Bad weather overtook us that day, going from a relatively calm sea to howling winds, heavy rain, and an ugly chop that made even Montrose bounce and roll a bit. The destroyers, when we could see them, were underwater half the time, their bulky radar antennas looking like periscopes. Perversely, the storm kept us from going back into Rendova for almost thirty-six hours, which meant that everybody, patients, staff, ship’s company could get some real—meaning more than a couple hours—sleep for a change. Colonel Maddox took that stand-down opportunity to do a comprehensive survey of our medical supplies and equipment. He sent out a message to Nouméa describing what we needed, including a recommendation to send one surgeon and two nurses back for failing to make the grade. He let me see the message before sending it out, and I was relieved to see that there was nothing about my joining the medical staff in it. He grinned when he saw my obvious relief.
“No point in waving red flags, now, is there, Doctor,” he said. I was beginning to really like this guy, fat rolls and all. I asked him if he actually thought he’d get those supplies.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “They’ve brought two whole squadrons of those Catalinas into Nouméa, with one rotating up to Cactus and the other staying behind. If the stuff’s there, they can get it here in forty-eight hours.”
We arrived back at Rendova around eight the next evening and found a mess: a destroyer with her bow blown off all the way back to the bridge, courtesy of a torpedo fight near some island called Kolombangara, a heavy cruiser with her forward-most turret in splinters following a turret explosion, and two dozen casualties from my own MTB squadron after they ran into a bunch of Jap barges and their destroyer escorts on the northeast side of New Georgia, where the Japs were landing reinforcements. Fortunately, there’d been an LST, USS Harlan County, in the harbor, so there’d been somewhere safe to put all the wounded.
The transfers began immediately. Montrose also needed fuel, so the Army harbormaster sent a fuel barge to come alongside and fill her empty bunkers while she onloaded casualties from the LST on the other side. It wasn’t long before we had to tell Harlan County to hold whomever they had left. We were out of room in both the triage area and the operating rooms. The Army general in charge of the New Georgia operation heard about that and started raising hell, citing Montrose’s advertised troop capacity for 2,500 men. The problem was that there were that many berths down below, but not all of them were equipped to provide life support for badly wounded men.
At 0200 it was time to clear the harbor. There were still 160 casualties on board Harlan County, so the decision was made to have her go out to sea with us. They had one doctor on board and he could begin immediate first aid. In the meantime, I was back at the operating table, given the sheer quantity of the casualties. There was no time for me to just roam through the operating suite, supervising. The nurses moved some cots into the areas outside the curtained tables so that the surgeons could lie down for a few minutes between operations while they cleaned the table and got the next case under anesthesia. I found out there were some Marines among the wounded, which surprised me because I thought that New Georgia was strictly an Army show. The Marines told me they’d been sent in to reinforce the Army division. As one of the Marines boasted, the Army guys gave it a good try but now it was time for the first team to end the stalemate. That sounded right to me, but I still admired his bravado, lying there with one and a half arms and a morphine drip going.
We got out to sea in good order. We were down to one destroyer escort, the other having been pulled into the ongoing sea battles to the north of New Georgia. The seas were calm enough for boat transfers the next morning. Harlan County had two bow-ramped amphibious boats on board which could bring us twelve patients at a time. Two of the Montrose’s berthing compartments had been converted into post-op recovery rooms, so we had someplace to put the people we’d treated or operated on. The surgeons got some sleep while the transfers were taking place, and we had a fresh set of nurses by the time we went back to the OR. There was a brief scare at noon when an unidentified plane overflew our little formation at high altitude. We then suspended the transfer operation while the two ships moved thirty miles to the south in case that plane had been a Jap reconnaissance aircraft.
