charlesworth's back. They would sit with their feet on an old soap box. And they would talk and talk.

"Tony," one of them said, "that damn fool Charlesworth is going to kill us all. Eight PT's blown up since he took over."

"He's a good man," Tony said.

"The enlisted men wish you'd come along tonight, Tony. They say you're good luck."

"OK. Wait for me at the Chinaman's wharf." And at dusk Fry would slip out of the cave, grab a revolver, and shuffle off as if he were going to war. Next morning the gang would quietly meet in the cave. As an officer accredited directly to Charlesworth I felt it my duty to remain loyal to him, but even I found solace of rare quality in slipping away for a chat with Tony. He was the only man I knew in the Pacific who spoke always as if the destiny of the human soul were a matter of great moment. We were all deeply concerned with why we voyagers ended our travels in a cave on Tulagi. Only Fry had the courage to explore that question.

As the great year ended he said, "The Remittance Man is right. The Japs have got to make one more effort. You heard what he said this morning. Ships and aircraft massing."

What you think's gonna happen, Tony?" a young ensign asked.

"They'll throw everything they have at us one of these days."

"How you bettin'?"

"Five nights later they'll withdraw from Guadal!" The men in the cave whistled. "You mean..."

"It's in the bag, fellows. In the bag."

You know what happened! The Remittance Man tipped us off one boiling morning. "Planes seem to be massing for some kind of action. It seems incredible, but I count more than two hundred."

It was incredible. It was sickening. Warned in advance, our fighters were aloft and swept into the Jap formations like sharks among a school of lazy fish. Our Negro cook alone counted forty Zeros taking the big drink. I remember one glance up The Slot. Three planes plunging in the sea. Two Japs exploding madly over Guadal.

This was the high tide! This was to be the knockout blow at Purvis Bay and Guadal. This was to be the Jap revenge against Tulagi. But from Guadal wave after wave of American fighters tore and slashed and crucified the Japs. From Purvis our heavy ships threw up a wall of steel into which the heavy bombers stumbled and beat their brains out in the bay.

In the waters around Savo our PT's picked up twenty American pilots. Charlesworth would have saved a couple of Japs, too, but they fired at him from their sinking bomber. So he blasted it and them to pieces.

He came in at dusk that night. His face was lined with dirt, as if the ocean had been dusty. I met him at the wharf. "Was it what it seemed like?" he asked. "Out there it looked as if we..."

"Skipper," I began. But one of the airmen Charlesworth had picked up had broken both legs in landing. The fact that he had been rescued at all was a miracle. Charlesworth had given him some morphine. The silly galoot was so happy to see land he kept singing the Marine song: Oh we asked for the Army at Guadalcanal But Douglas Mac Arthur said, "No!"

He gave as his reason,

"It's now the hot season, Besides there is no USO."

"Take him up to sickbay," Charlesworth said, wiping his face. The injured pilot grinned at us. "That's a mighty nice little rowboat you got there, skipper!" he shouted. He sang all the way to sickbay. At dinner Charlesworth was as jumpy as an embezzler about to take a vacation during the check-up season. He tried to piece together what had happened, how many Japs had gone down. We got a secret dispatch that said a hundred and twelve. "Pilots always lie," he said gruffly. "They're worse than young PT men." He walked up and down his hut for a few minutes and then motioned me to follow him.

We walked out into the warm night. Lights were flashing over Guadal. "The Japs have got to pull out of that island," Charlesworth insisted as we walked up the hill behind his hut. When we were on the plateau he stopped to study the grim and silent Slot. "They'll be coming down some night." To my surprise he led me to the cave. At the entrance we could hear excited voices of young PT skippers. They were telling Tony of the air battles they had watched.

We stepped into the cave. The PT men were embarrassed and stood at attention. Tony didn't move, but with his foot he shoved a whiskey bottle our way. "It's cool in here," Charlesworth said. "Carry on, fellows." The men sat down uneasily. "Fry," the commander blurted out, "I heard the most astonishing thing this morning."

"What was it?" Tony asked.

"This Remittance Man," Charlesworth said. "I met an old English trader down along the water front. He told me Anderson was married to a native girl. The girl broke her leg and Anderson fixed it for her. Then he married her, priest and all. A real marriage. And the girl is as black... as black as that wall."

