Since he was probably right, George didn’t argue with him. He just said, “Well, that’s a damn sight better than nothing, too.” The gun crew laughed. Even the CPO’s lips twitched.
They waited. Before too long, the executive officer said, “Y-ranging gear reports inbound aircraft. They aren’t ours. We’re going to have company in about fifteen minutes. Roll out the welcome mat for our guests, boys.” Five minutes later, he came back on the loudspeakers: “Trenton’s aircraft report that that Jap carrier is on fire and dead in the water. Score one for the good guys.”
Cheers rang out up and down the Townsend’s main deck, and probably everywhere else on the ship, too. The crew had faced savage air attacks more than once. Getting their own back felt wonderful.
“Those Jap pilots are liable to know they can’t go home again,” Dalby warned. “That means they’ll give it everything they’ve got when they hit us. Knock ’em down as quick as you can so they don’t crash into the ship or something.”
Knocking down airplanes was hard enough without any extra pressure to do it fast. George just shrugged. Unless somebody got hurt, all he had to do was make sure the gun had enough ammo to keep shooting. What happened after that was Dalby’s responsibility, not his.
The Y-range antenna swung round and round. George and everybody else up on deck peered northwest, the direction from which trouble had so often come before. The Townsend picked up speed. She would want to do as much dodging as she could. George glanced over toward the Trenton. The carrier couldn’t pick up a lot of speed. Her engines wouldn’t let her.
“There they are!” somebody yelled.
George swore softly. Those were Jap airplanes, all right. Their silhouettes might have been more familiar to him than those of U.S. aircraft. The half dozen fighters in combat air patrol over the little U.S. fleet streaked toward the enemy. Japanese escort fighters were bound to outnumber them. Their pilots would want to take out as many enemy strike aircraft as they could before the enemy shot them down. A pilot’s life wasn’t always glamorous. George wouldn’t have traded places with anybody up there.
An airplane tumbled out of the sky, leaving a comet’s trail of fire and smoke all the way down to the Pacific. “That’s a Jap!” someone shouted. George hoped he knew what he was talking about.
This wasn’t like the last few times the Townsend had ventured out in the direction of Midway. The main attack wasn’t aimed at the destroyer. The Japs wanted the Trenton. A carrier was really dangerous to them, as aircraft from the converted freighter had just proved. Destroyers? Destroyers were nuisances, annoyances, worth noticing now only because they tried to keep enemy aircraft away from the Trenton.
That made the 40mm crews’ jobs easier. They were less rattled, less hurried, than they had been when enemy dive bombers singled the Townsend out for attention. George fed his gun shells. Fritz Gustafson loaded them into the breeches. At Fremont Dalby’s command, two other sailors shifted the antiaircraft gun in altitude and azimuth. Empty shell casings clattered down onto the deck by the gun crews’ feet. Every so often, George or Gustafson would kick them out of the way so nobody tripped over them.
The Townsend’s five-inch guns blasted away at the Japs. Their shells could reach a lot farther and packed much more punch, but they couldn’t fire nearly so fast. Their roar, on top of the thunder from all the smaller weapons, hammered the ears. George wondered whether he’d be able to hear at all by the time the war ended.
And the big guns’ blast shook and jarred loose damn near everything on the deck. The last time they’d cut loose, a sailor George knew ended up spitting a filling out into the palm of his hand. He’d been lucky, too, even if he didn’t think so when the pharmacist’s mate played dentist on him. Stray too close to a five-incher’s muzzle when it went off and blast could kill, even if it didn’t leave a mark on your body. George didn’t aspire to be a corpse, unmarked or otherwise.
“Hit!” The whole gun crew shouted at the same time when a Japanese dive bomber they’d been shooting at suddenly wavered in the air and started trailing smoke. “We got the son of a bitch!” George added exultantly.
That pilot must have known he had nowhere to go. With his own carrier in flames, he wouldn’t have had anywhere to go even if his engine were running perfectly. Taking a hit must have rubbed his nose in it. He dove for the Trenton. Instead of releasing his bomb and trying to pull up, he seemed intent on using his airplane as an extra weapon.
A hail of antiaircraft fire from the escort carrier said its gunners realized the same thing. They scored more hits on the dive bomber, but didn’t deflect it from its course. The ship swung to starboard-slowly, so slowly. A carrier built from the keel up as a warship would have had a much better chance of getting away.
But that turn, small as it was, saved the Trenton. Maybe the enemy pilot was dead in the cockpit, or maybe the heavy fire severed the cables to his rudder and ailerons so he couldn’t swerve no matter how much he wanted to. He splashed into the Pacific a hundred yards to port of the carrier. His bomb went off then, sending up a great plume of white water. A near miss like that would damage the Trenton with fragments, and might make her leak from sprung seams. But it wouldn’t turn her into a torch and send her to the bottom.
“Fucker had balls,” Fritz Gustafson said with grudging respect. As grudgingly, George nodded. Trying to get in a last lick at your foe when you knew you were a goner took nerve.
Not so many Japanese airplanes were left in the sky now. U.S. fighters and ferocious AA had knocked down a lot of them. Then George watched something that chilled him to the bone. A Jap fighter pilot heeled his undamaged airplane into a dive and swooped on the Trenton like a hunting falcon. He didn’t try to save himself-all he wanted to do was damage that carrier the only way he had left. That he would die if he succeeded couldn’t have mattered to him. He wasn’t going home anyway.
The Trenton shot him down. His fighter broke up and fell in flaming pieces into the sea. But he’d given the other Japs an idea-or maybe he’d told them over the wireless what he aimed to do. One after another, they all dove on the American ships below them. Dead men themselves, they didn’t want to die alone.
George’s gun put as many rounds as it could into a fighter. The Japanese didn’t make their aircraft as sturdy as Americans did-not that a U.S. fighter would have survived a pasting like that. But the Jap wasn’t trying to survive, only to take Americans with him. He didn’t quite make it. His burning airplane crashed into the ocean off the Townsend’s starboard bow.
One fighter did crash on the Trenton’s flight deck-and then skidded off into the sea, trailing flames. It scraped eight or ten sailors off the ship with it. Fires lingered on the flight deck after the Jap was gone. Damage-control parties beat them down with high-pressure seawater. By the time the escort carrier’s strike aircraft got back, she was ready to land them. “By God, we did it,” George said. In the waters off the Sandwich Islands, Americans hadn’t said anything like that for a while, but they’d earned the right today. George said it again, with feeling.
XV
Brigadier General Abner Dowling’s guards now enforced a wider perimeter around the house he was using than they had before. He wondered if they joked that he had a wide perimeter, too. He wouldn’t have been surprised. The perimeter around the place, though, was no laughing matter. It came by direct order from the War Department.