Life on a destroyer—the Tin Can Navy, as we proudly described it—was intimate, noisy, informal, boring, exciting, dangerous, arduous, crowded, scary, and boring again. Three hundred and thirty men jammed into a 2,100-ton ship shaped like a steel greyhound. Long (380 feet), or longer than a football field. Narrow (32 feet, about as wide as an 18-wheel truck is long). And fast (36 knots, or 40 miles an hour). In a heavy sea, a destroyer can easily roll as much as 90 degrees—45 degrees to either side. Handles were welded to bulkheads everywhere, to be grabbed during heavy rolls. And the decks bristled with a variety of offensive weapons. Five 5-inch guns, roughly equivalent to 105mm howitzers. Eight torpedoes, in two four-torpedo mounts amidships. A pair of four twin 40mm antiaircraft guns, plus another eight 20mm AA guns. And a dozen depth charges in racks along either side of the stern.
This was heady stuff for a Greek-English major whose only extended previous sea experience was aboard a 12-foot Brutal Beast sailboat, and whose only previous experience with weapons involved a Daisy Air Rifle. All I had ever hit was the side of a pig, a green-eyed vireo, and a passing car window. It was impossible to grasp, really, for a newly married, still twenty-year-old ensign, who had led—I was beginning to appreciate—such an insulated, sheltered life.
I served almost exactly two years aboard the Philip. Certainly the most important two years of my life, then and maybe now. I arrived excited and scared, a boy just turned twenty-one, at the Federal Shipbuilding & Drydock Company shipyard, on the Passaic River, where she was still under construction in September 1942. And I left her in September 1944, in Pearl Harbor, where she was en route to the Philippines to rejoin the war, fully repaired and modernized. A man just turned twenty-three.
That was a short time for so long a trip.
The trip really started in the East River at 72nd Street in Manhattan. The U.S.S. Philip (DD498) was finally off to war—weapons tested, compasses calibrated, tearful goodbyes completed—en route from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Casco Bay, Maine, where we would pick up the battleship Massachusetts, and escort her some 10,000 miles through the Panama Canal, to Noumea, New Caledonia. We had asked our captain, Tommy Ragan, for permission to give two short blasts on the ship’s whistle at about 69th Street to alert Jean and a collection of Philip wives, who had gathered in our $100-a-month apartment with fourteen windows on the East River for one last wave farewell. Sentimentality still embarrassed me, and I felt only discomfort and embarrassment as my life and love receded slowly into the gray New York skyline. It was going to be almost two years before we saw each other again, and the next female person I saw was wearing a grass skirt and had a bone through her nose.
It took us about forty days to get to the former French penal colony of New Caledonia, through one of the worst storms in history off Cape Hatteras. So bad that one of the 16-inch gun turrets on the Massachusetts was staved in by the angry seas. (Think for a minute about seas strong enough to stave in a 16-inch gun turret on a battleship, and what they might do to a destroyer whose outer skin was three-eighths of an inch thick!) Just outside Noumea we saw the U.S. carrier Saratoga, limping back into port after taking a torpedo hit a few hours before. I don’t remember even going ashore in Noumea. We were off almost immediately to join what was left of the American fast carrier task force off Guadalcanal.
For weeks we escorted one carrier as it launched strikes during the day, then raced as far as possible at flank speed during the night to launch more strikes the next day, trying to fool the Japanese into believing we had more carriers in operation than we did. The mission of destroyers in escorting larger, more valuable ships is to put themselves in harm’s way. To find the enemy submarines lying in wait for the big ships and destroy them if possible, but to take the torpedo hit if necessary. To shoot down dive bombers or torpedo bombers if possible on their way to the big ships, but to take the hits in their place if necessary.
When escorting carriers, destroyers have one other job: during every launch and every recovery, one destroyer is stationed just aft and to one side of the carrier. If a plane doesn’t get airborne and crashes into the water just after leaving the flight deck, the destroyer is there within seconds to rescue the pilot. And if a plane doesn’t make it back to the carrier deck and lands in the water, same deal. Later in the war, the Philip got really good at this rescue procedure. We would steam up to the plane, reversing the engines when we were about 100 yards away. This would create a large turmoil in the water, which would move quickly toward the downed plane. Into this turmoil, a sailor would dive with one rope around his waist, and another rope over his shoulder to attach to the pilot. When all went well, the swimmer would almost surf right into the plane, the line would be around the pilot before the plane sank, and the pilot would be back aboard the destroyer, literally within two or three minutes.
Rescued pilots were prized possessions. Before returning them to their carriers—by breeches buoy, of course—we would strip them of all their fancy clothes—silk scarf maps, survival kits with great knives, compasses, and magnifying glasses, and their pistol. Then we would ask the carrier to send over all the geedunk (ice cream) they had, plus a minimum of two movies our crew hadn’t seen. Only when they had complied did they get their pilot back.
The first time a man goes into battle—making eye contact with someone trying to kill him—is strangely like the first time a man makes love to a woman. The anticipation is overpowering; the ignorance is obstructive; the fear of disgrace is consuming; and survival is triumphant.
For me, that first time came near some forgotten island in the Strait of Bougainville, or “The Slot,” as it will be forever engraved in the hearts of those who raced—or were chased—up and down it during most of 1943. We had escorted some LSTs filled with Marines to make an assault landing on . . . it could have been Vella Lavella, where the rats were said to be as big as dogs. LSTs were large, cumbersome, and slow transport ships, incapable of evasive action. We had gotten them ashore, when our radar operators reported “a mess of bogeys at 20, Angels 11.” Translation: Enemy planes 20 miles away, flying at 11,000 feet. Someone else was directing the small group of F4-U Corsair fighters, flying cover for our little operation. So my job was to relay the changing range and altitude information (which were then cranked into an amazingly unsophisticated fire-control system) until visual contact was made. Then, my job was over, at least for a moment. When I heard the anti-aircraft guns of the other ships in our convoy, I ran out of the darkened Combat Information Center (CIC) onto the bridge. The first plane I saw was whizzing along the water about 100 yards away. Just as I recognized it as one of ours, and cheered as I saw him splash the plane he was chasing, I looked almost straight up, and there it was.
It was a Val, with its distinctive fixed wheels, covered with equally distinctive streamlined wheel covers. I could see the pilot. And worse than that, I could see the bomb he had just dropped arching lazily down toward us. How far away was the Val? Maybe 150 feet. How big was the bomb? Somewhere between the size of the Empire State Building and about 200 pounds, probably closer to the latter. Was I scared? Who knows? I was so exhilarated it didn’t feel like any fear I had ever felt.
By the time I was sorting all that out, and noticing with some satisfaction that I had not wet my pants, the bomb smashed into the water so close that the towering splash soaked everyone on the starboard side of the ship—and never exploded. It was a dud. (I have felt strangely ambivalent about Japanese technology ever since.)
