Hara-Kiri_a novel of the Pacific War Page 10

  The deck gun banged again and again. The gunboat was burning, its bridge a tangle of metal scrap, without returning a single shot. Japanese sailors threw themselves into the water. Charlie almost felt bad for them, but after weeks of frustration, his blood sang at finally being in decisive combat.

  “Shift fire to second target,” he called. “Range, 500 yards!”

  “Aye, aye!” Morrison answered.

  They were shooting fish in a barrel here, but from the way the torpedo officer was fighting, you’d think his boys were taking down a flattop.

  The gun pumped round after round into the coaster. The ship slowly listed and sank in the mud, its camouflage ablaze.

  The sea truck floundered while the large two-mast schooner was making sail, reaching from the dock under heavy AA gunfire.

  “Contact!” Hooker cried, pointing.

  An Azio-class minelayer, hidden behind the gunboat, had raised anchor and was coming on with a bone in its teeth.

  “Right full rudder!” Charlie ordered. “Shift fire to the minelayer!”

  The Sandtiger turned hard-a-starboard. Morrison grinned and bawled fresh orders, having the time of his life. Charlie blinked at the startling crack of Japanese explosive rounds, which raked the water off their beam. It wouldn’t take them long to find the range.

  “Rudder amidships! Steady on this course, all ahead full!”

  The deck gun swiveled on its mount and boomed at the gunboat, striking the forecastle, which erupted in dust and spinning metal shards. The minelayer flashed with a heart-stopping bang as it brought its own deck gun into action. The shell tore the air overhead and splashed in the bay.

  Morrison corrected aim and hurled shell after shell toward the enemy’s gun, smashing the minelayer with terrific effect.

  “God, he’s good,” Charlie said.

  “Captain!” Hooker pointed at the schooner, which now lay on a convergent path with the Sandtiger.

  “Steady on this course.”

  “Oh.” The quartermaster grabbed hold of the coaming, bracing himself.

  The Sandtiger rammed the schooner’s bow, which splintered at the impact. The commandos sprayed the deck with small arms fire and threw grappling hooks like pirates of old. They clambered aboard with demolition charges, shooting anything that moved while Japanese sailors leaped into the water.

  “Helm, all stop,” Charlie ordered.

  The Azio’s gun had fallen silent under Morrison’s withering barrage. Charlie spared a glance and spotted one of his sailors being carried below. No time to find out who it was. The fighting, which was racing to its conclusion, demanded his full attention.

  The minelayer had stopped dead in the water and drifted, helpless, as Morrison targeted it below the waterline. The gunboat floated unmanned on a burning oil slick, its bridge a smoking ruin. The coaster was sunk in the mud, and the sea truck’s wooden hull had shattered under heavy fire, turning the small ship into a wreck. Garbage and debris bobbed on the water.

  The commandos returned from the schooner. The Sandtiger backed away as the demolition charges blew out its hull below the waterline. The ship pitched and sank bow first into the bay.

  On shore, the local garrison was finally getting into action. Machine gun fire winked in the darkness. Charlie kept the Sandtiger on station long enough for Morrison to pump another score of rounds into the gunboat, which refused to sink. At midnight, he called off the gun attack and showed the dying ship his stern, finishing it off with a single torpedo that broke its back.

  All told, he’d sunk five small ships adding up to 1,500 tons. Not a big haul but not bad for a night’s work. The men had earned their beer.

  “That was … savage,” Hooker said.

  Charlie acknowledged this comment with a grim nod. Savage, yes. The perfect word for it. He leaned against the coaming, venting the stress of battle and three weeks of frustration with a ragged sigh.

  “Conn, Bridge,” he said. “Set a course for Borongan.”

  At Borongan in the north, they’d try their luck again. Charlie hoped to catch more Japanese merchants as they fled Third Fleet.

  “Captain, we can’t go there,” Rusty replied.

  “Explain.”

  “We received a flash message from Pearl. We have new orders.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  NEW ORDER

  Charlie stepped through the passageway into the chief petty officers’ stateroom, where Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Henry Pearce operated on the wounded sailor, Signalman Third Class Eddie Kendrick. Still wearing his flak jacket, Morrison’s face was anxious and blackened with gunpowder.

