Warren scheduled himself out on the first dawn search. When his new Dauntless bounded forward between lines of hooded yellow guide lights on the deck and roared off into the cold night toward the crowded stars and the Milky Way, his spirit lifted too. The new fliers had looked grave during the ready-room briefing when told of the absolute radio silence orders; the carrier would send out no homing signals and if they had to make emergency water landings, distress calls were forbidden. Thus the chilly reality of the approaching enemy was thrust on them. Not having patrolled in an SBD-3 before, Warren too was uneasy at these tough rules. But the new machine purred out two hundred miles; then, in a soft lilac dawn and a beautiful sunrise, its new electronic homing device returned him dead on Point Option. A pleasant sight, those two carrier islands nicking the horizon! He landed with a clean catch of the number three wire. A great airplane, sure enough: improved navigation gear, a sweet engine, self-sealing tanks, extra guns, thicker armor. Even his gunner, a gloomy Kentucky mountain boy named Cornett, who seldom spoke and seemed to be using a foreign language when he did, climbed smiling out of the rear seat.
“Not a bad crate at that,” said Warren.
Cornett spat tobacco juice and said something like, “Rakn rat smat new dew.”
“Warren! Warren! It’s started. They’re bombing Dutch Harbor.” “Jesus.” Warren sat up on his bunk, rubbed his eyes, and seized his trousers. “What do you know! Alaska, hey? Screwed again.”
His roommate’s eyes shone. Peter Goff was an ensign new to the squadron, a youngster from upstate New York with a red beard like Byron’s. He said eagerly, “Maybe we’ll head north, cut off their line of retreat, and cream ‘em.”
“That’s three days’ steaming, fella.” Warren jumped barefoot to the cold iron deck.
When they got to Scouting Six ready room the big reclining chairs were full. Silently the aviators stared at words crawling across the yellow teletype screen:
DIVERSION MOVE AT ALASKA EXPECTED MAIN THRUST WILL BE AT MIDWAY DUTCH HARBOR PREPARED AND WELL DEFENDED
The commander of Scouting Six, a tough stocky old hand named Earl Gallaher, hung the big Pacific chart over the blackboard to discuss time and distance problems of a possible dash against the Japs to the north. The younger fliers listened hungrily. This was getting down to business. But Warren noted a new fleet course being chalked up: 120 degrees, southeast, away from the Aleutians, away from Midway, away from the wind. Just another routine turn to hug Point Luck; no action.
Within the hour words were sliding across the screen again:
PBY PATROL PLANE REPORTS QUOTE MANY HEAVY ENEMY SHIPS BEARING 237 DISTANCE 685 FROM MIDWAY UNQUOTE
The word “Midway” triggered shouts and rebel yells in the Scouting Six ready room. Everybody started talking at once. The CO jumped to the chart and drew a heavy red crayon ring at the point of the sighting. “Okay, here we go. Range about one thousand miles. They’ll be in striking range in sixteen, seventeen hours.”
The fliers were still clustering at the chart, spanning distances with fingers and arguing, when the teletype came to chattering life:
FROM CINCPAC URGENT THAT IS NOT THE ENEMY STRIKING FORCE THAT IS THE LANDING FORCE THE STRIKING FORCE WILL HIT FROM THE NORTHWEST AT DAYLIGHT TOMORROW
“Son of a bitch!” said Pete Goff at Warren’s elbow. “How do they know all that in Pearl Harbor?”
Night fell. Midnight drew on. Few Scouting Six pilots went to their bunks. They were reading, or writing letters, or going on with the everlasting talk about women and flying; but the buzz of words had a different sound, lower and more tense. Staff gossip kept drifting in. Spruance was receiving the dispatches not in flag plot, but on a couch in the flag mess where he sat reading a mildewy biography of George Washington, merely initialling the message board. Meanwhile, in a flag plot like an overturned beehive, Captain Browning was already making out the preliminary battle orders.