For the next twenty-four hours we slogged through the patient backlog, operating on the most urgent and then the less so. Not all our patients required surgery, but every one of them required care. Colonel Maddox had begun hounding Nouméa for the supplies. He told them we had only two more days’ worth of medical supplies for the operating tables, after which we’d be out of business. He’d exaggerated, of course, but not by much. If we got another load like this last one, he’d have been right. Rendova was already asking when we’d be back in. I asked Maddox why they didn’t set up a hospital on Rendova. I’d thought Montrose was supposed to have been a temporary solution to an unexpected casualty load from New Georgia. He pointed out that any field hospital set up on Rendova would have been subjected to bombing raids. Until we had complete control of the air around that area, we couldn’t do much to change the situation. That would require an airfield, and that, of course, was the whole objective of the New Georgia campaign—that relatively large Jap airfield at Munda, from which we could then stage fighters, bombers, and whatever else we needed to advance toward their big nest at Rabaul.
There was little point in our going back into Rendova until we’d cleared our surgical backlog. Nouméa had promised they’d start a Catalina stream, which would stage through Cactus and then land at Rendova to move our wounded out of the immediate combat zone. The planes would bring up medical supplies and take away the patients who were deemed fit to move. It wasn’t a perfect setup, but it was apparent to all of us that everybody was doing all they could to solve this knotty problem of how to save the wounded. They wouldn’t start the stream until they knew when we’d get back to Rendova.
The following day the weather became iffy, but Harlan County had by then put all her patients aboard Montrose. She sailed back northeast toward Rendova, disappearing into a set of dark squall lines when she was only five miles away. By this point, we’d done all the urgent surgeries. We were now doing follow-up work, second surgical repairs where necessary, and treating the lesser injuries, with the term “lesser” being very much a relative word. Colonel Maddox did another inventory and then declared that we had to go back in. He sent a message to Nouméa to start the Catalina stream, and then informed the Army at Rendova that we’d be returning at just after dark. We then set about determining who was fit to be off-loaded when we got in because we knew there’d be lots more “customers” waiting in Rendova harbor. We were overflown by another unidentified “high-flier” on our way back in, but the captain was confident that the rain-swept skies had kept us out of sight, assuming the plane was a Jap.
We arrived on the western side of Rendova just at nautical twilight. That big, black volcano, which loomed like some presiding judge over the whole island, was turning a bright orange color. Our destroyer escort had gone on ahead to get in before we did to refuel. We couldn’t see what ships were in the harbor because we were coming in from the west, but most of the medical staff and even some of the ambulatory patients were topside on the promenade deck just to watch the spectacular sunset and get some fresh air.
We were perhaps five miles from the big left turn into the harbor proper when one of the nurses said: “Look—a seaplane.” Everyone assumed it was one of the Catalinas until I saw that it had four engines, not two. It was approaching from behind us, and it was low, not skimming the surface but no more than a few hundred feet above it. It was coming straight at us, with no nav lights showing, aiming for our port side. Then I remembered all the stories about the Kawanishi; those huge armed Jap seaplanes that were night-capable. They’d killed many a PT boat. And, they carried Long Lance torpedoes.
Before I could yell Japs! two dark objects dropped from the seaplane’s belly, and then she banked hard to the right and began to make a big circle to the southwest across our stern, no more than two miles behind us. I thought I heard some shouting from way up on the bridge and then felt the ship begin to heel to port as Montrose attempted to evade the torpedoes that were coming, to no avail. An enormous explosion erupted on the port quarter of the ship, big enough to push the old girl deeper into her turn, followed by a second that hit the port side a third of the way up from the stern.
Almost everyone out on the promenade deck was knocked down by the force of the two blasts and, almost immediately, there was a roar of steam from the ship’s single funnel. As we scrambled to our feet, we could feel the unmistakable lurch to port as Montrose, mortally wounded, reacted to the thousands of tons of seawater rushing into her engineering spaces. Within seconds she slowed and began listing as her stern settled. I literally didn’t know what to do for one frightening moment. The nurses’ screams were drowned out by that blast of steam thundering out the stack as the ship’s boilers succumbed to the onrushing water. The ship continued moving slowly ahead even as she listed further to port, her own momentum carrying her forward in a slow right turn, as if she was intent on executing a death spiral into the deep.
