Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [74]
Emory Jernigan, by contrast, with none of the privileges of rank, wrote that “time and distance200, plus loneliness, make a tasteless soup, hard to stomach for long periods of time, and ours was a long, long time.” James Fahey wrote in his diary: “You want to be free again201 and do what you want to do and go where you want to go, without someone always ordering you around.” It was a sore point in the navy that officers received a disproportionate share of medals—they accounted for less than 10 percent of personnel, but received almost two-thirds of all decorations. They were the ones in the spotlight if a ship was deemed to have done something good, while their men remained “bit players.” On the destroyer Schroeder, for instance, Seaman Robert Schwartz dived into heavy seas one day to save a comrade who had fallen overboard—and received no recognition. Emory Jernigan hated seeing fried eggs being carried to the officers’ quarters, while he and his messmates breakfasted off the powdered variety, always watery, together with powdered lemonade: “It was a constant, nagging reminder that we were first-class citizens caught in a third-class situation.” One of the ship’s black mess stewards revenged himself on a bullying captain by spitting or urinating in the wardroom coffee before serving it.
Some men, however, found the experience of naval service deeply rewarding. Carlos Oliveira was the immigrant son of Portuguese parents. He had never been to school and spoke no English. In 1941 the navy rejected him as a volunteer, but in the panic after Pearl Harbor he was enlisted direct into the fire room of the battleship Wisconsin and served three years before being released to attend boot camp. It was there that a young officer, a southerner named Betts, made a remark that impressed him: “Carlos, a lack of formal education203 is not an impediment if a man can read and will read. Books can take you anywhere you want to go.” Oliveira said later that the war turned people like himself into real Americans.
Through his years at sea Emory Jernigan, a twenty-one-year-old farm-boy from a desperately poor home in Florida, missed more than anything the chance of a walk in the woods. He ate better as a sailor than as a child, but missed grits. At his battle station in a destroyer’s forward engine room, as Jernigan and his comrades heard the concussions of battle overhead, they never forgot that if steam lines fractured, they would cook in seconds. At high speed, propeller shafts shrieked in protest, “a warping sound204 as if they wanted to leave the mounts. The rudders and hydraulic lines would moan in their labors, and underwater explosions would hit the hull just outside.” After months of combat, nerves became frayed to the limits, “so that when a big pipe wrench fell very noisily on a grating behind me, it scared me half to death.” They emerged after hours of such ordeals covered in stinking salt sweat. One of Jernigan’s comrades, after experience of action below, jammed into an ammunition-handling room, successfully begged a station topside.
Some men found small-ship life intolerably uncomfortable and sought transfers, especially after experience of typhoons—three U.S. destroyers foundered with heavy loss of life in the great Pacific blow of December 1944. Conversely, however, life aboard escorts and submarines possessed an intimacy impossible to achieve on a big ship with a crew of up to 3,000, where no one man ever visited every compartment. “Each ship is like a city205, large or small,” wrote Emory Jernigan. “Even a tugboat is a little town all of its own.” Personal relationships fluctuated dramatically among