War and Remembrance (54 page)

“How long does it take our pilots to man their planes?”

Browning glanced at the operations officer, who said with a touch of pride, “On this ship, Admiral, two minutes.”

“Why not leave them in their ready rooms for now? They’ll be in those cockpits a long time today.”

Spruance walked out on the sunlit platform, and Browning testily broadcast the recall.

The flag shelter was a small area, cramped by the chart table and a couple of settees. A rack of confidential publications, a coffee maker, microphones, telephones, and radio speakers made up the equipment. One
speaker, tuned to the frequency of the Midway patrol planes, was emitting a power hum and loud popping static. About half an hour after sunrise this speaker burst out in gargling tones,
“Enemy carriers. Flight
5S
reports.
“

“Kay, that’s IT!” Browning again snatched the microphone. Spruance came inside. The three officers stared at the humming and popping receiver. Browning exploded, pounding the chart table with his fist, “Well?
Well,
you stupid son of a bitch?
What’s the longitude and latitude?”
He glanced in angry embarrassment at Spruance. “Christ! I assumed the squirt would give us the location in his next breath. What kind of imbeciles are flying those Catalinas?”

“Their combat air patrol may have attacked him,” said Spruance.

“Admiral, we’ve
got
the yellow bastards sighted now. Let’s get the pilots to their planes.”

“But if the enemy’s out of range we’ll have to close him, won’t we? Maybe for an hour or more.”

With a miserable grimace, as Spruance went out in the sunshine, Browning slammed the microphone into its bracket.

A dragging interval ensued; then the same voice, much clearer, broke through the random popping:
“Many enemy planes bearing 320 distance 150.
Flight 58 reports. ”

Again, humming silence.

More violently, the chief of staff cursed the PBY pilot for giving no position. He poured coffee, let it stand and cool; smoked, paced, studied the chart, paced some more, turned the pages of an old magazine and hurled it into a corner, while his operations officer, a burly quiet aviator, kept measuring with dividers and ruler on his chart. Spruance lounged outside, elbows on the bulwark.

“Flight Q2 reports.” It was a younger, more excited voice barking out of the speaker.
“Two carriers and battleships bearing 320 from Midway, distance 180, course
135,
speed 2$ Dog Love.
“

“AH! God love
that
lad!” Browning plunged for the chart, where the operations officer was hastily marking the position.

Spruance came inside, took a rolled-up maneuvering board graph he had tucked in a wall rack, and spread it beside him on a settee. “What was that position again? And what is our present position?”

Rapidly measuring, scrawling calculations, barking questions into the intercom to flag plot several decks below, Browning soon rattled off the latitudes and longitudes to Spruance.

“Is the message authenticated?” Spruance asked.

“Authenticated, authenticated? Well,
is
it?” Browning snapped. The operations officer threw open a loose-leaf book while Spruance was spanning distances on his small graph with thumb and forefinger. “
’The farmer in the
dell,’
“ the operations officer quoted, “
’any two alternate letters.’
The pilot gave us
Dog Love.
That works.”

“It’s authenticated, Admiral,” Browning said over his shoulder.

“Launch the attack,” said Spruance.

Startled, Browning jerked his head around from the chart to look at Spruance. “Sir, we’ve received no orders from Admiral Fletcher.”

“We will. Let’s go.”

At the chart, the air operations officer lifted a worried face. “Admiral, I make the distance to the target one eighty. At that range our torpedo planes won’t get back. I recommend we close at least to one fifty.”

“You’re quite right. I thought we were about there now.” The admiral turned to Browning. “Let’s put out a new fleet course, Captain Browning, closing them at full speed. Tell the
Hornet
we’ll launch at a hundred and fifty miles.”

A sailor in dungarees, life jacket, and helmet came thumping up the long ladder with a message board. Spruance initialled it and passed it to Browning. “Here are the orders from Fletcher.”

URGENT. COM TF 17 TO COM TF 16. PROCEED SOUTHWEST AND ATTACK ENEMY CARRIERS WHEN DEFINITELY LOCATED. WILL FOLLOW AS SOON AS MY SEARCH PLANES RECOVERED.

