Tales of the South Pacific (49 page)

"Yes, sir!" the boy in the bunk replied.

"Stand up!" Naked, Polikopf obeyed.

"Put your clothes on!"

"Yes, sir!"

"Did you give the guards orders to fire?" Captain Kelley asked.

"Yes, sir!"

Captain Kelley turned his back on Polikopf. "Arrest that man!" he ordered. The Master-at-Arms led Polikopf away.

By that time sleep was impossible! I and another officer inspected all guards, checked their revolvers, and issued new ammunition. When we reached the office, base police were there. While we talked the Island Commander called on the phone. Blinker was going out to all the ships. One replied, in the slow code of a learner, a message which all could read: "God help Polikopf!"

God and Bus Adams did help Polikopf! God helped by having created in man a sense of humor. Nobody could listen to the story of what happened without smiling. If you had enough rank, you laughed. And if you were an admiral, you roared, but only behind doors.

Polikopf's adventure, had it occurred in peacetime, would have been disastrous. He would have been jailed, at the least. But in the South Pacific, with a great strike in the offing, with Japs trying to infiltrate positions, and with nerves on edge, his actions were a hilarious burlesque of naval life. Men laughed more at Polikopf and his long coat than at any movie the area ever had! For myself, I think it was the long coat that saved him. The idea of anybody in a long coat, all wool, when the thermometer was at 90, was so hilarious that one simply had to laugh. And the burlesque of Naval Intelligence, which is the most secret and circumspect of all military organizations, was too much. Everyone had to roar at the long, woolen coat.

That is, everybody but Captain Kelley. He was coldly furious, and ordered a court-martial first thing next morning. But when the problem arose as to what Polikopf was to be charged with, Captain Kelley was stumped! He started to speak three times. Each time he stopped. "Damn it!" he said, sending Polikopf back to his cell. "This needs some looking into!" He went in to breakfast.

Bus Adams was the officer who threw the gall into Captain Kelley's wound. He laughed about Polikopf at breakfast while the captain was thinking. "You know," the insolent pilot said, "I don't see what we can try the boy for."

"Don't call him a boy!" Captain Kelley snorted. "He's a grown man!"

"What are you going to charge him with on the specification?" Adams asked.

"Impersonating an officer, for one thing," Captain Kelley replied. "But he didn't, sir," Adams contended. "He never said he was an officer!"

"He wore an officer's uniform!"

"Excuse me, sir," Adams replied. "There were no insignia on that coat."

"How do you know?" Captain Kelley asked. "I looked," Adams answered.

Captain Kelley put down his coffee. "Why did you look, Mr. Adams?"

"Because," Bus replied, "I've done a lot of work with Polikopf. I wouldn't be surprised if he requested me for counsel!"

Captain Kelley was choleric. Although he could hide his feelings when talking with guards and Polikopf, such insolence from Adams was beyond his understanding. He rose and dismissed us. Adams followed us out of the mess hall. "I'll bet I get back to flying pretty damned soon now!" he said. "This case is foolproof! Polikopf hasn't done anything. Peace, it's marvelous!"

Bus was dead right. Polikopf hadn't done anything. At first Captain Kelley was going to get him for impersonating Naval Intelligence, but Polikopf had never said he was Naval Intelligence. All he did was mutter the words mysteriously. The Captain tried to pin a charge of giving an unlawful order, but he knew that wouldn't stick. For Polikopf hadn't ordered anybody to do anything! He had merely suggested it. He and Adams went round and round in circles, Bus never yielding a point. Captain Kelley finally thought of something. In speaking to one of the guards Polikopf had stepped into a restricted area. The man had broken a lawful order! That was it!

They would try Polikopf for trespass! But again God intervened, and Bus Adams. Everywhere Navy men met, Bus would merely drop the hint that "Boy, this time they really got him! Trespass!" At that the assembly would break into a roar. In time the laughter reached Captain Kelley. He called Polikopf to his office. Then he dismissed the Master-at-Arms.

