SEPTEMBER 1943
Underway on the early afternoon of September 5, Hap Jolly gathered the crew in the mess and confirmed that this time it was for real, the invasion of the Italian mainland. They’d be going into Salerno in the early morning of the 9th, with a pit stop at Bizerte in Tunisia on the way.
They steamed out of Mers el-Kebir and then Oran in a complement of twelve destroyers, screening nineteen troop transports and three cruisers. In Bizerte, they tied up to the repair ship Delta for several hours while technicians righted their radar. One of Plunkett’s machinist’s mates, Ken Sahlin, might have said something then about his troubles while they idled next to Delta, but Murphy’s Law had them hell-bent for Salerno when Jack Simpson learned there was a major operation brewing in the wardroom, and that members of the repair party would be needed.
Dr. Bates was used to fielding complaints about stomach troubles, which he could sometimes trace to George Schwartz, who might serve weevils with his black-eyed peas, or Dutch Heissler, whose wheeling and dealing as provisioner didn’t necessarily include quality control. But the machinist’s mate’s situation—his nausea, fever, rigid muscles in the lower right abdomen—was clearly a bigger deal. The symptoms called for extraction.
As officer of the deck, Jack put the ship at general quarters before leaving the bridge at 8 p.m. and reporting to the wardroom, where Bates was setting up for something he’d never done before—an appendectomy. He hadn’t cut anyone since he’d tucked into a cadaver back in med school, but there wasn’t any choice. One hundred eighty German planes had stormed Bizerte just hours before their pit stop to fix the radar, and who could say what awaited them on the shores of Salerno? They were bounding over swells at twenty knots, and that appendix had to come out.
At the wardroom, Jack mustered a complement to Bates’s pharmacist’s mates with some of his repair party, including Heissler. Dutch seemed to be capable of handling anything, and the doctor needed a team that could keep their heads. They strapped Sahlin to the wardroom table, and then rigged a harness for Bates. One of the pharmacist’s mates was reading out of a medical book that detailed what was needed—sulfa tablets, hemostats, scalpel blades, catgut, cans of ether, retractors. Not every ship had retractors, and when they did not but needed them anyway, they’d bend back spoons from the mess. Harnessed, Bates doled out jobs to his team.
“Count the swabs,” he said to Jack. “Count them going in and count them coming out.”
One of the pharmacist’s mates started reading a how-to section on an appendectomy, and Bates dug in. It was long after sunset now, and Plunkett was in the convoy’s vanguard, the lead ship. If anything were to come down on this convoy in darkness, it would come down on Plunkett first.
With the first can of ether administered, Bates made his first incision and started for the appendix. He wasn’t a man to shy away from something he’d never done before. Later in life, as a general practitioner in northeastern Connecticut, he’d open the chest of a local justice of the peace with a scalpel, saw through the sternum, and perform open cardiac massage in a last-ditch effort to save the man’s life. Emergency surgery was not new to him by then, but this kind of thing was all new to Bates as they headed into Salerno. White masks covered the crews’ mouths and noses. Everything was happening in slow motion, each step placed as deliberately as a thief’s in the night, hoping to keep the floors from creaking while they waited out each of Plunkett’s shifts in the sea. Bates finally went after the appendix with his fingers, fiddling for it down behind the cecum. He knew it as soon as he had it, and there it was, the distal tip black and gangrenous and ready to burst. Bates called for fingernail clippers he’d had boiled in water and torpedo juice (alcohol), and he snipped off the offending little organ. He doused the stump with carbolic acid, cauterizing it, and then used sulfa, which they’d ground to powder from tablets and baked in the ship’s oven, and sprinkled that about the peritoneal cavity as a hedge against spores. With that, he double-checked the cavity for the gauze, confirmed the count with Simpson, and started sewing up the three-inch incision. They’d been more than two hours at it.
Appendix extracted, Plunkett steamed into the warp of a 642-ship armada bound for the shores at Salerno, there to deposit fifty-five thousand men. Topside at dusk on the 8th, right after they’d been secured from general quarters, the crew got word that Italy had surrendered. General Eisenhower had declared as much in a broadcast on Radio Algiers. The Italians hadn’t yet admitted to the armistice, but the crew trusted Eisenhower.
Notions about what this all meant began to ricochet among the white hats. The Salerno landings were to be a milk run. They were invading Italy, and the Italians had quit. Irvin Gebhart flexed his muscles and said, “They must have known we were on our way.” On the Mayo they believed “the war was over.” One of the men in the black gang on Niblack was less sanguine but confused. “Who is going to fight who when our guys land on the beach?” asked Joseph Donahue. The complacency didn’t last long. Enemy planes bore down on their convoy a couple of hours after the announcement, and Plunkett spent nearly an hour laying a smoke screen to hide the troops in the transports. That evening, Jim Feltz scribbled a furtive note in his journal: “Italy gave up. But we still half [sic] to push the Germans out.”