  “How is he, Doc?” Charlie said.

  Concentrating on his stitching, Pearce grunted but otherwise didn’t answer. Kendrick had taken shrapnel in his right leg. The medic had tied off the bleeders, cleaned the wound with alcohol, and dowsed it with sulfa powder. Kendrick lay clutching a pillow to his chest, in discomfort but feeling little pain thanks to a shot of morphine.

  One of the most valuable crewmen, the pharmacist’s mate had the same training as a civilian paramedic but served the boat as its doctor, nurse, dentist, and chaplain. Men who smashed their fingers when tossed around the boat in heavy weather, broke a rib clearing the topsides, or caught the clap on shore leave all went to see Doc. When he wasn’t treating the crew, he served as a day lookout, the ship’s librarian, and part of the cleaning detail for the after battery room. Pearce had kept Charlie alive and nursed him back to health after he’d caught a jungle fever on Saipan.

  His stitching done, Pearce cleaned a few of Kendrick’s minor wounds with merthiolate, covered them with sterile dressings, and began putting away his instruments. “He’ll be all right, but he’ll be on the sick list for the duration.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” Charlie said.

  “Don’t mention it, Captain.”

  As the pharmacist’s mate took his leave, Morrison gazed at Charlie. “It was a shell from the minelayer. Went off right in front of us. A geyser of water shot up. Metal pinged everywhere. I’m amazed only one of us got hit.”

  “Morrison.”

  The man’s eyes focused. “Captain?”

  “You did good. You did right by the Sandtiger.”

  The torpedo officer shivered, no doubt thinking how close he’d come to getting hit, how lucky he was to have avoided it. “Thank you, sir.” He let out a bark of laughter. “Careful what you wish for, right?”

  Charlie looked down at the wounded sailor, who had fallen asleep due to the morphine. If Kendrick had died, it would have been on him as captain for ordering the attack. Dodging responsibility for a man’s death was a different kind of close call. He knew, if one of his men died in combat, it’d chew him up inside. In calling him a navel gazer, Braddock had him pegged, but maybe he was right about another thing, that this made a good commander.

  He thought of the Robert E. Lee quote Rusty had told him. How could a good commander order the death of what he loved?

  Because he put duty first? Maybe it was because he believed his attack would kill the enemy, not his own men. Maybe because he had no other choice.

  Or maybe it was because, if some men died, the rest would live and go home.

  Charlie remembered how Rusty had told him on the S-55 that young men had a death wish. Not a real wish to die but a willingness, almost a craving, to face death and survive it. At the time, he’d questioned whether he would be willing to order the death of the thing he loved the most, which was his own life.

  To kill the enemy? No.

  To make sure his comrades lived? Absolutely. Just as Smokey had.

  In any case, he didn’t have to think too hard about it right now. The Sandtiger had received new orders, and they didn’t involve shooting torpedoes.

  “We received a new operation order,” he told Morrison.

  The torpedo officer perked up, which made Charlie smile. He’d had the same reaction when Rusty told him about the new order radioed from Pearl. He’d thought, this
was it; there was a big mission related to the invasion, and the Sandtiger would play a special role. The boat, like her crew, had her own destiny.

  “We’re on lifeguard duty,” he explained.

  “Oh,” Morrison said, crestfallen.

  No sooner had the submarine officer survived action in which he’d been inches away from being killed or wounded, he wanted to be right back in the thick of it.

  Charlie knew exactly how he felt.

  Among the submarines, lifeguard duty was important but not particularly desired. It involved a boat being on station during airstrikes and rescuing downed aviators from the sea.

  “We’re bombing the Philippines then, sir?”

  “On the other side of Guiuan Peninsula is Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet,” Charlie said. “We aren’t just bombing the Philippines. We’re invading it.”

  Morrison perked up again. Though lifeguard duty wasn’t exciting, this particular mission guaranteed a front row seat to a major invasion—and a turning point in the war.

