The following morning, George sat at the wardroom table stabbing disinterestedly with his fork at his powdered eggs and slippery tinned sausages. General quarters had been sounded a total of four times through the night and his eyes were sandy with fatigue. The wardroom was fairly full, even though it was almost 0500 because there was a major strike launch planned for 0600. He knew he needed food and he was painfully aware that a lot of the crew hadn’t had a chance at hot chow for almost thirty hours with all these constant probes and attacks. He planned to talk to the captain this morning about maybe staging people through the messdecks all day and night instead of sticking to rigidly fixed meal hours. He expected the usual gruff no, not regulation, but he thought it worth a try. The captain would declare that fighting off Jap planes was more important than full bellies right now. George would have loved to point out that he, the captain, had a personal steward who managed to keep him fed, whether he was in his stateroom or up on the bridge, and the admiral had a whole herd of stewards doing the same thing for him.
His fork failed to penetrate one of the rock-hard sausages. He’d been eating so slowly that his breakfast was now cold. He gave up. Billy-B Perkins came by his table carrying what looked like a fried Spam and ketchup sandwich that was barely contained in some greasy paper napkins.
“You gonna die, you eat that mess,” George observed.
“Probably,” Billy responded. “But at least it’s portable.”
“Big deal today?” George asked him, reaching for the coffee pitcher.
“Yes, sir, we’re throwing the whole damn air group at ’em this time. I think all the carriers are. Spruance is getting tired of these all-nighters.”
“Me, too,” George said. “I’m dead on my ass, and I’m afraid the whole crew is, too.”
“We’re sending so many planes today that we’ve had to arm and fuel some of them in the hangar bay ’cause there’s no room on the roof. I hate to do that, but—”
“If you have to, you have to,” George said. “Captain’s not gonna want to hear about any delays in the launch.”
“That’s for damn sure,” Billy said. “I guess this is what we get for stirring up the home-islands hornet’s nest. Gotta go.”
George stopped by his office to get a quick read on the morning’s message traffic before heading for the bridge. He half expected the hateful buzzer to go off. He was becoming convinced that the buzzer knew when he came into his office and informed on him to the captain, but apparently the captain had other people to annoy right now. He heard flight quarters being sounded at 0600 and then came a surprising announcement over the 1MC: set Condition Three with the exception of gun batteries, the bridge, and CIC. The messdecks will remain open until all hands have had a chance to get chow. Gun crews authorized to send one-third of their crew to chow on a rotational basis. That is all.
He felt the ship turning into the wind to begin the launch. That order must have come from the captain, who must have been thinking along the same lines as George about the crew not getting fed. He heard the passageway outside his office fill with men hustling down to the messdecks. He felt rather than heard the first of the fighters rolling down the flight deck toward the bow. Tired of paperwork and already getting sleepy in the warm office, he decided to go to the bridge to watch the launch. He actually preferred to watch from PriFly, but the captain would wonder why he wasn’t up there on the bridge. With him.
George grinned mentally at the thought of his self-deception as he threaded his way through the throng of hungry sailors. He decided to go out to the flight deck briefly before heading upstairs. Maybe that cold air streaming across the flight deck would help him wake up.
The noise nearly overwhelmed him as he stepped through the island hatch and into the light-locker leading out to the actual flight deck. Two dozen bombers were packed together back aft with their engines turning and wings drooping with bombs and rockets. Between the engine exhaust smoke and the noise, he wondered how the flight deck crews could even think, much less coordinate the steady movement of planes from their spots to the launch position, all the while prancing about the flight deck almost on their hands and knees to avoid the whirling propellers. The wind was blowing hard. He looked up to the signal halyards, where the Fox flag was two-blocked and standing stiffly in the relative gale. At least forty, maybe even fifty knots of relative wind over the deck. Good, he thought. It would help those overloaded Corsairs waddle off the deck. He, himself, had to hang on to a stanchion to stay upright in that baby gale howling down the deck.
He looked back aft to see what the gang was taking to Dai Nippon today. Some of the bombers carried the big stuff internally, with a couple of incendiary 100-pounders strapped to the wings. They’d drop the crowd-pleaser and the fire sticks together. The bomb would create wreckage; the incendiaries would start it on fire. Others had five-inch rockets, three to a wing, instead of bombs. These were the train-chasers, who’d find railroad tracks and fly down them until they found a train and then rocket the engine. With the engine disabled, they’d turn around and fly back down the line, strafing the freight and tank cars to finish the job. Still others had those murderous Tiny Tims, much bigger rockets with large, 500-pound warheads. These were used to smash into big factory buildings like steel mills or aircraft hangars. All the planes, fighters and bombers, also carried guns, and once they dropped their main armament, they’d turn around, get low, and strafe the hell out of whatever was left, especially all the people running for their lives. George had spent more than a few nights at bases in the Solomon Islands subject to Jap bombing raids and even battleship bombardments. This whole picture was immensely satisfying.
Okay, he thought. Time to go face the ogre and make nice. But as he turned to go back into the light-locker, something way above the flight deck caught his eye. His brain at first rejected what he was seeing, but then he realized he was seeing it: a lone Japanese bomber, green-skinned with a greenhouse structure for a cockpit, those big red meatballs staring back at him, flying directly over the carrier, from bow to stern, and going like a bat out of hell. A Judy! He was forming the words WHAT THE HELL, when there was a flash of reddish-white light and he was blown off his feet and all the way forward along the sides of the island, where his body then rolled through the space between the two forward five-inch mounts and right into the lifelines. He was frantically grabbing for something to stop himself from going right over the side and falling eighty feet into the sea when his head hit something truly hard and he blacked out for a moment. When he came to, the end of the world was upon him in all its fiery glory.