Old Nameless - The Epic Of A U.S. Battlewagon

NAMELESS

1

THE SHIP

THERE is no telling when you will be permitted to learn her name. It may be months, or a year or more hence, when reasons of naval security no longer require the strict secrecy that now is necessary. Or it may not be until the end of the war, when the last Jap ship lies at the bottom of the receptive Pacific or has sneaked back to whatever may be left of the place called Tokyo.

The Navy, in its official reports on her gallant and glorious deeds, calls her merely a United States battleship. That’s a cold appellation for such a fighting, slugging, sharpshooting, indestructible battle-wagon. Perhaps, for the time being, until her rightful and honorable name can be posted on the Roll of Honor of the United States Navy, along with such other immortals as Old Ironsides, the Decatur, and the Bonhomme Richard, you might prefer to think of her as Old Nameless.

She’s not really old, of course—that term is used affectionately. Actually, she is one of the newest battleships Uncle Sam has in service, and she and her sister ships of her class are just about the toughest, fightingest things that any nation has afloat on any sea. Old Nameless and her sisters can both hurl iron and take it: they can blast an enemy battleship (when they can find one) out of the water; they can hurl ten tons of metal at a target twenty miles away, and they can absorb punishment like a killer whale shrugging off the nip of a sardine. With their modern and multitudinous anti-aircraft guns and the Chicago pianos—the American version of the British pom-poms—they are as well protected as a porcupine, and their aim is as deadly as that of a Tennessee turkey-shooter. About the only satisfaction the Japs can get out of Old Nameless and her sister sea-going Amazons is to sink them, which they frequently do—on paper, and over the Tokyo radio.

Old Nameless—Old Incredible would be an equally appropriate name for her—has a very real and very glowing claim to glory. She was a brand-new ship, and she’d never had time even for a proper shakedown cruise when the Navy sent her out to sea looking for trouble. More than 60 per cent of her crew was made up of green boys, who had joined the Navy since Pearl Harbor. Back in their own home towns they had been excellent salesmen or mechanics or accountants or soda fountain clerks, but they just hadn’t been sailors—until they met a man named Gatch. Many of her junior officers were freshly appointed Naval Reservists, the crease hardly out of their new blue pants, and the ink hardly dry on their new commissions.

But Old Nameless went out to sea under command of a hard-boiled, methodical skipper, who was something of a wizard at training men. Thomas Leigh Gatch was his name, and to be under his command was about as good a break as a green crew could get. He was a black-browed, broad-shouldered, unflustered fighter, whose only gripe in life was that he hadn’t seen enough action in the First World War and whose principal current ambition was to relieve an old grudge he bore against the Japanese Empire by reducing the numerical quantities of its ships and subjects.

Old Nameless hadn’t been out long before the crucial period of America’s Southwest Pacific campaign developed. She found herself in the middle of those black days when the Japanese were pressing dangerously on the beleaguered marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal; it was at the time when Japan still had a decided numerical superiority in ships in that area; it was the time when the American people, mirroring the doubt that even some of the highest officials felt, wondered gloomily just why in the hell we had stuck out our neck in the Solomons if we weren’t going to be able to keep it on our shoulders.

Old Nameless was part of the Pacific fleet which, under the revitalizing command of Admiral William F. Halsey, helped keep the American neck on its shoulders and which administered to the anguished and thoroughly bewildered Japanese a crushing naval defeat that will go down in history with the Battle of Jutland. In her first engagement, her first taste of blood and fire, Old Nameless performed what for a battleship was an incredible feat. She was assigned the task of protecting an aircraft carrier, which, by all conventional rules of naval warfare, is supposed to protect the battleship. She steamed into action, and, surviving three unbelievably murderous attacks by waves of at least eighty-four Japanese torpedo planes and dive-bombers, she shot down thirty-two Jap planes with her anti-aircraft batteries.

This was part of the general engagement, later identified as the Battle of Santa Cruz, that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox described as the American victory in Round One of the major Japanese effort to oust the leathernecks and doughboys from Guadalcanal.

In her second engagement, less than three weeks later, with minor damage to the ship patched up and with Captain Gatch’s left arm still in a sling from injuries he had received because he refused to duck when a Japanese bomb came his way, Old Nameless sailed into battle again as part of a heavy-punching U. S. naval task force. When she and her sisters ceased firing, there were five less of the Emperor’s warships on the surface of the seas (as well as three others badly damaged), and the Navy gives Old Nameless credit for the major part of the sinkings.