  Charlie added, “Third Fleet, meanwhile, is roaming north of us, guarding Seventh’s flank and looking for the Japanese.”

  “I’d rather be with them.”

  He snorted. “Me too.”

  At least he’d gotten some action on this patrol, which now threatened to come to a tame finish. Whether pulling lifeguard duty or acting as a picket for a mobile fleet, neither promised much action for a submarine. The boats worked best when they worked alone, in open space, with the element of surprise.

  Braddock stomped into the small room. Already cramped, it barely fit the big machinist. “How’s he doing?”

  “Doc says nothing more than a scar to remember it by,” Charlie told him. “Sick list for the rest of the patrol.”

  “I told Doc to put him in my bunk. I’d like him to stay here until he’s good to return to the crew’s quarters. I’ll hot bunk until then. That all right with you, sir.”

  That last part a statement, not a question. Braddock was now a mama bear to the enlisted men of the Sandtiger, still a misanthrope to everybody else.

  “That’ll be fine, Chief.”

  In the crew’s mess, the sailors were cheering.

  “What’s going on?” Morrison said.

  Braddock grinned and said, “Beer, sir.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  LIFEGUARDS

  At dawn, the Sandtiger cruised in San Pablo Bay, near Tacloban City on the island of Leyte, in a patch of water designated as a ditching station for aviators. Big American flags lay tied to her decks next to the conning tower, clearly designating her as friendly. She was part of Seventh Fleet now, which lay stacked behind her for miles.

  Cruisers, dozens of destroyers, both American and Australian, an incredible display of military might. The battleships Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, California, and Pennsylvania, salvaged after the brutal assault on Pearl Harbor three years ago. Light carriers launching planes. And behind them, more than 400 amphibious craft carrying four divisions of the U.S. Sixth Army.

  General Douglas MacArthur had promised the people of the Philippines he’d return, and he seemed intent on keeping his word.

  From the Sandtiger’s bridge, Charlie and Rusty scanned the shoreline with binoculars. Rollers broke against yellow beaches backed by green jungle. A strange thing, cruising on the surface during the day in sight of a Japanese stronghold.

  A wave of fifty American planes roared overhead. P-51 Mustangs, F6F Hellcats, and other fighters and dive bombers. They swept over the gulf’s pale blue waters, following the rollers.

  “It’s begun,” Charlie said.

  Within hours, thousands of GIs would storm the beaches.

  “Ironic, isn’t it, Skipper,” Rusty said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Playing lifeguard for the guys who bombed our boat and tried to kill us.”

  Charlie was still chafing at the new order attaching him to Admiral Kincaid. “Don’t forget they strafed us in the Battle of the Philippine Sea too.”

  “War may be hell, but sometimes it’s funny,” Rusty said. “Funny in a ‘haha, you dodged a bullet right onto a landmine’ kind of way.”

  Charlie smiled, drinking in the briny scent of the bay, the engines pulsing, the palm trees crowding the shoreline. “Remember this. Just take a moment to let it all sink in.”

  “Skipper?”

  “This is a big moment. This operation might end the war.” And was far bigger than his ambition to sink another ship or two before his patrol ended. “When we take the Philippines back, we’ll cut off the Japs from the rest of their empire. They’ll surrender, if they know what’s good for them.”

  Rusty snorted. “They don’t.”

  The planes reached for land. The coastal treeline stood still in dawn’s pale light. If the Japanese were there, they were hiding. The heaviest formation raced toward Tacloban airfield, which lay along the Cataisan Peninsula.

  Then sparks erupted from the earth, tracer rounds from AA guns streaking toward the American planes. Charlie raised his binoculars again for a better look. Puffs of black smoke erupted in the sky. The formation dissolved as individual planes broke off to dive toward ground targets.

  A cluster of Japanese Zeros rose from the airfield to challenge the invaders. Charlie watched them dance with his heart in his throat, wincing as planes flamed out of the blue. From here, he couldn’t tell which planes were American.

  “We’re in it now,” Rusty told the lookouts. “Keep a sharp eye.”