Clear of the smoke screen, Jim stood with five or six other men in the midship repair party near the after deckhouse, just below the searchlight, as they steamed to within a mile-and-a-half of the Licosa Light at the southern reach of the Gulf of Salerno. It was a warm and moonless night, and the sky blazed with a million stars—the firmament, as the poets called it—each prickling of light sowing dreams of another world. In ancient days, Ulysses had sailed these waters tied to the mast while a siren called Leucosia beckoned from shore. She beckoned this evening, seducing them with songs of home, and Jim was listening. His thoughts drifted back to the dime store, the drudgery of all that work redeemed by the halcyon light of recollection. He envisioned the store’s front three bays, lit and merchandised with product, the middle bay separated from its neighbors by two inset doorways. After parking behind the greasy spoon, he’d always come in the back way for work, but he walked through the front door this evening, and there was Mickey, hunched over the glass shelf on her forearms, and Betty nearby, twisting a tube of lipstick between her thumb and forefinger. Just for a moment, there was a tremendous vividness to the recollection, and Jim yearned for reinstatement, as miraculous as that was, wondering that he ever wanted anything else but the dime store. In the one letter he’d had from Mickey after he enlisted, she’d written that she’d never been able to understand why he’d joined. That wasn’t a question he ever asked himself. However fervently he dreamed of something as mundane as cutting another piece of glass for one of Mr. Siegal’s shelves, he knew that night that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
As the 8th ticked into the 9th, there wasn’t supposed to be room for any quiet reflection before Avalanche, as the landings had been code-named. The Navy should have been pounding targets on shore. They’d been agitating for a license to do just that. But the Army thought they might spring a tactical surprise on the gulf’s defenders. They’d achieved surprise in North Africa, and, thanks to the man who never was, surprised them again with Operation Husky on Sicily. But the barbarians knew the Allies wanted the port of Naples, and it didn’t take hard math to swing one arm of a compass from Allied positions in Sicily onto the beaches of Salerno. While Army commanders dreamed of surprise, the Germans were moving a Panzer division onto the Salerno plain and crowding their airfields with bombers. They were positioning their 88mm and machine guns. They were ready.
Gebhart’s brother Leonard went in at H hour, 3 a.m. on the 9th. Gallagher suspected the same of his brother Frank, except that Frank’s ship, Durban Castle, was idling at a pier at Mers el-Kebir, held back because they’d had trouble getting water. Frank wouldn’t hit Red Beach near the old Greek temples at Paestum for another six days.
The first wave moved in, then the second, over inshore waters with “gentle swells like quiet breathing of untroubled sleep.” Waiting on the whites of their enemies’ eyes, the Germans finally unsheathed on the third wave and came down on the invaders with a ferocity comparable to the Japanese defense at Tarawa two months later. The Germans had mined all of the beaches, and were resolved to annihilate the Allies and throw them into the sea. Mortars, 88mm shells, and machine guns pummeled the assault beaches, and then the Luftwaffe swept in to strafe and bomb. All the while, as per the Army’s request, the Navy guns were silent. On one of the southernmost beaches, a German loudspeaker actually taunted the invading Americans: “Come on in and give up. We have you covered!” Two hours after sunrise, Navy gunners connected with their spotters in the air and fire control parties on shore and finally joined the battle. By the end of the day, they’d engaged 132 enemy targets and kept annihilation of the Army at bay, for that day, at least.
Through the first two days of the invasion, Plunkett patrolled an eight- by nine-mile rectangle of sea, guarding the southern approach to the gulf. On the northern stretch of its patrol, Plunkett was still ten miles south of the assault beaches at Paestum, where the Luftwaffe was in the midst of nearly 450 sorties. They dove on ships to the north of Plunkett’s position. They strafed the beach and bombed it. German E-boats sniped at the fringes of the transport area, but not from the south. Ken Brown didn’t get to weigh in with his battery until the end of D-day plus one, and then to no effect.
Nearly forty-eight hours after the initial landings, Jack Simpson watched from the bridge as an orange flash blazed suddenly on the near horizon. Orange was a color you never wanted to see in the wake of a hit, for that was the color of one of your own ammunition magazines exploding. Plunkett couldn’t identify the vessel from that distance, but the chatter was rampant in the wake of the explosion. It was another destroyer, Rowan, ruptured most likely by a torpedo dispatched from an E-boat or maybe a submarine. No one would ever know for sure. The ship sunk in forty seconds, killing 202 men and officers. Talk about the Rowan’s fate was all over the map the next day. Irv Gebhart was saying only seven had survived. Jim Feltz countered that eighty-three men had survived. In fact the number of survivors was seventy-one. At Gela, they’d got Maddox. At Salerno now, it was Rowan. It was almost as if one destroyer had to be given up to the gods of war per invasion, with complementary hits that would take out a dozen destroyer men here, another dozen there.
Hours after Rowan went down, Plunkett was called into the transport area to screen cruisers Philadelphia and Savannah. On D-day, these cruisers had pounded German tanks, infantry, observation posts, and artillery batteries with six-inch shells, summoned by fire control parties on shore and by spotters in float planes launched from the cruisers. At nine-thirty in the morning, Jack Oliver got word that a dozen enemy planes were approaching from the north and rang general quarters. Ten minutes later, the planes bore down on the two cruisers. From the director’s observation hatch, Ken looked at Savannah, which had been lying to, a sitting duck, and was now getting underway. His battery was to do nothing, as word had just come in from the bridge that Allied fighters were on the way, as if they were fighting the same war as the Navy.
