The Commodore (36 page)

“He know about this?” Sluff asked.

“Knows and volunteered to do it,” Hollis said. “Look—we're on the knife edge here. The Japs will have heavier and more experienced forces and they are desperate to get these troops ashore, not to mention the food and medicines they'll need just to stay alive on Cactus. If we can bust that up, we'll have won even if we don't win the sea fight. The few—very few—prisoners the Marines have taken came in for food. If we can turn them back, the Japs on Cactus are doomed to starvation if nothing else.”

Sluff nodded. “Piece of cake,” he announced, with much more confidence than he felt. Maybe it was all the booze.

Hollis gave him a long, hard look. “You up for this, Sluff?” he asked. “That's a big piece of metal in your head bone there.”

“Think of it as armor, Admiral,” Sluff said.

 

THIRTY-FIVE

The Slot

Two weeks later, not one, Sluff was ensconced in the left-hand captain's chair on the bridge of
J. B. King
as the task group pushed its way north up into the Slot at twenty knots. They'd passed the Russell Islands to port just before midnight. One heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, and six destroyers, not eight. Hollis had striven mightily for a trained and intact team with no more of this grab-a-destroyer-when-you-can business. He had succeeded, mostly, having lost two of the Fletchers to a carrier group, which was going into the Central Pacific to raise some hell.
New Orleans
remained the flagship, but the two light cruisers,
Roanoke
and
Carson City,
had joined the force only five days before word came that the Japs were finally going to make the big reinforcement push.

He'd tried not to dwell on the disaster he'd created the last time he was in these waters, but Halsey's reappointment of him as a squadron commander took some of the sting out of that. He absolutely understood that Halsey might have done that because the other captains available and vying for the job had never fought the Japs at night. The good news was that he had had an entire two weeks to take his ships out to sea off New Caledonia and put them through their paces, starting slowly in daylight, then graduating to higher speeds and more dangerous maneuvers until finally they were doing it at night, darkened ship, radio-silent, while slicing through the calm South Pacific waters at thirty-five knots.

J. B. King
was still running like a well-oiled machine. The commander who'd relieved him had suffered a ruptured appendix, which meant that his old XO, Bob Frey, was now in command. Sluff's press-gang efforts to form a staff had netted him two lieutenants and one JG. Lieutenant Commander Larry Price had turned out to be a real gem, quickly organizing the officers into an effective tactical staff. By the end of the two weeks, his staff could maneuver the six-destroyer formation like pros, unlike the two light cruisers, who'd seemed to stumble through their various tactical exercises. They had come over from the Atlantic Fleet, and it showed.

“Captain's on the bridge,” the bosun's mate announced. A moment later, Bob Frey materialized alongside Sluff's chair.

“Captain,” Sluff said.

“Commodore,” Bob replied solemnly.

Sluff had been glad to come back to
J. B. King.
The ship ran well and had, so far, manifested truly good luck in avoiding the destruction so many of her class had suffered in the past six months. Everyone who'd ever served in destroyers knew that there were some ships that seemed to just be better than all the rest, and
King
was one of them. Bob had been genuinely relieved and glad when he found out that Sluff had not been killed when
Barrett
had gone down. Sluff had spent hours recounting his various adventures, including those with the SOPAC chief of staff. Bob had told him that Browning had been sent to command a new aircraft carrier, which was doing shakedown training on the East Coast before coming out to the South Pacific. That meant he was about ten thousand miles away, which in Sluff's opinion was just about right.

“Is this gonna work?” Frey asked.

“I sure as hell hope so,” Sluff said. “It is nice to be able to go into a night fight with a plan that wasn't generated on the fly for once. Hollis is shaping up to be a damned good task group commander.”

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” Bob quoted from von Moltke.

“Yeah, but thus far, we've gone in to too many of these battles with
no
plan, period. Like the battleship action, or Callaghan's collision with the entire Jap striking force. We have a plan, and we know that once we get into it, everything will change. But at least it's going to start with a plan, an offensive action plan. That's real progress, Bob.”

