The Winds of War

A vile corrupt stink hit Victor Henry in the face as he stepped on the sloping quarterdeck of the California, and said, “Request permission to come aboard, sir.”

“Permission granted, sir.” The OOD’s salute was smart, his sunburned boyish face attractive. He wore grease-streaked khakis, with gloves and a spyglass. Five corpses lay on the quarterdeck, under sheets stained with water and oil, their soggy black shoes projecting, their noses poking up the cloth, water trickling from them down the slanted deck toward the OOD’s stand. The smell came partly from them, but it was a compound of reeks — seeping smoke, gasoline fumes from the pumps, burnt oil, burnt food, burnt paper, burnt flesh, rotted food, broken waste lines, a rancid-mildewy effluvium of disaster, of a great machine built to house human beings, broken and disintegrating. Unshaven sailors and officers in dirty clothing wandered about. Above the filth and mess and tangled hoses and scattered shells and ammo boxes on the main deck, the superstructure jutted into the sunset sky, massive, clean, and undamaged. The long fourteen-inch guns were trained neatly fore and aft, newly and smoothly painted gray, tampions in place, turrets unscathed. The ship bristled with A.A. guns. The old Prune Barge was tantalizingly alive and afloat — wounded, but still mighty, still grandiose.

“I’m Captain Victor Henry.”

“Yes, sir? Oh! Yes, sir! Captain Wallenstone’s been expecting you for quite a while.” He snapped his fingers at a messenger in whites, and said with a winning sad grin, “It’s awful that you should find the ship like this, sir. Benson, tell the C.O. that Captain Henry is here.”

“One moment. Where’s Your C.O.?”

“Sir, he’s with the salvage officers down in the forward engine room.”

“I know the way.”

Walking familiar decks and passageways that were weird in their fixed slant, climbing down tipped ladders, choking on smoke, gasoline, and oil fumes, and a gruesome smell of rotting meat, penetrating ever deeper into gloom and stench, realizing that these fume-filled spaces were explosive traps, Victor Henry got himself down to the forward engine room, where four officers huddled on a high catwalk, playing powerful hand-lights on a sheet of oil-covered water. By an optical illusion, the water half-drowning the engines appeared slanted, rather than the listing bulkheads.

With little ceremony, Victor Henry joined in the engineering talk about saving the ship. The quantity of water flooding through the torpedo holes was more than the pumps could throw out, so the ship was slowly settling. It was that simple. Pug asked about more pumps, about pumping by tugs and auxiliary vessels; but all over the anchorage the cry was for pumps. No more pumping was to be had, not in time to keep the battleship off the mud. Captain Wallenstone, haggard and untidy in greasy khakis and looking about sixty years old, reeled off sad answers to Pug’s other ideas. Patching the holes would take months of underwater work. They stretched over a dozen frames. Sealing off the damaged spaces by sending in divers and closing them off one by one could not be done in time. In short, the California, though not yet on the bottom, was done for. The talk was about cofferdams and cement patches, about a complete refitting in the States, about return to service in 1943 or 1944.

Wallenstone took Victor Henry up to his cabin. It was a blessed thing to smell fresh air again streaming in through windward portholes, and to see the evening star bright in the apple-green sky. The commanding officer’s quarters were intact, spacious, shipshape, glamorous, and beautiful, on this battleship sinking uncontrollably to the bottom. A Filipino steward brought them coffee, which they had to hold on their laps, for it would have slid off the tilted tables. Mournfully, the captain told Pug his experiences of the Japanese attack. Pug had never encountered this officer before, but Wallenstone appeared to know a lot about him. He asked Victor Henry what President Roosevelt was really like, and whether he thought the Russians could hold out much longer against the Germans.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, as he started to accompany Pug out, “quite a bit of mail accumulated here for you. I’m not sure that” — he opened and closed desk drawers — “yes, here it is, all together.”

Victor Henry tucked the bulky envelope under his arm and picked his way with the captain across the cluttered, stinking main deck in the twilight.

