And then it is over. You can’t hear, but there is a rushing sound in your ears. And you want sleep more than anything, but when you do sleep you are dream-ridden, your mind is uneasy and crowded with figures. The anesthesia your body has given you to protect you is beginning to wear off, and, as with most anesthesia, it is a little painful.
And when you wake up and think back to the things that happened they are already becoming dreamlike. Then it is not unusual that you are frightened and ill. You try to remember what it was like, and you can’t quite manage it. The outlines in your memory are vague. The next day the memory slips farther, until very little is left at all. A woman is said to feel the same way when she tries to remember what childbirth was like. And fever leaves this same kind of vagueness on the mind. Perhaps all experience which is beyond bearing is that way. The system provides the shield and then removes the memory, so that a woman can have another child and a man can go into combat again.
It slips away so fast. Unless you made notes on the spot you could not remember how you felt or the way things looked. Men in prolonged battle are not normal men. And when afterward they seem to be reticent—perhaps they don’t remember very well.
THE PLYWOOD NAVY
November 15, 1943—The orders were simple. The naval task force was to destroy or drive German shipping out of the sea in the whole area north of Rome. German convoys were moving out of various ports, possibly evacuating heavy equipment from Italy to the south of France. The task force was ordered to break up this traffic.
It is not permitted to say what units comprised the force but a part of it at least was a group of torpedo boats, some British MTBs and some American PTs. The British were not quite so fast as the Americans but they were more heavily armed.
The afternoon before the attack was spent in putting the boats ready. The gunners had their guns apart, oiling and scrubbing the salt spray from the working parts. The guns on the little boats must be worked on all the time. Even the cartridge cases turn green from the constant splashing with salt water. The American PTs are wet devils. Any speed of any kind of sea bring green water over the bow. The men dress in rubber clothes and rubber hoods and even then they do not stay dry.
In the afternoon the torpedoes were inspected and the fuel tanks filled to the limit. The sea was very blue and very calm. During the whole first two weeks of the attack against Italy the sea was calm as a lake, and that particular sea can be very bad.
The British officers and men were bearded with fine great brushes which projected forward from constant brushing outward with the hands. This gives a pugnacious look to a man’s face. A few American faces were bearded too, but the tradition is not set with our men.
From the little island harbor, the coast of Italy was visible in the afternoon—the steep hills terraced for vines and lemon trees and the mountains rising to bare rocky ridges behind. Vesuvius was smoking in the background, a high feather of smoke.
On the quay, surrendered Italian carabinieri stood looking at the “Plywood Navy,” which is what the crews call the torpedo boats.
As the sun went down the work was finished and dinner was started in the tiny galleys of the Plywood Navy. The force was to sail at dark. Long before dark the moon was up. It would set after two in the morning and it was planned to be on the ground and ready for attack as soon as the moon had set. This was a deadly swarm that prepared to go. In its combined torpedo tubes it carried the force to sink a navy. The little ships can dodge in close and, when the going is rough, they can scatter and run like quail. And they can turn and twist so fast and travel at such speed that they are impossible to catch and very hard to hit.
Just at dusk the motors burst into roars one at a time and then settled down to their throbbing beat. These motors can be quieted so that they make very little noise, but in ordinary running they sound like airplanes.
The moonlit night came, and the little boats moved out from their berths, and once clear of the breakwater they formed in three lines and settled down to traveling speed. In the moonlight their white wakes shone, and each boat ran over the wake of the boat ahead, and the beat of their motors was deep. On the decks the men had already put on their rubber pants and their rubber coats and the peaked rubber hoods. In the turrets the men sat at their machine guns and waited.
On 412 the master and his First stood on the little bridge. The spray came over the bow in long, swishing spurts as the PT put her nose down into the easy swells and the light wind picked up the splash. Their faces were dripping. Now and then the First stepped the three steps down to the tiny chart room where a hooded light glimmered on the chart. (One line deleted by censor.) The First checked the course and put his head through and climbed back to the bridge. A call came from aft—“Aircraft at nine o’clock!”
The men at the turrets and at the after gun swung their weapons sharp to the left and elevated the muzzles, and the gunners peered uneasily into the milky moonlit sky. Unless they come out of the moon, and they never do, they are very hard to see. But above the engines of the boat could be heard the hum of aircraft engines. “Ours or theirs?” the First asked.
“Ours have orders not to come close. It must be theirs,” the master said. Then off to the port side in the milky sky there was the dark shape of a plane and not flying very high. The gunners stirred and followed the shape with the muzzles. It was too far off to fire. The master picked up his megaphone and called, “He’ll come in from the side if he’s coming. Watch for him.” The drone of the plane disappeared.
“Maybe he didn’t see us,” the First said.
“With our wake? Sure he saw us. Maybe he was one of ours.”
He must have cut his motors. Suddenly he is overhead and his bomb lands and explodes just after he has passed over. The roar of the explosion and the battering of the machine guns come at once. A wall of spray comes over the side from the explosion, and the boat seems to leap out of the sea.
The lines of the tracers reach for the disappearing plane and the lines seem to curve the way the stream from a hose does when you move the hose. Then the guns are silent. The master calls, “Watch out for him. He may be back. Watch for him from the same side.” The gunners obediently swing their guns about.
This time he didn’t cut his motors. Maybe he needed altitude. You could hear him coming. The guns started on him before he was overhead and the curving lines of tracers followed him over and each line was a little bit behind him. And then one line jumped ahead. A little blue light showed on him then. For a moment he seemed to hover and then he fell, end over end, but slowly, and the blue light on him got larger and larger as he came down. The rest of the guns were after him as he came down. He landed about five hundred yards away and the moment he struck the water he broke into a great yellow flame, and then a second later he exploded with a dull boom and the fire was sucked down under the sea and he was gone.
“He must have been crazy,” the captain said, “to come in like that. Who got him?” No one answered. The captain called to the port turret, “Did you get him, Ernest?”
“Yes, sir,” said Ernest. “I think so.”
“Good shooting,” said the captain.
November 19, 1943—Torpedo boat 412 slipped southward. The moon seemed to hang in the sky and to have given up the idea of ever setting. Actually it was time in the mind that was slowed down. The muffles were still on the engines but the boat picked up a little speed, not the great roaring rush of the wide-open PT but a steady drumming that threw out a curving V of wake and boiled the water a little under the fantail. The captain said, “Keep your eyes peeled for the others. We don’t want our own people to smack us.” He went down into the little chart room again and studied his charts. Then he poked his head up and spoke to his First. “A port isn’t far off now,” he said. “Let’s get there. We might catch a convoy.” On top of his words there came a distant drumming of engines.