  Charlie’s AA gun crews aimed the big guns at the sky. While the carrier planes were supposed to protect the Sandtiger, he wasn’t taking any chances with a Zero breaking through and making a run at him.

  Their ordnance spent, the American planes streamed back to their carriers as a fresh wave howled over the island.

  Then the battleships opened fire with their fourteen-inch guns.

  “Yeah,” Rusty grinned. “This is it.”

  The force of the great thudding blasts echoed through the Sandtiger’s hull. The massive shells sounded like freight trains pounding overhead, which Charlie remembered all too well from his adventures on Saipan.

  This time, the awesome firepower was going the other way, and he couldn’t help but smile too. “I asked Morrison what he thought of his first war patrol.”

  “What did he say?” Rusty said.

  “He said it was like a movie, but he was in it.”

  The exec laughed. “You want to know what it feels like to me?”

  “What?”

  “Winning.”

  The shells struck the island, one earthshaking rumble after another that hurled vast hills of dirt and splintered trees high into the air. Columns of smoke poured into the sky from the airfield and other points across the island.

  Charlie leaned on the coaming. “Did you ever think we’d end up here?”

  “After Cavite, I can’t believe I’m here at all. I honestly didn’t think we’d survive that first year, much less end up giving the Japs hell.”

  When the war started, Rusty had been serving on the S-55, stationed as part of the Asiatic Fleet at Cavite Navy Yard, the Philippines. Three days after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese bombed the base and flattened it. In the war’s first year, America barely held on in the Pacific, and the submarines had been largely ineffective at stopping the Japanese juggernaut.

  “We’ve had a hell of a ride,” Charlie said.

  “We’re winning, but it isn’t over yet. It’s bad luck to talk like we’re all going home. It isn’t over by a long shot. The Japs just won’t quit.”

  Maybe he was right. The United States wouldn’t quit until they’d gained Japan’s unconditional surrender. The Japanese leadership would never agree to that unless they felt they had no choice. Until then, many more sailors and soldiers on both sides would lose life and limb because the Japanese would fight to impose a high enough cost that the Americans would negotiate for peace.

  Rusty added, “I h
ave a bad feeling we’ll be fighting them on their home islands soon enough. And I’ll be glad I’m not a GI.”

  During Charlie’s patrol in the Sea of Japan, Lt. Tanaka had told him the Japanese would never surrender, that they’d fight to the last man for their emperor. If that were true, the bloodbath was still only getting started, a depressing thought. He hated the idea this might go on for another three years.

  “Plane, near, approaching!” one of the lookouts said.

  Charlie focused on a plane that was trailing smoke. “Ours or theirs?”

  “Ours, I think,” Rusty answered. “He shoots at us, so help me, I’ll yank him out of the water myself and knock him flat on his can.”

  The plane was a Wildcat, flying half blind because of the black smoke pouring from its engine, its wings riddled with holes from a flak burst. The engine coughed. Without power, the propeller windmilled.

  The plane glided into the bay and slammed into the water. The pilot struggled to exit the shattered canopy. The hot engine sizzled in a cloud of steam.

  “All ahead emergency!” Charlie ordered.

  The helmsman rang up flank speed on both annunciators. The overloaded engines howled and spewed black smoke from the vents. The submarine gained speed, closing on the wreck. The pilot stood on the plane, pulled the toggles to inflate his Mae West with carbon dioxide, and waved.

  The Wildcat pitched forward and started to go under nose first, tail hook in the air. It sank like a rock, leaving the pilot floundering in the water.

  Charlie conned the boat near the fighter pilot and ordered all stop on the engines. The Sandtiger coasted alongside him. The man was too waterlogged and exhausted to climb the steps on the side of the boat. Two sailors dropped into the water to help him onto the boat and up to the bridge.

  The pilot sketched a salute and said, “Second Lieutenant George Jackson, Air Squadron VC-4 assigned to CVE-66, the White Plains. Am I glad to see you!”

  “Welcome aboard the Sandtiger,” Charlie said. “I’m Lt. Commander Charlie Harrison, and this is Rusty, our exec. He’ll take you below and get you set up with some brandy and hot coffee.”