“You wouldn’t believe what this ship looked like two days ago.” The captain shook his head sadly, pitching his voice above the whine and thud of the pumps and the metallic hammering everywhere. “We had the word from Manila to expect you. I ran off a captain’s inspection on Saturday. I was at it for five hours. What a job they’d done! You could have eaten your dinner off the engine room deck. It gleamed. She was the smartest ship in this man’s Navy, Henry, and she had the finest crew that ever — oh well, what’s the use? What’s the use?”

At the quarterdeck the bodies were gone. The captain looked around and said, “Well, they took those poor devils away. That’s the worst of it. At the last muster forty-seven were still missing. They’re down below, Henry, all drowned. Oh, God! These salvage fellows say this ship will come back and fight one day, but God knows! And God knows where I’ll be then! Who would think the sons of bitches could sneak all the way to Hawaii undetected? Who’d think they’d be screwy enough to try? Where was our air cover?”

“Is that the Enterprise?” Pug pointed at a black rectangular shape moving down channel, showing no lights. Wallenstone peered at the silhouette. “Yes. Thank Christ she wasn’t in port Sunday morning.”

“My son’s a flier on board her. Maybe I’ll get to see him. First time in a long while.”

“Say! That should cheer you up some. If anything can. I know how you must feel. All I can say is, I’m sorry, Henry. Sorry as a human being can be.”

Captain Wallenstone held out his hand. Victor hesitated.

In that tiny pause, he thought that if this man had been wiser than all the rest, had held the ship in readiness condition Zed or even Yoke — after all, he too had received a war warning — and had ordered a dawn air alert, the California might be the most famous battleship in the Navy now, afloat and ready to fight. Wallenstone then would be a national hero with a clear red carpet to the office of Chief of Naval Operations, and he would be turning over a fighting command to his relief. Instead, he was one of eight battleship captains conferring with salvage officers and saying how unfortunate it all was; and he was offering a handshake to the man who would never relieve him, because he had let the enemy sink his ship.

But could he, Pug Henry, have done any better? A battleship captain who roused his crew for dawn general quarters in port, while half a dozen other battleships slept, would have been a ridiculous eccentric. The entire fleet from Cincpac down had been dreaming. That was the main and forever unchangeable fact of history. The sinking of the California was a tiny footnote nobody would ever pay attention to.

He shook Wallenstone’s hand, saluted the colors, and made his way down the ladder — which leaned nauseatingly over the water — to the luxurious and unharmed captain’s gig that the OOD had summoned. The gig ran darkened to the landing. In the dim dashboard light of the car, Pug glanced over the envelopes of his piled-up mail; official stuff for the most part, with a couple of letters from Rhoda and one from Madeline. He did not open any of them.

“Dad!” Warren not only was at home, he had already changed into slacks and a flowered loose-hanging shirt. He came lunging into the living room, and threw an arm around his father, holding the other stiff at his side. One ear was plastered with surgical tape. “Well, you finally made it! Some haul, clear from Moscow! How are you, Dad?”

“I’ve just visited the California.”

“Oh, Jesus. Bourbon and water?”

“Not that much water, and damned rich on the bourbon. What happened to your arm?”

“Jan told you about how I ran into those Japs, didn’t she?”

“She didn’t tell me you were wounded.”

“It’s just a few stitches. I’m still flying, that’s the main thing. Come, it’s cooler out here, Dad.”

In the shadowy screened porch, Pug bitterly described the California’s state. Warren was scornful. The battleship Navy had been a lot of sleepy fat cats primed for defeat, he said; obsessed by promotions and competition scores, ignorant of the air, and forever drilling to fight the Battle of Jutland against the Japs. But the Japs had grasped naval aviation and had made a slick opening play. “We’ll get ‘em,” he said, “but it’ll be a long hard pull, and the naval aviators’ll do it. Not the battlewagons, Dad.”

“Seems to me a few airplanes got caught on the ground,” Pug growled, feeling the bourbon comforting and radiant inside him.

“Sure, I admit that. This whole base was all unbuttoned. Dad, I’ll tell you one thing, if Halsey had been