ONE
THE SURIGAO STRAITS, LEYTE, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, OCTOBER 1944
The battleship Nevada’s gunnery officer, Commander Brent Willson, frowned as he stared down at the circular radar scope. “This picture isn’t exactly useful,” he said, shaking his head. “Look at all that clutter down at the entrance. Can we maybe tune it?”
“Actually, sir, that’s a pretty accurate picture,” I said. “I looked at a chart of these straits this morning; the western entrance is a cluster of a couple dozen small islands and exposed reefs. Once they get up into the straits proper, their formation will come into better focus.”
“I sure hope so, Mister Bishop,” he said. “The bridge says it’s darker’n a well-digger’s ass out there. The primary optical range finder can’t help us tonight until we hit something and make it burn.”
“Yes, sir, I know,” I said. “This’ll be a radar shoot all the way. The OpOrder says the admiral wants to open on them at twenty-seven thousand yards. By then they’ll be in the narrowest part of the straits. And, we’ll have crossed their T.”
Willson smiled. “Admiral Jellicoe would approve. Assuming they keep coming after the PT boats and the destroyers take their shots, this will be a slaughter.”
“Just like Pearl Harbor,” I said. “Not like those bastards don’t deserve it.”
“Amen to that, Mister Bishop,” Willson said, quietly.
I looked around at the fifteen men manning their various stations in the space called Main Battery Plot. I was the ship’s fire-control officer, which was a principal job in the Gunnery Department aboard USS Nevada. Most of the Plot crew were tending to the hundreds of dials, brass cranks, and switches on the three-thousand-pound analog computer squatting in the middle of the space, the Mark One-Able gunfire computer. It was relatively cold down in Plot. We were three decks down from the main deck. Armored decks and massive, hydraulically operated hatches built into them sealed us inside the protective steel envelope that encased our battleship’s vital spaces. I recalled the instructor at gunnery school calling it the “armored box.” Think of a battleship as a giant shoebox-shaped steel enclosure, he’d said. Surrounded by a ship’s streamlined hull. The “box” contains all the vitals—the machinery for the guns, the Main Battery magazines, Plot, the four engineering spaces, vital interior communications centers, and the ship’s gyro and stable element. The rest of the ship—the weather decks, topside superstructure, berthing compartments, mess decks—could get hammered in a gunfight with another battlewagon, but as long as that armored box is intact, you can shoot back.
A battleship fight, I mused. There’d only been one other in this Pacific war, when USS Washington wrecked IJN Kirishima off Savo Island in the Solomons. Some of the ships in tonight’s battle line, including my ship, USS Nevada BB-36, were survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and had been raised from the mud around Ford Island and sent back to the States to be rebuilt. They were antiques, of a sort. Top speed of twenty-one knots, so they couldn’t run with the big dogs—the new, thirty-three-knot, sixty-thousand-ton Iowa class battleships, who could keep up with the growing fleet of big-deck fast aircraft carriers. Some in our task group, like us, carried “only” fourteen-inch guns; the four Iowas sported nine sixteen-inch guns.
Nevada was suitable mostly for shore bombardment these days, but not much else. The older battleships were more like the armored dragons who’d fought at Jutland in 1916, not to be trifled with, but ill-suited to today’s grand scale fleet engagements, where carriers fought each other at distances of hundreds of miles. On the other hand, now that the so-called Big Blue Fleet had transitioned to a campaign of island assaults, like this attack on the Japanese-occupied Philippine Islands, I knew that those poor bastards charged with going ashore to hit well-defended beaches were most appreciative when one of the elderly dragons materialized out of the offshore mists and started belching fire and throwing seventeen-hundred-pound high-capacity shells into Japanese defensive positions. And, truth be told, even the Glamor Girls, the Iowas, were seeing their mission transformed into serving as massive floating anti-aircraft gun platforms. Japanese battleships, having had a taste of massed US Navy carrier air, tended to remain far from the fray here in late 1944.
I checked the bulkhead’s ten-foot-high illuminated status boards. The information was displayed in vertical columns of amber-colored, backlighted plexiglass. The first set of columns listed our ship’s movement and ambient conditions: course, speed, true winds, barometric pressure, real-time pitch, roll, yaw, air temperature, relative humidity, powder magazine temperature, projectile magazine temperature. The second column listed target information: ship type—which in tonight’s engagement was actually going to be Japanese battleships—their plotted course, predicted speed of advance, range, and bearing. The third column listed what other ships would be in company with them, along with their gunnery reach. The fourth listed information on what we were going to shoot at them: the type of ordnance, the predicted time of flight, the predicted interval between salvos, how many of our ten fourteen-inch guns would be firing.