Miles Browning was a fighting man, everybody acknowledged that, and he had been waiting most of his professional life to see such a dispatch. His ill humor vanished. A beguiling masculine grin lit his lean weathered face (he was a well-known ladykiller, too) and he squared his cap and saluted Raymond Spruance. “Well, Admiral, here we go.”

Spruance returned the salute and went out in the sun.

In the ready rooms, when the carrier sighting printed out on the teletypes, the nervous irritation of the pilots cleared away. False alarm forgotten, they cheered, then fell to plotting and calculating. Guesses fired back and forth about probable time of launch. The range of the torpedo planes was of course the problem. Their chances of survival were reckoned poor at best, and the torpedo pilots deserved a decent chance to get back.

Visiting the ready room of Torpedo Squadron Six to kill the slow-grinding time, Warren found his friend Commander Lindsey in flying suit and life vest, his bandages gone, blood-caked scars on his hand and on his pale sunken face. This was the man whose plane had crashed on the first day out. “Ye gods, Gene, did Doc Holiwell shake you loose?”

Commander Lindsey said, unsmiling, “I’ve trained for this, Warren. I’m leading the squadron in.”

The torpedo squadron room was unusually quiet. Some aviators were
writing letters; some doodled on their flight charts; most of them smoked. Like the dive-bomber pilots they had stopped drinking coffee, to avoid bladder discomfort on the long flight. The effect here was one of taut waiting, as outside an operating room during surgery. At the blackboard a sailor wearing earphones was chalking new numbers beside
RANGE TO TARGET:
153 miles.

Lindsey said to Warren, glancing at his own plotting board, “That checks. We’re closing fast. I figure we’ll close to a hundred thirty miles. So we’ll be launching about an hour from now. This is for keeps, and we’ve got to get the jump on the little bastards, so even if we strain a bit —”

“Pilots, man your planes.”

Glancing at each other and at the pallid squadron commander, the pilots of Torpron Six got out of their chairs. Their movements were heavy, not eager, but they moved. So alike were the expressions of grave hard resolve on their faces, they might have been nineteen brothers. Warren threw an arm around Lindsey’s shoulder. His old instructor slightly winced.

“Happy landings, Gene. Give ‘em hell.”

“Good hunting, Warren.”

The fliers of Scouting Six were trampling by in the passageway, shouting high-strung banter. Warren fell in with them. As the squadron ran out on the gusty sunny flight deck, a sight met his eye that always thrilled him: the whole task force turning into the wind, the
Enterprise,
the
Hornet,
the far-flung ring of cruisers and destroyers, all moving in parallel; and old Dad’s
Northampton
right up there, swinging from the port beam to a station almost dead ahead in dazzling sun glare. With farewell shouts and waves the pilots climbed into their planes. Cornett nodded at Warren from the rear seat, placidly chewing tobacco in long bony jaws, his red hair flying in the wind.

“Well, Cornett, here we go to get ourselves a Jap carrier. You ready?”

“Stew lot yew dang sartin cummin,” Cornett approximately replied, then broke into clear English to add, “The canopy is freed up.”

Thirty-five dive-bombers were spotted on the flight deck, their motors coughing, roaring, and spitting dense blue fumes. Warren’s plane, among those farthest aft, carried a thousand-pound bomb; as flight operations officer he had made sure of that. The take-off run for some of the others was too short, and their load was a five-hundred-pound bomb, with two more hundred-pounders. Warren’s launch was heavy and lumbering. The SBD-3 ran off the end of the deck, settled much too close to the water, then began a wobbling climb. The rush of warm sea air into the open cockpit was soul-satisfying. A professional calm settled on Warren as he wound up the wheels and flaps, checked his dancing dial needles, and climbed skyward in a string of soaring blue bombers. The
Hornet
dive-bombers too were single-filing into the air in steep ascent about a mile away. Far above some shreds of high cloud, the gleaming specks of the combat air patrol circled.

At two thousand feet, as the squadron levelled and circled, Warren’s exaltation dimmed. He could see, on the shrunken
Enterprise
far below, that the launch was lagging. In their square deck wells the elevators sank and rose, tiny men and machines dragged aircraft about, but the time crawled past seven thirty, seven forty-five. Soon almost an hour of gasoline was gone, and still no fighter escorts or torpedo planes were airborne! And still the two carriers plowed southeast into the wind, away from the atoll and the enemy, slaves to the wind in launch or recovery, no less than sailing ships of old.

