The Winds of War

“Well, I’d say about two dozen bombers worked us over. Mainly they went after planes and air installations, Admiral. No ships were there to get bombed.”

Cincpac shot a glance at Victor Henry, as though suspecting irony in his words. “Say, weren’t you supposed to relieve Chip Wallenstone in the California?”

“Yes, sir.”

Kimmel shook his head, and started to read the letter.

Pug ventured to say, “How did the California make out Admiral?”

“Why, don’t you know?”

“No, sir. I came straight here from the Clipper.”

Not looking up, in the brisk tone of a report, Kimmel said, “She took two torpedoes to port and several bomb hits and near misses. One bomb penetrated below decks and the explosion started a big fire. She’s down by the bow, Pug, and sinking. They’re still counter-flooding, so she may not capsize. She’s electric drive, and the preliminary estimate” — he pulled toward him a sheet on his desk and peered at it — “a year and a half out of action, possibly two. That’s top secret of course. We’re releasing no damage information.”

Cincpac finished the letter from Wake in a heavy silence, and tossed it on the desk.

Victor Henry’s voice trembled and he swallowed in mid-sentence. “Admiral, if I broke a lot of asses, including my own — ah, is there a chance I could put her back on the line in six months?”

“Go out and see for yourself. It’s hopeless, Pug. A salvage officer will relieve Chip.” The tone was sympathetic, but Victor Henry felt it did Cincpac good to give someone else catastrophic news.

“Well, that’s that, then, I guess.”

“You’ll get another command.”

“The only thing is, Admiral, there aren’t that many available battleships. Not any more.”

Again, the quick suspicious glance. It was hard to say anything in this context without seeming to needle the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Kimmel made a curt gesture at the letter Pug had brought. “Now there’s a problem for you. Do we relieve Wake or not? It means exposing a carrier. We can’t go in without air cover. He’s asking for a pile of things I can’t give him, for the simple reason that the Russians and the British have got the stuff. Mr. Roosevelt was a great Navy President until the European fracas started, Pug, but at that point he took his eye off the ball. Our real enemy’s always been right here, here in the Pacific. This ocean is our nation’s number one security problem. That’s what he forgot. We never had the wherewithal to conduct proper patrols. I didn’t want to rely on the Army, God knows, but equipment only has so much life in it, and what would we have had to fight the war with if we’d used up our planes in patrolling? Washington’s been crying wolf about the Japs for a year. We’ve had so many full alerts and air raid drills and surprise attack exercises and all, nobody can count them, but — well, the milk is spilled, the horse is stolen, but I think it’s pretty clear that the President got too damned interested in the wrong enemy, the wrong ocean, and the wrong war.”

It gave Victor Henry a strange sensation, after Berlin and London and Moscow, and now this staggering personal disappointment, to hear from Admiral Kimmel the old unchanged Navy verbiage about the importance of the Pacific: “Well, Admiral, I know how busy you are,” he said, though in fact he was struck by the quiet at the heart of the cataclysm, and by Kimmel’s willingness to chat with a mere captain he did not know very well. Cincpac acted almost as lonesome as Kip Tollever had.

“Yes, well, I do have a thing or two on my mind, and you’ve got to go about your business too. Nice seeing you, Pug,” said Admiral Kimmel, in a sudden tone of dismissal.

Janice answered Pug’s telephone call and warmly urged him to come and stay at the house. Pug wanted a place where he could drop his bags, and get into uniform to go to the California. He drove out in a Navy car, took suitable if brief delight in his grandson, and accepted Janice’s commiseration over his ship with a grunt. She offered to get his whites quickly pressed by the maid. In the spare room he opened his suitcase to pull out the crumpled uniform, and his letter to Pamela Tudsbury fell to the floor.