The teletype now and then clicked out a burst of words about Dutch Harbor, or about the oncoming Jap landing force; Army Air Corps bombers from the atoll claimed to be pounding it and sinking battleships, cruisers, and whatnot in high-level attacks. Nobody placed any stock in that. The dive-bomber pilots had a word for high-level bombing at sea: it was like trying to drop a marble on a scared mouse. “What about the flattops? Where are their carriers? Any dope about the goddamned carriers?” All through the ready rooms that was the restless litany.
Warren went topside to check the weather again. Moon almost full; stars, light clouds, cold crosswind, the Big Dipper on the starboard quarter. Loud splashing far below of a high-speed run. Closing the enemy fast now! On the flight deck aft, moonlight glinted on the wings of jammed-together planes, and here and there the pencil-thin red flashlight beams of repair work barely showed. The enlisted plane captains squatted in small knots, where sailor talk went on and on: about the better torpedo planes coming to the fleet in August, about religion, about sports, about family, about Honolulu whorehouses; not much talk about the subject most on every man’s mind, the battle coming with the dawn.
Wide awake, Warren strode the breezy steady deck. The sea all around danced with moonlight. Passing through the hangar deck below, he had noted with peculiar clarity the quantities of explosive materials all about — bombs, gassed-up planes, full amino racks, oil drums, torpedo warheads. The Enterprise was an iron eggshell eight hundred feet long, Hill of dynamite and human beings. Of this, he was edgily aware as never before. Jap eggshells just like it were probably only a few hundred miles away and closing.
Who would surprise whom? Suppose an enemy submarine had spotted this force? Far from unlikely! In that case Jap aircraft might strike at sunup. And even if this force did get the jump on the Japs, would the assault come off? In fleet exercises, even with no enemy opposition, a coordinated attack of fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo planes had never yet worked. Some leader had failed to get the word, someone’s navigation had gone wrong, or bad weather had scattered the formations. Too many Enterprise fliers were green recruits like Pete Goff. The battered Yorktowris aviators were a sand lot team, scraped together off the beach after the Coral Sea losses. What would such a ragtag force do against seasoned Jap airmen who had wrecked Pearl Harbor and driven the British navy out of the Indian Ocean?
Yet there would be no more rehearsals, no more drills. This was it. Unless a surprise attack came off with total success, swift skilled Jap reprisal would explode the Enterprise into a grandiose fireball. He would either burn up in it, or if he was airborne he would fall in the sea when his fuel ran out. These were not fifty-fifty prospects.
And yet, Warren accepted them as all in the day’s work. He no more expected to die in the coming battle than does a passenger who buys an air ticket from New York to Los Angeles. He was a professional flying man. He had flown through a lot of enemy fire. He thought he knew enough about it to get through the day alive, with any luck. At the after end of the flight deck, aft of the last dark row of planes, with the wind whipping his trousers, he stood and watched the broad moonlit wake rushing away. There was no place he would rather be, he thought, and nothing he would rather do than fly against the Japs tomorrow.
He wanted a cigarette. Returning to the island to go below, he glanced up again at the sky and he halted, his face turned upward, recalling a scene he had not thought of for years. He was a boy of seven, walking at night under just such a sky, on a wharf piled with fresh snow, hand in hand with Dad, who was telling him about the big distances and sizes of the stars.
“Dad, who put the stars there? God?”
“Well, Warren, yes, we believe the Lord God did that.”
“You mean Jesus Christ himself stuck the stars up in the sky?” The boy was trying to picture the kindly long-haired white-robed man hanging gigantic balls of fire in black space.
He could recall his father’s silence, then the hesitant reply. “Well, Warren, you sort of get into rocks and shoals there. Jesus is our Lord. That’s true enough. He’s also the s
on of God, and God created the universe and everything in it. You’ll understand more about all this when you’re older.”
Warren could date the start of his doubts from that talk. In one of their rare arguments about religion, many years later, his father had cited the night sky as his old proof that there must be a God.
“Dad, I don’t want to offend you, but to me those stars look pretty randomly scattered. And think about their size and distance! How can anything on this earth matter? We’re microbes on a grain of dust. Life is a stupid and insignificant accident, and when it’s over we’re just dead meat.”
His father had never again discussed religion with him.
