Seven-Tenths (15 page)

Many must have had the fantasy of the sea vanishing and leaving its bed open to inspection, though the imaginative leap may be accompanied by uneasiness about the sea’s sudden return, catching the fantasist out in the middle, bent over something of interest. (The ominously rising breeze, the horrid realisation that the low strip of dark cloud on the horizon is actually an onrushing wall of water hundreds of feet high.) Treasure hunters, especially, must all have entertained the fancy of strolling offshore among the wrecks and hulks drying in the sunshine, scattered as far as the eye can reach. The image is likely to be sanitised, based on pictures of stranded fishing boats canted over in the deserts of Kazakhstan where the retreating waters of the ruined Aral Sea have left them. The reality would be one of draped and stenching putrefaction.

Wrecks have a particular fascination because they act as foci for so many preoccupations: death, loss, things being hidden and disappearing, things being discovered and reappearing, hoards of wealth. Irony is added in that wrecks and their contents are frequently quite close to their searchers. They may be no more than a few hundred feet away but the marine universe into which they have passed makes them as inaccessible as if they were miles distant or on the Moon. If one were to classify them, wrecks would conveniently fit into four categories: tombs, time capsules, gold mines and time bombs.

On Pier 40 of Honolulu Port, from which the
Farnella
sailed, stood a huge warehouse, practically empty. I learned from the security guard that until recently it had been used as a dump for impounded contraband and, indeed, below the wharf on the side opposite the ship were moored various oceangoing yachts and catamarans, all of
which had belonged to drug runners now behind bars. Their craft were waiting to be auctioned off by US Customs. Before that, the warehouse had contained one of the largest collections of aluminium coffins in the world.

Honolulu, and especially Waikiki, strikes many visitors as moronic in its empty-headedness. It is exactly the sort of place disgraced dictators would choose to go into exile, live in a tropical wedding cake of a villa and die protesting their innocence, all of which ex-President Marcos did. But the island of Oahu has long had a grimmer aspect, one which runs reassuringly beneath the sun-and-surf package tourism. Only a few miles along the coast from Waikiki is Pearl Harbor, while the air base of Wheeler Field at the island’s centre has been associated with death ever since World War II. For nearly forty years it was the stopover for American KIAs from the Philippines, the Marshalls and Solomons, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Those killed in action in every Pacific and South-East Asian theatre of war passed through Oahu, and it was here that bodies returned by the Vietnamese government came for identification. Hence the coffins. The bulk of them are now stored elsewhere; but 100 yards away from the warehouse, on the far side of rows of dusty new Japanese cars awaiting Customs clearance, was a barbed-wire compound and in this were still a few stacks of the silver boxes, slightly corroded from the salt air and with tufts of weeds growing round the bottom.

It is a positive relief for the visitor to Honolulu to be reminded of war, of anything serious and historic to set against a local culture which is so aggressively frivolous. The dignity of the USS
Arizona
Memorial at Pearl Harbor is a profound contrast. The
Arizona
, which had served with the Atlantic Fleet towards the end of World War I, was one of eight battleships sunk or damaged in the surprise Japanese air attack on 7 December, 1941. When the attack began a few minutes before eight on a Sunday morning the
Arizona
had aboard 1,447 of her full complement of officers and men. When she sank, 1,177 had died on the ship, including the division commander and the ship’s captain. Some 800 are still there. It was decided to turn her into a National War Grave together with a second battleship, the
USS
Utah
, which lies half submerged on the other side of Ford Island from the
Arizona
and still has fifty-eight bodies on board.

The memorial attracts something like 1.5 million visitors a year. What might have degenerated into just another attraction is remarkably sombre. The effect is achieved by an organisation which suggests that visitors have temporarily passed out of the indulgent cajolery of civilian guided tours and into the gaze of military discipline. One is ushered into a cinema by a trooper who introduces a short film with some background information about what was happening in the world in 1941. The film then shows the attack itself, grainy, jumpy, tilting pictures of hectic black-and-white action intercut with modern underwater footage of the ship as she is now: rusty chains and barnacled capstans. At the end, suitably subdued, the group is led out through another door straight on to a wharf and aboard a launch which heads out towards the
Arizona
’s resting place. In this way no ordinary visitor can see the ship without first entering its solemn context.

