Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [76]
Morale was much influenced by the frequency of letters from home. Cheers and whistles rang through a ship when mail call was piped. Emory Jernigan was ashamed to be summoned by his captain and rebuked for failing to write to his mother, who had complained. Rumour, scuttlebutt, was the breath of life: the Japs were ready to quit; the ship was headed for refit; the next target was Okinawa, or Leyte, or Peleliu. Good commanding officers broadcast frequently, telling their crews everything they knew about what the ship and the fleet were doing. This was especially important in action, to hundreds of men imprisoned in steel compartments far belowdecks. For their very sanity, they needed to know what a huge, unseen detonation meant; whether their team seemed to be winning; sometimes, whether damage to their own ship was as grievous as concussions, screams, smoke pulsing through ventilators made it seem.
By late 1944, even the biggest ships were overcrowded: with gunners for additional batteries of anti-aircraft guns crammed onto upper decks; up to 10 percent surplus personnel to compensate for those who habitually “missed ship” on sailing for the combat zone; and staff officers. Experts on one new specialisation or another—flak or human torpedoes or mine counter-measures—were shoehorned into messdecks, to the chagrin of those who had to make space. Commodore Arleigh Burke observed wryly that visitors left an aircraft carrier with an impression that “the most important thing211 was the battle for food and living room.” Nor was overcrowding confined to men. Far more technology was now available than ships could readily carry. “Top hamper,” excess weight on superstructures, threatened stability. A staff officer said ruefully: “Every time we bring out212 something new they [ships’ captains] will not give up what they have on board, they want the new item also. We have got to saturation point now, so you can’t put the stuff on.”
Men yearned for a chance to stretch legs ashore, but this meant only a glimpse of some thankless strip of coral and palms. On Mongong Atoll, for instance—“Mog Mog Island,” as sailors knew it—the genial Commodore “Scrappy” Kessing, an elderly officer who had escaped from hospital to join the war, provided R-and-R facilities which were once utilised by 20,000 sailors in a single day. In March 1945, before Okinawa, 617 ships were anchored there. James Hutchinson of the battleship Colorado joined his ship’s boxing team simply for the excuse to get ashore on Ulithi to train. Ulithi, repair base for the fleets, was a miracle of logistics organisation, but offered few joys to tired sailors. Enlisted men queued for hours for places in a boat to the shore, where they might be allocated four cans of beer apiece. Their commissioned counterparts forced a passage into the most overcrowded officers’ club in the western Pacific for a spasm of noisy drinking before recall to their ships.
Manus was reckoned to have much better facilities, but crews saw the island only when bombs and ammunition needed replenishment. Even this requirement was often fulfilled at sea. Sanctimonious post-war tributes were paid to the partnership between warships and civilian-crewed supply ships. In truth, however, the latter were often slothful and ill-disciplined, flaunting their higher pay