"Well, I'll be damned!" Fry said, bending forward. "Where'd you meet this fellow? What was he like? Holy cow! We ought to look him up!"

"He said a funny thing. I asked him what Anderson was like and he said, 'Oh, Andy? He was born to marry the landlady's daughter!' I asked him what this meant and he said, 'Some fellows are born just to slip into things. When it comes time to take a wife, they marry the landlady's daughter. She happens to be there. That's all.'"

The cave grew silent. We did not think of Jap planes crashing into The Slot, but of the Remittance Man, married to a savage, slipping at night from island to island, from village to hillside to treetop.

At 0700 next morning all of us but Fry were in the steaming quonset listening to the Remittance Man. We heard his quavering voice sending us good cheer. "Good morning, Americans!" he began. "I don't have to tell you the news. Where did they go? So many went south and so few came back! During the last hour I have tried and tried to avoid optimism. But I can't hide the news. I sincerely believe the Nips are planning to pull out! Yes. I have watched a considerable piling up of surface craft. And observe this. I don't think they have troops up here to fill those craft. It can mean only one thing. I can't tell if there will be moves tonight. My guess, for what it is worth, is this: Numerous surface craft will attempt to evacuate troops from Guadalcanal tonight. Some time after 0200." There was a pause. Our men looked at one another. By means of various facial expressions they telegraphed a combined: "Oh boy!" Then the voice continued: "You may not hear from me for several days. I find a little trip is necessary. Planes are overhead. Not the hundreds that used to fly your way. Two only. They are looking for me, I think."

From that time on the Remittance Man never again broadcast at 0700. He did, however, broadcast to us once more. One very hot afternoon. But by then he had nothing of importance to tell us. The Japanese on Guadal were knocked out by then. They were licking their wounds in Munda. They didn't know it at the time, but they were getting ready to be knocked out of Munda, too.

The Remittance Man guessed wrong as to when the Japs would evacuate Guadal. It came much later than he thought. When the attempt was made, we were waiting for them with everything we had. This time the PT boats were fortified by airplanes and heavy ships. We weren't fighting on a shoestring this time.

I suppose you know it was a pretty bloody affair. Great lights flashed through the dark waters. Japs and their ships were destroyed without mercy. Our men did not lust after the killing. But when you've been through the mud of Guadal and been shelled by the Japs night after night until your teeth ached; when you've seen the dead from your cruisers piled up on Savo, and your planes shot down, and your men dying from foes they've never seen; when you see good men wracked with malaria but still slugging it out in the jungle...

A young PT skipper told me about the fight. He said, "Lots of them got away. Don't be surprised if Admiral Halsey gives everybody hell. Too many got away. But we'll get them sometime later. Let me tell you. It was pitch black. We knew there were Japs about. My squadron was waiting. We were all set. Then a destroyer flashed by. From the wrong way! 'Holy God!' I cried. 'Did they slip through us after all?' But the destroyer flashed on its searchlights. Oh, man! It was one of ours! If I live to be a million I'll never see another sight like that. You know what I thought? I thought, 'Oh, baby! What a difference! Just a couple of weeks ago, if you saw a destroyer, you knew it was a Jap!'" The ensign looked at us and tried to say something else. His throat choked up. He opened his mouth a couple of times, but no words came out. He was grinning and laughing and twisting a glass around on the table.

Of course, one Jap destroyer did get through. As luck would have it, the DD came right at Charlesworth. That was when he got his third ribbon. It happened this way. We got a false scent and had our PT's out on patrol two days early. All of them. On the day the little boats ripped out of Hutchinson Creek and Tulagi Harbor Charlesworth stopped by the cave. "The boys say you're good luck, Tony. Want to go hunting?"

"Not me!" Fry shuddered. "There's going to be shooting tonight. Somebody's going to get killed."

"We're shoving off at 1630."

"Well, best of luck, skipper."

Tony was there, of course, lugging that silly carbine. They say he and Charlesworth spent most of the first day arguing. Fry wanted to close Annapolis as an undergraduate school. Keep it open only as a professional school for training regular college graduates. You can imagine the reception this got from the skipper. The second day was hot and dull. On the third afternoon word passed that the Nips were coming down. Fourteen or more big transports.