From a distance one sees the white, perforated memorial building, half bridge and half observation platform, which spans the sunken ship. The guide emphasises that at no point does this building touch the
Arizona
. (It was clear from the underwater footage that the ship may only be looked at, never touched. No gloved diver’s hand had reached out to wipe away rust from a hatchway or algae from a porthole.) If anything, this launch trip intensifies the solemnity, not least because the tourist’s prerogative of continuous smoking and eating and drinking is forbidden. Once at the memorial the group wanders reflectively around, not talking very much. The older they are, the quieter. There are the ship’s bell and a marble wall inscribed with all the names of the dead (as always, men may be sent carelessly to their deaths in wartime but their names are meticulously recorded); yet it is the sunken ship herself which commands attention. The memorial straddles the hulk and on both sides the ship tapers away, its ends marked by distant orange buoys. A few chunks of corroded steel poke up above the surface, notably a great circular drum, the barbette of a gun turret. Otherwise, the
Arizona
remains shadowy, bluish, submerged. Schools of damsel fish nose
around the coral growths which have taken hold on her decks, looking for plankton. They are familiar black-and-yellow-striped sergeant majors, though I thought I saw another variety as well,
Abudefduf
. The flitting of these creatures between the observers’ eyes and the object of their reflection did not have the same effect as of pigeons circling a cenotaph. They were not tokens of a natural world blithely indifferent to human pieties, but drew attention to the medium into which the victims had passed. The skeletons, the events of 1941 and the fish now inhabited the same world, no part of which had been retrieved for the redemption of daylight and the upper air. We who stood looking down through the fish arranged ourselves in the relaxed, slightly unfocused attitudes of those who musingly watch golden carp in a pond – a quite different posture from the stiff upward gaze of someone confronting a monument.

And herein lies the USS
Arizona
’s unique effect. We are accustomed to look downwards at gravestones but never downwards at public monuments. This sunken battleship is probably the only example of a monument which is viewed from above. The bowed head is at once a gesture of private grief, public respect and national mourning.

On the journey back in the launch our escort told us that the slight oil slick we might notice came from the two or so gallons of fuel oil which still leak daily from the
Arizona
. Legend has it that it will stop seeping on the day the last survivor from the ship is buried. ‘I guess the ship is weeping,’ said a fellow traveller on the bench next to me. He was a man in his fifties with a moustache, who told me he had come because he had been a boy at the time of Pearl Harbor and remembered it partly for the emotion and partly because no one at home in Connecticut had known where it was. He had not expected to be so moved, he said, but he retained a sound middle-aged asperity, remarking on the irony of our guide’s homeward commentary being full of platitudes about peace, friendship and the lessons of war when only the previous day the UN Security Council had passed a resolution which President Bush was interpreting as giving him leave to go to war in the Persian Gulf.
*

Back on land I visited the nearby submarine museum. Dotted around outside on concrete plinths and pedestals was a display of missiles, all of which looked oddly small and rudimentary. There were very few visitors and the place had a pleasantly mournful air. There was also a large black ‘Kaiten’-class Japanese one-man suicide torpedo. Apparently this was never a successful weapon, proving temperamental and difficult to control. Essentially a huge bomb with a little seat in it, it sat on its cement bed and bled rust from rivet heads. A notice said that one successful ‘Kaiten’ pilot had gone to his death wearing a white bandanna and with the urn containing the ashes of his friend killed in training jammed into the cockpit with him.

