Telling Tales by John Wheatcroft
Over TBS comes a report her sister destroyers, the Hull and the Spence, have also been swallowed, hundreds of unwitting kamikazes aboard. Unfathomable. Piloted by the unmalleable will of Old Ironsides, we blunder through to deal more death.
I imagine the three armor-plated coffins. Inside each is a contortion of bodies, which moments ago were snapping and obeying commands and performing assigned duties. Their resting place is the bottom of the South China Sea. In the ear of my mind I hear the descending voice of Lawrence Tibbett, which I'd listened to as a child when the needle clutched by the hand of the tone arm went spinning through the grooves of a seventy-eight r.p.m. bakelite record on the rosewood victrola in the parlor of my family home:
"Rocked in the cradle
of the
deep."
At this moment I'd give an arm, literally, yes, a leg, to be back there. Because of the wind's roar I don't have to stifle the childish sob I feel rifling up my throat.
#
He was having a bad night of it, very bad. The bed was a ping-pong table and he was being batted from awakenedness to sleep to awakenedness, from present to past to present, from where he was to where he'd been to where he was. Having fallen into a doze at a few minutes past four, after having gone through the South China Sea typhoon, he awoke at a few minutes past six to find himself tapping numbers in Morse code on his thigh: dot dot dot dot dash—four; dot dot dot dot dot—five; dash dot dot dot dot—six ...
When he reached ten he made himself stop tapping, but went on counting, slowly. Carrier planes. One of his duties had been to record the number of aircraft in a strike as, bomb-laden, they were catapulted off the flight deck of one of the carriers their task unit was protecting. Hours later he'd record the number that returned. Then subtract.
Off Luzon, during the retaking of the Philippines, the kamikazes had struck erratically. During the invasion of I wo Jima, where the invading troops desperately needed naval and air support, the suicide attacks accelerated to a steady flow. In mid-March, off Kyushu, Japan's southernmost island, the Franklin, the closest carrier in the task unit formation, her flight deck filled with loaded planes about to take off, was hit. Her bombs, ammunition and fuel exploded into flames that lit up the sky like a Fourth of July fireworks display. To watch with irresistible fascination human torches leaping from the hell of the flight deck into the sea brought tears salted with fear that scalded his cheeks. For eight hours the Franklin committed slow suicide. Next morning she was a smoldering hulk.
Some of the roasted bodies still alive enough to writhe and scream with pain, plucked from the sea by destroyers, were ferried to his ship, hoisted by boom, block and tackle onto the forecastle, then carried below to sick bay for whatever immediate treatment and relief the medical staff could administer. The metal stretchers on which they'd been transported were returned to the forecastle. There powerful hoses were played on their steel mesh to flush off shreds of scorched skin and charred flesh, morsels of beef cleaned from the grille of a hibachi.
During the month-long battle for Okinawa in April '45, kamikazes sank twenty destroyers on the picket line. More than a hundred and fifty other ships were severely damaged.
On the signal bridge a grim joke was going the rounds. He'd heard the format in junior high school.
"Knock, knock."
"Who's there?"
"Chicken."
"Chicken who?"
"Chicken Teriyaki."
"Who the hell is Chicken Teriyaki?"
"The only kamikaze pilot who'll survive this fucking war."
The laughter was hollow. When Blessington relayed the joke to Gallup, Gallup responded by grabbing Blessington by the shirt front, slamming him against a bulkhead, and twisting the chambray cloth so tight that Blessington squealed for help. It took Pettinghill, Mirski, and Catherman to pry Blessington, gasping and red-faced, loose. "It's a joke, for Chrissake," he whimpered as he went slinking off.
One afternoon our antiaircraft batteries, stressed, frightened, edgy, took down two U.S. fighters engaged in a dogfight with some Zekes, probably kamikazes. Neither pilot survived the friendly fire. Two replicas of the Stars and Stripes were not painted on the outside bulkhead of the captain's bridge to join the line of Rising Suns that served to keep score of the enemy we'd killed.
