White and some of the other seamen, I learned, had been married just before they left the States. It seemed incongruous to think of White as a married man. He carried with him, however, a photograph of his wife, and often he showed it to the others.
"This is my wife," I heard him say once after chow on the mess deck. "Anybody want to see a picture of my wife?"
There were polite exclamations, and then I heard several voices say, "Here"s a picture of mine."
As watch by watch the first week slipped by, the men resumed their ceaseless task of letter writing, and the mailbox outside the wardroom door began to fill up again. Foreseeing a b.u.mper crop of letters, Mr. Warren, Mr. Crane and I set about our censoring early. After breakfast one morning, four days before we expected to arrive in Honolulu, we took the mailbox off the bulkhead and emptied it on the wardroom table. Each of us took a third of the letters and started to read them. The men, after all, were faced with the same old problems, and the letters were all strangely alike. The same phrases were expressed in letter after letter until, no matter what their individual content, they became monotonous and lost meaning.
"My Darling Wife, I miss you so much. Don"t worry about me, though, everything is going fine."
"Good night, Darling. Probably it won"t be so very long before I see you again."
Most of the letters said these things in an infinite number of ways, and the whole stack of letters gave the impression of variations on a melody. A few of the letters stood out, however, as individuals. The tall gunner"s mate wrote many pages in a close, fine handwriting.
"Dear Doris," he wrote, "I wish I could be there for the spring planting. I think you were wise to wait before setting out the tomato plants. I saw by the paper that you had a late frost, and when I saw that, I was proud that you had waited."
The letters that the men wrote to their mothers and wives were much different from those others wrote to their girls. Most of the letters to girls were writen in a humorous vein.
Wortly, the c.o.xswain, wrote: "h.e.l.lo, there, do you mind if I come in? Well, how"s old Sally today? I bet she looks just as pretty as ever. Sure would like to be there to see her! Bet there are plenty of other men around, though. Ha, ha. Well, Sally, your old sailor boy is out on the deep blue sea."
There were very few pa.s.sages in the letters that had to be censored. Most of the men were not interested in writing about military subjects. Sometimes a clumsy attempt at telling our destination had to be extracted. "We"re going to an unnamed place where there are plenty of hula girls. You"ve probably heard lots of songs written about this place; lots of bands specialize in them," one boy wrote, and just to be sure he added, "In this place where we"re going I hear they play the guitar different than they do out West." Another seaman tried the familiar joke, "I can"t tell you where we"re going. Aloha. Jack."
A few of the letters had to be censored because of the clause that "nothing prejudical to the morale or reputation of the armed services" could be mailed. One seaman had unwisely written: "Boy, do I hate this G.o.d d.a.m.n outfit! What a ship! You could stand on the bow and spit over the stern. Ninety percent of the crew have never seen water before and I wish I had never seen it, either."
White wrote his wife a long letter about the escaping of the drum of steel cable. "Betsy darling," he wrote. "We had a terrible thing happen the other night, but I wasn"t as scared as I thought I"d be."
The letters differed a good deal in the neatness of writing, the spelling, and punctuation, and it was difficult not to make note of the amount of education the various men displayed. One seaman second cla.s.s by the name of Wenton wrote in a beautiful, neat hand that looked almost like engraving. There were no mistakes in his letters, and as we needed a yeoman striker, I resolved to keep him in mind. Another seaman by the name of Whysowitz wrote letters that were almost completely illegible. Security forbade our pa.s.sing letters we couldn"t read, but it was obvious that if we rejected Whysowitz"s letter he probably could not write a much better one, and would be condemned to silence for the rest of the war. Mr. Crane and I puzzled over the maze of scrawled misspelling for the better part of half an hour, and finally pa.s.sed it.
"h.e.l.l," Mr. Crane finally said, "if that boy is trying to tell anything to the enemy they"ll be just as confused as we are."
Two of the letters had in their context material that somewhat disturbed me. One was a long, badly written letter from a seaman named Wrigly. It was written to a woman and it was so filled with obscenity and downright lewdness that it was painful to read. Censorship forbade this sort of thing, and it was easy to just drop it in the box of rejects, but it was a temptation to me to call Wrigly in and give him a good talking to. After reflecting upon the subject a moment, however, I decided that that would be a misuse of authority, and I contented myself with enclosing a slip in the letter that read: "Not pa.s.sed because of obscenity. Further infraction of censorship regulations will result in disciplinary action."
The other letter that I found disturbing was from a radioman by the name of Whitfield. His letter was simply a collection of ingenuous lies.