A thousand yards to Plunkett’s stern, one of the bombs nearly struck Philadelphia, and the ship dialed up more steam for evasive action. Then Ken saw something he’d never seen before, a projectile in descent, not waggling, not like a bomb, but more like a shell, and not only a shell, but one with a mind of its own. The bomb sported fins and rocket boosters and had been dropped from a high-level bomber at eighteen thousand feet—dropped but not forgotten. The plane’s crew guided the bomb with radio control, steering a 660-pounder dubbed Fritz-X for the six-hundred-foot-long target on the surface below. Ken watched the glide bomb hit Savannah, just forward of the bridge. The bomb barreled through the top of a gun turret, and then through one deck after another—five decks in all is what they reckoned on Plunkett—and exploded in a lower handling room. The blast vented through the tunnel the bomb had carved for itself, and sideways, too, opening a thirty-foot hole in the hull.
Few in the Navy, let alone on Plunkett, had ever seen a bomb like this, and its debut at Salerno inspired a little doggerel from one of Plunkett’s junior officers, Russ Wright: “The engagement was quite a session / We learned there of CHOO-CHOO’s—they made quite an impression.” It was the largest bomb to hit a Navy ship during the Second World War.
A few minutes after Savannah was hit, Allied planes showed up—a day late and a dollar short as usual, thought Ken. Burke headed for Savannah, where the damage control parties had sprung to action right after the blast, dogging down bulkhead doors between compartments to staunch flooding. The ship’s engineers diverted fuel oil from one compartment to another, playing chess with disaster. All the while the crew fought fire as the ship listed degree by degree to port, and its bow settled twelve feet, until its forecastle was nearly awash.
It was September 11, and the day had only just begun. On Plunkett, the boatswain’s whistle shrilled again in the late morning as enemy aircraft attacked, and again just after noon when bombs started hitting the beach off their starboard side; in mid-afternoon as more enemy aircraft winged in; in late afternoon with enemy planes coming in from the north; in the early evening as the Luftwaffe swooped in again and Ken Brown dispatched three rounds before friendly fighters took charge.
A little before 7 p.m., the task force commander called for Plunkett to join a screen for Savannah. The crippled cruiser’s black gang had worked throughout the day, surviving one aerial assault after another, to get the ship’s power plant back online. They were now capable of getting underway.
Burke called general quarters—for the seventh time that day—and then for twenty-seven knots as he set the ship’s course on a 240-degree bearing for station at Savannah’s starboard bow. It was late afternoon now, the sun twenty minutes shy of the horizon in the Gulf of Salerno. For the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, writing of this place sixty years earlier, this stretch of the Italian coast had been an “enchanted land,” the strand not a beachhead but a “sickle of white sand,” the waters not a transport area but “the blue Salernian bay.” The potential for poetry seemed a distant thing to men reverberating with the klaxon’s call, and who knew that two hundred had gone down with Rowan that morning, and that there were uncounted dead on Savannah but many: that had been clear from the wrath of the explosion they’d seen—dozens, maybe hundreds.
At twenty-seven knots, Plunkett was at full steam. Her colors flew straight off the gaff and churned a wake as roiling as anger, that seemed as much a consequence of her fury as the turn of her screws. The bay was full of clustered ships, some lying to, all bracing for the next assault, as Savannah set a heading for Malta.
As Burke dialed down the ship’s speed to twelve knots and took station in the screen at 7:07 p.m., a curious thing happened all across the transport area as Savannah at last got underway, heading south. The sun was minutes away from setting and favoring its subjects with that soft, luminous light peculiar to September. Gallagher in his gun tub, Feltz with the midship repair party on the main deck, Brown up out of his observation hatch in the director, Burke on a wing of the bridge, they could all see the crews on other ships in the transport area—hundreds and hundreds of men—aligning themselves at the rails of their vessels with an alacrity reminiscent of shards compelled by a magnet. It was an overwhelming spectacle, like something choreographed on Broadway, the men bidden by fanfare, compelled by the sacrament of communion. The white hats stood at the rails all over the decks. The officers stood among them. Each man was holding a salute as Savannah passed by, trying for Malta with a thirty-foot hole in her hull and a tally of dead that had already climbed past two hundred.
The British hospital ship, HMHS Newfoundland, was a 406-foot-long steamer, launched in 1924 as a packet boat running mail between Liverpool and Boston with stops at St. John and Halifax. She was all white and had a wide green band of paint running around the hull but for big red crosses at intervals. While Navy ships darkened at dusk, hospital ships flipped the switches on everything they had. Green lights festooned the deck like decorations on a Christmas tree, alerting would-be bombers to the ship’s mission, which was supposed to be a deterrent. The Hague Conventions prohibited attacks on hospital ships, but that prohibition wasn’t always an effective shield. Nor was it any kind of buffer for ships lit by their glow. As heartening as it was to know there was a hospital ship in the task force, Plunkett hated to see them come into a transport area.
There were 103 American nurses on board Newfoundland, bound for hospital tents on the beachhead at Paestum. They’d embarked from Tunisia one day after the Salerno landings, gung ho and pleased by the prospect of being the first American nurses to set foot on the European mainland. But the beachhead was hot and getting hotter as six hundred German tanks bore down on the Allies that Sunday, and now there was no telling how long, or whether, the beachhead could hold against the German counterattack.
Concerned about too much light in the transport area off Salerno, the task force commander ordered Newfoundland and three other brilliantly lit ships way back offshore—twenty miles out—where they were to mill about until it was safe to discharge personnel. A little after five o’clock the following morning, a German pilot dropped a bomb that hit Newfoundland just behind the bridge. A British wireless officer heard the German pilot announce the strike over his radio, whether with contrition or glee, it’s hard to say:
“I’ve hit a hospital ship… she’s on fire… sure to sink.”