After a few weeks of trying to fool the Japanese into thinking we had a lot of carriers out there, instead of just the Enterprise, our squadron took up our semi-permanent assignment with three brand-new cruisers. The destroyers (Philip, Sauffley, Conway, Renshaw, Waller, Sigourney, Eaton) comprised Destroyer Squadron 22. The cruisers (Montpelier, Denver, Columbia, and Cleveland) made up Cruiser Division 6, and together we made up a Task Group, under the overall command of the flashy, charismatic Admiral William Halsey, or the brilliant, self-effacing Admiral Raymond Spruance, the admirals who taught our generation the art of “calculated risk.” (We all preferred Spruance.) For the next nine months we alternated with a Task Group of older destroyers and cruisers in night raids up The Slot. We would leave Tulagi, an island about twenty miles north of Guadalcanal, in the brilliant sun of a late afternoon.
“Let’s go get us some medals, Mr. Bradlee,” said our commanding officer, Tommy Ragan. “Yes sir,” replied Ensign Bradlee, hoping that his twenty-one-year-old sphincter would hold.
We would steam fast enough to be abreast of Bougainville by dark, and steam on more slowly in the dead of night toward Rabaul. Our official orders were to look for trouble. Some nights we found nothing, but not many. Some nights we would spot small coastal boats, transporting Japanese soldiers as they retreated up The Slot. Some nights we would be trailed by Japanese night fighters, who would suddenly bracket us in the phosphorous light of parachute flares—presumably to illuminate us for the Japanese submarines known to be in the area. Some nights we bombarded targets picked out for us by the Australian coast watchers, an extraordinary bunch of men, mostly former plantation superintendents who had melted into the jungle when the Japanese arrived.
And some nights our radars would spot a group of enemy ships coming down The Slot from Rabaul, looking for their own medals, and the two groups would shell each other in a blind slugfest for an hour or so. We worried more about Japanese torpedoes, fired from ships or submarines. Our torpedoes were nowhere near as good. Rabaul is where a young congressman, somehow a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, flew over one night as an observer, and flew back to Washington immediately. Got himself a Silver Star for that single flight, as the world would learn later. His name was Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Tex.).
Unless we were actually engaging the enemy, we would have to leave the waters off Rabaul by two or three in the morning in order to get safely out of range of the Japanese planes in Rabaul by daylight. We’d get back to Tulagi, refuel, and take on new ammunition, just in time to see the other Task Group start up The Slot to repeat the search and destroy mission. Of course, we would have to stand watch—four hours on, four hours off—until we went to General Quarters and started the whole process over again the next day.
Even without the constant concern for survival, it was an exhausting life that discouraged reflection, introspection, or anything more intellectual than reading. We slept in what we laughingly called our spare time—often in bunks that were only 18 inches above or below someone else, known as your fart-sack-mate. Always with a fan only a few inches from your face, since there was no air conditioning, of course. We played a little cards, mostly cribbage. We used to gamble—for high stakes because there was no place to spend money—but that had pretty much been outlawed by our skipper, Tommy Ragan. My favorite cribbage pigeon was Bill Weibel, from Detroit, the torpedo officer, hence known as “Tubes.” Our games ended in a repeat of my college “21” games. All of a sudden “Tubes” owed me more than $4,000, which approximated a year’s pay. When the captain heard about the debt, he ordered me to play double or nothing until I lost, and then quit playing for money. Took me three boards.
And we did read—when we weren’t too exhausted or scared to read. Boswell’s Life of Johnson was permanently in a book rack that had been welded to the bulkhead in the officers’ head aboard the Philip. I got hooked on the anti-establishment works of Philip Wylie, like A Generation of Vipers. I remember particularly a book called Love in America, a scathing description of the basic relations between men and women by David L. Cohn. Both Wylie and Cohn questioned the soupy sentimentalism that dominated advertising and film. I read a novel by Gladys Schmitt called The Gates of Aulis. Bill Cox, an officer on the Sigourney, specialized in comics, especially “Terry and the Pirates.” He had friends in the States who would clip comics from their newspapers, staple them together in sequences, and mail them out to him.
Bob Lee became my best pal and my model, probably because he was so many things I was not, at least was not yet. First, he was educated and motivated. He read books because he wanted to read books. Up to now, I had read books because I had to read books—except for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. A couple of years older than I, he had been on a four-stack destroyer before coming to the Philip, and so the insignia on his cap had that tarnished look that separated the veteran sailors from the new kids on the ship. He had gone to Amherst on a scholarship, and really learned things. His father had been a carpenter in East Orange, New Jersey. His sister was married to a wholesale Amoco Oil dealer in East Orange, and I had yet to meet a wholesale oil dealer. He shared his destroyer knowledge gracefully and often. When we were still in the Brooklyn Navy Yard being outfitted with things like motor whaleboats, he had asked me one morning to go pick up the one consigned to the Philip. He quickly saw I didn’t know what a motor whaleboat was (a motor launch), much less where it was, and we went off to pick it up together.
“General,” as he was known, was just like the hero of Tom Heggen’s great war novel Mister Roberts—relaxed, wry, hardworking, and loved by the people who worked under him. He was impressed by the way I had handled my first real people crisis. So was I, as a matter of fact. Before we sailed off to the Pacific, I was standing a night watch one night in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when a young sailor named Frank had pulled a Colt .45 pistol on me, maybe in search of a Section 8 discharge as a mental case. Since I was armed with my own .45, but would never have shot him under any circumstances, I had no choice but to talk him down quietly.
In thousands of hours of conversation at sea over more than twenty-four months, Lee and I shared each other’s lives, peeling back layer after layer, until we didn’t have to worry about our friendship: it had taken root and flourished.
Along about Christmas 1943, we got orders for Sydney, Australia, for a week of R&R. In conventional terms we hadn’t had a day off for almost a year. We had not heard a female voice for the same length of time except in the movies. We talked a lot about Garbo nibbling on Melvyn Douglas’s ear in Ninotchka. That’s how bad it was. And Sydney was the answer to our prayers. As we steamed into Sydney Harbor, General and I were standing on the bridge together when Hoppy, the chief signalman, pointed to some flags waving from a distant hill and said, “You’re not going to believe this.” The flags were actually semaphore signals, and the closer we got, the more easily we could see that the signals were being sent by young persons of the opposite sex. Age sixteen, tops. In fact, they were asking if anyone might be interested in dates that evening.
Lee and I had volunteered to stand watch that first night, moored to the Woolloomooloo Docks, so the rest of the crew except for a skeleton force could go on liberty. I knew why I had volunteered: I wanted to put off for as long as possible the critical question, was I going to get laid after only eighteen months of enforced fidelity?
We were duly hailed for our generosity by the rest of the crew, and were sitting alone in the wardroom discussing the liberty we would take next day, when we suddenly realized that the ship was listing obviously and ominously to starboard—away from the dock. The reason for the list was not hard to find: thirty sailors were drooped over the railing talking to three young women who had rowed alongside looking for a little action. Pogies, at a glance. (“Pogies” is Navy slang for very young females, as in “pogey bait”—candy for use to lure “pogies” into the sack.) General and I couldn’t come up with any regulation that was being violated, until one of the girls started scrambling aboard and the rowboat was being tied up. Plainly the pogies had accepted an invitation to entertain what was left of the crew, and the sailors looked to see what Lee and I were going to do about it.