The centrepiece of this display was still afloat: a submarine moored to the quay, USS
Bowfin
. She last sailed in training in the early 1970s and the interior looked as though it had been kept polished by use as much as for exhibition. She had survived the last war with a distinguished record of ‘kills’. From inside, even moored submarines give a powerful impression of being on the seabed, an effect only partly to do with the way daylight is rationed by a tiny hatch or two. It is one thing to go down into the depths in a bathysphere of one’s own free will, like William Beebe, but surely quite another to go into combat in that blind tube crammed with men and machinery. There was in the
Bowfin
an air of menace greater than could be explained merely by the ever-present pressure of the sea beyond the curving steel sides. Other men’s fear as well as extremes of discomfort, perhaps. In the engine room with the four huge diesels going for surface running it must have been hot even with the hatches open. When the submarine dived the engines were stopped and she went down under electrical power. In the already hot, confined space the four diesels went on giving up their heat. The engineers were naked but for shorts. Dehydration was a serious problem; men passed out.

The
Bowfin
produced a quite different effect from that of the
Arizona
. Although both ships had been in combat some half a century ago, the
Arizona
had felt as if she belonged even further back, to another epoch. In the museum were old photos of cocky
Bowfin
ratings lolling and smoking in port, draped around the very machine-gun up on deck against which I had just been leaning. Young in their 1940s hairstyles, they had none of the remoteness attending the marble names fixed above several tons of bones out in the harbour. For the real subject of Pearl Harbor is time, no matter how well it has been displaced on to trenchant exhibits. This at once became clear in the matter of gunsights. It was possible not only on
Bowfin
but also in the shore display to look through various gunsights, ranging devices, binoculars, periscopes and so on. Unlike much else these had not been maintained in working order. Since being given over to the public their focusing and other adjustments had become frozen or disconnected. At most there was a speckly view in one eye. Looking through a periscope towards the distant
Arizona
Memorial across the harbour I half expected to see a grainy, black-and-white clip from the film we had just been shown, as in the M. R. James ghost story about the pair of binoculars through which one could see only violent and desolating scenes from the past.
*
Indeed, I would swear I saw no colour through any of those eyepieces.

So the
Arizona
lies out there for all foreseeable time on the far side of a strip of water which is really too thin as insulation. Crossed as it is by a precise succession of launches bearing (among others) parties of faintly triumphant Japanese pretending to be from Taiwan, it scarcely cordons off the present. It all feels far too close, that nearby coastal strip, the freeways, used-car lots, dune buggies and ‘All the Ribs You Can Eat for $5’ joints. That, roaring by in its oblivion, does not feel like a ransomed world but one which has no use for the past in any other form than in national shrines.

It was at Pearl Harbor I first appreciated how, once it swallowed something, the sea washes it over less with water than with time, so whatever it engulfs becomes ancient almost immediately. It has something to do with being shut off from the continuity of vision, but in a way which is more powerful than mere burial on land. It felt
as though the 800 skeletons contained by the still-leaking hulk of the
Arizona
had been borne back and out of history until they and the
Titanic
’s victims and those of the
Mary Rose
or any Phoenician galley were coeval.

With its polished metal and ruthlessly closing watertight doors, the
Bowfin
pulled me back to an event in childhood. When I was between eight and ten years old there was a terrifying disaster involving a submarine. That is, what I remember is my own version in which I imagined what it was like to be a sailor trapped on the seabed in a metal coffin, eyes raised in silence to the curved ceiling in hourly expectation of the first sounds of rescue. I could not remember the submarine’s name, where it went down, or even the year.

What I am sure I recalled were the solemn tones of the BBC’s news bulletins: the grave, Home Service accents coming through the varnished wooden slats of our old EkCo wireless. Why the submarine had failed to surface was unclear. It was one of ‘ours’, in home waters, lying on the bottom intact but unable to come up and breathe. Memory has stretched the whole affair over many days, during which I invented everything we were not told. I had the impression of maybe 100 ratings being informed by a level-voiced captain that if everyone kept as still as possible, breathing as slowly and shallowly as they could while all unnecessary heating and power were turned off, the oxygen could be eked out for maybe four or five days, even a week. Certainly long enough for rescue to arrive. Were not their comrades in the Royal Navy (up there in the sunlight) the most intrepid in the world? With the most advanced rescue techniques? Sit tight, the captain said; help is on its way. And – yes – pray, of course. More things are wrought by prayer / Than this world dreams of. …