Once there was a war - John Steinbeck

The First cut his motors still further to listen, and the speed of the 412 dropped. “I guess those are ours,” he said.

The captain cocked his head a little. “Something wrong.” he said. “Doesn’t sound right.” And he cocked his head on the other side, like a listening spaniel. “Ever heard an E-boat?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t. You know damn well I haven’t.”

“Neither have I,” said the captain, “but those don’t sound like PTs or MTBs to me.” He peered over the rail. The signalman had his blinker ready to make a recognition signal. The captain said quickly, “Kill the motor.” Through the milky light the E-boats came. They seemed to grow up out of the night, the misty shapes of them high-powered and unmistakable. The 412 drifted easily in the water.

The captain said hoarsely to the signalman. “Don’t signal, for God’s sake!” He was silent for a moment and there seemed to be E-boats all around. “Listen,” the captain said. ‘We’ve maybe got to make a crash run. I don’t know when.” (Ten lines deleted by censor.)

The E-boats moved slowly past. They must have seen the 412 lying uneasily in the moonlight. Perhaps it didn’t occur to them that a hostile craft would lie so still so near to their guns. The breathing of the crew was almost audible. The E-boats were nearly past when one of them, just on the chance, blinked. (One line deleted by censor.) The gunners brought down their barrels. The engines of the 412 roared and the boat leaped in the water. She stood up on her own crest and tore away. (One line deleted by censor.) Her wake in the last of the moonlight was creamy behind her. She whipped over the water like a gull. But the E-boats did not fire on her. They continued placidly on their way.

Five minutes of the run, and the First throttled down and the 412 settled back into the water and leveled out and the sound of her motors died away. “God Almighty,” the captain said. And he whistled to himself. “That was close.” (Three lines deleted by censor.) “Let’s lie here and get our breath. That was too close.”

The moon lay close to the water at last. In a few minutes it would be dark, deliciously dark, safe and dark. Then men stirred about nervously on the silent boat.

And then across the moon a dark shape moved and then another. “Good God,” the captain said, “there’s a convoy. That’s what the E-boats were for.” A large dark hull moved across the moon. “We’ve got to get to them,” the captain said excitedly.

“They’ll get us sure,” said the first.

“No they won’t.” (Three lines deleted by censor.)

He called his orders softly. The torpedo men moved to their places. The 412 turned silently and slipped toward the passing convoy. There seemed to be ships of all sizes, and the 412 could see them against the sinking moon and they could not see the 412. “That big one,” the captain said. “She must be at least five thousand tons.” He issued his orders and took the wheels himself. Then he swung the boat and called softly, “Fire!” There was a sharp explosive whisk of sound and a splash, and the torpedo was away. He swung again and fired another. And his mouth moved as though he were counting.

Then without warning the sea and the sky tore to pieces in a vomit of light and a moment later the 412 nearly jumped out of the water. “Run,” the captain shouted. “Run!” And the 412 leaped up on its fantail again and pushed its bow into the air.

The explosion was gone almost the moment it had started. There wasn’t much of any fire. It just subsided and the water closed over it.

“Ammunition,” the captain shouted. “Ammunition or high-test gasoline.”

But the rest of the fleet was not silent. The tracers reached out for the sea, and the rockets, even the flak rockets. The crossfire reached to sea and combed the sea and searched the sea. (One line deleted by censor.) Some time later the captain touched his First’s arm and the First pulled down the boat again. In the distance, as the moon went down, the E-boats were probably beating the ocean looking for the 412 or the submarine or whatever had hit their ship. But the 412 had got away. (One line deleted by censor.) The pitch blackness lay on the water after the moon had gone. Ocean and land and boat were blotted out.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said the captain. “Let’s get on back.”

A DESTROYER

November 24, 1943—A destroyer is a lovely ship, probably the nicest fighting ship of all. Battleships are a little like steel cities or great factories of destruction. Aircraft carriers are floating flying fields. Even cruisers are big pieces of machinery, but a destroyer is all boat. In the beautiful clean lines of her, in her speed and roughness, in her curious gallantry, she is completely a ship, in the old sense.