"Dear Mother," he wrote. "We have been at sea only about a week, but we have already been attacked twice. The first time it was a submarine, and she sure was a big one. We dropped depth charges on it and seemed to blow up the whole ocean. Blood and oil came to the surface, so I guess we got her. The second attack was from a dive bomber. It strafed our decks and killed a couple of our men, but I opened up on a machine gun and shot it down. Well, that"s all for now, Mother. I"ve got to go and stand by the guns again."
I picked up a slip of paper and wrote, "Rejected because of ..." There I paused, because it was difficult to give an official reason for rejecting such a letter. Certainly it was disclosing no military information. Finally I wrote, "It is suggested that letters be written to cause a minimum of worry to the families of military personnel."
CHAPTER NINE.
TWO DAYS before we arrived at Honolulu the crew perked up. It was as though when they left San Pedro that they had thought they were merely heading out into the vast unknown, and now it came to them as somewhat of a surprise that they were actually going to arrive somewhere. The last two days of the voyage were calm, and I think the men were further surprised that life at sea could be quite pleasant.
The ocean spread out around us as harmless and as blue as a mountain lake. Instead of being bounded by mountains, however, it so blended with and mirrored the pastel blue of the sky that it seemed to have no boundary, and gave an impression of almost astral s.p.a.ce. As we sailed southward the sun took the cold sting from the air and beat pleasantly upon our shoulders. Many of the men took their dress whites from their seabags and hung them up to air on deck.
More and more I was asked if the ship would get mail in Honolulu. The men showed no interest in the Hawaiian Islands as other than a place where they could get mail. The government-issued travel leaflets describing the islands and the customs of the natives went unopened. The men had far more of a sense of going away from something than going toward anything. The mail was the only thing that interested them, and in their antic.i.p.ation of that they were really more looking over their shoulders than ahead. A dozen times a watch I heard the question, "Sir, do you think we"ll get mail in Honolulu?" In desperation I finally put a sign on the bulletin board that read: "It is expected that mail will await this unit at her next port of call."
The day before we arrived in Honolulu another question was continually asked: "Sir, when will we get in?" As navigator I felt my reputation depended on giving them a reasonably accurate time of arrival. According to my calculations we would raise Oahu Island at about noon of June 4, but the night of June 3 I began to get a little jittery about it. For the first time in my life I had no one aboard to check my calculations. Mr. Warren and Mr. Crane were just beginning to use a s.e.xtant, and their results were so often contradictory that I had to go entirely according to my own observations. My uneasiness increased when I awoke on the dawn of the fourth to find the sky too overcast for star sights. Returning as stoically as possible to my cabin, I lay there imagining the most terrible events. I imagined arriving at what I should calculate to be the position of the island of Oahu, and finding no land there-only the limitless ocean. I imagined finally making a landfall on an island, only to find it was the wrong island, one without any habitation at all. When the sun came out and was visible as a dim blur behind the haze, I was on deck taking sights as fast as I could plot them. To my delight the haze cleared away and by ten o"clock the sky was as blue as the ocean beneath.
At eleven I sent a lookout to the masthead. All hands off watch crowded onto the forecastle deck and craned their necks forward for land. After twelve days at sea it appeared as though land would be something completely out of the ordinary. At eleven-thirty the masthead lookout shouted, and in my excitement I clambered up the mast myself to verify his judgment.
Lying very low on the horizon, hardly different in substance from a shadow, was a tiny gray blur. As I strained my eyes I could follow it a little to the left and a little to the right; it seemed to waver as I stared at it. It was land, however, not a cloud; there was no doubt about it.
A few minutes later off the port bow we could see a long low point of land, and gradually the two islands, Oahu and Molokai, sprang up around us. I took a few bearings to verify our position, and with a great sense of satisfaction sat down on my stool on the bridge and smoked a pipe.
Now that my own anxiety was gone I could look around me and appreciate the crew. The man at the wheel stood confidently and, looking astern, I could see our wake streching straight as a railroad track behind us. The men on deck somehow looked like sailors. Their faces had neither a look of worry nor of irresponsible gaiety. As I watched them, the Chief started them to rousting out the mooring lines, and they moved quickly, as though they knew what they were doing. It was no longer necessary for the Chief to shout at them; I hardly heard his voice at all.
As I sat there I heard Mr. Rudd come puffing up the companionway behind me. He stood beside me and rested his elbow on the rail. For a moment he surveyed the land that was building up around us, and by the way he blinked I knew that he had just come out of the engine room.
