Winds of War (140 page)

A knock at the door; the voice of the Chinese maid: “Your uniform, Captain?”

“Thank you. Ah, that’s a fine job, I appreciate it.”

He did not tear the letter up. He did not think he could write a better one. The situation of a man past fifty declining a young woman’s love was awkward and ridiculous, and no words could help much. He slipped the envelope into his pocket. When he passed a mailbox on his way to the Navy Yard, he stopped and mailed it. The clank of the box was a sad sound in a sad day for Captain Victor Henry.

Sadder yet was the trip to the
California
, through foul-smelling water so coated with black oil that the motor launch cut no wake, but chugged slimily along in smoky air, thumping like an icebreaker through a floating mass of black-smeared garbage and debris. The launch passed all along Battleship Row, for the
California
lay nearest the channel entrance. One by one Pug contemplated these gargantuan gray vessels he knew so well – he had served in several – fire-blackened, down by the head, down by the stern, sitting on the bottom, listing, or turned turtle. Grief and pain tore at him.

He was a battleship man. Long, long ago he had passed up flight school. Navy air had seemed to him fine for reconnaissance, bombing support, and torpedo attacks, but not for the main striking arm. He had argued with the fly-fly boys that when war came, the thin-skinned carriers would lurk far from the action and would fuss at each other with bombings and dogfights, while the battleships with their big rifles came to grips and slugged it out for command of the sea. The fliers had asserted that one aerial bomb or torpedo could sink a battleship. He had retorted that a sixteen-inch steel plate wasn’t exactly porcelain, and that a hundred guns firing at once might slightly mar the aim of a pilot flying a little tin crate.

His natural conservative streak had been reinforced by his football experience. To him, carriers had been the fancy-Dan team with tricky runners and razzle-dazzle passers; battlewagons, the heavy solid team of chargers, who piled up the yardage straight through the line. These tough ground gainers usually became the champions. So he had thought - making the mistake of his life. He had been as wrong as a man could be, in the one crucial judgment of his profession.

Other battleship men might still find excuses for these tragic slaughtered dinosaurs that the launch was passing. For Pug Henry, facts governed. Each of these vessels was a grand engineering marvel, a floating colossus as cunningly put together as a lady’s watch, capable of pulverizing a city. All true, all true. But if caught unawares, they could be knocked out by little tin flying crates. The evidence was before his eyes. The twenty-year argument was over.

The setting sun cast a rosy glow on the canted superstructure of the
California
. She listed about seven degrees to port, spouting thick streams of filthy water in rhythmic pumped spurts. The smoke-streaked, flame-blistered, oil-smeared steel wall, leaning far over Pug’s head as the motor launch drew up to the accommodation ladder, gave him a dizzy, doomed feeling. The climb up the canted and partly submerged ladder was dizzying, too.

What an arrival! In bad moments in Kuibyshev, on Siberian trains, in Tokyo streets, in the Manila Club, Pug had cheered himself with pictures of his reception aboard this ship: side boys in white saluting, honor guard on parade, boatswain’s pipe trilling, commanding officers shaking hands at the gangway, a sweet triumphant tour of a great ship shined up to holiday beauty and brilliance for the eye of a new captain. Often he had played a minor part in such rituals. But to be the star, the center, the incoming “old man”! It was worth a lifetime of the toughest drudgery.

And now this!

A vile corrupt stink hit Victor Henry in the face as he stepped on the sloping quarterdeck of the
California
, and said, “Request permission to come aboard, sir.”

“Permission granted, sir.” The OOD’s salute was smart, his sunburned boyish face attractive. He wore grease-streaked khakis, with gloves and a spyglass. Five corpses lay on the quarterdeck, under sheets stained with water and oil, their soggy black shoes projecting, their noses poking up the cloth, water trickling from them down the slanted deck toward the OOD’s stand. The smell came partly from them, but it was a compound of reeks – seeping smoke, gasoline fumes from the pumps, burnt oil, burnt food, burnt paper, burnt flesh, rotted food, broken waste lines, a rancid-mildewy effluvium of disaster, of a great machine built to house human beings, broken and disintegrating. Unshaven sailors and officers in dirty clothing wandered about. Above the filth and mess and tangled hoses and scattered shells and ammo boxes on the main deck, the superstructure jutted into the sunset sky, massive, clean, and undamaged. The long fourteen-inch guns were trained neatly fore and aft, newly and smoothly painted gray, tampions in place, turrets unscathed. The ship bristled with A.A. guns. The old Prune Barge was tantalizingly alive and afloat - wounded, but still mighty, still grandiose.