The stars were majestically rocking over the prickly radar masts. They had never seemed so beautiful to Warren Henry. But despite the vivid patterns of the constellations, they still looked randomly scattered.
He lay in the dark in his cabin, chain-smoking. Pete Goff softly snored in another bunk. The third roommate, the squadron exec, was writing in the ready room. Warren yearned for just a couple of hours’ sleep. He thought he had better try reading, and switched on the bunk light. Usually his glance passed over the black-bound Bible as though Dad’s gift weren’t in the book rack. Just the thing to make him drowsy! He propped himself up, and on a fortune-telling impulse opened the book at random. His eyes fell on this verse in the second Book of Kings:.
Thus saith the Lord, set thy house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.
It gave him a turn. He had never quite stopped believing in God, though he thought He must be more like his father, for forbearance and a sense of humor, than the thundering blue-nosed God of the preachers. “Well, ask a silly question, hey?” he thought. “I better mind my own business and leave the rest to You.”
He read the Creation chapters, then the stories of Noah and the Tower of Babel. He had not looked at these since Sunday school days. Surprisingly, they seemed not boring, but terse and perceptive. Adam’s dodging of responsibility was something he saw every day in the squadron; Eve was a lovely troublemaker like too many he had tangled with; Cain was every envious hating son of a bitch in uniform; and the storm description in the deluge chapter was damned good, the real thing. He began to bog down in the patriarchs, and Jacob’s troubles with Laban did the trick. He fell asleep clothed, his gold wings gleaming in the light he was too drowsy to turn off.
“Now General Quarters. General Quarters. Man your battle stations. ”
The dawn GQ call boomed over the windy flight deck. Stars still twinkled in the black sky, and in the graying east one cloud glowed pink. Pulling on helmets and life jackets, sailors poured out on the gloomy deck, some to the gun tubs, some to the aircraft, some rolling out fire-fighting equipment. Warren was in his plane, checking a balky canopy. Most of the aviators were still in the ready room; they had all long since breakfasted, and were just waiting. Warren, usually a sausage-and-eggs man, had taken toast and one cup of coffee to keep his insides quietly in order. In the dark morning hours the teletype had fallen silent. Of enemy carriers, still no word.
The canopy was moving freely, yet Warren lingered in the plane. The stars faded, the sky went from indigo to blue, the sea brightened. Starkly clear in Warren Henry’s mind was a relative movement diagram of what was probably happening. The Jap carriers — if Pearl Harbor was right about a dawn strike — would now be about two hundred miles west of the Enterprise. In a God’s-eye view, the two moving carrier forces and the motionless Midway atoll made an equilateral triangle on the sea, and the triangle shrank as both forces speeded toward the atoll. Some time this morning the distance between the forces would close to strike range, and that would be the flash point of the battle. Of course, the Japs might not be there at all. They might be down off Hawaii, in which case Admiral Nimitz had fallen for a historic sucker play.
The sun pushed a blazing yellow arc over the sharp horizon and mounted. Well, no Jap daybreak attack; one hazard passed! That was what Warren had really been waiting for. He went down to the ready room, and as he was walking in, the loudspeaker rasped, “Pilots, man your planes.“
“Okay… This is it… Here we go…”
The fliers jumped from their chairs, boots thudding on the metal deck, faces taut and eager. This time by a common impulse they turned to each other and shook hands. Then, slapping shoulders and joking, about half of them had crowded through the door when in the passageway the loudspeaker bawled, “Now belay that last word. Pilots return to their ready rooms. ”
Angry and jumpy as racehorses pulled up short after a bad start, the aviators trudged back to their chairs, trading rude comments about “those idiots up there.” A bad business, Warren thought, some nervous faltering on the command level.
What had happened “up there” was that Captain Miles Browning had given the order, and Rear Admiral Spruance had countermanded it.
Spruance had already discomfited Halsey’s chief of staff well before dawn. Prior to the GQ alarm Browning and his operations officer had mounted to Halsey’s flag shelter, a small steel eyrie high up above the flying bridge; and as Spruance had left no call, Browning had not disturbed him. A short shadowy form in the starlight outside the shelter had greeted them. “Good morning, gentlemen.”
