Annapolis, page 62
Then Nimitz said he would accept no letters of resignation. Period.
“I need you all, and I want to hear no more stories of men going gray over what’s happened. Let’s make the Japs go gray instead.”
iii
An Annapolis Wedding
It did not happen on a bright Sunday afternoon, in the presence of proud family and friends. There was no Episcopal priest, no ring, no marriage license, no blood test. Truth was, there was no real wedding.
The navy did not want its young submarine officers marrying. And of the three brothers, Tom Stafford was the most respectful of naval authority.
Their commissioning ceremony took place on a gloomy December afternoon. Tom’s grandparents came up from the Patuxent. Katherine came out from Washington. And Betty’s parents, who had embraced their daughter’s fiancé as their own, came down from Boston. It was an understatement to say that the atmosphere was subdued. These young men were going straight to war. Few classes in the history of the Academy had graduated knowing that.
Still, the dinner that Abraham and Julia hosted at the Stafford House generated a few cheerful toasts, especially after a few bottles of Veuve Cliquot had been offered up to the serious toasts.
And that evening, Tom and Betty went for a final walk through the yard.
The snow was falling gently, softening the sounds of a quiet town and a quiet campus, so that nothing could be heard but the whisper of the flakes.
In the shadows before the chapel, Tom wrapped his arms around Betty and kissed her. A dusting of snow piled up on his hat and on the shoulders of her coat, and a dozen midshipmen hurried past them on their way back to Bancroft from the library, all eyes in the boat and not a smart remark from any of them.… Then he whispered, “Till death do us part.”
She looked up into his solemn face. “Oh, Tom, don’t be talking like that.”
“Say it.”
“All right. Till death do us part.”
“If we say it, we can face it.” And then he pulled her against him and held her tight, squashing her face against his overcoat.
“Tom,” she whispered into the wool, “I’ve been taking my temperature, Tom.”
He looked down at her. He had been holding her so tight that a button of his coat had left the imprint of an anchor on her cheek.
She smiled and took him by the hand. “Come on.”
At the Stafford House, Katherine was sitting in the hotel lounge, the room where Union men had interrogated Alexandra after Lincoln’s death. A fire roared in the fireplace, above which hung a Gabriel Shank portrait of Alexandra. A glass of sherry was in front of Katherine, and she was flipping through a golf magazine.
“Wait here,” said Betty in the hallway. “I’ll handle this.”
From the hallway, Tom watched Betty sit with his aunt, say a few words, make a few gestures. And Katherine beamed. It was as if she had just been asked to be someone’s godmother. Without another word, she reached into her purse and took out a key.
With the night manager looking the other way, Betty led Tom through the French doors at the back to a room on the first floor.
“What did you say to her?” asked Tom.
“Something she said to me a few weeks ago… about love.”
iv
A Deal
On a fine Hawaiian morning just after New Year’s, Jack Stafford was called to his father’s office at CINCPAC. He went with his notebook and a sharp eye for everything in the big old building overlooking the submarine pens. “A Peek Inside CINCPAC” might make a good title for an article, if he could get it past the censors.
Jack found his father at his desk, once more in charge as assistant operations officer of the Pacific Fleet. The graying of his hair had slowed, and the bruised look was gone from beneath his eyes. He was all business in the wash khakis that Nimitz favored for his working uniform. “A nice article you wrote about that messman Dory Miller.”
“Thanks, Dad. How did you happen to see it?”
“The censors passed it on to me before they pass it back to you.”
Jack felt his jaw muscles tighten. “Pass it back?”
“The navy doesn’t think America’s quite ready to make a colored messman the hero of Pearl Harbor.”
“But, Dad, he was a hero. I talked to him. A high school dropout from Detroit, and he stood out there firing a gun he’d never even been trained on.”
“That gun could’ve blown up in his face.”
“C’mon, Dad.”
Will fidgeted with the papers on his desk. “I know he’s a hero, Jack. But we just don’t think he’s the best example of a hero we can find right now. After all, the army has that Colin Kelly, flying a B-17 into the Haruna in Lingayen Gulf.”