It trickled down the chain of command that, after the first beachhead had been established, it was touch and go on Okinawa. To provide stronger air support, the bomb loads carried by the carriers' TBF's were increased. On one memorable morning one out of every half dozen or so aircraft catapulted from the carrier he was keeping track of failed to get the necessary lift as it left the flight deck and went plunging nose-down into the drink. For hours destroyers circled, searching for those who'd managed to extricate themselves from their harness and wriggle out of the cockpit of their submerged planes. He estimated that less than half were rescued.
With chilled awe he remembered those airmen on the carriers. Knowing whose and how many seats at mess in the wardroom and bunks in their sleeping quarters were empty, they'd watched the plane ahead of them in line take off, nose down, and disappear. Then they'd taxi their own plane into position to be catapulted to potential death by drowning. How could they do it? Were they too not kamikazes, willing to give up their own lives for a chance to kill the enemy? If they were, along with the pilots shot down by their own guns and those burned to death from their own explosives aboard the stricken Franklin and those buried inside the Monaghan, Spence and Hull, was every airman, soldier, marine, and sailor, including him, also a breath of the death-dealing Divine Wind?
But at least our "kamikazes" had a chance, he reminded himself, not for the first time. Only eight or nine hundred men needlessly went down in the typhoon, ironic as "only" and shameful as "needlessly" were. Our guns destroyed many fewer of our own planes than Japanese. Most of our pilots lifted off the flight deck and flew into the blue to deliver their loads of killing fire without being taken down by Japanese antiaircraft batteries or gunners on Japanese planes, their opposite comrades-in-arms. Those who failed to get airborne at least had about a fifty-fifty chance of freeing themselves and being fished from the sea by a searching destroyer.
But the Japanese kamikaze took off knowing he was not to return. He recalled a night when he was stretched out, frightened and weary, expecting general quarters to sound at any second, commanding him to leap out of his bunk, scoot up the ladder from his compartment, race across the forecastle, and climb to the signal bridge. Night after night, to work their nerves and deprive them of sleep when they were already worn down by repeatedly alternating five hours on and off watch, Japanese planes, flying above the range of their antiaircraft fire, would drop tinfoil that showed up on the radar screen as flocks of bogeys. That night, while waiting, he'd tried to imagine himself as a Japanese kamikaze, about to take off on what was certainly his last mission, perhaps his first. "Duty is heavier than a mountain," he still remembered reading somewhere, would be the imperial rescript written on his brain, "while death is light as a feather." He hadn't been able to put himself inside his enemy.
#
A gorgeous morning. On the surface of the water you can track the wake of flying fish for yards. Sea and sky are vying for the purity of ail blues. Clarity of air means unlimited vision to the horizon. Sun is a wafer dipped in red wine. "Red in the morning, sailors take warning." Our carrier planes are off striking Japanese ground installations on Kyushu.
All at once the peace is broken by the popping of ack-acks. Glasses to eyes, I'm scanning the quadrant from zero to ninety degrees starboard. On the way back to zero, I pick up a plane, skimming the water to stay beneath the waves of our radar.
"Zeke approaching at two o'clock," I shout into the mouthpiece of my headset. "Closing fast."
Undeterred by the swarms of twenty and forty-millimeter shells our antiaircraft batteries let fly, the plane keeps coming. It's close enough for me to see its nose, targeted on the signal bridge, on me.
All at once I've been shot headfirst from the mouth of a five-inch gun. Zooming toward the plane, along with a stream of red tracers, I can make out a goggled and helmeted head behind a plexiglass windshield. Suddenly over the racket of the twenties and forties, I hear the blast of five-inch guns. I know I'm on the bridge, paralyzed, but I can't feel the deck beneath my feet, I know I'm screaming "still close..." but I can't hear my voice.
Now there's nothing to see but endless blue and the red sun, nothing to hear but silence.
#
Now as he lay hopelessly awake, sleep-deprived not by dropped Japanese foil but by gin-fueling and history-feeding machinery in his brain he couldn't switch off, he found himself trying again, six decades later, to imagine what would have been his state of mind on the morning just before, had he been the one to take off on a death flight. Quietly, careful not to disturb Alma, whose brain had no such machinery and contained no such pernicious material, he slipped from bed. Fumbling at the night stand, he felt out his glasses and the tablet and pen the inn provided beside the telephone. Then he tiptoed into the bathroom, slowly closed the door to keep it from creaking, turned on the light, and slipped on his glasses. After relieving himself, he sat down on the toilet seat. Making use of his scant, romantically cliched notion of things Japanese, he began writing. The words were waiting to spill out.