Two crewmen came running down the tilting promenade deck dispersing gray kapok life jackets to everyone there, especially the terrified nurses. There was a life jacket locker right next to where I was standing, so I opened it up, grabbed one, and then began pulling more of them out onto the deck. By then it was becoming difficult to stand upright. The ship was sinking by the stern and listing ever more to port. I’d barely got my jacket strings tied up before there was a great whooshing sound from somewhere aft and then she capsized, going all the way over onto her beam ends and pitching everyone topside into the sea in a waterfall of tumbling bodies. Then she slowly righted herself, paused as if to get a final breath, and then began to slide down by the stern. A big wave forced my head underwater. I had to kick violently to get back to the surface. There were bobbing heads everywhere and a sudden smell of fuel oil. One of the ship’s officers nearby was yelling Go! Go! Go! to everyone around him, indicating that we should start swimming hard to get away from the suction effect that was coming.
I couldn’t tell how many survivors were in the water at this point but I could hear a lot of female voices calling for help. The two nurses nearest me were doggedly trying to swim away from the ship. One of them had a life jacket on, the other was clutching hers under one arm as she kicked vigorously. Then I spotted another nurse who was trying to swim, stay afloat, breathe, and get her life jacket on. Her eyes were closed and she was crying hysterically. I changed direction, came up alongside her, grabbed one of her flailing arms, and started pulling her along with me. She screamed when I first touched her but then relaxed when she saw I wasn’t a shark. She then tried to help us both make progress away from what was coming, but mostly ended up kicking me in the legs.
I told her to hold on to her life jacket but I didn’t think she could hear me over the roar of steam and compressed air coming out of the dying ship. There was just enough of a seaway that my view of everyone in the water was intermittent. The sinking ship was visible, though, and everybody out there was frantically trying to get away from her as more and more of her red underbelly rose into the air. Her cargo booms began to topple over in a tangle of heavy cables and crashing steel. The roar of air leaving the hull increased and then her bow disappeared in a cloud of dust as the forward cargo hatches gave way. Then she was just gone.
I think everyone out there in the water felt the sudden pull of a massive, sucking current back toward where she’d gone down, but, fortunately, it didn’t last. The sudden silence was overwhelming, and then the shouting began as survivors milled around in the darkening ocean. There was no more hysteria; everyone who was still alive began concentrating on getting closer to other survivors. A gray life raft popped high up out of the water and then slapped back onto the surface. Then another. And another. I vaguely remembered that the rafts had been attached to the ship by hydrostatic devices, set to release them if water pressure ever entered the devices. I steered my clingy new best friend toward the nearest raft as even more popped up from the deep. She’d been a troopship, so she’d carried lots of rafts. Soon there were small flashlights coming on across the surface as men got aboard the rafts and began helping others climb in. The rafts were pretty basic: balsa wood covered in painted canvas fabric, eight feet wide by ten long, with a netting bottom and more nets strung along the sides for people to hang on to. Then my heart about stopped when I heard airplane engines approaching. The bastards were coming back to finish the job.
We were suddenly enveloped in a blaze of yellow-white light as the plane came in, but it wasn’t a Kawanishi, thank God. It was a twin-engined Catalina, followed by two more in close succession. They’d turned on their landing lights and began to circle the area as the pilots took stock of the situation and made their reports back to Rendova. One of them expanded his circle and then dropped some rafts to a clutch of survivors who had drifted away from the main group. I became aware that the young woman whom I’d been helping had buried her wet head against my chest and was sobbing so hard I wondered how she could breathe. I tried to calm her, telling her rescue was coming, that we were going to be OK, but she kept on crying. Finally, she got control of herself and looked up at me with an anguished expression on her face.
“The patients,” she sobbed. “What happened to the patients?”
I was embarrassed to realize that I hadn’t thought even once about all those patients, as well as the medical people tending to them, trapped belowdecks. At that instant we both knew what had happened to them, to all of them. Montrose hadn’t lasted more than a few minutes after the torpedoes struck. She hadn’t been a warship, with watertight compartments and damage-control measures installed. Those fearsome Jap torpedoes had eviscerated her, opening up probably half her underwater body to the sea. It was certain that anyone not thrown into the sea when she did that one big roll had gone down with her. I suddenly felt sick at the sheer scale of the slaughter. I put my arm around the nurse and then we both wept as we hung on to the raft’s netting.