“I’m Captain Victor Henry.”

“Yes, sir? Oh! Yes,
sir!
Captain Wallenstone’s been expecting you for quite a while.” He snapped his fingers at a messenger in whites, and said with a winning sad grin, “It’s awful that you should find the ship like this, sir. Benson, tell the C.O. that Captain Henry is here.”

“One moment. Where’s Your C.O.?”

“Sir, he’s with the salvage officers down in the forward engine room.”

“I know the way.”

Walking familiar decks and passageways that were weird in their fixed slant, climbing down tipped ladders, choking on smoke, gasoline, and oil fumes, and a gruesome smell of rotting meat, penetrating ever deeper into gloom and stench, realizing that these fume-filled spaces were explosive traps, Victor Henry got himself down to the forward engine room, where four officers huddled on a high catwalk, playing powerful hand-lights on a sheet of oil-covered water. By an optical illusion, the water half-drowning the engines appeared slanted, rather than the listing bulkheads.

With little ceremony, Victor Henry joined in the engineering talk about saving the ship. The quantity of water flooding through the torpedo holes was more than the pumps could throw out, so the ship was slowly settling. It was that simple. Pug asked about more pumps, about pumping by tugs and auxiliary vessels; but all over the anchorage the cry was for pumps. No more pumping was to be had, not in time to keep the battleship off the mud. Captain Wallenstone, haggard and untidy in greasy khakis and looking about sixty years old, reeled off sad answers to Pug’s other ideas. Patching the holes would take months of underwater work. They stretched over a dozen frames. Sealing off the damaged spaces by sending in divers and closing them off one by one could not be done in time. In short, the
California
, though not yet on the bottom, was done for. The talk was about cofferdams and cement patches, about a complete refitting in the States, about return to service in 1943 or 1944.

Wallenstone took Victor Henry up to his cabin. It was a blessed thing to smell fresh air again streaming in through windward portholes, and to see the evening star bright in the apple-green sky. The commanding officer’s quarters were intact, spacious, shipshape, glamorous, and beautiful, on this battleship sinking uncontrollably to the bottom. A Filipino steward brought them coffee, which they had to hold on their laps, for it would have slid off the tilted tables. Mournfully, the captain told Pug his experiences of the Japanese attack. Pug had never encountered this officer before, but Wallenstone appeared to know a lot about him. He asked Victor Henry what President Roosevelt was really like, and whether he thought the Russians could hold out much longer against the Germans.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, as he started to accompany Pug out, “quite a bit of mail accumulated here for you. I’m not sure that” - he opened and closed desk drawers - “yes, here it is, all together.”

Victor Henry tucked the bulky envelope under his arm and picked his way with the captain across the cluttered, stinking main deck in the twilight.

“You wouldn’t believe what this ship looked like two days ago.” The captain shook his head sadly, pitching his voice above the whine and thud of the pumps and the metallic hammering everywhere. “We had the word from Manila to expect you. I ran off a captain’s inspection on Saturday. I was at it for five hours. What a job they’d done! You could have eaten your dinner off the engine room deck. It gleamed. She was the smartest ship in this man’s Navy, Henry, and she had the finest crew that ever - oh well, what’s the use? What’s the use?”

At the quarterdeck the bodies were gone. The captain looked around and said, “Well, they took those poor devils away. That’s the worst of it. At the last muster forty-seven were still missing. They’re down below, Henry, all drowned. Oh, God! These salvage fellows say this ship will come back and fight one day, but God knows! And God knows where I’ll be then! Who would think the sons of bitches could sneak all the way to Hawaii undetected? Who’d think they’d be screwy enough to try? Where was our air cover?”

“Is that the
Enterprise
?” Pug pointed at a black rectangular shape moving down channel, showing no lights. Wallenstone peered at the silhouette. “Yes. Thank Christ
she
wasn’t in port Sunday morning.”