For one thing, a destroyer is small enough so that her captain knows his whole crew personally, knows all about each one as a person, his first name and his children and the trouble he has been in and is capable of getting into. There is an ease on a destroyer that is good and a good relationship among the men. Then if she has a good captain you have something really worth serving on.

The battleships are held back for a killing blow, and such a blow sometimes happens only once in a war. The cruisers go in second, but the destroyers work all the time. They are probably the busiest ships of a fleet. In a major engagement, they do the scouting and make the first contact. They convoy, they run to every fight. Wherever there is a mess the destroyers run first. They are not lordly like the battleships, nor episcopal like the cruisers. Most of all they are ships and the men who work them are seamen. In rough weather they are rough, honestly and violently rough.

A destroyerman is never bored in wartime, for a destroyer is a seaman’s ship. She can get under way at the drop of a hat. The water under fantail boils like a Niagara. She will go rippling along at thirty-five knots with the spray sheeting over her and she will turn and fight and run, drop depth charges, bombard, and ram. She is expendable and dangerous. And because she is all these things, a destroyer’s crew is passionately possessive. Every man knows his ship, every inch of it, not just his own station. The Destroyer X is just such a ship. She has done many thousands of miles since the war started. She has been bombed and torpedoes have gone under her bow. She has convoyed and fought. Her captain is a young, dark-haired man and his executive officers looks like a blond undergraduate. The ship is immaculate. The engines are polished and painted and shined.

She is a fairly new ship, the X, commissioned fifteen months ago. She bombarded at Casablanca and Gela and Salerno and she has captured islands. Her officers naturally would like to go to larger ships because there is more rank to be had on them, but no destroyerman would rather sail on anything else.

The destroyer X is a personal ship and a personality. She is worked quietly. No one ever raises his voice. The captain is soft-spoken and so is everyone else. Orders are given in the same low tone as requests for salt in the wardroom. The discipline is exact and punctilious but it seems to be almost mutually enforced, not from above. The captain will say, “So many men have shore leave. The first man who comes back drunk removes shore liberty for everyone.” It is very simple. The crew would discipline anyone who jeopardized the liberty of the whole ship. So they come back in good shape and on time. The X has very few brig cases.

When the AT is in a combat area she never relaxes. The men sleep in their clothes. The irritating blatting sound which means “action stations” is designed to break through sleep. It sounds like the braying of some metallic mule, and the reaction to it is instant. There is a scurrying of feet in the passageways and the clatter of feet on the ladders and in a few seconds the X is bristling with manned and waiting guns, AAs that peer at the sky and the five-inch guns which can fire at the sky too.

The crouched and helmeted men can get to their stations in less than a minute. There is no hurry or fuss. They have done it hundreds of times. And then a soft-spoken word from the bridge into a telephone will turn the X into a fire-breathing dragon. She can throw tons of steel in a very short time.

One of the strangest things is to see her big guns when they go on automatic control. They are aimed and fired from the bridge. The turret and the guns have been heavy dead metal and suddenly they become alive. The turret whips around but it is the guns themselves that seem to live. They balance and quiver almost as though they were sniffing the air. They tremble like the antennae of an insect, listening or smelling the target. Suddenly they set and instantly there is a belch of sound and the shells float away. The tracers seem to float interminably before they hit. And before the shells have struck, the guns are trembling and reaching again. They are like rattlesnakes poising to strike, and they really do seem to be alive. It is a frightening thing to see.

A RAGGED CREW

December 1, 1943—When the plans were being made to capture a German radar station on an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. forty American paratroopers were assigned to do the job, forty men and three officers. They came to the naval station from somewhere in Africa. They didn’t say where. They came in the night sometime, and in the morning they were bedded down in a Nissen hut, a hard and ragged crew. Their uniforms were not the new and delightful affairs of the posters. The jackets, with all the pockets, and the coarse canvas trousers had been washed so often and dried in the hot sun that they had turned nearly white, and they were ragged at the edges.

