Rage of Battle

and none of the crew could see how long it had been flowing in, it wasn’t viewed by the captain as a major problem as the pumps were easily handling it. However, because of the warm, dry air being continuously circulated throughout the dry bulk cargo tanks and other storage areas to keep dry everything from electronics and ammunition to yeast, a massive oven effect had been created, part of the fissure in the hull having penetrated the starboard walls as well as the bottom of tanks five and six, containing sugar and yeast.

It was a disaster that any housewife might have predicted but which the New York Port Authority, beset by a multitude of other problems, had, not surprisingly, overlooked. By 4:00 a.m. enough of the huge tanks of damp sugar and yeast had combined in the dry, warm air to create enormous pressures. And by the time the bridge sensed the buckling of the plates under the pressure within the tightly sealed tanks, it was too late; the longitudinal steel stiffeners reinforcing both the inside and outside plates retained their integrity, but the seams were stressed beyond their limit.

Soon, high-pressure pipes burst and there was a low whoomp from down below in the engine room, the needles of the “explosimeters,” or gas-pressure gauges, for tanks five, six — and now tank four, buckling under the abnormally high “back” pressure of tanks five and six — moved into the red. Then, in the pitch darkness, there was a sound like a rocket taking off, but no flame, as one of the Butterworth fuel tank covers whistled high into the night and everything began shuddering, the Nagata listing hard astarboard, its four tank developing a deck blister on the starboard side of the ship.

“She’s about to blow!” the starboard lookout informed the master. “Her weight’s shifting like a beanbag.”

The fuel tank didn’t blow, but its seams gave way, the high octane spewing into the sea. The captain could do little, for like most of the big Combo carriers, which relied on shore-based suction pipes for loading and unloading bulk cargo, the Nagata had derricks only midships and at the forecastle, and these were surrounded by stacked and lashed containers. Helpless to do anything about the mountain of yeast and sugar now growing like some enormous amoeba, or vast cake overspilling its pan, shifting the ship’s center of gravity dangerously, all he could do was try to vent some of the bunker C and more of the octane to compensate for the starboard list.

Twenty minutes later, at 0426, the Nagata’s master gave orders for his crew of thirty to abandon ship and, refusing to break radio silence, alerted the convoy leader by signal lamp, allowing only one repeat of his SOS, and then, opening all cocks, he scuttled his ship rather than run the risk of leaving her afloat as a half-sunken hazard to the other convoys en route to and from Fortress Europe. In obeisance to the ancient and unwritten law of the sea and the traditional precepts of the Japanese code of honor, he remained aboard, after seeing all his men safely off in the Beaufort rafts, and went down with his ship.

The loss in equipment was enormous, for while there were other spare parts for the A-10 Thunderbolts in the convoy, the Nagata had been carrying the lion’s share of A-10 replacements — engines, ammunition, bombs, and electronic “boards.” Enough to have reequipped seventy of the tank-killing Thunderbolts, which, coming in low at four hundred miles an hour, often no more than two hundred feet above the ground and loaded with six and a half tons of bombs with three-second BPSM — best possible safety margin — had proven critical in slowing the Soviet surge through the Fulda Gap.

Although they had managed to take out only two thousand Russian tanks, a third of the Soviet force, the Thunderbolts held a special place in the affections of the half million men in the British Army of the Rhine, the American Fifth, and the German Twelfth. Though the NATO soldiers had been pushed back almost a hundred miles from the prewar NATO/ Soviet line, and though they were fighting for their lives in one of the fiercest combats ever recorded in modern history, they owed what life they had to the bravery of the Thunderbolt pilots and the astonishing maneuverability of an aircraft which, swooping down with its two high-mounted rear engines, could absorb the kind of punishment that would have downed the “supersonics” on the first pass.

The loss of the Nagata was a hard lesson for everyone, from John Brentwood at the New York Port Authority to the naval planners in Norfolk, Virginia. Reams of new instructions regarding the loading of mixed cargo were issued along with an order to all NATO and “associated merchant marine” ships that ship’s masters were not required to die with their ship. Captains, like pilots, were in short supply.

The consequence of this order would be a spread of what, ironically, became known as the “Nagata defense” in courts-martial where it was charged ships could have been saved had the captain and crew remained. It was an argument the counsel for the defense planned to use in the ongoing inquiry into the sinking of the fast guided- missile frigate USS Blaine off Korea. Ray Brentwood, however, refused to consider it, arguing that this defense would require him admitting that he gave the order to abandon ship when in fact he said that, to his recollection, he had not. The defense counsel, once again, had to resume the task of trying to find a witness who would corroborate Ray Brentwood’s stand. It was thought at least six other men, including the OOD who thought he’d been given the order, were on the bridge when the North Korean missile had hit, but three of them had been killed outright, two dying later of burns to 80 percent of their bodies; the remaining sailor and ensign, Mahler, was still fighting for his life in Honolulu’s Veterans’ Hospital, having been judged too ill to be flown on to La Jolla’s Veterans’ burn unit.

Another outcome of the Nagata incident was that despite the heroic efforts of the convoys, the frontline soldiers, though representing only one-tenth of the total force, nine out of ten men required to support one soldier at the front, could no longer be guaranteed the regulation six pounds of food per man per day. And much of the bread the Western armies would be eating from now on would be flat. The loss of the Nagata also meant that the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket would shrink further without the vital resupply for the tank-killing A-10s.

The other lesson from Convoy 24 was a reminder to all NATO commanders that any man guilty of self- inflicted wounds would not only be court-martialed, but his next of kin would forfeit receipt of all military pensions. The rule, of course, was already on the books of NATO’s armies, but it was the most diplomatic way that ACLANT could think of conveying to their Japanese allies that choosing death rather than withdrawal or a surrender was not in the defensive interest of the Allied cause. The more enemy troops that the Allies could tie up with either delaying tactics or surrender, the better.

The difficulty of getting this message across, however, was compounded by the fact that, following a failed counterattack by the German Second Army and the American First against the Soviet’s southern flank ninety miles west of Prague, 321 American and West German prisoners of war had been summarily executed by the Stasi—the supposedly disbanded secret police of what was formerly East Germany, many of its members still working for Moscow.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In the darkness of the drop, all David Brentwood remembered was lining up when the green “go” light came on, the steady shuffle to the Hercules’ rear, the dark incline of the ramp-door disappearing into the vast blackness of the night. The master sergeant smacked him on the shoulder, then the jump. Tearing air so cold, he couldn’t breathe. And coming up toward them, graceful arcs of red and green tracer, crisscrossing with unhurried fluidity. The surrounding darkness was so black that though he knew his five hundred comrades must be all around him, they were invisible for the first thirty seconds.

Then he spotted several figures momentarily silhouetted in flashes of antiaircraft fire, some slumped like small toy soldiers, dead in their harness. The air was rocking violently with AA shells exploding, the acrid smell of the cordite reminding David not so much of war as of the Fourth of July. The fumes of the antiaircraft explosions, together with the pungency of burning rubber tires from several of the airborne’s Humvee trucks, threatened to overcome Brentwood as he neared the ground, his legs flailing the air in panic lest he hit stiff-limbed with his eighty-pound pack before he could take the roll.

Suddenly flares illuminated a field below, the burnt-out hulk of a barn, dead horses strewn about, the dark plum gash of a cow ripped open, its head missing, and off to the left, short, sharp stabs of bluish-white machine- gun fire. The sound of the battle increased to a crescendo at times, then fell off, small-arms fire heard in the pauses between the screams and crash of artillery and heavy 120-millimeter mortars coming in from the outer fringes of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Here the American airborne, instead of having landed within the designated drop