They took advantage of his ignorance by sending him on such fool’s errands as fetching five pounds of beano from the beano locker-an ancient wheeze inspired by such pronouncements over the public address system as “There will be no man-overboard drill today,” and the like. They took advantage of his trusting nature by borrowing money they never intended to return, and cheating him out of the rest of his pay in rigged poker games. They took advantage of his presumed innocence by trying to bend him on in the spud locker, whereupon he stabbed one of the two sodomists in the groin with a potato knife and scared the other into retreat. They won anyway, with perjured testimony before a summary court that got him sixty days in the brig for unprovoked assault.
Not all of Forte’s unpleasant experiences aboard the battleship were the result of his shipmates’ malice or mischief. Most were due to the conflicts inevitable when one hundred officers and seventeen hundred young men are crammed into a ship making month-long patrols, with little to do but get on one another’s nerves. Watch-standers were constantly on the lookout for enemy submarines, a morale-sapping and futile precaution, for the Texas possessed no antisubmarine weapons whatever. The ship was slow, ponderous, and uncomfortable. High seas buried its bow beneath the waves, flinging icy sheets of water as high and far astern as the pilothouse; in far northern waters it froze into a frigid mush on one’s back and shoulders, and brought on a chill that the hottest coffee couldn’t dispel. The ship’s pitch was like riding a gigantic yoyo in slow motion, and could turn a veteran sailor green.
Young Gwillam Forte, weary from constantly fighting the bucking and plunging ship, often seasick, and never more than barely tolerated by his older shipmates, lived a life of lonely misery. He found it hard to believe that anyone could be happy, as one or two of his shipmates actually seemed to be, aboard a man-of-war. He found it even more incredible that this floating concentration camp was once the gem of the ocean. Of course, that was long before his time . . .
In 1912, the year she was launched, the United States Ship Texas was indeed the pride of the U.S. Fleet, for it was then the most modern and powerful battleship in the world. Its 27,000-ton displacement was exceeded only by that of the Argentinian battleships Moreno and Rivadavia. The U.S.S. Texas could sail ten thousand miles without refueling-from San Francisco to China and back-make a flank speed of twenty-one knots-over twenty-four land miles an hour-and had a main battery of ten fourteen-inch guns in twin turrets, which could fire shells weighing three-quarters of a ton almost twelve miles. In addition, it had twenty-one five-inch guns as secondary battery and a thicket of smaller guns for close-in defense. The ship was sheathed in steel armor up to fourteen inches thick.
The “Big T” served with the Allied Grand Fleet in World War I, and lived through some historic moments. She landed U.S. Marines at Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914, in one of the last unrepentently imperialist actions of the United States in Central America. From a platform on her number two turret, on 9 March 1919, Lieutenant Commander F. O. McDonnell, piloting a Sopwith Camel, made the first flight from a battleship of the U.S. Navy. A full generation later, the U.S.S. Texas served successively as flagship of the U.S. Fleet, flagship of the Atlantic Training Squadron, and with the Neutrality Patrol in North Atlantic waters before the United States formally declared war on Germany in December 1941.
By then, the Texas was a venerable twenty-nine years old, overdue for scrapping and replacement by a bigger, sleeker, faster, more heavily armed ship. She got a reprieve when Japan’s stunning victory at Pearl Harbor made clear that veteran ships as well as veteran seamen to man them would be needed to do their duty-again-if the nation was to survive.
Her first service was in the North Atlantic on patrol and convoy duty. Then its big guns covered the Allied landings in North Africa. Off Mehdia, Algeria, on 7 November 1942, the Texas fired its fourteen-inch batteries for the first time in World War II, against Vichy French ammunition dumps and armored columns at Port Lyautey. When the beachhead was secured, she returned to Norfolk for overhaul. It was there that Gwillam Forte, with his government-issue bugle, reported aboard.