General and I were widely respected for the wisdom of our decisions in disciplinary matters. This respect dated from an incident which had occurred one night a few months earlier, while the Philip was anchored in Iron Bottom Sound, Tulagi. We had rigged the movie screen forward and were showing a movie when another destroyer signaled for permission to come alongside. This was normally no big deal. We would stop the movie for maybe five minutes, while the other ship came alongside and moored bow to stern, allowing the new ship to rig its movie screen forward and show its movie alongside our stern. The whole process shouldn’t take five minutes.
This time, though, the ship moored their bow to our bow. To make matters worse this was our new skipper’s old ship, and Jimmy Rutter, our new skipper, was in no mood to ask his old captain for any favors. On top of that, damned if they didn’t rig their movie screen forward and start showing their own movie, in competition with ours. Rutter, knowing when he was licked, threw up his hands, canceled our movie, and retired to his quarters. Not our crew, however. Some of them retired to the spud bin, the place between the smokestacks amidships where potatoes were stored—when there were any to store—and started throwing them at the new arrivals. Pretty soon one of our potatoes hit their commanding officer in the back of the neck, and pretty soon after that Jimmy Rutter was invited aboard his old ship for a tongue-lashing from his old skipper. Something about how important it was to take command quickly, and show his new ship who was boss.
Jimmy Rutter returned steaming and sent for General and me, immediately. He had never been so humiliated in his life, he told us. The worst behavior he’d ever seen, and in front of his old commanding officer. What kind of ship was this anyway? And he demanded that we find out who had done this dastardly deed, and tell them they were going to get their asses court-martialed. Lee and I left meekly, knowing we were on a fool’s mission. Potatoes, we heard? “Mr. Bradlee, you know we ain’t had no potatoes on this ship for months.” We went from bow to stern. No one had seen any potatoes thrown. No one had seen any potatoes, period. Plenty of them told us they wished they had found some spuds, so they could have thrown them at those “bastids.”
After delaying our report for an extra hour to enforce our claim of thoroughness, we told the captain we had found no culprits, and felt we had no chance at all of finding any. We wished his former skipper had not been hit by a flying potato, but we felt the Philip had been trashed, and some defense was explainable if not completely meritorious. Anyway he cooled off and we got credit from the crew for the lack of discipline.
Now we used the same strategy. We did nothing for about half an hour, then asked a chief petty officer buddy by loudspeaker to report to the wardroom. We were worried about the Sydney police, we said. These girls were plainly minors. We were worried about venereal disease, we said. These girls were also plainly pros. And we were worried about the number of Navy Regulations the captain could claim were being violated if he returned to the ship early. And so, we told him, we were going to stroll through the ship on an inspection tour in twenty minutes, and we sure hoped that we wouldn’t find any extra passengers, or any rowboats. Right on schedule, we took our stroll. We found no stowaways, and the rowboat had disappeared into the Woolloomooloo night.
The next night was our turn ashore, one of the most memorable nights of my life—and I didn’t even get laid. We started off in the (men’s) bar of the Australia Hotel, downing glass after glass of the great, bitter Aussie beer. Next, we were flipping Australian pennies up over our heads into the large glass bowls, which hung on chains like lampshades under the hanging lights. We were quickly joined at this by a wonderfully tough-looking group of soldiers, a good deal older than we, and much harder. But just as thirsty. We had been told there were no able-bodied men in Australia; they’d all gone overseas to fight in Europe and North Africa. This, we’d heard, was why the women were so friendly. But these were able-bodied men, by God. These were the ragtag remnants of the Second Australian First. The First Australian First had been composed of the first Australians to leave to fight World War I. And these were the first Australians to leave to fight World War II. In fact, they had landed that very day, back home for the first time in five years, after fighting in Crete, fighting Rommel across North Africa, and after crossing the Owen Stanley Range in New Guinea to fight the Japanese. After these incredible battles, they wore no decorations other than the curved metal AUSTRALIA at the top of their shoulders. Despite our callow youth and comparatively limited battle experiences, we had at least one row of ribbons. After listening to their stories, we solemnly pinned our ribbons on them, and they wore them for the rest of the night, as we wore their hard-earned AUSTRALIAS.
As the night slowed into morning, and we slipped in and out of stages of oblivion, our new friends started slipping off quietly—except for one: the towering figure I can recall only as “Shag.” “Shag” had taken a piece of shrapnel in his neck from one of Rommel’s tanks at Tobruk, and he spoke through a hole in his throat. He’d been repaired and sent back into battle without home leave. He was pretty drunk by now, as drunk as we were, but it gradually dawned on us that he was scared, on top of everything else. Before long he told us why. He hadn’t seen his wife for six years! And hadn’t dared call to tell her he was home. She lived across Sydney Harbor in Manly Beach, but he was scared to go home to her alone, scared that she would think his new voice box would be a fatal disfigurement in her eyes. As the skies lightened he asked us, begged us, to go home with him. We pleaded that would be an intrusion; he insisted he needed us. Were we real mates, or not? What was friendship about, anyway? And finally, as the sun rose over this fabulous city, the three of us boarded the ferry to Manly Beach, Lieutenant junior grade Robert E. Lee, Ensign Benjamin C. Bradlee, and PFC “Shag,” all three gloriously drunk, on the mission that scared him more than a desert battle. We wove our way slowly and noisily down this country road of cottages, each with gardens, fenced with rose bushes. And suddenly, “Shag” tottered to a stop, tears streaming from his eyes—and as tears streamed down our cheeks—and we knew he was home. None of us said a word as a door quietly opened, a woman appeared, and they slowly walked into each other’s arms.
Our next night was more selfish. We rented a flat for a week in Rosalyn Gardens, in a building that housed scores of pretty, friendly young secretaries, as willing to go to bed with us as we were desperate to go to bed with them. All it took was satisfactory answers to a few questions about VD, and since we were ashore for the first time in a year, we had satisfactory answers. So much for the fidelity problem. I felt such guilt, so fast, that it didn’t happen again during our short stay. I tried one more time, but I found someone who preferred women to men, much to the amusement of General and his girl, who giggled all night in the next room. I remembered my mother and father talking about one of their friends being a “Lesbian” in the hushed tones reserved for all such matters, but in my innocence I had never thought that I might end up trying to seduce one.
Before I could wrestle my way through the subtleties of that particular moral quandary, we departed beautiful, downtown Sydney, waving sadly at our young nymphets, still in position on the hill, and headed back to more months up and down The Slot. We were involved in landings at Rendova, Vella Lavella, Bougainville, firing shots in anger, or being fired at, almost every time we looked for trouble.