"After three days inform my father, gem merchant in Kyoto: 'In the month of the ripening plum he answered the summons of the Rising Sun without sorrow.' To my mother convey this empty urn, enameled with gulls on the wing. Speak no word. Bow three times and retire. Do not search for the girl with oval hands and lustrous eyes.
"Here in moonlight, ahead of dawn, stands the raven-winged plane that will burst into flame. May the birds on the back of the giant eagle it is my duty to destroy be pregnant with eggs that will consume their mothers and the father eagle with them.
"Sometimes when you light the ceremonial tapers and scatter incense before your sons, remember, my friend, how we locked fingers here, last human touch. Not yet twenty, I fly to greet the sun and dive."
"At last," he murmured to himself as he crawled back into bed. Within minutes he fell into sleep.
#
Reveille has sounded over the PA system. Minutes later, in the light of false dawn, I'm standing in ranks on the signal bridge, still groggy with sleep. Ensign Farnham is calling muster in a voice shrill as a bosun's whistle.
"Argersinger... Blessington... Dean... Gallup... Mirski... Pettingill ... Vincenti.. . Webster... Whitlock..."
Hearing my name jars me fully awake. "Ho, sir," I sing out. The top of a fireball, which is either the sun or an aircraft carrier bursting into flames, is just becoming visible on the eastern horizon.
#
He awoke to a sliver of light between the draperies. When he and Alma entered the dining room for breakfast, he immediately looked at her table. Empty. Most likely she was already off to "respect" Laurence Sterne's grave. Sometime he'd have to read Tristram Shandy.
Craving a shot of caffeine to counter sleep deprivation and, he hoped, rally him to contend with the despair that had him by the throat, he pushed down on the plunger of the French press the instant the waitress let go of the handle, poured Alma, then himself a full cup of coffee.
"Have a rough night?" Alma asked, as he took a long swig even though the liquid was burning his tongue. "You should give it a couple of minutes to mix. That'll make it stronger."
"No need to let it stand. That's the mystery of a French press. Brews in an instant. Thoroughly." He swilled more coffee.
"Doesn't seem possible. Think of the time it takes a percolator. Or a drip."
From the nearest tables he could hear what for the English, who had a tendency to mumble and who in the dining room at breakfast would pitch their conversation almost to a whisper, were perfectly audible voices. Certain he knew what was inciting them, he refused to allow his brain to process their words. To hold his own in a skirmish with Alma over the virtues of various methods of brewing coffee was beyond his power. Bruised, shaky, paralyzed, he gave in to silence.
"I suppose Yuko's had early breakfast and already's off to 'respect' the tomb, wherever it is, of that writer whose name I can't seem to remember who wrote a novel I've never heard of. Don't you find me a perfect blend of ignorance and loss of short-term memory?"
The sound of the name "Yuko" gave him a shake. Well-intentioned as Alma was in trying to divert him from himself by making what she believed was small talk, she was asking him to address a subject which, so early in the morning after a dreadful night, he'd prefer not to. Yet he hadn't the heart not to respond.
"That writer's Laurence Sterne. The title of his novel is Tristram Shandy. It's a classic. The name of the village, I think, is Cock's Wold. You know how eccentric English place names seem to us."
"Oh the blessed fortune to be hitched to a star that displays learning like a shower of meteorites. How does that blazing metaphor strike you, Mr. Luminary?" Coming on as though he were a literary historian did make him an inviting target. "What say we drive to Cock's Wold and respect Laurence Sterne's grave? Could be that would seduce me into reading... Tristran Sandy. That's not quite right, is it? Whatever, we might run into Yuko and we could lunch with her in the local pub."
He had no intention of seeming to be following Yuko Miyataka and traipsing through the parish churchyard, searching for the grave of Laurence Sterne. The reason was ... well, the reason had to be akin to why he'd lied when Alma had asked whether he'd noticed the woman sitting alone in the bar without a drink the previous evening.