A signal light flashed on the
Enterprise,
beaming straight up. Letter by letter, Warren read the message, addressed to the new group leader, Commander McClusky:
Proceed on assigned mission.

A second shocker, after the very long-range launch — suddenly, no coordinated attack! What was going on? No fighter protection, no torpedo planes for the knockout punch: the
Enterprise
dive-bombers ordered to go in alone against the Jap interceptors! Rear Admiral Spruance was jettisoning — or allowing Halsey’s staff to jettison — the whole battle plan at the outset, with the drills of a year, the fleet exercises of many years, and the entire manual of carrier warfare.

Why?

A barometer in Warren’s spirit registered a quick sharp rise in the danger of this mission, and in the chances of his dying. He could not be sure what “those idiots down there” had in mind. But he suspected that between the inexperienced Spruance and the overeager Browning — who was something of a joke among the veteran pilots — the thirty-six
Enterprise
dive-bombers were being squandered in a jittery shot from the hip.

Warren Henry knew too much military history for a young flier. To him all this strongly smelled of the Battle of Balaclava:

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die —

Resignedly, he made hand signals to his wing mates. From planes roaring along a few yards below and behind him, they grinned and waved. They were both new ensigns; one was Pete Goff, clutching a cold corncob pipe in his mouth. McClusky waggled his wings and swooped around to the southwest. Warren did not know McClusky except to say hello. He had been the squadron CO of the fighters, but there was no telling how he would perform as group leader. The other thirty-five planes gracefully veered to follow McClusky. Making his turn over the screen, Warren saw from his tilted cockpit the tiny
Northampton
straight below, cutting a long white wake ahead of the
Enterprise.
“Well, old Dad,” he thought, “there you are, sitting way down there, and here I go.”

On the bridge of the
Northampton,
Pug Henry stood among crowding officers and sailors in gray helmets and life jackets. He had been watching
the
Enterprise
since dawn. As the departing bombers dwindled to dots, he stared after them through binoculars. Everybody who served on the cruiser’s bridge knew the reason.

The wind was smartly flapping the signal flags. Below, noisy swells were breaking on the hull like surf. Pug raised his voice to the exec at his elbow, “Secure from
GQ,
Commander Grigg. Maintain condition Zed. AA crews stand easy at their guns. Float plane pilots stand by the catapults ready to go. Double the regular lookouts for aircraft and submarines. All hands be alert for air attack. Where men remain on battle stations, serve out coffee and sandwiches.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

In a different tone Pug went on, “Say, incidentally, those SBDs won’t be breaking radio silence till they’re over the target. We’ve got the right crystals for the aircraft frequency, haven’t we?”

“Chief Connors says that we do, Captain.”

“Okay. If you hear anything, call me.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

In the sea cabin, Victor Henry slung helmet and life jacket on the bunk. His eyes smarted. His legs were leaden. He had not slept all night. Why were those dive-bombers flying off unescorted to face a cloud of Jap interceptors? His own prize lookout, Tray nor, a sharp-eyed Negro youngster from Chicago, had spotted a Japanese float plane slipping in and out of low clouds. Was that the reason? Pug did not know what orders had gone out to the squadrons of the
Yorktown
and the
Hornet;
he could only hope the whole battle picture made more sense than he could yet discern. The game was on, that was sure.

From the old triple photograph frame on the chart table, between Madeline and Byron, Warren looked out at him sternly in the Academy graduation picture: a skinny solemn ensign in a big white officer’s cap. Well, thought Pug, a damned good lieutenant was flying off against the Japs, with fitness reports that were a string of “outstandings,” and a solid combat record. His next job would be as a Stateside flight instructor, no doubt. The air cadet programs were clamoring for combat veterans. Then he would rotate back to an air group in the Pacific, to gain command experience and reap medals. His future was radiant, and this day was the needle’s eye of his destiny. Hardening himself to endure the wait for a break in radio silence, Pug took up a detective novel, reclined on his bunk, and numbly tried to read.