Off Bougainville, under air attack, we clipped an uncharted coral pinnacle trying to dodge bombs, and had to steam down to Espíritu Santo to get a new propeller. The Navy had no way of making new charts, and so we had to make do with charts made by someone else, in some other time. Off Bougainville, we were using German charts. Our own private bit of coral lay uncharted 16 feet below the surface of Kaiserin Augusta Baie. Off Vella Lavella we got jumped by some twenty Japanese planes, which snuck in on us just over the water from the other side of the island. The first wave was over us so fast they couldn’t release their bombs. When they came at us again, the Philip and the Waller were laying a heavy screen of smoke on either side of a column of fat-ass LSTs, trying to scramble to safety at 5 knots. Suddenly there was a deafening, shuddering crash, and I was sure we had been torpedoed, though I had seen no evidence of the much slower torpedo planes in the attacking force. Much to my relief, a voice broke radio silence, and the skipper of the Waller was saying something like, “I’m sorry. That was my fault. I was trying to bring my guns to bear on the bastards.” Neither destroyer could see the other because of all the smoke, and the Waller had crashed into us amidships trying to get into a position where she could shoot her 40mm and 20mm guns against the Japanese planes. It was an historic admission. In all my time in the Navy, I never heard another open admission of error.
During some other landing our radar operators reported a “shit-load of bogeys” about a hundred miles away. (In Navy parlance, an initial “shitload” could mean anything from two to a hundred; we would worry about details later.) We were particularly vulnerable, operating with the LSTs again, without any air cover this time and without the prospect of any air cover. I was in the Combat Information Center, sifting information from radars, SONAR, and radios to pass on to the captain when I thought they needed it. On the spur of the moment, I pretended I was a fighter director, vectoring nonexistent squadrons of F4S or F4US to attack this particular shitload of bogeys. Like “Code name for fighter squadron, this is code name for Philip. We have a mess of bogeys, bearing whatever, at about one hundred miles, or about ninety from you. Vector [whatever course, to intercept].” We kept this up for about five minutes, moving our “planes” up and down, right and left, when damned if the shitload of bogeys didn’t suddenly change course and run off. I have no idea whether they even heard us. Lee and the skipper put me in for a Bronze Star for this particular scheme. Never got it.
Another time one stormy night we were fiddling with the fighter-director radio circuits in CIC, when we suddenly heard a distant voice singing “Bless ’Em All.” And then a whole lot of different guys singing “Bless ’Em All,” with especially good renditions of the final line, “Cheerup, my lads, fuck ’em all.” They turned out to be a New Zealand fighter squadron, lost in the storm, getting their courage up to run out of gas and land in the drink. Our radar operators finally found them on their screen, and we interrupted their rendition of perhaps the finest Pacific War song, and sent them to the nearest friendly base.
My first important solo decision came just before dawn one morning, steaming in the middle of a line of the other destroyers in our division, off somewhere after a night in The Slot by ourselves. I was the officer of the deck, which meant acting captain since we weren’t at General Quarters, when CIC reported an unidentified plane, closing on us fast, almost dead ahead. The blip on the radar screen lacked the pulse below the line on the screen (known as IFF for “Identification, Friend or Foe”) which identified friendly planes, but we couldn’t see it at first, and the gun crews on watch were tracking it. I was just about to give the signal for General Quarters and wake the captain, when we saw it, about 500 yards just off the port bow, lumbering along only a few feet off the water, easily identified as a “Betty,” the code name for a twin-engined Japanese bomber. None of the ships ahead of us had fired, but when I saw it myself, I felt sure, and shouted, “Commence firing,” just as the captain, the medal-hungry Wild Bill Groverman, popped out of his night cabin. (The flame from the 5-inch shots took both his eyebrows off, and he couldn’t hear for a week.) We must have fired a dozen shots from the 5-inch guns, and a clip or two from the 40s and 20s, but we missed him. Later, the war historians identified this as a plane taking a high-ranking Japanese admiral to Rabaul.
This kind of responsibility was typical in destroyer war in the Pacific for its youngest officers. You start as J.O.D., Junior Officer of the Deck, helping the O.D. run the ship under way from the bridge. Eight months after I graduated from Harvard, I made Officer of the Deck. That meant that when we were not at General Quarters, ready for battle, I ran the ship on my watch—twenty-one years old, in command of a 370-foot warship, responsible for the safety of more than 300 people, four hours on watch, eight hours off, during which time you did your regular job running a department. Twenty-one years old, you are almost as scared of telling sailors what to do as you are of a Japanese bullet.
My regular non-battle job involved communications, the care and feeding of the machines which provided raw information to the ship, and of the men who operated and maintained those machines. This responsibility was more educating than Harvard, more exciting, more meaningful than anything I’d ever done. This is why I had such a wonderful time in the war. I just plain loved it. Loved the excitement, even loved being a little bit scared. Loved the sense of achievement, even if it was only getting from Point A to Point B; loved the camaraderie, even if the odd asshole reared his ugly head every so often. For years I was embarrassed to admit all this, given the horrors and sadness visited upon so many during the years I was thriving.’ But news of those horrors was so removed in time and distance. No newspapers, no radio even, except Tokyo Rose, and of course there were none of television’s stimulating jolts. I found that I liked making decisions. I liked sizing up men and picking the ones who could best do the job. Most of all I liked the responsibility, the knowledge that people were counting on me, that I wouldn’t let them down.
Many of the reserve naval officers with no obvious technical qualifications were better at their jobs than the regulars. Naval Academy ensigns were mostly electrical engineers. They knew how steam turbine engines worked, but they weren’t so sure when to start them or when to stop them. They were better doers than teachers, and in wartime they had to lead and teach.
The first night Jimmy Rutter was in command of the Philip, he had had to bring her alongside a tanker to refuel. Mooring a 2,100-ton ship to a stationary object—like a dock, or another ship at anchor—isn’t all that difficult, even if you studied the fragments of Sappho more than seamanship. But only experience will teach you the exactly right moment to order the engines “All back, One” while the ship is still moving forward, or “All ahead, One” while she is still inching backward. Poor Jimmy Rutter had no such experience. Again and again, he was a moment late with his orders, and twice he snapped mooring lines. I suspect the boys in the engine room were answering the commands a second or two late, screwing the new skipper over just to let him know who was really the boss. But he finally endeared himself to everyone by shaking his head and saying, “Goddamn it, I can’t stop this son of a bitch. You do it.”
Barely seven months after our R&R in Sydney, we headed for another R&R session, this time in New Zealand. This one I was really waiting for. I had left the States with the title to a 1,000-acre sheep station on the North Island of New Zealand in my pocket. It seems that in the last part of the nineteenth century, one George Bradlee had so disgraced his parents by getting a young girl in a family way that he had been sent to live permanently in London, with a $50,000 stake. According to family legend, George had whistled through the $50,000 in no time at all, and returned to Boston. Next time, his father personally escorted him to New Zealand, bought him the sheep station, and left him there. George was said to have married a Maori woman. They both died—childless—at about the same time, and the title to the 1,000 acres returned to the Tremont Street vaults of Welch & Forbes, the Bradlee family trustees.