Fifteen British nurses, officers, and crew died in the explosion; the American nurses, who’d been sleeping in the hospital wards, struggled out from under blown debris and piled into lifeboats. Nearly an hour after the bomb hit, the task force ordered Plunkett to Newfoundland.
Captain Burke had only two boilers on-line that morning, but he made the most of them at twenty-five knots. Within a half hour he had the burning ship in his sights and picked up his pace slightly for the final fifteen-minute run to the stricken vessel. The bomb had hit on the boat deck just behind the bridge. Its main funnel was still standing, though swayed by the blast, and one of its deckhouses was tilted into a ruptured crater spewing smoke. The survivors had decamped already for the nearby hospital ships, and the destroyer Mayo was drawn up alongside Newfoundland’s port quarter.
Burke decided to take Plunkett bow to bow with the burning hospital ship and stood by the helmsman to direct the delicate maneuverings.
The squadron commander voiced another idea. He wanted Plunkett to stay clear of the burning ship. Mayo was already up against the hospital boat. What more could Plunkett do?
It was seven-fifteen in the morning, and the officer of the deck, Jack Oliver, decided then that that moment would be a good one to make a note in the deck logs: “Commenced steaming on various courses at various speeds, preparing to go alongside the burning ship.”
The squadron commander’s preference sounded to Burke like an order, as the previous squadron commander’s suggestion to Lewis Miller that they take on a pilot in Norfolk had been an order, defiance of which could very well lead to sacking. Except that this was his ship, not the squad dog’s. That was how Burke saw it.
He maintained course for Newfoundland’s bow. Jack Simpson was already in the wheelhouse, as keyed up as the last man in a relay, waiting for the baton. As Plunkett’s first lieutenant, his repair parties took the lead when it came to fighting fire.
Jack didn’t think much of this squad dog, not since he’d seen the man duck under a table during an aerial assault and heard about how he’d quaked all the way into Ustica on the whaleboat. Now this man had found cause to fear the possibilities of a burning hospital ship. He was like one of those Civil War generals who always overestimated what he was up against and so elected to stand down. It was embarrassing.
If the squad dog was afraid of a sympathetic explosion as the fire raged about the nether parts of the hospital ship, Burke knew he needn’t be. This was a hospital ship and didn’t have any magazines.
Still, the commander wanted Plunkett to stay clear.
Burke didn’t know what it was to stand down, hang back, or do anything but go toe to toe when a threat was imminent. There was nothing for him to do now but remind the squadron commander he was CO of this ship, a declarative fact fraught with no more urgency of voice than recognition of the sky as blue. Relieve me if you have to, Burke told him. Otherwise, Plunkett was going in.
Minutes later, the destroyer’s port bow caressed the port bow of the burning hospital ship, and Jim Feltz swashbuckled over the rails onto the burning deck, gripping the nozzle of a fire hose. Jack Simpson clambered after him, then several hose men, then the auxiliaries with forcible entry tools, the corpsmen, and an electrician’s mate. The nurses’ leather suitcases and olive canvas bags were strewn all over the deck for the nurses had left everything deposited there the day before, anticipating disembarkation.
Jack had graduated from two Navy firefighting schools and was trying to fall back on what they’d taught him, wondering whether any of it was applicable, or if he’d come up against a fire that defied the rules. He looked from the bow to the superstructure, where smoke was venting from innumerable hatches, blown bulkheads, and ruptured decks like a geyser field. The source of the fire had to be somewhere beneath where the bomb hit, and he led his hoses in that direction.
Meanwhile, Jim had checked pressure on his nozzle, glanced across the relatively stable forecastle, and loosed a fog of water into the wreckage. He felt for heat through the soles of his shoes, if that was possible, and moved on smoke pouring out of a hold that had lost its hatch with the concussion of the blast. The textbooks had distinguished between the likes of Class A fires, and Class B, and Class C, and there were protocols for fighting different kinds of fires. Should they be running foam into those hatches, or water? No one knew for sure, so they just poured on what they had at hand—water.
It didn’t seem to Jim that the ship’s circuitry could be responsible for as much smoke billowing out of her guts, but what did he know. All the fire he’d fought had been orchestrated in Brooklyn and Norfolk, in mocked-up deckhouses and engineering compartments they’d set ablaze and run the men through, as much to sap them of fear as for any technological expertise they might gain from the schooling. Jim knew to fight electric fires with CO2; ammunition, bedding, wood, paint, and other such combustibles with water; and fuel oil with foam. Beyond that, he knew how to point a nozzle when he was on point, and how to cradle a 1.5-inch hose when he was trailing the lead man. At the blown hatch, he looked down into an inferno that took his breath away. How was anything they could do going to put out that? He tilted his nozzle into the hold and switched the lever from fog to stream.
While Jim and his crew funneled water into the smoking holds, another party from Plunkett salvaged the nurses’ luggage, passing suitcases off the forecastle and into a chain for the fantail. Newfoundland edged deeper into its starboard list, and an hour and twenty minutes after he’d dispatched his firefighters, Burke called them back. Newfoundland’s master boarded Plunkett with the men, and Burke learned that the ship’s medical supplies alone constituted the need to do everything possible to save the ship. He mustered the crew on station to be sure they’d left no one behind, and then, two hours after nosing in, shoved off to try for a better angle of attack on the fire.