“My son’s a flier on board her. Maybe I’ll get to see him. First time in a long while.”

“Say! That should cheer you up some. If anything can. I know how you must feel. All I can say is, I’m sorry, Henry. Sorry as a human being can be.”

Captain Wallenstone held out his hand. Victor hesitated.

In that tiny pause, he thought that if this man had been wiser than all the rest, had held the ship in readiness condition Zed or even Yoke - after all, he too had received a war warning - and had ordered a dawn air alert, the
California
might be the most famous battleship in the Navy now, afloat and ready to fight. Wallenstone then would be a national hero with a clear red carpet to the office of Chief of Naval Operations, and he would be turning over a fighting command to his relief. Instead, he was one of eight battleship captains conferring with salvage officers and saying how unfortunate it all was; and he was offering a handshake to the man who would never relieve him, because he had let the enemy sink his ship.

But could he, Pug Henry, have done any better? A battleship captain who roused his crew for dawn general quarters in port, while half a dozen other battleships slept, would have been a ridiculous eccentric. The entire fleet from Cincpac down had been dreaming. That was the main and forever unchangeable fact of history. The sinking of the
California
was a tiny footnote nobody would ever pay attention to.

He shook Wallenstone’s hand, saluted the colors, and made his way down the ladder - which leaned nauseatingly over the water - to the luxurious and unharmed captain’s gig that the OOD had summoned. The gig ran darkened to the landing. In the dim dashboard light of the car, Pug glanced over the envelopes of his piled-up mail; official stuff for the most part, with a couple of letters from Rhoda and one from Madeline. He did not open any of them.

“Dad!” Warren not only was at home, he had already changed into slacks and a flowered loose-hanging shirt. He came lunging into the living room, and threw an arm around his father, holding the other stiff at his side. One ear was plastered with surgical tape. “Well, you finally made it! Some haul, clear from Moscow! How are you, Dad?”

“I’ve just visited the
California
.”

“Oh, Jesus. Bourbon and water?”

“Not that much water, and damned rich on the bourbon. What happened to your arm?”

“Jan told you about how I ran into those Japs, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t tell me you were wounded.”

“It’s just a few stitches. I’m still flying, that’s the main thing. Come, it’s cooler out here, Dad.”

In the shadowy screened porch, Pug bitterly described the
California’
s state. Warren was scornful. The battleship Navy had been a lot of sleepy fat cats primed for defeat, he said; obsessed by promotions and competition scores, ignorant of the air, and forever drilling to fight the Battle of Jutland against the Japs. But the Japs had grasped naval aviation and had made a slick opening play. “We’ll get ‘em,” he said, “but it’ll be a long hard pull, and the naval aviators’ll do it. Not the battlewagons, Dad.”

“Seems to me a few airplanes got caught on the ground,” Pug growled, feeling the bourbon comforting and radiant inside him.

“Sure, I admit that. This whole base was all unbuttoned. Dad, I’ll tell you one thing, if Halsey had been Cincpac, none of it would have happened. He’s been so ready and eager for war, his tongue’s been hanging out. He’d have kept this goddamn fleet in condition Zed, and on dawn and dusk GQ’s for a year. He’d have run patrols till the planes fell apart. He’d have been the most hated son of a bitch in Hawaii, but by God, when they came he’d have been waiting for ‘em! Why, we stripped ship in November. We’ve run darkened ever since, with warheads in our torpedoes, and bombs in the planes, and depth charges on ready. Of course he does go galloping about like an old mule with a bee up its ass.”

Warren described Halsey’s futile dart south of Oahu looking for Japanese carriers. The direction had seemed dead wrong to Warren Henry and the other fliers. The only place for the Japs to be lurking was north, where they could dash straight for home after the strike. But Halsey - so they later learned - had received a direction-finder report of heavy radio signalling to the south, so southward he had roared, launching all his torpedo planes and dive bombers. For hours the planes had scoured over empty seas, till the
Enterprise
had sheepishly summoned them back. The report had been the commonest of direction-finder errors, a reciprocal bearing. The Japs had lain in the exact opposite direction-north. By then, of course, catching up with them had been hopeless.

His father grunted incredulously. “Is that what happened? God Almighty, that’s nearly as stupid as the battleship performance.”