We knew tonight was going to be special: we were going to shoot the “good stuff,” armor-piercing 2,300-pound shells that would be capable of piercing fourteen inches of the best Vicker’s armored steel. With the evolution of our mission from battle line to shore bombardment, Nevada only carried 250 rounds of the AP ammunition; everything else now was high-cap except for some white phosphorus rounds, known as Willie Peter (for the letters WP), used for spotting. The high-cap shells were general purpose, point-detonating crowd pleasers that would throw tanks and artillery pieces a hundred feet into the air and collapse bunkers, tunnels, and other fortifications buried as much as fifty feet deep. Tonight was special because most of the ships in our formation had been battered down into the mud by the attack of 7 December. This was going to be revenge of the best sort, and definitely enjoyed cold.
All of the light panels showing data were being fed from the massive computer and its daughter, the Mark Eight-Able rangekeeper, sitting right next to it in the middle of the Main Battery Plotting room. Some of the panels were dark because we had not yet established our own radar contact on the anticipated Japanese formation. Our ambush battle line had been established at the top, or northeastern, end of the Surigao Straits, which itself was the gateway from the southwest into Leyte Gulf.
There were five other battleships in the American formation: West Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, and California. The other, western, end gave access from the straits out into the Sulu Sea, where an Imperial Japanese Navy task force, consisting of two battleships, IJN Yamashiro and IJN Fuso, and their escorts were expected to enter the straits around midnight and head northeast, in an effort to surprise the Americans who were making an amphibious landing on the eastern shores of Leyte Island.
Waiting for them at the northeastern end were our six battleships (invisible to the Japanese, who purportedly did not have radar), twelve heavy cruisers, and twenty-eight torpedo-firing destroyers. As the Japanese came up the straits, they’d initially be harassed by a swarm of PT boats, then attacked by two squadrons of destroyers. And then, once they were within our range, the big boys would get into it with radar-controlled salvos of fourteen- and sixteen-inch shells plunging down on them from a range of thirteen and a half miles. Plus, we would have “crossed their T”: the entire battle line of American battleships would be able to bring all their guns to bear on the entire Japanese column, which, because they were advancing up a relatively narrow channel straight at us, could only return fire from the lead ship of that column. With any luck, it would be a much-deserved slaughter, indeed.
“California reports radar contact,” the fire-control chief announced. “Bearing two four five true, range forty-six thousand yards.” That’s a good radar, I thought—twenty-three miles.
The talk between ships (TBS) radio speaker, mounted in the overhead, came to life. “Nemesis, this is Ranger: enemy in radar contact. Change one to the OpOrder: I intend to open fire, at my command, at thirty thousand yards. Remember Pearl Harbor. Acknowledge.”
Ranger was the call sign of Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, commander of the battleship fire support task group, telling his force of six battleships what his latest intentions were. I listened as each of the dragons replied in turn, acknowledging the admiral’s message. Remember Pearl Harbor, I thought. Nice touch. Thirty thousand yards. Fifteen miles. Yamashiro and Fuso were elderly remnants of the interwar battleship construction campaign in Japan, just like we were. Fifteen miles was beyond the extreme end of their own gunnery range.
“Range is now forty-three thousand yards,” the chief announced.
“Do we have radar contact yet?” Commander Willson asked.
“Negative, sir,” the chief replied. “California has the new surface-search radar; ours won’t see ’em until about thirty-five thousand yards. California will report range and bearing once every three minutes until the rest of the group acquires.”
I walked over to the main tracking table to examine the plot, where California’s reported radar contacts were being plotted on a navigational chart of the straits. It looked like they were just approaching the area where they’d be jumped by a swarm of PT boats. The captain had said at the morning’s planning session that the torpedo boats weren’t expected to accomplish much in the way of torpedo hits because the Japanese had their first-class cruisers and destroyers screening them. But they’ll raise hell and take names, the skipper had noted. Hopefully throw their formation into confusion, shoot up some of their bridges and pilothouses, scare the hell out of all the topside AA gunners, stuff like that. And while the Japanese are dealing with all that excitement, two squadrons of our destroyers will be coming at them from each side of the strait at thirty-three knots, each of them capable of firing ten torpedoes into the Japanese formation.
“Will there be anything left for us?” the executive officer had asked innocently.
The captain had smiled. “Once the destroyers hit ’em, it’ll turn into a melee,” he’d said. “Hopefully that will happen when they’re fifteen miles from us. You remember that the Japanese coded signal to attack Pearl Harbor was: East Wind Brings Rain? We’re going to deliver a different kind of rain tonight. Six battleships firing full salvos. Just the prospect warms the cockles of my icy black heart.”
“Range is now 39,500 yards. Track indicates steady bearing of two four degrees true, closing.”
I picked up a sound-powered phone and called the director officer stationed at the top of the ship’s forward director tower, some 120 feet above the water line.
“See anything?” I asked. The director officer was Lieutenant (junior grade) Marty Cullen, my roommate. His battle station was inside the Main-Battery director, a squat steel box at the very top of the tower. The director contained the ship’s stereo optical rangefinder, a circular beam some thirty feet in length and a foot in diameter, which housed the optical telescope and mirrors that allowed its operator to give a precise range to the target.