Like a wrestler adjusting his grip, Plunkett sidled back up against the burning boat with as many hose and nozzle men as they had, arrayed along the rail, streaming water on the ship. That didn’t seem to do much, so Burke sent fifteen men and officers back onto the burning ship.
It was Monday and turning blacker by the hour. On the Salerno beachhead, German tanks had broken through American lines. Britain’s General Montgomery—“Slow Motion Monty”—had been lackadaisical about his advance up the Italian boot, and General Clark was readying an evacuation order for tens of thousands of Americans. Dunkirk was on everybody’s mind, and the Navy raged against the possibility. “We have never done this,” said one rear admiral.
An hour into the second detail’s attempt to get a handle on Newfoundland’s fire, the salvage tub Moreno showed up to render assistance. The tug was to distressed vessels what a medic is to a fallen soldier, and Plunkett deferred to Moreno’s expertise.
That afternoon, with Plunkett circling the burning ship to guard against a predatory sub, the crew scribbled notes to the nurses and stuffed them into their luggage. Jim wrote a short note, saying he was happy to help save this luggage—he struggled for any more eloquence than just that—and shoved the slip, with his mailing address, into the case. Though he’d maintained his fidelity to Betty, the fortune-teller had seemed to doom their future. He wasn’t happy about the prognostication, but on the other hand, that fortune-teller at least had him surviving the war.
The uncertainty on the beachhead trembled as well in the set piece happening offshore. Moreno fought the fire and rigged the hospital ship for towing. Moreno’s commodore had salvaged wrecks and impediments in harbors from Casablanca to Palermo. If he could save this one vessel from going down, so much the better.
The task force commander called Mayo back to the beachhead, leaving Plunkett to maintain the vigil. Burke sent a whaleboat out in the afternoon to sink a flotsam of lifeboats and life rafts that would otherwise have floated on as a distraction to other ships in the task force. After general quarters at dusk, they sunk quietly into the night, rousing once near midnight when German planes attacked ships that had come in on Operation Avalanche.
Ken Brown squatted in the director afterward, obliged to that roost by the ship’s modified Condition II (battle stations for select gun crews only), and moreover by brooding he couldn’t help. He had screwed up badly when they’d bombed the boot, smarting off to the captain from a compulsion that percolated as naturally within him as breathing. He’d deserved the sacking, he’d admit as much. If he’d done right by the shore bombardments on the leapfrog landings, that hardly mattered as much to him as that aircraft in the harbor in Palermo, which haunted him as a Spitfire, no matter what Bonnie said about its German provenance. Nor could he forget his stitching legs at Gela, and what that nervous energy said about his mettle as gun boss. They’d lobbed but a single salvo since they’d come in on Avalanche. Maybe that’s why they had been relegated to the fringe of the action. Plunkett’s battery wasn’t getting it done. He wasn’t getting it done.
Getting to sleep in the director at general quarters was never an easy proposition, especially when there was plenty to think about. He could count sheep; he could do that all the way to one hundred. But it was no use this evening, for any of them, wedged as they were into that tiny box, steaming fraught circles around Newfoundland at fifteen knots. They sighted an unidentified plane in the small hours of the morning, sliding by to starboard at low altitude. They couldn’t identify it, one way or the other, and so didn’t touch it. Lapsed back into another bid for slumber, they struggled for decent shut-eye, as they frequently did in the director and sometimes tried to redress with a song. It would be just the one man at first, a little something for himself, a snatch of verse that dwelled within him and that he’d retrieved as a way to deal with the melancholy or deepen it. Someone else hummed along with the verse, encouraging the singer into a chorus that a couple of them picked up. It would be a small song, carried by an undercurrent of yearning and homesickness, and expertly rendered by no means, the acoustics of the director all wrong, and it couldn’t be heard outside the confines of their little perch on the Tyrrhenian Sea, except for the echoes of this song, of so many of those songs, melded by memory and reverberating across the decades. Dinah, won’t you blow. Dinah, won’t you blow. Dinah, won’t you blow your ho-o-orn.
In the morning, Plunkett picked up a sound contact on a vessel that may have wanted to add insult to Newfoundland’s injury. They dropped a pattern of five depth charges, but nothing turned up. Though the officers fighting to save the ship believed it could be saved, the task force decided that afternoon to have it sunk. They wanted the destroyer back on the beachhead.
Plunkett edged away from the now doomed ship, and Ken’s battery tightened its grip on the burning vessel. He thought these orders to scuttle the hospital ship were premature, and he was of half a mind to let Burke know what he thought. Except that he fired that first shell without protest. Burke stood on one wing of the bridge, watching as each shell put another straw on the camel’s back. He gauged the reaction to each new hit, wondering whether it had had enough. It went on like that for forty-five minutes. Ken marveled at the seaworthiness of the old mail packet. After the forty-seventh shell hit, at 10 p.m., Burke called him off. The hospital ship was listing badly and seemed to be slowly sinking. Plunkett secured its crew from battle stations ten minutes after the firing stopped. They idled topside, watching twenty more minutes as Newfoundland finally succumbed.
