Days of Infamy (22 page)

Halsey braced against the railing, feet spread wide, thrilling to the roar of the gunnery, the sharp crack of the five-inch guns, the staccato of the 1.1-inchers and light twenty-millimeters, tracers crisscrossing the sky.

Now aft, the wall of flak was increasing, the torpedo bombers well into range, spread out as they approached. One squadron was
making a wide, sweeping turn to the west, to set them up for the classic anvil attack, simultaneous drops from two directions so that no matter which way they turned, something would hit.

It was going to be tight.

Their port side escort, the cruiser
Northampton
, was tucked in close, barely two hundred yards out, her captain expertly turning with them, even though in peacetime he’d have gotten his ass chewed for being this close in.

Enterprise
straightened out from its starboard turn only for an instant. Then orders were shouted inside the bridge, and she started to cut to port, turning away from the torpedo strike to the west, but presenting a broadside to the torpedo planes coming in from the north. At nearly the same instant, the next wave of dive bombers was on them, then pulling out. The first bomb detonated two hundred yards forward of the bow; the next one walked in closer, a hundred yards, kicking up spray. A Val, trailing smoke, apparently came straight down at them, then went into a spin. A wing sheared off, and the plane crashed into the ocean nearly amidships.

He caught a quick glimpse of the pilot. It was obvious he had been trying to ram them, dying in flames… He felt an instant of pity for him, going out like a warrior.

“We’re gonna get one!”

He looked up, tightened his grip. A shudder ran through
Enterprise
as the fourth bomb of the second wave struck square on the forward elevator, piercing the deck, blowing up below on the hangar deck. The elevator, dismounted from its hydraulic lifts, pitched up twenty feet, then slammed back down, tilted drunkenly.

We’re out of action now, he thought. As if it mattered: he had no planes left to fight with, other than the few Wildcats still aloft and rapidly running out of fuel. They’d most likely have to ditch. The bridge loudspeaker crackled with their excited reports:

“I’m on him, got him… got him, you son of a bitch …”

“This is blue two, closing on torpedo bombers to the north… Come on, tighten it up!”

“Vince… He’s on your six… He’s on your six …!”

The loudspeaker crackled off for a moment, carrier wave lost, and he could see a plane, sky blue belly, a Wildcat, breaking up, a second one diving straight down, Zero on its tail.

He swung his binoculars aft, caught a glimpse of a Wildcat trying to intersect the torpedo bombers, Zeroes from above pouncing.

“Another!”

Men around him ducked. He instinctively followed suit. He felt a damn hard slap. A geyser of water erupted directly abeam the bridge. He stood back up, water cascading down around him, wiped his face, raised binoculars, scanning to port. Nearly every gunner on the port side had lowered their barrels, was now pouring it into the wave of Jap torpedo bombers. It was hard to see with the smoke—six, maybe seven, one of them on fire, going in.

They were pressing in faster, a lot faster than Devastators.

Enterprise
started to turn again heeling back over. He kept the torpedo bombers in focus, four at least still boring in, one after another releasing, but still coming straight in after dropping, not exposing their bellies, skimming low, so low that gunners could no longer depress their barrels to hit them. At the last instant they pulled up, skimming right over the deck of
Enterprise.
Damn, they were good, one pilot actually saluting the bridge as he roared past, but the tail gunner, with a far different attitude, had his 7.7-millimeter machine gun depressed, aiming at the bridge, firing. Several shots flashed off the steel siding.

The torpedoes?

He could see two wakes, tracking in.

The blows from the two torpedoes striking starboard amidships, spaced a hundred feet apart, were stunning. It felt as if the 27,000 tons of
Enterprise
had been physically lifted half out of the water by the explosion of half a ton of high explosive in each one. In those first few milliseconds of detonation, the expanding blast actually pushed hundreds of tons of water back and away from the hull, creating a near vacuum. The detonation at nineteen feet below the water line ignited an upward rush, a column of water over two hundred feet high, a geyser weighing a thousand or more tons, until finally
gravity brought it back down in a crushing shower that could knock a man flat. Some of the explosion blew in the bulkhead, rupturing through a fuel tank filled with fuel oil, designed that way to actually serve as an outer shield of armor. The blast was so intense, though, that the shockwave burst through the fuel oil, cracking open the main hull.

Less than half a second after detonation, the outward push of the explosion was finally overcome by the weight of water, which now slammed back inward, filling the vacuum created. A tidal wall burst into the initial hole cut by the explosion itself, tearing aside steel plates as if they were sheets of paper, smashing in through the oil bunker and then into the bowels of the ship. Less than a second later the lives of forty men were snuffed out seven decks below Halsey, crushed by the thousands of tons of water that tore apart dividing bulkheads, watertight doors… thousands of tons of water in less than thirty seconds added its mass to that of the
Enterprise
, initiating
a list that if unchecked could eventually cause the ship to roll over and turtle.

Halsey stood silent, watching the flight deck relative to the horizon, saying nothing as with each passing minute the list increased.

Enterprise
seemed to be dying.

THIS HOME OF
the President was steeped in history, FDR thought, and never did he feel the weight of it press down as heavily as it did at this moment.