"Those big transports have guns, don't they?" Tony asked at chow.

"Big ones."

"Then what the hell are we doin' out here?"

"We'll stick around to show the others where the Japs are. Then we'll hightail it for home," Charlesworth laughed.

"Skipper, that's the first sensible thing you've said in three days."

That night the PT's were in the thick of the scramble. It was their last pitched battle in the Solomons. After that night their work was finished. There were forays, sure. And isolated actions. But the grand job, that hellish job of climbing into a ply-wood tug, waving your arms and shouting, "Hey fellows! Look at me! I'm a destroyer!" That job was over. We had steel destroyers, now.

You know how Charlesworth got two transports that night. Laid them wide open. He had one torpedo left at 0340. Just cruising back and forth over toward Esperance. With that nose which true Navy men seem to have he said to Fry and his crew, "I think there's something over there toward Savo."

What are we waiting for?" his ensign asked. The PT heeled over and headed cautiously toward Savo. At 0355 the lookout sighted this Jap destroyer. You know that one we fished up from the rocks of Iron Bottom Bay for the boys to study? The one that's on the beach of that little cove near Tulagi? Well, the DD they sighted that night was the same class.

Tensely Charlesworth said, "There she is, Tony."

"Holy cow!" Fry grunted. "That thing's got cannons!"

This remark was what the skipper needed. Something in the way Tony drew back as if mortally afraid, or the quaver in his voice, or the look of mock horror on his thin face was the encouragement Charlesworth wanted.

"Pull in those guts!" he cried. The PT jumped forward, heading directly at the destroyer.

At 2000 yards the first Jap salvo landed to port. "Holy cow!" Fry screamed. "They're shooting at us!"

At 1800 yards three shells splashed directly ahead of the PT. One ricocheted off the water and went moaning madly overhead. At 1500 yards the PT lay over on its side in a hard turn to starboard. Jap shells landed in the wake. The PT resumed course. The final 500 yards was a grim race. Jap searchlights were on the PT all the time, but at about 950 Charlesworth nosed straight at the port side of the destroyer and let fly with his last torpedo.

I wish that torpedo had smacked the Jap in the engine room. Then we might have some truth to support all the nonsense they write about the PT's sinking capital ships. A little truth, at any rate. But the damned torpedo didn't run true. You'd think after all this time BuOrd could rig up a torpedo that would run true. This one porpoised. The Jap skipper heeled his tug way over, and the torpedo merely grazed it. There was an explosion, of course, and a couple of the enlisted men were certain the Jap ship went down. But Charlesworth knew different. "Minor damage," he reported. "Send bombing planes in search immediately." So far as we knew, our planes never found the Jap. We think it hid in some cove in the Russells and then beat it on up to Truk.

Back at Tulagi our officers and men tried to hide their feelings but couldn't. Nobody wanted to come right out and say, "Well, we've licked the yellow bastards." But we were all thinking it. Tulagi was exactly like a very nice Sunday School about to go on a picnic. Everybody behaved properly, but if you looked at a friend too long he was likely to break out into a tremendous grin. Fellows played pranks on one another. They sang! Oh, Lord! How they sang. Men who a few days before were petty enemies now flopped their arms around each other's necks and made the night air hideous. Even the cooks celebrated and turned out a couple of almost decent meals. Of course, we starved for the next week, but who cared? The closest anyone came to argument was when Charlesworth's ensign ribbed a pilot we had fished from The Slot. "If you boys had been on the job, you could have knocked over a Jap DD." A week earlier this would have started a fight. But this time the aviator looked at the red-cheeked ensign and started laughing. He rumpled the ensign's hair and cooed, "I love you! I love you! You ugly little son-of-a-bitch!"

But there was a grim guest at all of our celebrations. Fry saw to that. He would come out of the cave at mealtime, or when we were drinking. And he would bring the Remittance Man with him. He dragged that ghostly figure into every bottle of beer. The coastwatcher ate every meal with us. Officers would laugh, and Fry would trail the ghost of that lonely voice across the table. The aviator would tell a joke, and Tony would have the silent broadcaster laughing at his side. He never mentioned the man, his name, or his duties. Yet by the look on Fry's face, we all knew that he was constantly wondering why the morning broadcasts had not been resumed.