Shortly after the ship was lighted the next morning, Plunkett steamed into the swept channel at thirteen knots, bound for the transport area off Salerno and a British ship with a funny name that would top off their fuel. Thanks to hundreds of dropped paratroopers over the previous two nights and incessant naval gunfire, the pressure on the beachhead had lightened at last. After Plunkett secured the men from general quarters at dawn, the crew started for breakfast at the mess hall. They were slouched against the bulkheads, awaiting their turn for Schwartzie’s fixings, when Jack Simpson responded to a red alert. The men sprang for general quarters and braced against an aerial assault that began eight minutes after the klaxon had sounded.
Ken Brown popped from his hatch to scan the skies as Focke-Wulf 190 fighter bombers burst from the sun. Plunkett’s machine guns opened on the low-level bombers, and Ken gripped the slewing sight as the director readied a salvo.
“Mr. Brown,” torpedoman Frank Vyskocil shouted from the torpedo director between the stacks. “Mr. Brown, there’s an aircraft overhead.”
Ken looked off the port side.
“There are two aircraft,” Vyskocil yelled.
Ken looked but couldn’t see it.
“No, it’s one,” Vyskocil said. “It’s one and he’s dropped something.”
Ken saw the thing then, a flicker of green on an angle of descent that he computed against the speed and bearing of his own ship and decided was lethal. It was a glide bomb, one of the choo choos chugging under the command of a German in a plane overhead.
There wasn’t time to take cover, or any place to take it really. But something had to be said. He said it but didn’t move.
A hundred yards away, dozens of Army stevedores had been teasing cargo from the holds of a Liberty ship, James Marshall, and loading it into the maw of a landing craft. The radio-guided bomb flashed by Plunkett and drilled James Marshall’s boat deck, exploding. The blast sprung bodies airborne in obscene arcs of flight, and fire flashed all over topside.
Burke called in to the bridge for more steam, and in an instant, Plunkett dug into the sea like a fighter who’s sensed an opportunity. The skipper thrived on competition, with an offense like a cyclone of jabs, hooks, and crosses. But all of his offense was in the hands of Ken Brown, and he had nothing to do but run. Hard right. Hard left. Full steam.
Amidship, Jim Feltz hunkered by a bulwark beneath the torpedo tubes, watching a landing craft hustle through the tumult at seven knots like a fat man who knows he has to hurry. He doesn’t know where or how, but he knows why. Men clung to the edges of their vessel, its empty berthing space as wide open as an invitation. Jim’s repair party was as vulnerable as the men in the LCT, but they enjoyed the illusion of protection afforded by the bulwark and the proximity of the deckhouse behind them. There were bombs falling all over the roadstead, and for whatever reason, Jim gripped this one landing craft with his sight. Until he blinked. Or maybe he didn’t blink. All he knew after the fact was that whatever he saw was right then and forever banished from his sight because the landing craft simply “disappeared.” That was Jim’s euphemism for what he didn’t want to remember because what actually happened was this: Another bomb, dropped from one of the high-level bombers, whacked LCT-241 and so completely obliterated it and the seventeen men it carried that the Navy could only presume it was sunk.
With fire now raging on the James Marshall, and panicking men flinging themselves into the sea to swim for the beach, four of the Fw 190s swept on Plunkett low and fast. Burke now had the ship at flank speed, maneuvering at twenty-five knots on two boilers. Ken dispatched a single salvo with the five-inch battery, and the machine guns and 1.1-inch maintained fire. Burke called for a rudder change, putting the helm over hard to port as one of the German bombs streaked for the ship. The bomb dove into the ship’s wake 150 yards from the stern, a second or two shy of its mark.
The dive-bomber circled back to come in low and tight on the port beam, like a taunt. The no. 2 and no. 4 machine guns each emptied a full canister into the Fw 190, the tracers making no mistake about it. The plane absorbed the shells without evidence of injury. It was the damnedest thing. They could plant shells in the fuselage of a plane, and sometimes it wouldn’t even cough back smoke.
As quick as they’d come, the planes were gone, all of the action contained within five minutes—the James Marshall hit, the bombing runs on Plunkett, the ship to flank speed, the expenditure of 194 rounds of the 20mm and 55 rounds of the 1.1-inch. Burke slowed the ship to five knots and, like a shepherd to his sheep, crawled in among the merchant ships should the bombers circle back over this part of the transport area. They did not, and by 9 a.m., Plunkett was siphoning fifty-one thousand gallons of fuel oil off the British tanker Dertwendale. In the faux leather oxblood diary that Cliff Dornburg was keeping of his time on Plunkett, he jotted five words to sum up the day: “Near dead by dive bombers.”
The day was not over. Jack Simpson was on the bridge as officer of the deck when the James Marshall was hit and Plunkett was dive-bombed, and he dutifully penciled the details into the ship’s log after the fact. Having Jack in the box quite often meant something was about to pop. In his stints as officer of the deck and as first lieutenant, Jack found himself more often than not a witness to or a player in matters of consequence and calamity. He’d put his name on that telegram to Roosevelt, asking the president to retain Miller as Plunkett’s CO. He was at the conn when they first sighted Africa in the fall. At Gela, he’d been officer of the deck when German planes roared into the roadstead and started bombing the transports. He was one of the first three men on Plunkett wounded in action. He went out to retrieve the downed German pilot. He’d counted the swabs coming out of Ken Sahlin. He’d led men onto the Newfoundland to fight the fire. He’d watched the Rowan explode at Salerno and noted the time he saw the flash at 0132. If there was a pivotal moment on board Plunkett, Jack Simpson invariably found himself at the fulcrum, shouldering some of the burden. No wonder Burke wouldn’t let him go.