"Polikopf," he said. "We can't hold you. Much as I want to. This is a Navy of laws. You can thank heaven it is. I intended to punish you drastically for what you did. You endangered the war effort. You impeded our work. Fortunately for you, I would have to cook up some general charge to punish you adequately. The Navy doesn't like that. It's a Navy of laws, Polikopf. You have rights that even I can't trespass..." Inadvertently, he winced at the word.

"You may go, Polikopf. Your time in jail is your punishment." Captain Kelley wheeled around and looked out the window. Then he whipped his chair around once more. "Man to man, Polikopf, and what either of us says must never leave this room? Agreed?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Did Lieut. Adams put you up to this?"

"Oh, no! Excuse me, sir. No, sir!" The sailor was so obviously astonished by the question that he must be telling the truth. Captain Kelley dismissed him.

From then on Bus Adams had rough sailing. A great carrier came into the channel for supplies. Bus was forbidden to go aboard. He was not permitted to fly with pilots he had known in the States. They zoomed the volcanoes on Vanicoro and flew low over jungle villages. He had to stay behind on desk work that mysteriously piled up. He worked and swore and worked. Like the rest of us, he did more work in a week than he had ever before done in a month. He began to reconsider some of the snide jokes he had once pulled on the Supply Corps. "Real officers with their brains beat out!" he used to say. Now he began to wonder if maybe the Seashore Navy wasn't the real Navy and the Big-Boat Boys merely a gang of vacationists!

Even the weather conspired against Bus. He finally arranged to borrow a plane from the carrier on his day off. To hell with sleep! He could sleep any time, but he couldn't fly into Vanicoro volcanoes again. But on the day he was to fly, definite word was received that a hurricane was moving north! All ships for the strike moved out into the ocean under forced draft and headed away from the great storm.

We had to stay and take it! We stayed at the Depot and watched other activities move onto higher ground. We tied down our sleeping quarters while other units abandoned theirs and fled to safe positions. We locked doors, moved trucks against weak walls, hustled delicate instruments and chronometers to a small hill, broke out helmets to wear in case trees should blow over, and waited.

The fleet was gone by the time night fell on the second day of rain. There was a strong wind from one point off south. Gradually it veered to sou'-sou'-east. There it stayed and increased in velocity. It was now forty miles an hour, but it was still constant.

I had the watch that night, and for a while I hoped that the wind was subsiding. It did, for half an hour. Then a huge gust came in eight or ten violent puffs. I judged the velocity of the puffs to be about ninety miles an hour. Then there was another calm. I saw the rain perpendicular against the tired lights. Slowly, slowly it began to slant toward the coconut palms, in from the empty channel. Then, with a burst of tremendous power, the slanting rain was cracked like a whip and lay out parallel to the ground. A light went out, and then another. Wires were whipped away like the rain. Coconut trees threw their palms toward the hills, as if eager to flee, and some went down.

"Building 97 is buckling!" a voice cried over the phone. Our plan was to rush fire trucks and dump wagons to any building that weakened, but before I could put the plan into operation, I could hear, above the storm, the sound of a quonset hut ripping to pieces.

"Building 185 is going! All men safe!" another voice reported, and then that phone went dead.

Runners came into the barricaded office breathless and afraid. "It's rough out there!" one advised. "We can't send trucks into it. We'll have to trust to luck!"

We did. All that night men kept running to and from my watch to tell me of incidents that occurred. At 2300 Captain Kelley left his post at the switchboard and came in with me. Two other officers reported from a foot tour of the buildings.

"They're holding, captain," the inspection party reported.

In furious gusts the wind howled and drove water through every opening in every building and shack. One generator burned out and half the Depot was in darkness. Cooks brought kettles of coffee at 0300. "Potato shack done for," they reported. A jeep must have been left in neutral against strict orders. The wind caught it and dashed it through the night until it struck a building.

Then quiet followed, and from all parts of the Depot men rushed in with reports. Dripping from rain and sweat they blurted out their news and left. Mostly they said, "They're still standing!"

Captain Kelley's buildings stood that night and the next day. I tried to sleep in the morning after I got off watch, but a falling tree capsized the hut next to mine and severely crushed two officers. I helped to drag them free of the ruins and spread ponchos over them until doctors arrived. After that all huts were cleared. In the afternoon two more were capsized by trees.