“Yes, sir, I agree with that,” Bob said. “But I'd sure like to see some of those battleships that run with the carrier groups, those very distant carrier groups, up in the line with us. Why the hell do we always go up against heavier odds while the bigger half of the gun fleet escorts carriers?”

“I hear you,” Sluff said. “We're here because we're the only forces Halsey has to do this job right now, and besides, the Solomons is just one campaign.”

“The Japs sure seem to think it's important.”

“I think that when the Jap admirals sit down with some sake on the midwatch, they'll be coming to grips with some stark facts: We're going to get stronger here in the Pacific and they're only going to get weaker. Little bitty island nation. No oil. Surrounded by our subs. They lose a ship they can't replace it. We can and do. Up to now, they've been meat-grinding
us
here in the Slot. Pretty soon, though, within a year, anyway, they're gonna be the meat.”

“But for tonight…” Bob said.

“Yup,” Sluff said. “Tonight they've got the weight advantage.”

Bob blew out a long breath, but had nothing more to say. He went back over to his captain's chair on the starboard side of the bridge.

Sluff saw him pick up the sound-powered handset next to his chair and then turn the barrel switch. JA—Sluff just knew it. The captain's battle circuit. He surreptitiously switched his own sound-powered phone-set to the JA circuit and listened in.

“All stations, this is the captain. I want to review the battle plan for tonight. Here's what's happening. Our task group is shaped like a trident headed north into the Slot, away from Guadalcanal. The destroyers are on either side of the formation axis in two divisions of three ships each. The three cruisers are three miles behind us. As soon as any ship of the force makes radar contact with the oncoming Japanese force, the tin cans will announce the contact by flashing light and then peel off to either side, speed up, and conduct a torpedo attack. The cruisers behind us will slow down and then turn perpendicular to the oncoming Jap column in order to bring all their guns to bear.”

“The right-hand three-ship division, which is us, will come right and head up the
eastern
side of the Jap formation, while the other division will turn left and then go up the
western
side. At the preplanned range and bearing, we, the eastern division, will launch thirty torpedoes at the Jap force and then we will turn to match the Japanese course and speed, going south. When our fish begin to go off, we will open fire with guns. When the Japs start shooting back, the western division will run in from the other side and launch thirty more torpedoes and then they'll come around and match the Jap formation's course and speed. When their fish start hitting they will engage with guns while we, the eastern division, run for cover. Once all that gets started the cruiser force will open on the Jap columns from dead ahead with nine eight-inch and eighteen six-inch guns. There will be no radio comms until our division's torpedoes start going off. That's the plan. Stay loose.”

Sluff nodded as he listened in. Couldn't have said it better myself, he thought, as he hung up the handset. Bob Frey ought to be a commander. That's your job, he realized—commodores were supposed to get their best ship captains promoted.

He looked at his new watch, which had a radium dial so he could see it in the dark. Based on the coast watchers' reports, the Japs ought to show up on their radars anytime in the next hour. He hoped it would be soon, because they were now in the widest portion of the Slot. If they went much farther north, the channel would narrow down and then the plan would fall victim to von Moltke's famous prophecy.

“Bridge, Combat, Sigs. Signal from the flag: Radar contact, bearing three four zero, range fifteen miles, closing, fast. Composition many. Execute plan.”

Sluff punched down the switch on the bitch-box. “Acknowledge,” he ordered, and then called Combat.
J. B. King
was leading the three-ship formation on the eastern side of the task group. Larry Price answered immediately, and then Sluff heard the orders going up to the signal bridge for the eastern division to turn together to 030, speed thirty-five knots. This order would be sent by red flashing light to the two ships behind
J. B. King.
Ninety seconds later he heard
King
's forced-draft blowers spooling up as the ship turned to starboard and accelerated. Time for him to go down to Combat. He climbed out of his chair and grabbed his steel helmet and life jacket as the ship went to general quarters. He had to wait for the throng of sailors crashing up the interior ladders to man their topside battle stations. Then he went below.