“That didn’t happen. The Haruna was nowhere near there.”
“Well, maybe not, but the marines have that Devereaux on Wake Island. Imagine a guy radioing a message, ‘Send us more Japs.’ It’s the best damn line of the war.”
“‘Send us more Japs,’ my ass.” Jack was no respecter of rank. He didn’t have one, didn’t want one, and wouldn’t get one, thanks to a heart murmur. Still, he was intent on doing his part for the war effort. And his part was telling the truth to the American people, because the truth made people free, and freedom gave people real strength. “I bet that marine major said, ‘Send reinforcements, and fast.’”
Will pushed his papers from one side of the desk to the other. “Jack, a lot of rabble-rousers at home are agitating for us to open all ratings to Negroes.”
Jack leaned forward in his chair. “Rabble-rousers?”
“We’d be playing right into their hands if we gave them a colored hero before we have a white one.”
Outside, heavy hammers and pile drivers and drills kept up their incessant racket. Planes roared overhead. Ships pushed in and out of the harbor. And Jack filled his voice with the sound of disappointment. “Is this what you believe?”
“The navy’s not ready for mixed-race berthings, Jack.”
“You mean, what’s good for the U.S. Navy may not be good for Dory Miller, but what’s good for the U.S. Navy—”
“Is good for the U.S.A.” Will plastered a condescending smile on his face, as he would have done with any reporter. “You bring a bunch of colored boys into berthings where white men are sleeping, put them in a mess where white men are eating… it’s a recipe for trouble.”
“I thought the Japs were giving us all the trouble we needed.”
“Dammit, Jack, you don’t know anything about the fleet. It’s a world of tradition and regulation… no place for social experiments.”
“What if I disagree? What if I try to file my story anyway?”
“You might as well go back to New York and try to get on the radio.”
Jack thought about the sole of Lois Hoyt’s foot. He thought about Dory Miller’s big heavyweight fists and all the energy in them, just waiting to be released. And he knew his father was still holding some kind of an ace. “If I bury the story…?”
Will pointed out the window. “Do you see the ten-ten dock?”
“The Enterprise. She got in this morning. Billy locked himself in his bedroom with Maureen two hours ago. Juan says we should send for an oxygen tank. Ma’s pretending she doesn’t know what he means.”
Will chuckled at that. “Bill Halsey’s in command of the Enterprise. He’s steaming out on the tenth. I won’t tell you where, but I will tell you that he’s one of the few naval officers I know who actually likes reporters looking over his shoulder.”
“And?”
“He says you can bunk in with Billy, get some real combat stuff. But you’ll put on wash khakis like the rest of us—no insignia—and do as you’re told. We can’t have any troublemakers out there.”
“Troublemakers are against tradition and regulation, right?”
“Do you want the chance or not?” snapped his father.
“Halsey is good copy.” Jack threw his head back and did a Halsey croak. “‘Before we’re through with ’em, the Jap language will be spoken only in hell.’”
“Does that mean you see my point?”
Jack asked himself what good it would do if he filed the Dory Miller story and got himself banished from Hawaii in the process. On the other hand, after he’d established a byline, he could get the Dory Miller story published anywhere.
And he could rationalize anything. What a bastard. “I’ll do it.”
“Good. And when the time comes, I’ll submit this.” Will reached into his desk and took out a paper recommending Dory Miller for a Navy Cross. It was undated.
v
Aircraft Carrier
They called her the Big E, but her name had descended from the dawn of American naval history. An earlier Enterprise had been a twelve-gun sloop that sailed against the Barbary pirates.
“This Enterprise,” wrote Jack Stafford, “sails against modern pirates.”
She is one of four operational aircraft carriers now in the Pacific, and to her has fallen the honor of delivering Nimitz’s first counterpunch in the Great Pacific War—a raid on the Marshall Islands.