"Well," he said, "I see you found the place."
"Yes," I said, "it"s here, all right."
Mr. Rudd picked a piece of waste from his rear trouser pocket and wiped his hands on it reflectively.
"We"ve come a long way," he said.
"Yes," I said, "a long way. What do you think of your men below?"
Mr. Rudd said, "They"re a funny bunch. If I can get them to thinking about anything else but letters home and if I can get them to forget their bellies, I guess they"ll be all right. Most of them have got their sea legs already, and a couple of them seem to know their business pretty well. The last two days I"ve only gone down to the engine room a couple of times a watch to look around, and they seem to be handling things all right by themselves, but sometimes when I hear them carrying on about letters and whatnot, I get the idea that they"re really not here at all. If they all divorced their wives and deserted their mothers we might make sailors out of them."
"I"m afraid only Regulars could qualify under that clause," I said.
"Well," Mr. Rudd retorted, "you can"t be a sailor and a decent man at the same time. When I go to sea give me someone with tattooed arms and a foul mouth. Give me a shipmate that has to be bailed out of jail when it"s time to go to sea."
"Do you mean that?" I asked.
"Of course not."
I turned and looked at him. "What do you mean?" I said. "I"ll put you on the spot and be serious."
Mr. Rudd thought a moment and puffed at his cigar.
He replied, "What I just said has a certain amount of truth. For a short voyage all you care about a man is that he knows his business, and you don"t want to take time to teach him. For a long voyage, I don"t know ..." He paused and looked up at me. "This is liable to be a mighty long voyage, you know," he said. "We"ve gone a long way, but this is just the beginning."
"That"s right," I said. "Honolulu is a far cry from New Guinea and the j.a.ps."
"It"s not that so much. It"s the time I"m thinking about. We"ve got to be with these men for about two years at least. We"ve got to be within a hundred and eighty feet of them twenty-four hours a day for two years."
"It"ll be a long voyage," I said, "and I think they"ll be all right."
Mr. Rudd grinned. "Ask me about that two years from now," he said.
Even before we entered Honolulu harbor the mail orderly was dressed and ready to go ash.o.r.e. Somehow he claimed to have found out just where the Fleet Post Office was located. When we nosed up into a far corner of the harbor we were surprised to see six little ships exactly like ours. It gave us quite a thrill to see our sister ships: somehow before we had considered ourselves in a uniquely unenviable position. The men on the battleships seemed like sh.o.r.e based personnel to us, and even the men on the destroyers seemed like big ship men. It was good to see that others faced exactly the same problems as we did. When we moored alongside the SV-130, our mail orderly sprinted across her deck to the wharf on his way to the post office. The men of the SV-130 came out on deck, and leaned on the rail talking to us.
"Did you get any mail when you first got in here?" was the first question our men asked them.
"Sure," they said, "lots of it."
A strange sort of nervousness pervaded our men. They fidgeted about the deck, and none of them asked permission to go ash.o.r.e.
"How long do you think it"ll take the mail orderly to get back?" the Chief asked me.
"I don"t know," I said. "I don"t even know where the post office is."
"I do," said the Chief. "You go three blocks straight up toward Aloha tower."
"Have you ever been here before, Chief?" I asked.
"No," he said, "but I found out."
In about half an hour there was a sudden pause in all movement about the ship, and I heard a voice say, "No, there"s no mail."
"No mail?" a dozen voices chorused.
"No. No mail."
"Why, the sons of b.i.t.c.hes!"
I went on deck and found the men glaring angrily at the mail orderly who was just stepping over the rail empty-handed.
"They said they never heard of the SV-126," he reported. "They said they didn"t even have her listed."
"I"ll go up and find out about it," I said quickly. "I want mail as much as you do."
At the post office, after being told just what the mail orderly had been told, I arranged for the mail to be traced, and I returned to the ship.
The Chief was awaiting me at the gangway. "What did you find out, sir?" he asked.
I said, "I had it traced. I can"t do any more."
"No," the Chief said, "you can"t do any more."
After that the men did not go aboard the SV-130 much, for that ship had received mail. Instead, they sought out another of our sister ships, one that had not received mail-the SV-131. There was a great pairing together of the men of the two ships. Our seamen went into their forecastle and talked to their seamen; our cooks went into their galley and talked to their cooks; Mr. Rudd was down in their engine room swapping spare parts with their engineering officer; and I went and knocked at the cabin door of their commanding officer.
