Walk in Hell

Dakota. At the time, it was a distinction he could have done without.

“What do we do if we get right in among ’em?” he asked, that being the worst thing he could think of.

“Sink,” Kidde answered, which was very much to the point but not what Carsten wanted to hear. The gunner’s mate added, “Hurt as many of ’em as bad as we can before we go down.”

With nothing better to do, they kept firing as they spun within eight or nine thousand yards of the British line of battle. Smoke enveloped the enemy battleships: some the smoke of damage, more from the big guns the ships carried. Shells from those big guns and from the enemies’ secondary armament rained down on the Dakota.

Sam lost count of how many times the ship was bracketed. Seawater from near misses rained down on her, too, and fragments pattering like deadly hail. And, every so often, she would shake when another shell struck home. Damage-control parties-everyone not serving a gun or the engines-dashed along the corridors, fighting fire and flood.

“Thank God, we’re turning away,” Kidde said, peering out through the vision slit. That meant that, for the time being, his gun didn’t bear on the British fleet. A chance to take it easy, Carsten thought. But then the gunner’s mate let out a hoarse, vile exclamation. “We got more ships bearin’ down on us from the north.” He stared at them, out there in the distance. His voice cracked in anger: “Those aren’t limeys-they’re Japs!”

“I don’t care who they are,” Luke Hoskins said. “We’ll smash ’em up.”

Methodically, as if they were a pair of machines, he and Pete Jonas took turns passing shells to Carsten. “Cap’n” Kidde yelled like a wild man when they started scoring hits on the Japanese. “The limeys, now, they’re good,” he said. “Till the slant-eyed boys messed with us, the only fight they ever picked was with Spain. Hey, I can lick my grandmother easy enough, too, but that don’t mean I’m a tough guy.”

Carsten heard that, but paid it little mind. He was a machine himself, a sweating machine coughing in the fume-laden air but doing his job with unthinking accuracy and perfection. Load, close, wait for the round to go, get rid of the case, load, close…

Shells kept falling around and sometimes on the Dakota. Were they British or Japanese? They didn’t leave calling cards-not calling cards of that sort, anyhow. From not far away, Lieutenant Commander Grady screamed for sand to douse a fire. Nothing exploded, so Sam supposed the fire got doused. The guns in the turrets kept thundering away. So did all the weapons of the secondary armament that would bear on the foe.

“Christ on His cross,” Kidde said, “we’re going around through our own fleet again.”

He was right. Carsten got glimpses of other ships with spouts from near misses splashing up around them and still others aflame. But the U.S. ships were shooting back, too; smoke from the guns, smoke from the fires, and smoke from the stacks all dimmed the bright sunshine of the tropical Pacific. “Are we winning or losing?” Sam asked.

“Damned if I know,” “Cap’n” Kidde answered. “If we live and we make it back to Honolulu, we can find out in the papers.” He barked laughter, then coughed harshly. “And if we don’t live, what the hell difference does it make, anyway?”

Luke Hoskins came up with another good question: “We ever going to get this beast under control again? We’ve done one whole circle, just about, and now…”

With the five-inch gun screened from the enemy by the bulk of the ship, Sam took his place at a vision slit beside Hiram Kidde. He saw they’d come round behind most of the American fleet, and…He grimaced in dismay. “Looks like we’re going to swing toward them again,” he said.

Kidde whistled between his teeth. “It does, don’t it? Well, that means the gun’ll bear again. Get your ass back there, Sam. If they take us out, it ain’t gonna be like we didn’t give ’em something to remember us by.”

“Yeah,” Carsten said, and then, “You know, I wouldn’t mind that much if they remembered some other guys instead.” Pete Jonas handed him a shell. He slammed it into the breech.

Newsboys shouted their papers as Sylvia Enos walked from her apartment building to the trolley stop: “Battle of the Three Navies! Read all about it!” “Extra! USS Dakota in circle of death!” “American fleet crushes the Japs and limeys off Sandwich Islands!”

Sylvia paid her two cents and bought a Boston Globe. She read it on the way to the canning plant. As often seemed true in the war, the headlines screamed of victory while the stories that followed showed the headlines didn’t know what they were talking about.

The U.S. fleet hadn’t crushed those of the two enemy empires, any more than the German High Seas Fleet had crushed the Royal Navy in the North Sea the month before. The papers had shouted hosannas about that, too, till it became obvious that, even after the fight, the bulk of the German Navy couldn’t break out to help the U.S. Atlantic Fleet against the British and the French and the Rebs.

In the Pacific, though, what seemed to be a drawn battle worked for the United States, not against them as it had on the other side of the world. Where the Germans hadn’t been able to break out into the Atlantic, the British and Japanese hadn’t been able to break in toward the Sandwich Islands, which remained firmly in American hands.

Though the Globe hadn’t been the paper whose headlines screeched loudest about the Dakota, its account of the fight did prominently mention the battleship’s double circuit straight into the guns of the opposing fleets. “The valiant vessel sustained twenty-nine hits,” the reporter said, “nine definitely from the enemy’s large-caliber guns, eleven definitely from smaller shells, and nine that might have come from either. Although drawing thirty-six feet of water at the end of the battle, as opposed to thirty-one at the outset, the Dakota and the heroes aboard her also inflicted heavy damage on the ships of the foe and, miraculously, suffered only fourteen killed and seventeen wounded, a tribute to her design, to her metal, and to the mettle of her crew.”

Sylvia left the newspaper on the trolley seat when she got out and hurried over to the plant: let someone else have a free look. She’d wondered why the Navy, in its wisdom, had sent George to the Mississippi rather than the open sea. Now she thanked God for it. The Dakota had got off lightly as far as casualties were concerned, but what about the cruisers and destroyers and battleships that had gone to the bottom with all hands, or near enough to make no difference?

Going down with all hands could happen to a monitor, too. Sylvia made herself not think about that. Coming up the street toward the factory was Isabella Antonelli. Sylvia waved to her friend. “Good morning,” she called.

“Good morning,” Mrs. Antonelli answered. Seeing her, though, did not take Sylvia’s mind as far away from the war as she would have liked. Isabella Antonelli wore black from head to foot, with a black veil coming down from her hat over her face. In her imperfect English, she said, “All this talk of the big Navy fight, I think of you, I think of your husband, I pray he is all right-” She crossed herself.

“He’s fine, yes. He wasn’t anywhere near this fight out on the ocean, thank God,” Sylvia said.

“Thank God, yes,” Mrs. Antonelli said. They walked into the plant and punched their time cards together. As Sylvia did whenever she talked about the war with her friend, she felt faintly guilty that George still lived while Mr. Antonelli had met a bullet or a shell somewhere up in Quebec. The black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed every day showed how easily it could have been the other way round.

She welcomed the mesmerizing monotony of the line that sent cans into her labeling machine and then out again. If she concentrated on the work, she didn’t have to think about the war-although she wouldn’t have been here without the war. She would have been at home with George, Jr., and Mary Jane.

Was what she had now better or worse? Having George away-and in harm’s way-tipped the balance, of course. Suppose George were home-or home as often as he was when he went out on his fishing runs. What then? The children sometimes drove her mad. Even so, she missed them fiercely every moment she was away from them.

Mr. Winter came limping down the line to see how things were going. He smiled at her. She nodded back.

“Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said, smiling to show off his bad teeth. “How are you this morning? Your husband wasn’t in the big battle the papers are talking about, I hope?”

“I’m fine, thank you, Mr. Winter,” she answered. “My husband, too, so far as I know. He’s on the Mississippi,