“What do you mean?” Hinman said.
“Our friend the Nip has kicked the shit out of our combined naval forces at a big battle not far from here in the Solomons,” the Major said. “Took place at a place called Savo Island. The stuff I heard was plain language Japanese, the chappie doing the talking was saying that the Jap Fleet had destroyed a major American and Australian cruiser fleet without the loss of a single Jap ship! He said at least five major allied ships had gone down!”
“I didn’t know you understood Japanese, Major,” Hinman said.
“I don’t read it or write it,” Struthers said. He took a cup of tea from the Officers’ Cook with a smile of thanks.
“I savvy the lingo. Wasn’t always a bloody-handed commando, you know. Was a time, it seems years and years ago, when I taught the Romance languages at the university in Sydney. Studied Japanese as a sort of hobby. Chinese, too. Bloody army wallahs figured if I could speak, read and write a half-dozen European languages that I would be an ideal commando type!
“Must say that knowing Japanese did me some good. When our lot got captured on New Guinea a silly cow of a sentry, thinking no one could understand his language but another Jap, told his buddy to cover for him while he went off to take a shit. With him gone and his pants down, so to speak, no trick at all to strangle the other sentry and climb the fence with my Skipper on my back. Poor bastard had the dysentery so bad he couldn’t walk. Would have died if he’d been left behind.”
“That report you heard might have been propaganda to fool our intelligence people who monitor their radio,” Hinman said.
“If so, pretty complicated propaganda, sir,” the Major said. “The bloke on the ratio was addressing a message from Admiral Mikawa to the Emperor himself, telling of the victory.
“That’s about as official as you can get. If he was polishing his brass, as we’d say, and he was found with the lie in his teeth he’d have to say his prayers and open his belly. No, I’d say it was the straight goods.”
“What the hell is there in this area to fight a major sea battle over?” Hinman said. “Nothing out here!”
“Might be this place Guadalcanal,” the Major said.
“Never heard of it,” Hinman said. “Where’s it at?”
“Nor did I hear of it before,” Struthers said. “But I was talking to some of your intelligence types when this mission we did was being planned. They told me the Jap had built a big airfield on Guadalcanal, down at the southeast end of the Solomon Islands, east of where we’re going now. Caused no end of a dust-up with your people and ours. An airfield there would control the sea lanes from the U.S. and Hawaii, I was told, as well as flank the east end of New Guinea. With New Guinea flanked it would fall and that would give the Jap a port of entry to Northern Australia.”
Captain Hinman and the Mako’s officers listened to the heavy-set Australian, their faces intent.
“Your intelligence people said your Navy was launching a top-hole amphibious landing job, going to put thousands and thousands of your Marines ashore at Guadalcanal. Reckon the Ghurka and the American Marine are the two finest fighting men in the world, bar none, not even our own chaps. This battle the Nips are boasting about may have been the result of trying to stop the amphibious assault or it could have been an effort to throw the Marines off the island if they’d already landed.”
“They never tell us anything like that in these damned messages they send,” Hinman growled. “They’re quick as hell, though, to tell us that those ships you put on the bottom in that harbor aren’t sunk, that we quote and unquote may have damaged them!”
“To be expected!” the Major said cheerfully. “If the bloody rear echelon bastards don’t do it themselves they can’t see how others can do it. When I brought my Skipper out to Port Moresby, had to carry the poor fucker most of the way on my back and him shittin’ all down me all the while, the intelligence brain down in Sydney decided my report that I’d killed thirteen of the Japs on the way out was an error. He credited me with five, I think. Bastard sits there in a cushy office with beer and American cigs at hand and tells me what I did! You’d think there was a bounty on the head of the Jap and they didn’t want to pay the money!”
“Did you really kill thirteen of the Jap bastards, Major?” Pete Simms’ eyes were shining, his tongue flicking out to lick his lips. Struthers looked at Simms for a long moment.
“I stopped counting at thirteen, sonny,” he said. “I think it was probably double that. Really doesn’t make any difference, does it? You have to put down something so the fat-asses in the rear know it wasn’t all steak and eggs. Bloody war is a bloody war, right? If you don’t kill them they kill you. That’s progress, you know. Sign of an advanced state of civilization when you can kill your fellow man before he kills you. Look at this lovely ship of yours; beautiful piece of machinery! Bloody useless except for legalized murder.
“Look at me! Bloody professor, I am. Spent my years trying to teach students the mysteries of grammar and pronunciation. For what purpose? What I should have been doing is studying the habits and ambitions of my natural enemy, the Jap.
“If I kill enough of them and if I live and if we win this bloody war and those are all great fucking items.” He drew the word out, his sweeping mustache bobbing.
“Then, when it’s all over I’ll be de-mobbed and will go, hat in hand, and ask if I can have back my old school desk. And in twenty years some student will point me out as I go hobbling across the quad and tell his girl that I fought in the war. And she’ll say what war? And he’ll say the war against Japan. And she’ll say war against Japan, against our great friend and trading partner? So what’s the sense of it all?”
“There’s sense to it if you’re attacked!” Simms said.
“I grant you that,” the Major said. “The attack against your Pearl Harbor made no sense. The Jap should have invaded! If he did I Warrant he’d won that battle and where would you be now?”
“Where would Australia be?” Sirocco asked.
“Down the bloody toilet, mate, that’s where! Down the bloody head, as you call it!
“Make no mistake, we know we owe our existence to date to you chaps. Without you we’d long since been in Jap prison camps. Poor bloody Pommies can’t help us, they’ve got their hands full with Adolf. But none of that changes the fact that all war is for naught, as some old Greek once said. Forgot who said it.”
“How far are we from the new patrol area, Joe?” Hinman said pointedly, anxious to end the conversation and the direction it was moving. Sirocco pricked off the distance with his dividers.
“Less than two hundred miles, sir. We should be on station before midnight tomorrow.”
“I wonder why Rabaul?” Hinman said. “The message doesn’t tell us what to expect there.”
Another message came from Brisbane just before Mako dove on its patrol station off the harbor of Rabaul. The message said that Naval Intelligence believed the Japanese would make a strong effort to reinforce their garrisons at Guadalcanal and Tulagi, that Mako might encounter various types of small ships pressed into service as troop carriers. Mako should also expect these troop ships to be escorted. The message concluded, “Attacks will be made on troop-carrying ships rather than escorting warships unless necessary for survival.”
“Different commands, different orders,” Hinman said to Joe Sirocco in the Control Room. “In Pearl it’s ‘get the escort ships first and then go after the merchant ships or tankers.’ In this command it’s get the escort vessels last, if you can.”