“Commodore's in Combat,” someone announced as Sluff came into the crowded space. It seemed incongruous that men who were assigned as plotters on the DRT still had to be in life jackets and helmets, but as Sluff knew only too well, one minute you could be plotting, the next, bleeding and swimming. He pressed two fingertips to the steel plate in his head, as if to reassure himself that it was still there. The ship's shipfitters had had to hammer out a bulge in Sluff's steel helmet to accommodate the plate.

“Everybody going where they're supposed to?” he asked Lieutenant Commander Price, who was a tall, thin, and hatchet-faced New Englander.

“Yes, sir, so far so good. We've got good skin paint on our guys; nothing yet on the bad guys.”

“The
New Orleans
's radar is another eighty feet in the air, compared to ours,” Sluff said. “We'll get 'em pretty soon.”

“Radar contact, bearing three three zero, range twenty-three thousand yards. Contacts are fuzzy.”

“Course and speed?”

“Need three minutes to calculate, sir.”

“Okay,” Sluff said. “Start passing our ranges and bearings to the targets to
Morgan
and
Whitfield
until they get contact. Order prep torpedo attack.”

“TBS?” Price asked.

“Not yet—keep it visual.”

Price gave him a look that said sending out a flashing-light message was going to take too long, but then called the signal bridge. Sluff knew what the problem was: If the Japs were coming at their usual speed, they'd be flashing past each other before they could get torpedoes away. Sluff had asked about Hollis' orders to maintain radio silence, especially when they got close, but the admiral had been adamant. No radio until the ambush had been sprung. Period. Memories of the Russell Islands ambush, Sluff supposed.

The Japs were now eleven, maybe ten miles northwest of them.

“
Morgan
and
Whitfield
do not hold the contacts,” the radar talker announced.

Sluff realized this wasn't going to work. Even if he turned right now and headed in for a torpedo attack, as long as his other ships still didn't hold firm contacts, they couldn't attack. They needed more time. The only way to get more time was to reverse course and slow down. That way, the Jap ships would be overtaking him at ten knots of relative speed instead of roaring at them at a closing rate of sixty knots. He was explaining this to Larry when the TBS erupted. One of the light cruisers, five miles behind them, announced she had radar contact on the approaching Japs and requested permission to open fire.

“Oh, shit!” Sluff exclaimed. So much for radio silence. So much for the plan, too.

Then the flagship came up on TBS and told the cruiser formation to open fire immediately. Sluff knew what had happened: Admiral Hollis, realizing that surprise had probably been lost, had decided to start shooting.

The destroyers were on their own. Von Moltke had been right. Now it was his ballgame.

“Commodore, the Japs are on a course of one seven zero, speed thirty-five.”

Sluff didn't hesitate. He picked up the TBS handset, called the collective voice radio call sign for his three-ship division, and ordered them to perform an immediate-execute turn to starboard to course one seven zero. Both ships rogered and he felt
J. B. King
heeling to port as she leaned into the turn.

“Combat, Bridge, we see gun flashes to the south.” It was Bob Frey's voice. “I think the cruisers have opened fire.”

“I concur, Bob,” Sluff said. “We're going to come about, slow down the relative speed of advance, and then conduct a torpedo attack while the Japs are busy with the cruisers.”

“What happened to the plan?”

“What always happens to the plan?” Sluff responded angrily.

Then he called Dragon Murphy, the skipper of the lead destroyer in the western division of destroyers, who was also the de facto western division commander. He told Dragon to conduct a torpedo attack as soon as he could.

“What the hell's going on?” Dragon responded. “You attacking?”

“Affirmative,” Sluff replied. “Launch your fish as soon as you have a solution, give 'em time to get there, and then open with guns.”

“We're gonna be in the cruisers' line of fire if we do that,” Dragon said.