The officers, two lieutenants and a captain, were dressed in no way different from their men, and they had been months without their insignia of rank. The captain had two strips of adhesive tape stuck on his shoulders, to show that he was a captain at all, and one of his lieutenants had sewed a piece of yellow cloth on his shoulders for his rank. They had been ten months in the desert, and there was no place to buy the pretty little bars to wear on their shoulders. They had not jumped from a plane since they had finished their training in the United States, but the rigid, hard training of their bodies had gone right on in the desert.

There had been no luxuries for these men, either. Sometimes the cigarettes ran out, and they just didn’t have any. They had often lived on field rations for weeks at a time, and they had long forgotten what it was like to sleep in a bed, even a cot. They had all looked somewhat alike, and perhaps this is the characteristic look of the paratrooper. The eyes were very wide set, and mostly they were either gray or blue. The hair was cropped, almost shaved, giving their heads a curious egg look. Their ears seemed to stick straight out from their heads, perhaps because all their hair was cut off. Their skins were burned almost black by the desert sun, which made their eyes and their teeth seem very light, and their lips were ragged and rough from months of the sun.

The strangest thing about them was their quietness and their almost shy good manners. Their voices were so soft that you could barely hear them, and they were extremely courteous. The officers gave their orders almost under their breaths, and there was none of the stiffness of ordinary military discipline. It was almost as though they all thought alike so that few orders were necessary at all. When something was to be done, the moving or loading of their own supplies, for instance, they worked like parts of a machine, and no one seemed to move quickly, but there was no waste movement and the work was done with incredible speed. They did not waste time saluting. A man saluted his officer only when he spoke to him or was spoken to.

These paratroopers had as little equipment as you can imagine. There were some rifles, some tommy guns, and the officers had the new carbines. In addition, each man had a knife and four hand grenades, painted yellow, but they had had their grenades so long that the yellow paint was just about worn off. The rifles had been polished and cleaned so long and so often that the black coating was worn off in places and the bright metal shone through. The little American flags they wore on their shoulders were pale from sunburn and from the washing of their clothes. There was no excess equipment of any kind. They had what they wore, and they could carry. And for some reason they gave the impression of great efficiency.

In the morning their officers came into the conference to be instructed in the nature of the action. They filed in shyly and took their places at the long, rough table. The naval men distributed maps and the action was described in detail, part of it on a large blackboard that was set up against a wall.

The island was Ventotene, and there was a radar station on it which searched the whole ocean north and south of Naples. The radar was German, but it was thought that there were very few Germans. There were two or three hundred carabinieri there, however, and it was not known whether they would fight or not. Also, there were a number of political prisoners on the island who were to be released, and the island was to be held by these same paratroopers until a body of troops could be put ashore.

The three officers regarded the blackboard with their wide-set eyes, and now and then they glanced quietly at one another. When the discussion was finished the naval captain said, “Do you understand? Are there any questions?”

The captain of paratroopers studied the board with the map of the island, and he asked softly, “Any artillery?”

“Yes, there are some coastal guns, but if they use them we’ll get them with naval guns.”

“Oh! Yes, I see. Well, I hope the Italians don’t do anything bad. I mean I hope they don’t shoot at us.” His voice was very shy.

A naval officer said jokingly, “Don’t your men want to fight?”

“It isn’t that,” the captain said. “We’ve been a long time in the desert. My men are pretty trigger happy. They might be very rough if anybody shoots at them.”

The meeting broke up and the Navy invited the paratroopers to lunch in the Navy mess.

“If you’ll excuse us,” the captain said, “I think we’ll get back to the men. They’ll want to know what we’re going to do. I’ll just take this map along and explain it to them.” He paused apologetically and added, “You see, they’ll want to know.” The three officers got up from the table and went out. Their men were in the Nissen hut. The ragged captain and his lieutenants walked across the street, blinding in the white sunlight, and they went inside the Nissen hut and closed the door. They stayed a long time in there, explaining the action to the forty men.

VENTOTENE

December 3, 1943—The units of the naval task force made their rendezvous at sea and at dusk and made up their formation and set off at a calculated speed to be at the island of Ventotene at moonset. Their mission was to capture the island and to take the German radar which was there. The moon was very large and it was not desirable that the people on the island should know what force was coming against them, consequently the attack was not to be attempted until the darkness came. The force spread out in its traveling formation and moved slowly over the calm sea.