With Freddy in the cavalry at Fort Riley, Kansas, I was thought to have the best chance of getting to New Zealand, and so I was charged with reporting back to the family on the precise quality of this great asset. It was not to be. Two days out of New Zealand, we were turned around and sent to Eniwetok, where the biggest Pacific convoy ever was forming to bombard and invade the Marianas—Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. They were heavily defended, and critically needed, to serve as air bases for the planes that started to bomb the Japanese mainland in June 1944. The Enola Gay, which dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima, took off from Tinian.
The Marianas campaign seemed endless. We had bombarded the shit out of Saipan for days before the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions and the 27th Army Division had landed. Now, we were lying less than a mile offshore in direct radio contact with a young Marine lieutenant in a front-line foxhole. My battle job was to run the CIC—the Combat Information Center. One room crammed with all the radar, all the SONAR, all the radios, all the telephones, all the plotting equipment. All information came in to CIC, and CIC parceled it out as needed—to the captain, to the gunnery officer, and to the watch officer. When the young Marine and I talked he was so close to the Japanese defenders that I could hear them yelling, whenever he transmitted his request for a barrage of 5-inch gunfire from us. I’ve lost his name, unfortunately, but this guy was one brave son of a bitch. He would ask for gunfire in such-and-such a place—often within a few yards of his foxhole—and would relay the coordinates he gave me to the gunnery officer. First “Fire,” then deafening explosion. Then pause, while the 57-pound shells streaked toward their target, followed by comments from our unseen buddy. “Fan-fucking-tastic”; “Bullseye” maybe. Often, even. And sometimes: “That was a little close, friends. Back off a blond one.”
We had been at General Quarters doing this for more than fifty hours, when there was a lull while our forward area observer changed his foxhole. I told the captain I was out on my feet, and scared I would mess up. He told me to go down to the Radio Shack on the seaward side of the ship, and grab what sleep I could. I was in the middle of a deep, deep sleep, when I heard a strange explosion, followed by the noise of what could only be shrapnel hitting us. If it was shrapnel, it had to be from a Japanese shore battery and there had to be more coming. I burst out of the Radio Shack and raced forward back to my battle station. Halfway up the port side ladder, I felt a sharp sting in my right buttock. About what a squash ball used to feel like, traveling really fast, from really short range. I looked down, and by God there was a piece of shrapnel on deck, about two inches long, half an inch thick with jagged edges. Without thinking, I reached down and picked it up. Clearly it had ricocheted into me after hitting something else, because, though I could feel a small tear in my pants, I felt stung, not wounded. And it was extremely hot when I got it into my pocket and got myself back to my battle station.
The gunnery officer was now my special pal, Bob Lee. He and his team had silenced the shore battery before I got back to work, and I told him over the sound-powered phones that tied us all together in battle that my ass had got nicked. That word spread through the ship like wildfire, and by the time we eventually secured from General Quarters, it was widely believed that “Mr. Bradlee has been shot in the ass.”
When the ship’s doctor, Ralph Morgan, from Thomas Wolfe country in western North Carolina, saw that whatever had happened to me I was perfectly fine, he insisted that we go to the wardroom together. (Wardrooms on destroyers are normally where the officers meet and eat, but during battle they serve as temporary hospitals.) He made me lie down on the wardroom table, ass up, pulled down my pants to examine the “wound,” a certain redness around the slightest, bloodless abrasion. Scalpel in hand, he announced that since there was no blood, there could be no Purple Heart, and damned if he didn’t nick me, just hard enough to fetch a drop of blood. You have to apply for the Purple Heart, and—needless to say—I didn’t. (But I did get sort of a Purple Heart—months later, when we had returned to the States for repairs to the ship and R&R for the crew. In the middle of a special ship’s party, there was a roll of drums, and our new skipper, Wild Bill Grover-man summoned me forward, asked me to bend over, and pinned a large purple velvet heart to my rear end, drawing blood for the second time.)
Once, when our forward area observer got a few much-needed hours off, we arranged over the fire-control radio circuit to meet. I went ashore in the Philip’s motor whaleboat, armed to the teeth with a never-fired Colt .45 strapped to my waist, to pick him up. He turned out to be my age, and even younger-looking, all jerky gestures and haunted eyes. The crew cheered him aboard, and after the longest hot shower in the history of Destroyer Squadron 22, we gave him so much ice cream he threw up, and slept the sleep of the dead. I wasn’t the only one crying when we cheered him off next day. I didn’t know how to tell a man I loved him in those days, but I sure loved him.
He seemed so vulnerable, so much at the mercy of events he couldn’t control.
Army units on the western side of Saipan were taking forever to get into position for the final push on the caves at the southern end of the island. One general was relieved of command of an infantry division because he was taking too long. The Philip was firing so many rounds of 5-inch shells, wherever our forward area spotter wanted them, that we were concerned that the barrels were deteriorating. We had been hit by Japanese shore batteries when I had been “wounded.” We were doing our bombarding from as close as 1,500 yards off the east coast of Saipan, close enough to be swarmed over by the flies that we were told were attracted by the night soil used to fertilize the island crops. The stench was overpowering. At sunset, it was routine for destroyers to ask permission to proceed at flank speed into the wind, with all portholes and watertight doors wide open, to try to blow the damn flies out of the ship.
Finally, at the end of the campaign, the Philip was chosen to transport all the brass in the area from Saipan up to Tinian for a flag-raising there. Normally on a destroyer, if you saw a four-striper (captain) once a month it was a big deal. We never saw any kind of admiral, much less a general. Destroyers pride themselves on their informality, and flag officers are prohibitively formal. But now, here was all this brass down below in the wardroom, including the great man himself, Admiral Raymond Spruance. Spruance was both Commander, Central Pacific Force, and Commander, Fifth Fleet, at the time. Also the legendary Marine General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, and a whole boatload of stars, bars, and braid. Our captain was in the wardroom with the brass, doing everything but stand on his head to occupy his guests. I was on the bridge, as Officer of the Deck, having been told only to “take her up to Tinian.” No course, no speed, no nothing. Just “take her up.”
It was one of those glorious tropical days that cost so much to enjoy in peacetime. Not a cloud in the sky. That incredible blue-green seawater. And so I thought we would take the brass on a real destroyer spin—like about 30 knots (33 mph). The water was so smooth you could hear only the big waves thrown off by the bow as the ship sped “up to Tinian.”
Suddenly, the quartermaster snapped to attention (I’d never seen him do that before) and shouted, “Attention on the bridge. The Admiral is present.” I saluted him (I was never awfully good at that), and asked him if there was anything he would like to see. He shook my hand with just the slightest smile, and thanked me, but he would just like to look around. We all watched him as he started thumbing through the file of ALNAVs (directives issued to all ships of the Navy and all the other Pacific ships). In this case, directives issued by Spruance to the Philip. Suddenly, he stopped, as if he’d found the one he wanted. As soon as he moved on, I rushed casually to see which one had been left for us to see, and I saw the one that ordered all ships to proceed no faster than 15 knots, unless specifically ordered otherwise.
I rang Jimmy Rutter in the wardroom and asked for instructions. We came up with a deceptively simple solution: every few minutes, we would decrease the Philip’s speed by 1 knot, all but imperceptibly, and we steamed into Tinian an hour later making a steady 15 knots.