So when the lookouts spotted several dead men floating two hours after they’d finished fueling off the Dertwentdale and had begun patrolling Able sector, it was Jack Simpson who lowered one of the ship’s whaleboats and, together with Dr. Bates and a damage control party, went out to investigate.
Burke didn’t stick around. He resumed his patrol, always within sight of the detached gig, leaving Jack and Bates to putter from one floating man to another, some of whom were intact, some of whom were not. There wasn’t any mystery to why these men had not stayed down with their ship. Each had bloated completely out of his clothes, as well as his necklace of dog tags, and was buoyed now by the gas of decomposition.
They retrieved seven bodies in all and then sat with them in the cockpit of the whaleboat, Jack and Bates and the crew, while Plunkett continued its survey of Able sector. At last, after too much time in a cockpit roiling with the stench of decomposition, Charley P. steamed within reach, and hoisted the gig.
They laid the bodies out on the fantail between the depth charge projector and the bulwark. They’d looked for clues to the individual identities of these men, but all they could know for sure was that the bodies were male. The miasma—what else to call it?—was overwhelming, like rotten cabbage.
Though Savannah had also lost two hundred men, they surmised these men were off the destroyer Rowan. That ship had been steaming at such a high rate of speed that when the explosion ripped open its hull, the ship took on water like a fiend. As water rushed in, presumably, men washed out.
They’d worked alongside Rowan on the leapfrog landings, and had seen these men, or their downed shipmates, moving topside as silhouettes in the dark off the northern coast of Sicily, or in the light of day on a nest in Palermo. Now here they were, and there but for the grace of God, they knew.
The grace of God would be called for now, because there was no way Burke was going to indulge the luxury of further attempts at identification. Plunkett didn’t have a chaplain on board, but one of the ship’s reserve officers was a Southerner, and he had a Bible.
They retrieved canvas for shrouds and fifty-two-pound shells to weigh the men down. There was some discussion about what to do next, for the dead men had to be relieved of the gas but nobody wanted to do it. So Jack Simpson, the Southerner, did it, because he was also first lieutenant. Jack didn’t have a Navy-issue knife but had fashioned one for himself in the ship’s engine rooms, grinding one of the files until it was white hot, dunking it in colder water to set the shape, then grinding and dunking again until he got it the way he wanted it.
Jack knelt before the first bloated sailor and slipped his blade into the man’s gut, venting gas so wretched that a sympathetic ventilation of his own gut was now a possibility. The first lieutenant stood and turned away from the body a moment, collecting himself. The Med sparkled sunlight off swells that made for a head of land that was no sanctuary. It wasn’t enough to address only the gut; each lobe of the lungs must be vented. It was a thing you wanted done quickly, but hurrying such enterprise would be tantamount to blasphemy, for this was the end of a man who had a mother out in the world perhaps, or a wife or a child. He angled the tip of his blade at the rib cage between the armpit and nipple, and then leaned on the hilt to pierce the skin. Surprisingly, it took very little pressure to get into the space between the lining of the lung and the lung itself. He could almost feel a pop at the entry, and there was an audible rush of air as the gas was exhausted. There were prayers stirring within Jack as he conducted this ministration, psalms susurrating from his lips at barely discernible volume and with no need for articulation. This was between Jack and the man for whom he had to do this. The man deflated to a semblance of his former self, and the pharmacist’s mates negotiated the remains into a canvas sack. The gunner’s mates contributed two fifty-two-pound shells per canvas.
Burke stood by in stony silence, bearing witness to the administration of each man. Plunkett’s crew not otherwise on watch mustered themselves at the fantail, no boatswain’s whistle needed. A crew of six emerged from below deck in dress whites to man the sides of a board that would usher each man to burial. The other sailors stood by in dungarees, some with hands clasped at the rear, some with slumped posture, and all with bowed heads as Jack Simpson’s gentle, rhythmic voice with its rounded vowels and dropped r’s said the words that concluded as such: “God, we give these men up to you and the depths of the sea.”
One by one, each of the seven was brought to the board and draped with an American flag. Jack repeated the rites, and each of the retrieved dead was balanced on the upper cable of the guardrail between the depth charge projector and a rack of ash cans, and slid feetfirst, two five-inch shells leading the way into the Tyrrhenian Sea at 40° 21" N and 14° 43.5" E. It was 4:40 in the afternoon.
In the small hours of the morning, an unidentified plane flew over the ship at low altitude, and Plunkett’s machine guns opened fire. With his 20mm stabbing blindly in the dark, and Ken now cognizant of a positive blip they’d just picked up on the surface radar, a tidal wave of adrenaline overwhelmed the director as the men broke from slumber. Up out of his hatch, Ken twisted around to the right and the left, trying to read something, anything, from the 20mm tracers, but the gunners were acting on hunches, the worst possible information. Their lines of fire unspooled in the weak light, each falling off in an impotent little comma of failure. Not for the first time he wondered what else he might do to refine the decision-making in the ship’s gun tubs. The 1.1-inch remained silent.
