Sentinels of Fire by Deutermann P. T

Author:Deutermann, P. T. [Deutermann, P. T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, War, thriller
ISBN: 9781466837331
Amazon: 1466837330
Goodreads: 20442479
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-07-15T07:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

The next morning our squad dog acknowledged our damage report, and we were ordered to depart station and proceed down to the tender Dixie at Kerama Retto. The big-deck carrier formations were almost back in the area, so we had CAP during the transit. We’d learned that Murray had been hit by three Vals in waterline strikes almost simultaneously. She’d rolled over and sunk a minute later with the loss of all but thirteen souls. One other picket had been badly damaged by a similar night-strike and was being towed to Kerama Retto. Two other pickets had been attacked but had managed to fight off the suiciders with little damage. There were no air contacts as we started down, so I retired to the captain’s inport cabin and began to write the letters to the families of the men lost when mount fifty-one was blown over the side. We’d searched the area of our picket station at dawn, while still at sunrise GQ, in the scant hope that someone might have made it out of the sinking gun mount, but found absolutely nothing. We’d now lost enough people that the empty seats on the messdecks were becoming alarmingly noticeable.

I ground out the letters over a two-hour period as we wove our way south and east. There was a basic format, and then, with the help of the men’s division chiefs, I interjected personal details wherever I could so that the families wouldn’t think we’d mimeographed their letter of condolence. In each case, I was careful to use language suggesting that their loved one had been killed instantly and suffered a minimum of mortal anguish. The truth was, of course, quite different. That plane had hit the mount broadside with enough energy to lift it from its roller path and smash it sideways right over the side in the blink of an eye. The mount would have been buttoned up for GQ, which meant there was no way out for any of them. Some of the men would have been killed outright at the moment of impact. Some of them, however, would have discovered that they had no chance whatsoever only when the remains of the gun mount passed through the first few hundred feet of depth on the way to the dark oblivion of the Pacific Ocean bottom and imploded.

If this keeps up, I told myself, we all might soon join them. It would come down to how many kamikaze pilots and planes the Japs had left, and apparently that number was a lot bigger than all the king’s intel officers had known. For the first time in my naval career, I experienced the helplessness that any individual feels in the face of the sheer, overwhelming power of war at sea in the face of strong odds. The radar picket destroyers needed some protection, but Halsey wasn’t going to bring the picket line back into the protection of the fleet formation. We had become the equivalent of a seaborne tripwire.

I

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