Once the Marianas were secure, most of our squadron was ordered back to the States. R&R for the crew, and repairs plus a complete overhaul for the ships. I had been twenty-one years old when the Philip steamed up the East River past our apartment on my way to war—scared of the future. As we steamed under the Golden Gate Bridge, en route to the Oakland Navy Yard, I was twenty-three years old—scared of different things. Like who would I find that I had married. And more importantly, who would she find that she had married.
But on the way from Saipan to San Francisco, our skipper received a formal envelope from Harvard College, addressed only to the Commanding Officer, U.S.S. Philip, FPO, San Francisco, California. In it was the long-deferred Bible-Shakespeare-Greek Classics examination, which I had never taken, with a letter from some dean asking the commanding officer to isolate me completely at some convenient time and get me to take it. I was not completely surprised because my father had written me that he had persuaded Harvard to let me take this exam and thus complete my degree (even though Harvard had eliminated the fucking exam from degree requirements a year earlier). And so I had been reading the Bible, some Greek plays, and a little Shakespeare in my spare time. The crew of the Philip was following this saga every step of the way, and cheered as I was escorted by the captain into his stateroom to take the exam, while the ship steamed home.
Half an hour later, there was a knock on the door, and a Seaman First Class entered saying—apropos of absolutely nothing—“The Officer of the Deck [it was George Hamilton, an Annapolis engineer] presents his compliments, sir. The shortest verse in the Bible is St. John, chapter II, verse 35. ‘Jesus wept.’” I finished the bloody thing, shipped it off when we landed in the States, and months later got a letter from my father announcing I had passed, with honors. Only a B, but honors.
Back in the States, and safely under that gorgeous Golden Gate Bridge, Lee and I started off home leave on the absolute worst foot, by missing the plane taking us back to our loved ones. We had used extraordinary pull to get us on a DC-4 to New York, leaving at 6:00 A.M. on the morning after we tied up in the Navy Yard. We had even gotten a room at the St. Francis Hotel, and then we had gone out to party. Next thing I knew, General was saying, “Jeezus, Beebo, it’s six-thirty and we’ve missed our plane.” It seems pretty obvious fifty years later, but I don’t remember worrying about how come we missed our plane. I worried about explaining to Jean how come we missed the plane, and struggling to find another way back. Wartime trains from one end of the country to the other took forever—two and a half days—but that’s how I Came Marching Home.
When we finally finished our first embraces, we each insulated ourselves with commitments that kept us superficially busy. Jean had been seeing someone to help her cope with the problems of marriage without a husband, after a family life that could easily be described as difficult, if not traumatic.
The “someone” turned out to be a Dr. Edward Spencer Cowles, a white-haired Park Avenue quack who dispensed feel-good concoctions to a variety of unsuspecting patients suffering from various forms of mental anguish. (Probably methamphetamines, according to one expert in this area.) I later learned that Cowles ran something called the Body and Mind Foundation, and had been investigated for violating medical laws.
But, damned if Jean didn’t take me to see him on the same day I arrived in New York, and damned if I didn’t go, meekly. I had no idea why Jean was seeing him, what relief he was providing her, or what the hell I was doing there instead of being greeted as some sexy war hero. We talked for maybe five minutes—the three of us—with Cowles telling me to be sure to keep my uniform clean and pressed: “You’ll be needing it to fight the Russians before too long,” then giving Jean her “cocktail” in a small paper cup, and we were out of there.
Soon enough we retreated to the comforting bosom of our families—anything to avoid being alone for too long. Neither one of us had developed any skills at being close, physically or emotionally, and our parents were so genuinely glad to see me, and find out what I had been up to, that it was relatively easy not to explore—much less understand—where our relationship stood.
My father wanted to know every detail of my life for the last two years, not that it was such a tough task. He yelled at my mother when she asked if I had ever faced danger. “Jesus Christ, of course he faced danger. What do you think he’s been doing for two years?” He shook his head, and mixed himself another drink. He had become friends with Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, the great naval historian and Columbus biographer. They had lunched together, at the common table in the Somerset Club’s men’s dining room. Morison, of course, knew in general what Destroyer Squadron 22 had been up to; he knew all about the nightly hunting expeditions up The Slot, all about the landings in the Solomons and the Marianas. Now, the old man’s interest was consuming, and he wore his pride in me like a smile.
When he had gotten everything he could out of me about where I had been, he wanted to know everything about where I thought I was going. Morison had told him he thought the Philippines would be the next hot spot for destroyers and carriers. How soon would we be invading Japan? A particularly awesome prospect for destroyer types, for the destroyers would be taking the largest fleet of ships and men ever assembled to those unknown and scary shores. Sitting by the fire in that lovely Beverly house, we faced that prospect together.
Jean and I settled into a routine, insulated by family and friends, that left us in almost the same condition we had found ourselves at the beginning of home leave . . . cautious, not quite comfortable but perfectly pleased with each other, and perfectly willing to re-up for an unknown duration, despite the first signs that I was increasingly unsatisfied with my intellectual achievements and interests. If I had been able or willing at that time to describe a “trophy wife,” I would probably have described Jean—pretty, sure to be a good mother, fine family and all that. Jean would be headed back to teach at the Dalton School in New York, sharing an apartment with my sister, waiting out the war. Unless she got pregnant. For without any real discussion or planning, that had become a possibility. I knew only that I was heading back out to the Pacific front, on the Philip, probably, until the war was over.
And soon enough, after four weeks leave, and two more weeks with Jean in Oakland, standing only one four-hour watch a day, as the ship’s overhaul was completed and all the shiny new gadgets were installed, the time had come for those emotional farewells that I found so difficult. Other husbands got used to saying goodbye, dry-eyed and necking passionately in front of a hundred other people doing the same thing while the train was ready to pull out of the station, or while the ship was all but leaving the dock. Not me. I dreaded goodbye scenes then, as I do now. But this one was over, and I went back to war.
* * *
On the way back to Pearl Harbor, starting my third year in the Navy, we had begun to believe the end of the war was in sight. But instead of relief, we felt concern, and fear. It was one thing to be screwing around the Solomons, or the Marianas, but it didn’t take a naval genius to look at the charts and see the Philippines and Okinawa ahead, closer and closer to the Big Casino, Japan. We didn’t know about Kamikaze pilots yet, but we believed the Japanese would fight to the last American to defend their homeland; it was widely accepted that a landing on Japan would cost a hundred thousand American lives the first day.
When we got to Pearl, I was ordered to leave the Philip and report to the Commander of Destroyers and Cruisers in the Pacific, COMDESPAC. As his representative, I was to go from destroyer to destroyer communicating what wisdom I would accumulate about how to run Combat Information Centers to other destroyers in the ring of ships closing in on Tokyo. In the two years on the Philip, we had pioneered the theory of what a destroyer CIC should be doing during battle. CIC staff would monitor all incoming info, assess it, and distribute the information to the officers on a need-to-know basis. CICs hadn’t existed when we put to sea in 1942, but they had grown so fast in concept and equipment that I was considered an expert at the age of twenty-three, even though I didn’t have a clue how any of the machines worked. For eight months, from January through August 1945, I served on nineteen different destroyers—all of them under way and in battle, first in the Philippines, then with fast carrier task forces off Okinawa and Japan itself.