“Lightning, white and red,” Marty replied. “Long way off. There’s so much humidity that I’ve got guys hanging out on the optical beam, wiping the lenses.”
“This is gonna be a radar shoot,” I reminded him.
“Hell, yes,” he said. “But I’m gonna have a ringside seat unless we run out of lens tissues.”
I grinned and went for some coffee. Lieutenant (junior grade) Jackie Beamish took over supervision of the main plotting table. He was the assistant fire-control officer. He hadn’t been aboard for Surigao Straits, but he had been with us for the previous island assaults on Saipan and Peleliu, so he was no novice. The ship was barely moving, steaming at five knots on a course perpendicular to the enemy’s axis of approach. We just had to wait. Eighteen miles down the straits, there was a fierce battle taking place, as American destroyers fought it out with Japanese heavy cruisers and destroyers to get close enough to launch their torpedoes at the two Japanese battleships.
Soundless lightning, white and red.
For a moment, I felt some comfort in being where I was: deep inside the armored box of a battleship, instead of in the middle of that thirty-knot running gunfight, with ships blasting away at each other at point blank range while maneuvering to avoid being hit or even run over. I’d secretly always envied the destroyermen, with their fast, nimble ships, negligible armor, and daring maneuvers. I felt slightly chagrined that I was here and not there, twisting and turning in the midst of a flashing confrontation between tin cans and much, much bigger ships. I could just see it: our 2,100-ton destroyers dashing through the Japanese formation, pumping five-inch rounds against those towering, armored pagodas while white-hot eight-inch shells sought out their own unarmored sides. If you lived through it, you’d by God have some stories to tell, I thought.
Admittedly, that could be a big if.
“Nemesis, this is Ranger. The enemy formation has slowed. Ships in radar contact and with stable solutions may expect to commence firing in about five minutes to give our destroyers time to clear. At my command, regardless of range. Acknowledge.”
The six battleships again acknowledged the order. It was clear what the admiral wanted: if you have a fire-control solution, start shooting when I give the order. If you don’t, wait until you do.
“Fill the Main-Battery hoists,” Commander Willson ordered.
The fourteen-inch gun turret officers acknowledged. Nevada had four Main-Battery gun turrets. Two mounted down on the main deck—one forward, one aft—contained three fourteen-inch guns apiece. Two more—also mounted one forward and one aft, just behind and above the three-barreled turrets—contained two guns each.
Down in the magazines the hoist elevators would begin to whine as powder bags were lifted four decks up to position the silk bags on one side of the ten open breeches. On the other side, the projectiles, each weighing more than a ton, began their ascent, stopping just above the transfer-tray fire doors where the elevator machinery rotated them to the horizontal position. When the “load” command finally came, the projectile would be pushed through the flash-fire prevention shutters onto the transfer trays, which would then lower the shell onto the rammer tray, after which the hydraulic rammer would come forward and force the projectile into the breech and all the way forward, until the shell’s copper rotating bands engaged the rifling in the sixty-eight-foot-long barrel, leaving only the very back end of the shell, called the boattail, visible.
The rammer would then withdraw and as many as six silk powder bags, depending on the anticipated range, would be rolled down onto the rammer tray The powder bags, each filled with nitrocellulose powder grains the size of cigarettes, would then be pushed a lot more gently forward into the breech chamber, snug up against the boattail. The rammer would again withdraw and the breechblock would start rising into position. The chief gunner would lean down over the gleaming stainless steel maw of the breech and place what looked like a hot-pan holder against the back of the last powder bag just as the breechblock came forward to lock into the face of the breech. The gunners prided themselves on knowing how long to wait before placing that fabric patch, containing simple black powder, up against that last bag, just before the block closed and rotated into locked position.
Once the shell and its propellant were safely locked into the gun barrel, the gunner would press the ready button. Up in the control booth, at the back of the turret and one level above the gun pits, the turret officer would watch for all three barrels to report ready. When he had three green lights on his console, he’d press his ready button, which would light up the fire-control display boxes for unloaded/loaded/ready on the electric status board down in Plot. That was the signal for the Mark One-Able computer to begin producing continuous train and elevation orders. The guns themselves wouldn’t swing out until the ship’s captain gave the order.
Commander Willson nodded at his phone talker, who reported to the bridge that the Main Battery was loaded and ready. At that moment, the chief announced that our ship’s radar had gained a solid contact on the lead ship of the Japanese formation. This meant that the crew who’d been inputting ranges and bearings manually, based on radar reports from other ships, could step back and let the radar electronics communicate directly to the Mark One-Able. Our senior talker then reported to the captain up on the bridge that the ship’s gunfire-control system was now in full automatic and locked on.
Copyright © 2023 by P. T. Deutermann