She is near nine hundred feet long, covered from one end to the other with a gray wooden deck that looks like nothing so much as the boardwalk at Atlantic City. But no peaches and cream here. It’s more like Yankee Stadium, with a Murderers’ Row of Douglas Dauntless dive-bombers, Devastator torpedo planes, and Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters circling above, ready to take the field. And all around the warning track are five-inch guns, 1.1-inch antiaircraft pom-poms, and fifty-caliber machine guns.
Instead of a dugout, a slender gray island rises out of the deck on the starboard side, four stories high, carrying the stack, the big basket mast, and the bridge that is the brain center for our manager, Admiral William F. Halsey, who looks like a craggy old mountain man, come down to the sea.…
Jack leaned back from the little desk in his brother’s little stateroom and read what he’d written. Maybe he had a few too many metaphors working at the moment—baseball, mountain men.… He hadn’t even laid eyes on Halsey.
“Now hear this! Now hear this! Flight crews and LSOs to the flight deck. Stand by to receive aircraft.”
Jack jumped up from his typewriter. This he had to see.
When a carrier was in port, the squadrons flew off to Ford Island. Now it was time to bring the air wing aboard. Jack had been told that he could go anywhere from the 01 deck to the island bridge, so he hurried to the gangway. He followed it up one flight, then two, three. And… did that lieutenant tell him he could step out on the 02 deck or the 03? What the hell, he’d go to the 03. The view would be better.
And was it ever. What a sense of power to stand up there, with the ship gliding over the waves and the ballet beginning on the flight deck below. Maybe dance would make a better metaphor than the ball game.
The arrester cables were tightened across the deck, a dozen of them, a dozen chances for the plane to catch and stop. The flight crews, wearing soft helmets of different colors for identification, moved to their positions. The landing signal officer began his gyrations with the signal paddles—too high, too low, just right. And the first Dauntless approached in perfect cut position—flaps down, landing gear down, tailhook extended like a stinger.
Jack fumbled with the windblown pages of his notebook and wrote, “Squadron leader Wade McClusky comes in first. Clear to see why he’s boss. Puts that plane down like a saucer of milk for the cat.”
The palm of a hand appeared in front of Jack’s face, holding rubber earplugs.
Jack took them. “Thanks.”
Another plane was coming in now, and Jack was trying to watch it.
“Put these things in, or you’ll be sorry.” The old man’s face was creased and sunburned. Gray hair scraggled out from under a khaki baseball cap.
“That’s Billy Stafford coming in,” Jack said.
“You don’t know where you are, do you?”
Halsey. Jack felt his stomach drop. “The flag bridge?”
“Reserved for the admiral. Today, consider yourself the admiral’s guest.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“In exchange, I expect stories that’ll make ’em stand up and spit bullets back home. We’re here to kill Japs, but America needs a shot in the arm, too. I’m countin’ on you.”
Jack thought he was immune to speeches like that. But it was hard to be cynical on the Big E, with Halsey looking you right in the eye. Jack muttered something about doing his best, and then, instinctively, he saluted.
“You’re not wearin’ a cover, son. Correspondents get overseas caps, just like the fliers. Wear it and I’ll return your salute. Now, here comes your brother… right in the groove.”
Jack had spent little time with Billy since he went off to the Naval Academy in 1931, and he had spent most of his childhood doing the opposite of what Billy did. If Billy liked baseball, Jack turned to tennis. If Billy was a math whiz, Jack would read Shakespeare. If Billy chose to be the Annapolis golden boy, Jack would head off to some Ivy League egghead factory. But today, Jack was very proud of Billy.
“He’s a helluva flier,” said Halsey. “Now get the hell off my bridge.”
JACK AND BILLY looked a lot alike, both near six feet, dark-haired, strong-featured in the Stafford way. But Billy was harder, almost stringy, and presented a face to the world that suggested no complication whatsoever. One look at him told you what he was thinking. Cynicism was not in his flight bag.
“Melon!” he cried when Jack came into the pilots’ ready room.