“Ah — Admiral?”
“Yes. Looks like we’ll have good weather for it.”
As day broke, Spruance leaned on the bulwark outside, watching the ship come to life. Captain Browning was nervily ready for battle, his head was full of contingency plans, but this early presence of the placid Spruance was unsettling. Halsey would be pacing now like a caged cat. The chief of staff, who was wearing a leather windbreaker like Halsey’s, did all the pacing, smoking cigarette after cigarette with Halsey gestures, fuming at the lack of news, arguing with the operations officer about where the Jap carriers could be.
Abruptly he seized a microphone and issued the summons to the pilots that had greeted Warren in the ready room.
Spruance called in, “Why are we doing this, Captain?”
“If you’ll look here, please, Admiral.”
Spruance amiably came to the chart table.
“By now, sir, the Japs have certainly launched. It’s broad day. They probably launched well before dawn. We know the range of their planes. They must be somewhere along this arc, give or take twenty miles.” He swept a stiff forefinger in a slim circle near Midway. “They’ll be sighted any minute. I want to be ready to hit them.”
“How long does it take our pilots to man their planes?”
Browning glanced at the operations officer, who said with a touch of pride, “On this ship, Admiral, two minutes.”
“Why not leave them in their ready rooms for now? They’ll be in those cockpits a long time today.”
Spruance walked out on the sunlit platform, and Browning testily broadcast the recall.
The flag shelter was a small area, cramped by the chart table and a couple of settees. A rack of confidential publications, a coffee maker, microphones, telephones, and radio speakers made up the equipment. One speaker, tuned to the frequency of the Midway patrol planes, was emitting a power hum and loud popping static. About half an hour after sunrise this speaker burst out in gargling tones, “Enemy carriers. Flight5S reports.“
“Kay, that’s IT!” Browning again snatched the microphone. Spruance came inside. The three officers stared at the humming and popping receiver. Browning exploded, pounding the chart table with his fist, “Well? Well, you stupid son of a bitch? What’s the longitude and latitude?” He glanced in angry embarrassment at Spruance. “Christ! I assumed the squirt would give us the location in his next breath. What kind of imbeciles are flying those Catalinas?”
“Their combat air patrol may have attacked him,” said Spruance.
“Admiral, we’ve got the yellow bastards sighted now. Let’s get the pilots to their planes.”
“But if the enemy’s out of range we’ll have to close him, won’t we? Maybe for an hour or more.”
With a miserable grimace, as Spruance went out in the sunshine, Browning slammed the microphone into its bracket.
A dragging interval ensued; then the same voice, much clearer, broke through the random popping: “Many enemy planes bearing 320 distance 150. Flight 58 reports. ”
Again, humming silence.
More violently, the chief of staff cursed the PBY pilot for giving no position. He poured coffee, let it stand and cool; smoked, paced, studied the chart, paced some more, turned the pages of an old magazine and hurled it into a corner, while his operations officer, a burly quiet aviator, kept measuring with dividers and ruler on his chart. Spruance lounged outside, elbows on the bulwark.
“Flight Q2 reports.” It was a younger, more excited voice barking out of the speaker. “Two carriers and battleships bearing 320 from Midway, distance 180, course135, speed 2$ Dog Love.“
“AH! God love that lad!” Browning plunged for the chart, where the operations officer was hastily marking the position.
Spruance came inside, took a rolled-up maneuvering board graph he had tucked in a wall rack, and spread it beside him on a settee. “What was that position again? And what is our present position?”
Rapidly measuring, scrawling calculations, barking questions into the intercom to flag plot several decks below, Browning soon rattled off the latitudes and longitudes to Spruance.
“Is the message authenticated?” Spruance asked.
“Authenticated, authenticated? Well, is it?” Browning snapped. The operations officer threw open a loose-leaf book while Spruance was spanning distances on his small graph with thumb and forefinger. “ ’The farmer in the dell,’“ the operations officer quoted, “ ’any two alternate letters.’ The pilot gave us Dog Love. That works.”