But still the buildings along the waterfront held. Only four blew apart, but in one of them a man was killed. The other two hundred buildings stood fast, and by eight o'clock at night, the hurricane was over.

It was followed by a mournful rain that lasted two days. Roads were washed away and life was miserable, but the hurricane was past. As several of us walked among the buildings, surveying what had happened, I tried to remember what a tropical hurricane was like. It was strange, but I could remember little. There were no massive waves, for we were in a protected channel. To me a hurricane will always be a jangle of bells, horizontal rain, and deathly silence. It will also be the sound of steel buildings tearing apart and coconut trees snapping off.

When the great storm subsided forty ships of the fleet hurried into harbor and demanded immediate supplies. So our enlisted men turned promptly from holding buildings up to emptying those same buildings. Again the Depot went on a thirteen-hour day for every man, and finally the laggard ships were filled.

When the last one pulled away, the strike was on! We had done everything that could be done. Like villagers who have watched a haggard army pass through in pursuit of the enemy, we put our hands to our hot foreheads. For us the battle was ended.

But that very night there limped into our channel a worn and beaten ship. It was the old ammunition carrier Torpex, loaded with explosives for the strike. Acting under orders, it had stayed at sea during the hurricane rather than venture into a harbor where it might explode. The Torpex had fled to a position away from the hurricane, but a tail of the storm caught the unhappy ship. For three horrible days the small, desperate Torpex had lashed through heavy seas. Decks were awash, stanchions were torn away, and even the permanent superstructure was scarred. Two men were washed overboard. Six others suffered injuries for which they were hospitalized at the Depot.

The Torpex lay in mid channel, lighted fore and aft and with guard boats to ward off chance stragglers. Accidents with ammunition ships were weird, because no one was ever able to determine what had caused the accidents. There were no witnesses. Therefore, all available precautions were taken. At its lonely berth the Torpex was no more lonely than its crew and officers. It was the backwash of the invading fleet. Its officers were ghosts who came after the heartier crew had left.

On the third night after its arrival, four officers of the Torpex happened to run into Bus Adams at the Officers' Club. Bus was having a whiskey when they passed his table. He knew one of them, and in the manner of all naval personnel, invited them to have some drinks with him, to eat dinner with him that night, and to spend the night with him, if possible. Not yet recovered from their recent severe experiences, the Torpex officers were delighted. Bus drove them to the dock so they could send necessary messages to their ship. Then he brought them to dinner.

Captain Kelley was not pleased. In the first place, he suspected any of Bus Adams' friends. In the second place, they were slightly drunk. And in the third place, one of the officers said something which caused the captain apparent concern.

"Did I understand you to say, sir," this officer asked at dinner, "that you lived in Madison?"

"Yes, sir," Captain Kelley replied. "I did."

"I used to attend the University there."

"You did?" the Captain inquired coldly.

"Yes, sir. I was a Phi Chi."

Captain Kelley stared at the man for a moment, and said no more during the rest of the meal. After he had left, Bus invited me to join the four officers and himself on a small veranda overlooking the channel. It was a peaceful scene. The Torpex rode at anchor, its two guard boats moored some distance away. Wrecks of four huge quonsets lay-strewn about the Depot, but moonlight danced quietly upon the roofs of two hundred others. Negro truck drivers hurried endlessly up and down the water front. At one dock a barge was loading with gear for the Torpex. And along myriad paths through the Depot trucks, lifts, dollies, mules, finger lifts, cherry pickers, stone crushers, and paint machines moved in prim precision.

It was an orderly scene, a quiet scene after rush and hurricane. A low moon hung to the south, and coconut trees were everywhere. It was a tropic night in early March. Autumn would soon begin and there would be some respite from the heat. We felt at ease when suddenly from the bay came a great noise and rush of wind. The Torpex exploded!

Destruction was instantaneous and complete. The Torpex and the two guard boats were never seen again, no part of them. Our dock was blown down and all hands on the loading barge killed. Four quonsets nearest the channel were blown apart. And the blast did not last five seconds!

All that we saw was a flash of light. All that we heard was a great sigh of wind that knocked us to the deck. And the Torpex was gone.