“Melon?” Wade McClusky was at the coffee urn, filling a big white cup.
Jack gave his brother a “Thanks, pal.” He had one of those heads that could be called leonine if someone wanted to compliment him but had looked a size too big for the rest of his body when he was a skinny kid. So the nickname was natural.
He extended his hand to McClusky. “Call me Jack.”
“Jack the journalist,” said McClusky. “We call your brother ‘Balls.’”
“Because I fly my plane like it was gliding on ballbearings.”
“So,” said Charlie Osterhausser, Billy’s bunkmate. “We got the whole Stafford anatomy. Melon Head and Balls.”
And Jack was welcomed aboard.
Billy said that once you’d gotten over the majesty of it, you realized that the carrier was a seagoing factory: below the hangar deck—a giant service station packed with planes—the ship was a honeycomb of passageways and compartments unique only in their ugliness, nothing but gray paint and steam pipes. And it was all getting uglier, because everywhere Jack looked, sweaty sailors were on their hands and knees, swinging hammers and chisels against bulkheads and floors. Chip, chip, chip.
Jack thought it was some kind of punishment duty.
“Not this time,” said Billy. “We have to get all the paint and linoleum off the ship. We found out on December 7 that they burn like a son of a bitch.”
And yet there was majesty to the Big E.
To feel it, Jack stood on the island at night, when the ship was darkened down, and the wondrous wind blew, and the luminosity enveloped her in a sky so full of stars that it was more silver than black, in a sea that showed great phosphorescent wakes streaming out behind all the vessels in the task force.
“I’ve always wanted Maureen to see this,” said Billy, and stood with him. “Then maybe she’d understand.”
“I didn’t understand until I saw it.” Jack felt the motion of the great ship rushing through the sea, saw the darkened silhouettes of the other ships all around them. “It makes you feel like part of something a lot bigger than yourself.”
“And the best part”—Billy grinned—“is that I’m part of it on the ship, but up in the air, I’m all of it. I’m the reason they built the damn ship in the first place. The god of the flight deck, that’s me.”
“You never were one for humility.”
Billy gave a little shrug. “You neither.”
Jack looked up at the stars.
FOR A MONTH, they delivered hit-and-run strikes against lightly defended targets—73,000 tons of enemy shipping sunk, thirty-five Japanese planes shot down.
The unblooded American pilots gained the confidence they would need when the real fights began, because even though no one had more inbred cockiness than American flyboys, no one knew better how much more experienced the Japanese fliers were… and how much better was their equipment.
However, the raids did nothing to stop Yamamoto’s rampage, and Jack said so in his first article.
But Billy read it before Jack filed it. “Is this what the folks back home want to hear, on top of all the other bad news?”
“Don’t you think they want the truth?”
“You have to make these raids sound good, Jack. We’re doing more than just swatting flies out here.”
Jack was surprised at how easy he found it to write the story the way his brother and Admiral Halsey wanted him to. It was part of the war effort. And it paid off. To reward him for his fine dispatches, Halsey invited him out for another raid in March.
vi
BuOrd
While the Big E was at sea, the orders came through for the wives of military personnel to leave the island. Will had tried to get Maureen a job, but he wasn’t the only one without any pull. Even admirals would sleep alone. If Hawaii was invaded, it would be defended by professional soldiers, not by men fighting for their wives and families.
At least Will had some pull with friends at the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington, and a week after she arrived home, Maureen went to work as a secretary in the old State, War, and Navy Building, and stayed in Katherine’s apartment at Dupont Circle.
The navy wasn’t simply a lot of ships. It was, like most government organizations, an interlocking and overlapping system of production, management, and waste that expanded to spend whatever money was allotted to it plus ten percent more.
The Bureau of Ordnance oversaw the design and production of naval weapons systems. Some were simple, like the five-inch gun. Others were more complex, like the torpedo that, in the latest Mark XIV design, included a steam engine for propulsion, a gyro mechanism for direction, a 750-pound warhead, and a Mark VI exploder.