Shipboard routine aboard the Texas in Atlantic waters failed to fulfill Forte’s conception of naval warfare. Instead of running gunfights against the Germans, there was running of messages from the captain to his junior officers. Instead of the acrid stench of gunpowder, there was the greasy stench of stack fumes. Forte’s contribution to World War II, it seemed, would be to stand watch four hours on and eight hours off, and sound Reveille, Mess Gear, Pay Call, Man Overboard, Church Call, Tattoo, Taps, and the several dozen other calls that constitute the entire bugle repertoire. That was all right with him. It wasn’t his war.
D-Day, 6 June 1944, found the battleship off Omaha Beach in Normandy, firing three-quarter-ton shells into German shore batteries four miles away, and against troop concentrations and enemy columns moving up to support the defenders. During the nineteen days that followed, the Texas fired 891 rounds of fourteen-inch ammunition. It gave much better than it got: off Cherbourg a German 280-mm shell wrecked the bridge, killing the helmsman and wounding thirteen others, the only casualties of the campaign aboard the Texas. During the thirty-two years since the battleship had been commissioned, the helmsman was the only man to have been killed in action aboard.
The following spring, while the U.S. Marines invaded and captured the Japanese island of Iwo Jima in the bloodiest and fiercest battle in Marine Corps history, the Texas stood offshore with the Amphibious Support Force and bombarded the well-dug-in garrison of 22,000 Imperial Marines with nearly one thousand shells from her big guns. After reprovisioning in Ulithi, in March 1945, the Texas steamed north again, to Okinawa, to take part in the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific war. There the Texas and other ships of the Fifth Fleet mangled pillboxes and entrenchments the Japanese had been constructing for thirty years, paving the way for beachhead operations by the Marines and Army. Simultaneously, her antiaircraft batteries fought off the Kamikazes that came screaming in out of the clouds, bearing a single suicide pilot astride a ton of high explosive fitted with stubby wings. For the U.S.S. Texas, the Battle of Okinawa lasted six weeks. For Gwillam Forte, it would last four. . . .
The second of May, two years to the day since he enlisted in the Navy, began like many another for Gwillam Forte. At three-fifteen in the predawn darkness, “Jimmy Legs,” the Navy’s master-at-arms, slapped his night stick against the underside of Forte’s hammock to rouse him for the four-to-eight watch. Forte rubbed the sleep from his eyes and dropped lightly to the deck from the hammock, rigged seven feet above the division passageway. He unhitched the hammock from its hooks, folded the edges in over the thin mattress, and lashed it into a neat sausage with seven half hitches. He folded it over into a horseshoe and heaved it into the division hammock nest.
Forte groped his way down the darkened, pitching passageway to the division galley, where a big galvanized pot of coffee and a rack of thick white handleless cups awaited the watch. He poured a cup and squatted on his heels beside the others to drink his coffee in the dim light of the single red bulb that illuminated the compartment. Nobody spoke. The warmth radiating through the linoleum deck from the boiler room below induced a sense of weary detachment that made conversation a burden. Anyway, what was there to talk about, when each day was like yesterday, and even more like tomorrow?
After a second cup of coffee, Forte deposited his cup in the rack and shuffled down the passageway to the head, first downhill, then uphill, then downhill again in the never-ending rhythm of the pitching ship. There he shaved and bathed in half a bucket of water heated by immersion under live steam.
At three-fifty, dressed in the uniform of the day, Forte entered the pilothouse on the bridge. Sunrise was forty-five minutes away in this latitude, but the shadows of the watch-standers were already well defined in the light of false dawn. In his high-backed, padded swivel chair, bolted to the deck, the officer of the deck sat facing forward, his cap pulled down over his eyes. He appeared asleep, but Forte knew better. Amidships, the helmsman kept his eyes on the binnacle’s illuminated compass card, continually applying minute adjustments to the small brass wheel, so that the ship’s swinging bow was never more than two or three degrees off course.