That engagement was part of the renowned Battle of Guadalcanal, in which the Japanese had twenty-eight warships sunk, ten damaged, and a vast number of men—estimated at a minimum of 25,000 and possibly as many as 40,000—killed by shellfire, bombs, and drowning. That was Secretary Knox’s Round Two, which so knocked the wind out of the Japs that (for a long time, at least) they stayed in their corner and did most of their fighting on paper.

That was the battle which swayed the balance of power and led to the American victory in that particular distant and turbulent theater of the Solomons. History undoubtedly will show that it exerted a profound influence upon the eventual outcome of the entire Pacific war.

It also wrote a new rebuttal to the hotly running debate on Airpower-versus-Seapower, for the exploits of Old Nameless in the Battle of Santa Cruz posed an answer embarrassing, at least, to those critics who insist that the battleship is dead and that no capital ship, without overwhelming air protection, can reckon as anything except a clay pigeon against determined air attack.

The debate isn’t over yet. It may never be completely resolved, for there probably is no clear-cut answer that ever will rule out the usefulness or establish the supremacy of either the battleship or the bomber. It certainly is not the intention of this book to suggest that the record of Old Nameless in her first baptism of fire settled this controversial issue for all time. But an accredited score of thirty-two planes out of some eighty-four attackers, made while protecting the carrier which traditionally is supposed to protect her, is a pretty good total for any battlewagon in anybody’s navy, and certainly would seem to indicate that the United States battlewagons have come a long way from the stage where the air enthusiasts were ready to inter all battleships (without flowers!) as relics of a vanished era.

On this issue, it is pertinent to hear what Captain Gatch, who is recognized by his colleagues as a thoughtful and temperate student of naval tactics, has to say. The skipper of Old Nameless makes the following statement:

"Following Pearl Harbor, the battleship had been pretty generally condemned as an obsolete and useless ship. But, it should be remembered, the battleships at Pearl Harbor were built in 1922, and, basically, there is more difference between a 1942 battleship and a 1922 battleship than there is between a 1942 and 1922 automobile.

"Therefore, it is obvious that the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor were obsolete by the mere passage of time. But the modern 1942 battleship is unquestionably the most powerful fighting machine afloat, and it is my opinion that the most vulnerable aircraft carrier can not hope to survive any long and determined attack by any force unless it is protected by a modern battleship.

It also seems entirely obvious that the two ships can be used to best advantage when they mutually support each other, since the fighters from the carrier to a great extent can break up an air attack, and the battleship, with its tremendous anti-aircraft batteries, can finish the job. This merely exemplifies the old story that war is fundamentally a problem of cooperation between different arms.

2

THE SKIPPER

THERE is but one way to describe Captain Tom Gatch, the fifty-one-year-old skipper of Old Nameless. He is Navy from the top of his head, on which a gold-braided, captain’s cap perches at a to-hell-with-you angle over gray-black hair, to the bottom of his substantial feet, which never feel so much at home as when they are planted on the bridge of some fighting ship.

Oddly enough for a sea-going lawyer—there were three years in the Captain’s life when the Navy had him going to law school and four years when he worked for the Judge Advocate General—and somewhat lamentably for the purpose of this narrative, the Captain is just about the world’s worst sailor when it comes to sounding off about himself.

Tom Gatch knows how to sail a ship, how to train a green crew to follow the commandment of his tough boss, Admiral Halsey: Hit hard, hit fast, hit often, how to spit at danger and keep a ship fighting when the shells and bombs are coming at you thick and the main deck is running red with the blood of your own wounded. But—he doesn’t know how to tell you about it. Until you can break him down, until you can jog him with leading questions based on clues supplied by his admiring associates or the attractive and animated Mrs. Gatch, the Captain’s comments on how it feels to stand on the bridge when the whole sky above you is a flaming, smoking blanket of death, or when the mighty, 16-inch guns of your ship are slugging it out with the enemy, are quite likely to have all the full, rich flavor of a legal report on the purchase of one gross of life preservers by the Navy’s Supply Department.

The Captain is a big man, and his broad shoulders make him seem even taller than his six feet. The thing you notice first about his face is the blackness of his bushy eyebrows, which give him a deceptively shaggy appearance. In contrast with his graying hair, they are so black and so prominent that they shadow his eyes: unless you see him in a bright light (or unless you ask Mrs. Gatch), you can not tell their color, which is gray. They are snapping, piercing eyes, though, with faint creases at the corners, and they seem to be perpetually staring into the distance, as if they were keeping company with his mind, which often these days is 10,000 miles away at Guadalcanal.

His small, neat mustache is blacker than his hair, though not as black as his eyebrows, and his jaw looks as tough as iron. His sharply defined mouth is set