I reported to each of these ships by breeches buoy—an awesome contraption, which in its wartime version had become a canvas bag, attached by four short lines to a pulley. The pulley rode on a line stretched between two moving vessels. The pulley itself was connected to each ship by a line, so the breeches buoy—containing mail, ice cream, movies, or people—could be pulled from one ship to the other. A destroyer would pull up alongside a tanker, or a carrier, to refuel under way. I would transfer by breeches buoy from the destroyer to the mother ship. And transfer back to the next destroyer to refuel. Nineteen destroyers meant almost forty trips in this satanic device. Actually it got to be a piece of cake, when the ships got close to each other and stayed close and parallel to each other. Say 50 feet. All this with both ships making 15 knots. But destroyer skippers are human; they know that if they get too close, a surge of wind or water can slap their ships into a carrier—never mind who or what is in the breeches buoy—and there goes a career.
I had to land on the deck of a different destroyer every couple of weeks, scared shitless from the breeches buoy ride over, not knowing a soul, carrying only a single duffel bag, and aware that the last person anyone wanted to see was some young hot shot representing an admiral. I had to spend the first two days trying to break down that resentment. It helped when I offered to stand watch with all the rest of the officers, but that cut into my sack time seriously, and so I was always exhausted.
It helped enormously that I started my new outrider assignment in the Philippines with my old squadron, and almost immediately with my own ship. One day in the Philippines is still crystal clear in my mind. It started in Subic Bay, on another sparkling morning. The crew was in dress whites, for we were headed for a special, supervised liberty in Manila, which had been liberated a few days earlier. As we steamed down from Subic Bay and turned left toward Manila, there on our port side was the fortress island of Corregidor, where Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright and his troops (the last forces of American resistance) had been starved into surrendering in 1942. Corregidor was now officially in Allied hands, but it was honeycombed by tunnels and caves, and the tunnels and caves were still hiding Japanese stragglers who had refused to surrender. For a while, it was standard procedure for any American warship passing Corregidor in either direction—regardless of any other mission, like making liberty—to check in with an Army bombardment-control officer, get specific coordinates from him, and lob fifty shells into some cave. We accomplished our mission, even though the sailors handled the 57-pound shells like objects of art, so as not to soil their dress whites.
I had volunteered to lead a small column of my crewmates ashore. I wanted to walk to Santo Tomaso University a few miles out of town, where recently liberated American prisoners were awaiting relocation. My brave little band of sailors wanted to get laid. Which turned out to be no feat at all. We had barely formed up into a ragged column when we were besieged by little kids, shouting the charms of their sisters, or mothers, and asking the guys if they wanted to “zig-zig.” As a matter of fact, they were extremely interested, and one by one they would drop out of line, for a remarkably short period of time, and return to the column. We never made it to Santo Tomaso, but we did make it back to the Philip, which had to leave in time to get to Subic Bay before dark.
We had just finished sending another fifty shells into Corregidor on our way back to Subic Bay, this time on our starboard side, when a lookout spotted a head bobbing in the water about 100 yards away between us and the island. Once we were sure it was not some Philip sailor fallen overboard from booze or slaked lust, the captain asked me to go aft and take whoever it was aboard for later delivery to some intelligence types for questioning. I strapped on my .45, just in case he had some secret weapon, and went aft, with the crew offering such helpful advice as “Let’s kill the Jap bastid.” We threw him a line and reeled him aboard, the sorriest-looking SOB I ever saw. He was covered with sores, barely 90 pounds, clad only in a loincloth, and plainly more scared than I was. “Throw him back,” one crewman suggested. Instead, I ordered him to strip. Very authoritatively. First in English, then—ridiculously—in French, in case he knew any words in my other language. Orders immediately repeated by the crew in Polish, Finnish, Greek, and Yiddish. He stripped, but just stared at us, until the doctor took him off to the infirmary, for further examination and incarceration.
Except for the Val pilot who had given me my baptism by fire in the Solomon Islands, this was the only Japanese person I saw during the entire war. Who was this forlorn figure, and where is he now? Was he wondering what the hell he was doing swimming half-naked off Corregidor, as much as I was wondering what the hell I was doing with a Colt .45 pistol in my hand, momentarily diverted from supervising an afternoon of street fucking and sightseeing?
This was the winter of 1945, and Desron 22 (Destroyer Squadron) was in on the tail end of the fabulously successful naval battles in the seas around the Philippines. After I straightened them out (“Smile,” as the V-Mail letters home used to put it), I joined a destroyer squadron a few days before it fired torpedoes from a range of less than two miles at a huge Japanese Naval Force in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The Japanese were caught steaming due north in a column in the narrow confines of Surigao Straits between the islands of Leyte and Mindanao. A successful torpedo shoot depends on knowing the course and speed of the enemy ships. In this case we knew their course, because they would run aground if they were on any other course, and their speed was not important because there were so many enemy ships: if you missed the one you were aiming for, you would hit the next one.
Or so we told ourselves.
One sunny afternoon, I found myself off the coast of Zamboanga on the island of Mindanao, in the southern Philippines where, as the old song that rang in my head went, “O, the monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga.” In fact, I was off Zamboanga in a PBY, a clumsy two-engine seaplane, trying to take off for my next assignment, when the plane was scissored by Jap machine-gun fire but kept flying.
The early months of 1945 were the toughest of the war for me. I got almost no mail, which was more important to us all than food or ammunition. Someone kept pretty good track of where individual ships were, but no one could be expected to follow one brand-new lieutenant as he bounced on his own from ship to ship. I got almost no sleep, as I “taught” during the day and stood watch half the night. The problems I found, and tried to correct, were almost always the same, and therefore less challenging to solve. The noise level in the cramped CICs was always too high, with as many as six or seven voice radio circuits, plus the endless pinging of the SONAR, the submarine detection system, the reports of lookouts and radar operators, plus crewmen relaying voice messages they received by sound-powered telephones from all over the ship. The more imminent the battle, the louder the noise level, and the more important it was to hear everything. The other incredible challenge was to keep track of where your own ship was in relation to other ships: your own task force, your own fighter planes, enemy ships—surface and submarine—and enemy planes, at 20,000 feet, or at sea level on a torpedo bombing run. All this at speeds of up to 30 knots, in the dead dark of night as well as in the brightest daylight, in driving thunderstorms or in the fairest weather, in mountainous seas or dead calms.
We had been escorting some high-speed minelayers one night, trying to seal off an escape route used to ferry retreating Japanese soldiers. We had laid the mines, and were hauling ass at 37 miles per hour in a torrential rainstorm, when the captain came back into the CIC soaking wet and pleaded, “Bradlee, where the hell am I?” It was a good question, one I have often remembered at times when I felt I was in some jam, not entirely of my own making, and not entirely in charge of extricating myself. We were taught in Naval ROTC that if you asked an admiral where he was, he would put his hand on the center of the chart. If you asked a commander where he was, he would point at the chart. But if the skipper asked you where he was, you should be able to pinpoint his exact location. This captain didn’t want to know latitude and longitude. He wanted to know he wasn’t going to run aground at 34 knots, or collide with other ships. And thereby stop his career and his ship dead in the water. That was exactly what I wanted to know.