In a dressing gown he glanced through the letter, which he had written during the long hop from Guam to Wake Island. It embarrassed him as one of his old love letters to Rhoda might have. There wasn’t much love in this one, mostly a reasoned and accurate case for his living out his life as it was. The whole business with the English girl — romance, flirtation, love affair, whatever it had been — had begun to seem so far away after his stops in Manila and Guam, so dated, so unlike him, so utterly outside realities and possibilities! Pamela was a beautiful young woman, but odd. The best proof of her oddness was her very infatuation with him, a grizzled United States Navy workhorse with whom she had been thrown together a few times. Dour and repressed though he was, she had ignited a flash of romance in him in those last turbulent hours in Moscow. He had allowed himself to hope for a new life, and to half believe in it, in his elation over his orders to the California.

And now — how finished it all was! California, Pamela, the Pacific Fleet, the honor of the United States, and — God alone knew — any hope for the civilized world.

A knock at the door; the voice of the Chinese maid: “Your uniform, Captain?”

“Thank you. Ah, that’s a fine job, I appreciate it.”

He did not tear the letter up. He did not think he could write a better one. The situation of a man past fifty declining a young woman’s love was awkward and ridiculous, and no words could help much. He slipped the envelope into his pocket. When he passed a mailbox on his way to the Navy Yard, he stopped and mailed it. The clank of the box was a sad sound in a sad day for Captain Victor Henry.

Sadder yet was the trip to the California, through foul-smelling water so coated with black oil that the motor launch cut no wake, but chugged slimily along in smoky air, thumping like an icebreaker through a floating mass of black-smeared garbage and debris. The launch passed all along Battleship Row, for the California lay nearest the channel entrance. One by one Pug contemplated these gargantuan gray vessels he knew so well — he had served in several — fire-blackened, down by the head, down by the stern, sitting on the bottom, listing, or turned turtle. Grief and pain tore at him.

He was a battleship man. Long, long ago he had passed up flight school. Navy air had seemed to him fine for reconnaissance, bombing support, and torpedo attacks, but not for the main striking arm. He had argued with the fly-fly boys that when war came, the thin-skinned carriers would lurk far from the action and would fuss at each other with bombings and dogfights, while the battleships with their big rifles came to grips and slugged it out for command of the sea. The fliers had asserted that one aerial bomb or torpedo could sink a battleship. He had retorted that a sixteen-inch steel plate wasn’t exactly porcelain, and that a hundred guns firing at once might slightly mar the aim of a pilot flying a little tin crate.

His natural conservative streak had been reinforced by his football experience. To him, carriers had been the fancy-Dan team with tricky runners and razzle-dazzle passers; battlewagons, the heavy solid team of chargers, who piled up the yardage straight through the line. These tough ground gainers usually became the champions. So he had thought — making the mistake of his life. He had been as wrong as a man could be, in the one crucial judgment of his profession.

Other battleship men might still find excuses for these tragic slaughtered dinosaurs that the launch was passing. For Pug Henry, facts governed. Each of these vessels was a grand engineering marvel, a floating colossus as cunningly put together as a lady’s watch, capable of pulverizing a city. All true, all true. But if caught unawares, they could be knocked out by little tin flying crates. The evidence was before his eyes. The twenty-year argument was over.

The setting sun cast a rosy glow on the canted superstructure of the California. She listed about seven degrees to port, spouting thick streams of filthy water in rhythmic pumped spurts. The smoke-streaked, flame-blistered, oil-smeared steel wall, leaning far over Pug’s head as the motor launch drew up to the accommodation ladder, gave him a dizzy, doomed feeling. The climb up the canted and partly submerged ladder was dizzying, too.

What an arrival! In bad moments in Kuibyshev, on Siberian trains, in Tokyo streets, in the Manila Club, Pug had cheered himself with pictures of his reception aboard this ship: side boys in white saluting, honor guard on parade, boatswain’s pipe trilling, commanding officers shaking hands at the gangway, a sweet triumphant tour of a great ship shined up to holiday beauty and brilliance for the eye of a new captain. Often he had played a minor part in such rituals. But to be the star, the center, the incoming “old man”! It was worth a lifetime of the toughest drudgery.

And now this!