“Well, doesn’t look like the Japs are going to drive us back to San Francisco after all,” George remarked. He spoke with the flat vowels and swallowed r’s of the Boston fisherman he was before he joined the Navy to make sure the Army didn’t conscript him.
“Damn well better not,” said Fremont Blaine Dalby, the CPO who commanded the twin 40mm antiaircraft gun for which George jerked shells.
“Didn’t look so good when they were bringing their carriers down from Midway and knocking the snot out of us here,” George said.
“They had their chance. Now it’s our turn.” Chief Dalby was a man who knew what he knew. Even his name showed that: it showed he came from a rock-ribbed Republican family in a country where the Republicans, caught between the Socialists and the Democrats, hadn’t amounted to a hill of beans since the 1880s.
“About time, too.” Fritz Gustafson, the gun crew’s loader, talked as if the government charged him for every word he said.
“If we can get Midway back…” George said.
“That’d be pretty good,” Dalby agreed. He wasn’t shy about talking-not even a little bit. “Run the Japs out there, run ’em off Wake, too, so they don’t come back to Midway, and then we can stop worrying about the real Sandwich Islands, the ones down here, for a while.”
“Gotta hang on to Hotel Street,” Gustafson said. George and Fremont Dalby both snorted. Hotel Street not only had more saloons and cathouses per square inch than any other street in Honolulu, it probably had more than any other street in the world. Sailors and soldiers and Marines might not give a damn about the Sandwich Islands as a whole, but they’d be bound to fight like men possessed to keep Hotel Street in American hands.
“Think four of these baby flattops are enough to take Midway?” George asked.
“Dunno. I ain’t no admiral,” Dalby said. As a CPO, he had a much smaller sphere of authority than a man with a broad gold stripe on his sleeve. But within that sphere, his authority was hardly less absolute. “Tell you what, though-I hope like hell there’s a couple more of those babies somewhere halfway between here and the coast.”
“Yeah.” George nodded. There was a gap in the middle of the eastern Pacific that neither aircraft from Oahu nor those from the West Coast could cover very well. Japan had done her best to get astride the supply line between the mainland and the Sandwich Islands and starve the islands into submission. It didn’t quite work, but it came too close for comfort, both metaphorically and literally.
Thinking of U.S. warplanes looking for enemy aircraft and ships made George notice the combat air patrol above Pearl Harbor. Fighters always buzzed overhead these days. Y-ranging gear should be able to give U.S. forces enough warning to scramble airplanes, but nobody seemed inclined to take chances.
“Wonder how come Jap engines sound screechier than ours,” George said. Japanese carrier-based fighters had strafed the Townsend more than once. He knew the sound of those engines better than he wanted to.
“They take ’em out of the washing machines they used to buy from us,” Dalby suggested. George laughed. Any joke a CPO made was funny because a CPO made it.
The Townsend sailed a couple of days later, escorting the Tripoli and the Yorktown north and west toward Midway. They wouldn’t get there in a hurry, not at the escort carriers’ lackadaisical cruising speed. George wasn’t enthusiastic about getting there at all. He’d gone north and west from Oahu too many times, and sailed into danger each and every one of them.
You always ran to your battle station like a madman when general quarters sounded. When you didn’t know if it was a drill or the real McCoy, you ran even harder.
Run as he would, George couldn’t get to the twin 40mm mount ahead of Fremont Dalby. The gun chief seemed drawn there by magnetism instead of his legs, which were shorter than George’s.
“What can I tell you?” he said when George asked him about it. “I know I’ve got to be here, so I damn well am.” In a way, that didn’t make any sense at all. In another way, it did.
Up above the bridge, the Y-ranging antenna spun round and round, round and round. It would pick up incoming Japanese aircraft long before the naked eye could. How much good picking them up ahead of time would do was an open question. They weren’t any easier for guns on the destroyer to shoot down. With luck, though, fighters from the carriers could drive them off before they got within gunnery range.
Few of the islands north and west of Kauai were inhabited; if not for its position, Midway wouldn’t have been, either. Albatrosses and other sea birds nested on the rocks and reefs rising above the Pacific. Some of the enormous birds glided past the Townsend and the other ships in the flotilla.
Pointing to a long-winged albatross, George said, “I’m surprised Y-ranging doesn’t pick up those things. They’re damn near as big as a fighter.” He exaggerated, but not too much.
“I hear from the guys on the hydrophones that they’ve got to be careful, or else they really can mistake a whale for a sub-and the other way round,” Fremont Dalby said.
“That wouldn’t be good,” George said.
“No shit!” No, Fritz Gustafson didn’t talk a lot, but he got plenty of mileage out of what he did say.
As they got closer to Midway, tension built. George didn’t want to do anything but stick close to his gun. The Townsend had come through a couple of ferocious attacks. Blazing away with everything you had gave you a chance to come through, but the pilots in the enemy airplanes were the guys in the driver’s seat these days.
Dive bombers and escorting fighters roared off the escort carriers and flew up toward Midway. “Still not obvious the Japs have Y-ranging,” Dalby said. “If they don’t, we can plaster their aircraft on Midway before they even know we’re on the way.”
“Wouldn’t break my heart,” George said. “Bastards tried to do it to us at Pearl Harbor. Not like we don’t owe ’em.”
“If they’d done it, I bet they would have followed up with a landing,” the gun chief said. “Maybe we’ll be able to do the same up here before long.”
“That wouldn’t break my heart, either,” George said.
The more time went by without a warning over the PA that the Y-ranging gear was picking up enemy airplanes, the happier he got. Maybe the American bombers really were knocking the daylights out of whatever the Japs still had on Midway.
Then the speakers crackled to life. George groaned, and he wasn’t the only one. “May I have your attention?” the exec said, as if he didn’t know he would. “Our aircraft report the Japanese appear to have abandoned Midway… May I have your attention? Our aircraft report the Japanese appear to have abandoned Midway.”
“Fuck me,” Fremont Dalby said reverently.
“Wow,” George agreed.
“Little yellow bastards know how to cut their losses,” Dalby said. “If they can’t take the Sandwich Islands, what’s Midway worth to ’em? It’s out at the ass end of nowhere, and it’s got to be even more expensive for the Japs to supply than it is for us.”
“What do you want to bet they’ve bailed out of Wake, too?” George said.
“I wouldn’t mind,” the gun chief told him.
“Beats working,” Fritz Gustafson said.
“Oh, hell, yes,” Dalby said. “If they’re gone from Midway and Wake, what are we gonna do? Go after ’em? Charge through all their little islands and head for the Philippines? We need the Philippines like we need a hole in the head.”
“Amen,” George said. “If they want to call this mess a draw, I don’t mind. I don’t mind a bit.” The rest of the gun crew nodded. They’d all developed a thoroughgoing respect for Japanese skill and courage. The Japs had already come too close to killing them more than once. George knew he wouldn’t be sorry never to see any more maneuverable fighters with meatballs on their wings.