Thousand-Mile War by Brian Garfield

Author:Brian Garfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781602231177
Publisher: University of Alaska Press

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* 1995 ADDENDUM: The existence of this railroad gun from Singapore has been questioned by veterans and scholars. Described in one of the Japanese soldiers' diaries from the Reineke/Russell collections, the gun may have been kept in a tunnel where it couldn't be seen from the air. It wasn't found on Kiska. If it existed at all, it could be under water or may have been removed from Kiska prior to the Allied invasion in 1943.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Battle of the Komandorskis

BUNDLED IN HIS THICK BLUE bridge coat, Admiral “Soc” McMorris searched the wide ocean from the bridge of his flagship, the old (1918) light cruiser Richmond. It was 7:30 in the morning, March 26, 1943—an hour before sunrise. Strung out ahead and behind him in a six-mile column were his four destroyers and the newcomer, thirteen-year-old heavy cruiser Salt Lake City, a 600-foot seagoing teakettle better known as “Old Swayback Maru.” She had completed six months' repairs after the Battle of Cape Esperance and had just arrived to take the place of Indianapolis, which was en route back to Pearl Harbor.

McMorris had pressed far to the west in his attempt to cut Japan's Aleutian supply lines. This morning he was almost two hundred miles west of Attu, crossing an ocean deep about a hundred miles south of the Russian Komandorski Islands. The temperature stood at 34°; the air was crystal clear—in the gray dawn lookouts could see jumping fish several miles away. In the flag cabin, the admiral studied reports from PBYs of a fleet of several ships that had kept appearing and disappearing somewhere to the west. It sounded like a supply convoy, a big one; McMorris was anxious to find it.

A fifty-three-year-old Alabaman who had taught English and history at Annapolis, McMorris was best known for his ability to leaf through a thick sheaf of reports and memorize them all verbatim, while carrying on a conversation at the same time. He had ranked fifth in the USNA Class of 1912, where his purported Socratic wisdom had earned him the nickname “Soc.” Only once had he been known to blunder: On December 3, 1941, he had stated flatly that Pearl Harbor would never be attacked from the air.

In the South Pacific, with Halsey and his friend Kinkaid, he had already earned the Navy Cross, his country's second-highest military honor. Today he had no visions of glory; he anticipated only a routine interception of an enemy cargo convoy, perhaps a few destroyer-escorts to fend off before sinking the transports. Victory in the Aleutians, he was certain, would be won not by big decisive battles but by attrition—the steady erosion of the enemy's power and will.

It was routine in contested waters to call General Quarters each day at dawn. Right after breakfast McMorris' six old ships sounded GQ and went to battle stations. The Klaxons still echoed when a message was piped to the flag bridge from Radar Plot: the flagship, and leading destroyer Coghlan, were in radar contact with several unidentified ships about ten miles north.

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