The cruiser should have been back at Pearl with the rest of the fleet, but they had put to sea for yet another training cruise. So here they were, many miles from base, the sharp bow cutting a wake through the blue Pacific.
Although the cruise had its own rewards, such as this moment staring out at the Pacific with a hot mug of coffee in hand, it meant that the crew and officers had missed out on a weekend of shore leave. He doubted that there was any place on earth as lively as Oahu when all the ships were in port.
But things weren’t all bad. In fact, he had gotten into a good poker game last night. Considering that he had won twenty dollars, he supposed that he had come out farther ahead than he would have during a night on the town.
Being a good card player not only helped pass the time, but it had been something of a necessity for supplementing his meager salary over the years. He had graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1933, barely hanging on as the peacetime navy cut officers during the Depression era, then getting married and starting a family on paltry pay.
He was fortunate that his parents, both Irish immigrants, had become fairly well off back in Cambridge and weren’t about to let their grandchildren starve. But the poker money helped.
“Don’t look so smug, you damn card shark,” said Lieutenant Smith, approaching with his own mug of coffee in hand. The hot coffee managed to steam in the morning air. The very fact that they had a few moments to themselves to enjoy the view and their coffee indicated that this was a very relaxed cruise. “Just because you won twenty bucks off me, you don’t have to stand there grinning like the Cheshire cat.”
O’Connell laughed. “You can win it back from me next time. At least you can try.”
“You must be one lucky Irishman is all I can say.”
Even coming from Smith, who didn’t mean any harm by it, the Irish remark was a little galling. The United States Navy officer corps was very much a WASP club that was hard for an Irish Catholic with an ethnic name to break into, even as an Annapolis graduate. O’Connell was sensitive to that. Then again, he knew that Smith was just giving him a good-natured ribbing.
Despite the headwinds he sometimes faced in his naval career, O’Connell didn’t regret the choice that he’d made. After graduating from Cambridge High and Latin at the top of his class, it had come down to deciding between Harvard, which had been almost literally in his backyard, or Annapolis. Although his parents had some money and could be proud of what they had accomplished after coming to America without a dime to their names, they were far from being wealthy.
The young son of immigrants had been under no illusions about his chances of fitting in with the Boston Brahmins who populated Harvard. He had decided on a free education at the United States Naval Academy.
No matter where you went to college, it still made you a member of the elite, educated class — scarcely 1 percent of all Americans held a college degree in 1941. O’Connell had heard that fact somewhere, and it still awed him.
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll buy you a beer when we get back to shore,” O’Connell said with a grin.
They stood in companionable silence, drinking their coffee and gazing out to sea. The calm seas made drinking coffee on deck relatively easy, which wasn’t always the case when the Pacific was really rolling. They nodded at the chaplain, who came by, preparing for the Sunday-morning service.
Gazing across the Pacific, they noticed smoke rising in the distance, in the direction of Oahu. The island itself was too far away to be visible.
“Is that coming from Pearl?” O’Connell asked, puzzled. He couldn’t think of anything on Oahu, other than the navy complex, that could be on fire and produce that much smoke.
“Maybe they’re burning off the sugarcane.”
“I don’t think so,” O’Connell said. On occasion, there had been big fires when the old sugarcane was burned off by the plantation managers, but this looked different. “Look at that smoke. It wasn’t even there a minute ago.”
Indeed, the smoke was thick, black, and heavy, rising in massive columns from multiple sources. Oil smoke, not burning cane. Even this far out to sea, it was an incredible amount of smoke.
“You know what? I think that is Pearl,” Smith agreed. “What the heck is going on?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” O’Connell said, just as puzzled.
Just then, the call sounded for general quarters. What had been a calm, even relaxing, Sunday morning aboard ship dissolved in a flurry of action as sailors poured out of the hatches and ran to operate the cruiser’s guns. Except for the thick pillar of smoke on the horizon, it all still felt like a drill, considering that the sea and sky surrounding them looked as empty as ever.
O’Connell stopped another officer rushing past, hurrying to tug on his flotation vest and helmet. More sailors streamed toward the big guns and to the antiaircraft batteries, taking their stations.
“Hey, Jimmy, what’s happening? Is this another drill?”
“Hell no, this isn’t a drill,” said the officer whom O’Connell had stopped. The man looked almost frantic. “Don’t you see the smoke?”
“Sure I do, but that’s way the hell over there. Besides, doesn’t anybody know it’s Sunday morning?”
“Tell that to the Japs. They just attacked Pearl Harbor.”
At O’Connell’s elbow, he heard Smith choke on his last swig of coffee. He took one last swig of his own coffee, then hurled the mug into the sea and ran to his post.
The ship that had been so sleepy only minutes before had now come fully alive. The drills that they had run through so many times meant that the call to action went smoothly, but this time there was a new urgency. This time it wasn’t a drill. This time it was for real.
Next to a battleship, a US Navy cruiser was one of the most powerful vessels on the sea in terms of sheer firepower. Designated as a heavy cruiser, Northampton was just a hair over six hundred feet in length and was armed with nine 8-inch guns, four 5-inch guns, torpedo tubes, and several antiaircraft batteries. If she gave you her full attention, you’d notice.
The United States Navy was relatively small, and most of the Pacific Fleet had been at Pearl, Northampton being a notable exception. Considering that WWI had been mostly fought in the trenches by the time the United States got involved, the navy hadn’t seen any real action since the days of Commodore Dewey and the Spanish-American War. That had been four decades ago.
As for the attack on Pearl, nobody knew any details. Rumors flew around the ship. They heard everything from the attack being an air raid, to a naval bombardment, to a full-on invasion of the Hawaiian island. What was actually happening was anybody’s guess. The sailors and officers scanned the skies and the horizon, expecting at any moment to see enemy planes or the silhouette of the Imperial Japanese Navy fleet.
More troubling was the thought of a Japanese submarine prowling these waters, waiting to launch a torpedo at the cruiser. Northampton and her crew weren’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with anything on the sea, but it was hard to fight an unseen enemy like a Jap sub.
The base at Pearl Harbor had been attacked, but it was frustrating that there was nobody to strike back against, which was any red-blooded sailor’s natural inclination. It was like a punch had been thrown out of the dark, and there was nobody to punch back against.
“Here we are on a goddamn cruiser and there’s nobody to fight,” O’Connell grumbled.