But each day of my naval life I had been learning perhaps the most important lesson of my life: You can’t do any better than surround yourself with the best people you can find, and then listen to them. And I had done that. “We’re one hundred yards behind the Sauffley, sir, in the middle of the channel, on the same course and speed. We’re doing fine.” I didn’t know where the hell we were, but I knew where the best people we could find thought we were.
When whatever ship I was on during this winter and spring of 1945 went to General Quarters, everyone had a specific job, except me. It is one thing to accept or solicit advice from a visiting “expert” as you zigzag peacefully across the sparkling Pacific, but when a ship is attacking or under fire itself, a destroyer crew works together as a team, and strangers are tolerated with difficulty. I hated feeling helpless, but it is what I felt when one of the destroyers I was on fired a spread of torpedoes at a small column of Japanese warships in the middle of the night, using information produced by the team I was coaching but not leading. And I felt helpless as I followed the blip of a Japanese plane into our formation and was sent reeling as it crashed into the stern of another destroyer close by. This was my first encounter with the strangest of all Japanese behavior, the Kamikaze, or the Golden Wind. I could imagine myself in the heat of battle where I would perhaps instinctively take some sudden action which would almost surely result in my death. I could not imagine waking up some morning at 5:00 A.M., going to some church to pray, and knowing that in a few hours I would crash my plane into a ship on purpose.
Anyway, I boarded my nineteenth and last destroyer, the U.S.S. DeHaven, on July 23, 1945, some fifty or sixty miles southeast of the coast of Japan. She was the flagship of Destroyer Squadron 61, whose staff included my old friend Joe Walker, and she was commanded by my old Philip skipper, Bill Groverman. On August 7, I finished my inspection/instruction tour of the DeHaven, and was transferred (under way, of course) to a fleet tanker, the U.S.S. Cacapon (AO 52), to start a trip to pick up new orders in Pearl Harbor.
But on August 6, one atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing 80,000 people in a flash, seriously injuring another 100,000, and leveling 98 percent of the city’s buildings. All we knew came from a brief radio dispatch, and yet everyone knew it was the beginning of the end of the war. None of my new shipmates knew the first thing about atomic energy, much less atomic bombs. But I spotted an unused set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the modest library, and I volunteered to research the subject enough to write a small information bulletin for the ship’s crew. Without knowing a thing, we sensed that this event was going to rival December 7, 1941, in importance to all our immediate futures.
Was this the first time I wrote in ignorance? Knowing way too little about my subject? Or the last?
I wish.
Memory has blurred my recollection of the last months of this assignment, but the opinion of my performance has been preserved, through the endorsements of the many commanding officers whom I served. Some of this evidence was provided by men whose future naval careers were not all that noteworthy, but it is all that I have that is tangible to show for those long months.
Life as an itinerant expert was incredibly busy and active on one hand—from battles to bull sessions—and yet isolated and lonely on the other. So I sustained myself with the life-saving mini-editions of Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker—small Reader’s Digest-sized publications without ads, but with proof that there was a world out there, beyond radar blips, endless horizons, and the uneasy camaraderie of friendships that would begin, flourish, and end in two weeks.
I was sustained, too, by the fitness reports I received from each commanding officer as I left one destroyer and headed for the next one. These fitness reports were in the form of endorsements to my orders, where my performance as a visiting expert was described and evaluated. As a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness, but that kind of evidence was hard to come by in wartime, if you weren’t a combat pilot, measuring enemy planes shot down, or a submarine skipper, counting enemy ships sunk. My destroyer skipper bosses seemed to have spotted some things in me that appear almost more relevant to my later life than to my life as a Navy lieutenant:
Lieutenant Bradlee is the first C.I.C. training officer [with] practical experience and theoretical background equal to that of ship’s officers. . . . He is enthusiastic and knows how to put his stuff over . . . he volunteered and stood watches with regular watch sections . . . he has increased interest of all hands in C.I.C. work.
E. B. Grantham, C.O. of the U.S.S. Robinson (DD562). 14 March 1945
The services of Lieutenant Bradlee . . . are greatly appreciated. More has been gained from his visit than from even the most interesting publications. . . . It was pleasant as well as profitable to have Lieutenant Bradlee on board. His manner and his constructive approach, which are such [as] to make others receptive to his ideas, are worthy of note.
Chesford Brown, C.O. of the U.S.S. Eaton (DD510). 14 April 1945
Lieutenant Bradlee has done an outstanding job. His tact, friendliness, and obvious ability have been greatly appreciated. The infectious enthusiasm and obvious competence of subject officer have done much to revive interest and enthusiasm in tasks that the same personnel have been performing for 18 months. The imaginative yet realistic approach that he makes on the difficult problem of casualty drills has been most valuable. W. S. Maddox, C.O. of the U.S.S. Mertz (DD691). 5 June 1945
The report cards described the beginnings of an adult—still only twenty-three years old, but emerging with recognizable characteristics. Signs of a personality boy. A self-starter. Enthusiastic, tactful, hardworking, constructive, practical, diligent, consistent, resourceful, cooperative, realistic, able to inspire people below him, and to impress those above him—when he knows what he’s talking about.
Without these generous endorsements, I would have been operating in a total vacuum, thousands of miles from superiors who were complete strangers. With them, I plugged away, almost convinced I was leaving each destroyer in better shape than I found it, and thus helping end the war which we all sensed was winding down. We were devastated by the news of President Roosevelt’s death. No one in my immediate family had died by April 1945; FDR’s death—almost personal—was the first. My last destroyers were operating with fast carriers and battleships off the coast of Japan itself. The giant 16-inch guns lobbed their shells over the destroyers I was serving, at targets on the Japanese mainland from about 25,000 yards offshore, only twelve miles. Escorting destroyers would station themselves between the battleships and the shore, to get torpedoed first in case there were enemy submarines around. Their guns flashed long before the deafening sound, and then what seemed like much later, we could actually see the 16-inch shells—big as Volkswagens—streak over our heads.
When August finally came with the world’s first atomic explosions, I was on the fleet oiler U.S.S. Cacapon, waiting for a ride to Pearl Harbor. I got there on the escort carrier U.S.S. Munda (CVE 104) on August 17, 1945, three days after the fighting ended in the Far East. Two weeks later, on September 2, General MacArthur accepted the formal surrender of Japan on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay. And the war was unbelievably over.
I had more than enough points (which were earned for time in service as well as time in campaign battles) to be released from active duty. But I was stuck with orders keeping me in Hawaii to help rewrite the destroyer CIC manual before I got released, hoisted on my own fitness reports. I think it took me three weeks to finish the job. I hitched a ride on a cruiser back to San Francisco in October 1945, and back to the real world.