As his Secret Service agent pushed the wheelchair toward the closed doors of the conference room in the basement of the White House, he allowed a moment of thought beyond the present crises.

Is this how Lincoln felt when word came of First Bull Run, the bloodbath at Antietam, or the futile charges at Fredericksburg? He remembered how Lincoln was moved to tears when reading the casualty reports after yet another failed battle lamenting, My God, what do I tell the people?

He knew already that his speech delivered little more than six hours ago had served to galvanize a nation and put the world on notice. Where forty-eight hours ago there had still been voices of doubt, of dissent, even of fear, now Americans were a people united with a single goal.

But to reach that goal? He had spoken of the enemy onslaught, but the new reports coming in all afternoon, each one darker than the next… Could the Japanese indeed push us so hard, then keep us off balance for so long that our national will, aroused at this moment, might waver?

Lincoln had faced that wavering during the dark winter of 1862 and the horrid debacles in the spring of 1864, when the North was bleeding out over two thousand casualties a day, and even then, as the national will faltered, he had held the course.

I must do the same. We can be as brave and as determined as Lincoln and his generation. Our losses, appalling as they are, are small compared to the Soviets and British. During the summer and autumn, and even now, the Soviets were enduring a hundred thousand casualties a week. If we have to pay the same price to defeat this enemy, we will do so. He could conceive of no other answer except Yes, if need be, we will pay that price, we must pay that price. His friend Winston was indeed right: this was not just a war about imperialism, or economics, it was a back-to-the-wall stand of Western Christian civilization against the dark forces of totalitarianism. If we lose our will, if we turn aside now, the world will indeed be plunged into a thousand years of darkness.

The increased military presence around the White House was highly noticeable. Though he thought the reaction was extreme, there were rumors of saboteurs targeting the White House or the Capitol, and as in 1861, troops were now positioned nearby to repel any threats. Even the door to the conference room ahead was guarded by two well-armed Secret Service agents, one of them opening it at his approach.

As usual, he preferred to roll himself in rather than be pushed in and took over the wheels of his chair. Waiting for him, in what was already being called “the map room,” were the secretaries of War and Navy and their military counterparts, Admiral Stark and General Marshall. All stood as he came in, and he motioned for them to be seated as he slipped into place at the head of the table.

He paused for a moment, putting a cigarette in its holder, lighting it up, and inhaling deeply.

“Two things,” he began, without any preamble. “I want to know the situation now, as of this moment, and what your projections are for the next few days. Let me add, I have already spoken to Prime Minister Churchill once today. He is all full of enthusiasm, and I will talk with him again after this meeting. Our disaster seems to be his opportunity. I need to know the hard truth of the matter.”

He scanned the room, and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox stirred, clearing his throat.

FDR knew the real report would come from Admiral Stark, but a sense of protocol indicated the Secretary should speak first. Frank was by no means a heavyweight, though a good man and a solid manager. He was a Republican and had run against the Democrats in the 1936 election as Landon’s vice presidential candidate. He had been brought into the cabinet in 1940 as an attempt to build bipartisan support for the impending war and had turned out to be, at least as an advocate to the Congress, the news media, and the American people, a good choice. Republican but an avowed anti-Nazi who was passionate about preparedness, he was, interestingly, a combat veteran, having fought alongside Cousin Teddy as a Rough Rider in Cuba, back in 1898.

The President nodded for him to begin.

“I’ll leave the operational details to Admiral Stark,” Knox said, “but, sir, it is grim, and getting worse by the minute. There is the distinct prospect that within a week there might not be a single major American warship afloat from the coast of China to Hawaii. Hawaii itself might very well be enduring an invasion. If not Oahu, the Japanese might venture to seize one of the smaller islands in the chain. We must assume that Wake and Midway islands will be attacked as well.”

He stood for a moment, arms folded, looking over at the map of the Pacific Ocean on the north wall of the room. Numerous pins of red and some of blue were affixed to it. He then turned his attention to Admiral Stark, who sat patiently, and motioned for him to start.

Stark stood up, clearing his throat. He held a sheaf of telex printouts in his hand.

“Sir, these are the latest reports from our naval monitoring station at Mare Island and the Army station at the Presidio in San Francisco. They’ve been able to monitor some radio transmissions and have wired them here.”

“Are the cable connections to Hawaii back on line yet?” the President asked.

“No, sir. There must have been a direct hit where the cables came ashore; either that”—he paused—“or they were sabotaged.”

“Sabotaged?”

“Sir, that was our primary concern all along, and I think it should still be one. Tens of thousands living on Oahu are of direct Japanese descent. They even had their own Japanese-language newspaper on Oahu, which would print reports of the latest victories of their ‘gallant army’ in China. I think, sir, if you checked with Mr. Hoover, you would see that the FBI has dossiers on scores, perhaps hundreds who traveled back to Japan this year, some to volunteer for their army, others undoubtedly to get orders, and then came back to Oahu and even to California. It will require action on your part.”

The President nodded, taking that in, not reacting though. The subject, now that war was declared, was a delicate one. In the last war there had been excesses against those of German descent that proved to be a national embarrassment by the time calmer heads had prevailed. Besides, it was not the top priority this evening.