It was opened by a tall, heavy man about thirty-five. We introduced ourselves, and he bade me come in and sit down. It was somehow comforting to walk into a cabin exactly like mine; I felt I knew Mr. Stuart, the skipper of this ship, even before I talked to him.
"Did you hear about the one-fifty?" he asked.
"No," I said, "what about the one-fifty?"
"Lost," he said. "Lost between here and San Pedro. Collision. About half her crew went down with her. Fellow by the name of Richardson commanded her."
"Richardson!" I said. "Not Tom Richardson! I knew him. Was he saved?"
"Tom Richardson it was," Mr. Stuart said with satisfaction. "He was lost."
When I went back to our ship all hands were talking about the SV-150. Several of the men knew men who had been aboard her. They talked in low tones about it, taking an awed relish in disaster brought close.
"Why, Bill Dawes!" I heard White say. "I was in boot camp with him! I saw him in San Pedro just before we left."
"The SV-150!" the mail orderly said. "They had mail for her. They showed me a list of the ships they had mail for, and she was on it!"
CHAPTER TEN.
WE WERE in Honolulu a month waiting for repairs and spare parts, and we never got any mail there. It took eight days for them to trace the mail, to find that it was all going straight through to New Guinea. By the time they found that out we thought that we were to leave any day, and I was afraid that if I had the mail sent back to us it would be in Honolulu when we arrived at New Guinea. As soon as the men found out that they were not going to get any mail themselves, they began writing more and more letters home, as though by writing they felt almost as close to their families as by receiving mail. Every morning we censored the mail, and certain phrases stuck in my mind.
Guns wrote: "Please don"t write me nice cheerful letters. When I finally do get mail, I want to know how you"re really feeling."
White wrote: "I don"t like being a sailor, but I guess I"ll have to fool myself into liking it. When I was at school I convinced myself that I loved Latin."
The Chief wrote: "As far as I am concerned the clock stopped when I left you, and will only start again when I walk across our front porch."
In the evenings when their work was done, the men wandered around the streets of the city. There were thousands of sailors in Honolulu; a person in civilian clothes stood out from the crowd. Even if the sailors had not been dressed differently, I think I could have told them apart from the civilians who were at home. There was something aimless in the sailors" movements as they drifted about the strange city; there was something vacant about their faces as they stared at the sights. I walked through the city a good deal myself, and I saw them standing in lines before movie theaters, buying postcards that had pictures of stylized Hawaiian girls brightly painted on them and so could not be sent through the mail. I saw them buying woven pocketbooks to send home, and necklaces of seash.e.l.ls. A pa.s.ser-by walking through the streets of Honolulu would have had a difficult time telling what kind of men the sailors were. They sat in the reading rooms of the libraries reading the cla.s.sics, and even on weekdays one could not go into a church without seeing them leaning forward on a pew with their heads resting on their arms. Also they got drunk on street corners and were sick leaning against the windows of stores. They swayed down the street arm in arm, they whistled at girls, and on the buses they struck up conversations with anyone who sat beside them.
"h.e.l.lo, ma"am, can I help you with your packages?"
"Tell me, honey, are you doing anything tonight? I"ve got a few hours to spare myself."
They sat in the city parks staring at the strange birds that looked half robin, half sparrow. They hitchhiked out to Waikiki Beach and swam in the surf, stumbled off the long native surfboards and eyed the girls. They aimlessly enrolled in educational courses that they would have no time to finish: lessons in shorthand, English literature, and steel engraving. In back alleys down by the waterfront they waited in line before the wh.o.r.e houses, and they struck up conversations with children on the street.
"Say, sonny, want an ice cream cone?"
"Sure, mister!"
"Come on, and I"ll buy you one."
There were sailors everywhere. When officers walked down the street they didn"t salute them much if they didn"t know them, but when a familiar officer appeared they smiled and their arms snapped up like the arms of a king"s guard.
"Good afternoon, sir! Not much doing, is there? Not much of a town."
In the bars they crowded each other and sometimes they fought. The Sh.o.r.e Patrol fought a battle every hour of the night, and civilians stepped aside as they hauled kicking sailors from sidewalk saloons.
"Let me go, d.a.m.n you, let me go! I didn"t do nothing!"
"Take it easy, Mac, take it easy. We"ll just take you in and let you sober down."
Sometimes the telephone in the Sh.o.r.e Patrol office rang and a voice said, "I"m pretty drunk. Can"t find my ship. Got to be back pretty soon. Down at the Blue Bell bar."