The hell with it, Ken thought. They’ve got something. He called down to his gun captains and told them to load. Jim and Bing kept up a low mutter that firmed up suddenly when the blip showed on their screens. All they had to do was grip that thing a moment and get that info down to the Mark 1 computer so they could read its course and speed, and then bang.
Bing was onto the plane for a minute, and though it was a shot in the dark, Ken let it go. A salvo spewed from the muzzles and went silent. The 20mm went quiet, and they listened. To nothing.
At dawn they stood general quarters for an hour, tried for some breakfast, and ran back to battle stations for a red alert on enemy planes coming in from the east. Plunkett was too far from the assault to offer up any gunfire, but at least had the satisfaction of seeing three planes flare out of their trajectories, downed by naval gunfire.
Ken exercised his mounts after breakfast, training them through a full circle and making sure the elevation hooked up neatly to the director. They’d recently had a problem with the air pressure in the no. 4 gun. Someone had neglected to tighten a valve, and an air leak caused the gun to fall out of battery when they tried elevating it. McManus and Richardson, another one of the ship’s gun captains, took to the mount with crowbars and got an air line into it, and 1,550 pounds of pressure again. Now, on full automatic, Ken had complete confidence in the battery as he slewed the works, as if each of the guns channeled directly into his grips on the sight. There was some extra sense at work, some preternatural feeling of confidence in the outcome.
Plunkett fell in behind Philadelphia’s stern as the cruiser steamed into position to lend fire support to a naval assault now crushing German forces on shore. Dr. Bates puttered away in one of the gigs to help a man who’d been injured on a minesweeper. There was a red alert that came to nothing in the late morning, and Ken sent the men down to the mess at lunch.
Just then, a bomb exploded off Plunkett’s stern and Ken sprung from the hatch as the bridge called general quarters. He looked for targets, but the dome over Plunkett was a void. They had to wonder if what had come down on them was one of these new kinds of bombs, like the one that got Savannah, a choo choo bomb. How else to explain the absence of an airplane?
Twenty minutes after they were secured, a red alert had them hopping again, this time as Fw 190s sped out from shore. The lookouts spied two of them in their binoculars, coming on high and fast.
They nailed them on the fire control radar, and Bonnie had them on the range finder. Ken took the battery to thirty-eight degrees and, twenty seconds after they’d spotted the planes, let the guns go straight off the port beam.
The port machine guns and 1.1-inch drew beads on the same planes, one of which was now coming under fire by ships in the vicinity, the other veering toward Plunkett’s bow. The ship’s battery tracked after the one bomber, and the barrels cranked up to fifty degrees.
In each of the ship’s four five-inch gun mounts, the men braced for another burst—the pointer, the trainer, the fuse setter, hot shell man, projector man, powder man, and gun captain, all squeezed into that impossibly tight space like fraternity boys in a telephone booth.
Plunkett’s guns boomed, and a shell burst near a plane that immediately peeled away in distress, heading back the way it had come but in jeopardy. There wasn’t the luxury of tracking this one to confirm its fate. Burke had the ship’s speed up and down, dashing erratically as he tried to stay one step ahead of the Folke-Wulfs.
The planes coursed over the fire control radar, and Ken swiveled after them, loosing one salvo after another. They only had the one plane to deal with now. With his guns pointing up again at fifty degrees, Ken’s battery discharged another salvo and flames burst from the barrels. Almost simultaneously, a parachute blossomed away from the plunging aircraft.
It was the kind of moment that might rouse a huzzah from the men on deck, or the antics of players in an end zone, but of this first downed plane there was only tacit acknowledgment on Plunkett’s deck, as if they’d been there before. The ship was moving too fast, there was too much to do. This was combat, and each one of them, all the way down to the men in the bowels of the ship, was in the thick of it, all equally vulnerable, all in it together. On a destroyer in combat, they all walked point.
The following afternoon, they were screening Philadelphia as the cruiser pounded targets on shore, and two more Focke-Wulfs again came in off the port bow. They’d just learned that Slow Motion Monty’s Eighth Army had finally connected with Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, adding another layer of security to the Salerno beachhead. With the Fw 190s angling for approach, Burke kicked the ship into a surge again, sloughing this immediate threat with the finesse of a running back. Ken didn’t sweat that. The ship’s computer was faster than Burke. The gun boss tracked his targets for twenty-four seconds before calling up the first salvo. At the one-minute mark in this new action, he watched two shells burst near one of the Folke-Wulfs, and then watched a shell burst right on the target. By the time he pulled his eyes from his sights, and looked for confirmation with the naked eye, it was gone. Disappeared. Vanished.
Once the skies cleared over their heads, the crew allowed themselves to pump fists in the recollection of what they’d done. “We knocked out two,” Gebhart kept saying. On the more sober bridge, they confirmed one and said a second was possible, but Gebhart, no matter his battle station below deck, was convinced of the second.
Jim Feltz watched the bombers dive other ships in the roadstead. He watched geysers erupt sometimes by the hulls of near misses and other times in the middle of nowhere. The Germans, this master race of people, looked more to him like the Keystone Kops, flying hither and thither. “They’re guessing, by golly,” he thought.
After Gela, Palermo, and now Salerno, watching the Luftwaffe in action, sometimes too close for comfort but as frequently from a near distance that gave him a perspective and that allowed him to run a little math, Jim wondered a thing that he wouldn’t sound out to anyone, that seemed treasonous even to think: Why wouldn’t the Luftwaffe concentrate on just a single ship?