"To be honest, I've been looking forward to watching the delayed tape of the test match between Australia and Sri Lanka on the telly. If it's on."
#
Alma was ensconced in the window seat, reading the Guardian. He'd vowed not to look at a newspaper for the duration of their A.W.O.L. Unable to get his mind off what he imagined was going on in Iraq, he was slumped in a Chippendale wing chair, only his eye attending to the match on the TV screen. Suddenly his full attention was grabbed by a powerful stroke from a Sri Lankan batsman. The camera was following the flight of the ball toward the boundary. Then it shifted onto the Aussie at long-leg racing toward it. Leaping like a grasshopper, he thrust out his right arm and snatched in his palm what surely would have been a six.
Still stretched out, he crashed onto the green, doubled up, rolled over three times, and lay still. The downed man's teammates raced into the frame and surrounded the player motionless on the grass. In their whites they looked like a team of doctors consulting over a patient. As the camera withdrew, in a long perspective they blurred to a single white shape, a fallen parachute ballooning above the surface of a body of water.
#
General quarters has sounded. I race from my compartment, where I've been folding wash on my sack, up the ladder, out the hatch, across the forecastle, up the ladders to the signal bridge. Sky is an endless prairie of blue, sea a field of deeper blue. Manning a long glass on a swivel, I slip on my headset and commence scanning a quadrant off the starboard beam, air space that's my responsibility. My eye picks up and focuses on a bomber at low altitude.
"Betty four o'clock starboard, elevation 30°, approximate distance a half miles" I shout into the mike hanging around my neck. "Betty closing fast at four o'clock. .." My voice is drowned out even to my own ear by the chattering of two twenty-millimeter antiaircraft guns directly below me. All the forties on the starboard side are also crackling.
Suddenly a puff of black smoke trails from the tail of the Betty. Two parachutes, white handkerchiefs signaling "we surrender," open behind the plane. Letting the doomed aircraft pass out of the lens of my long glass, I focus on the body dangling from one of the parachutes. Guns are still spitting out shells. All of a sudden there is no body, just dangling shreds. The firing doesn't stop as the unmanned chute continues its slow descent. Nor does it end when the ch
Even though he felt vomit about to rifle up his throat, still he couldn't help re-experiencing a giddy elation over the destruction of a plane and its crew whose mission had been to bomb his ship, intending to kill him.
Then he recollected that full recognition of the war crime he'd abetted by discharging his duty hadn't come until a year later. War over, honorably discharged, he was being rewarded for his services by a grateful government with the benefits of the G.I. Bill of Rights. He'd returned to. the university in which he'd been a freshman when, prompted by conscience to fight against the Nazis, not the Japanese, he'd enlisted in the Navy and after a stint in communications school had found himself in the Western Pacific.
For a class in world literature he'd been reading the Iliad. At the desk in his room, light thrown by a gooseneck lamp, he'd come to Homer's account of the behavior and emotions of Achilles during the killing of Hector. Daniel's eye could still see Achilles stripping the armor from his enemy's lifeless body, repeatedly stabbing the corpse with the point of his spear, tying the carcass to the axle of his chariot, then dragging what had been Hector around the walls of Troy for the eyes of the dead man's mother and father to behold.
Etched in Daniel's brain were the words with which Homer had had Achilles reveal to the dying Hector his impulse to revert to cannibalism: "Would that my heart's desire could so bid me to carve and eat your raw flesh." Sitting before a television screen in a room in an inn in Yorkshire fifty-seven years later, he felt again the shudder of horror that had come over him in his dormitory room that night as the connection suddenly had sparked.
#
The Aussie at long-leg who had made the amazing catch was hobbling on one foot, arms around the shoulders of two teammates, toward the pavilion. Shaking his head to bring himself back to here and now, Daniel turned toward Alma, immersed in the Guardian, and stared at her for reassurance—reassurance for what, he couldn't say. Just reassurance. Then while waiting for play to be resumed, he leaned his head back on the top of the chair and shut his eyes. Within seconds he heard a loud cheer. Raising his eyelids, he saw the hand on the right arm of the injured player raise itself from the shoulder of one of his teammates and wave. This heroic gesture increased the cheer to a roar.