Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [119]
Belowdecks on the Dai Moji Maru, Julius Heinen found Capt. Hugh Lumpkin, a medical officer, and two other Lost Battalion officers absorbed in a game of bridge. “What’s the bid?” he asked. One of the officers said he’d bid four spades. Heinen took his own cards, looked at everyone’s hands, and said, “If you play that hand correctly, you could make five spades, but I don’t think you’ve got time to finish it. They’re making a run over us with three bombers, and they’ve already sunk the ship ahead of us.”
Cards flew. As the bombers headed for them, Ensign Smith stood at the edge of the hatch above, calling down ranges and angles of elevation: “Thirty degrees, forty, forty-five…” Zero degrees was a line to the horizon, ninety was straight overhead. The soldiers from the Lost Battalion were hazy on what all the Navy’s aerial geometry meant, but understood well enough when Ensign Smith announced, “I can see them! Jesus, these are close!” The planes homed in on them again, approaching the drop point of fifty-five degrees. As the American bombers bore in high on the starboard hand of the undamaged Dai Moji Maru, gunners on the ship’s forward mount tracked one of the twin-tailed bombers and carelessly closed their firing key just as the plane flew behind the ship’s superstructure. The projectile slammed into the bridge, blowing its starboard portion clean away and raining shrapnel over the bridge and the forward deck. Still tracking the plane, the crew fired again. This projectile struck a guide wire directly in front of them and exploded, killing them all. Five bombs came whistling down and landed right across the Dai Moji Maru’s beam, straddling the ship, three to starboard and two to port.
Observing his target from twelve thousand feet through his Norden bombsight, the bombardier of the plane, 2nd Lt. Thomas B. Sledge, could see flames raging amidships on the vessel. Then he watched as his bombs splashed close aboard, the nearest barely twenty feet alongside. The blasts ruptured hull plates, lifted the ship’s bow clear of the water, and turned her about fifteen degrees off her previous heading. As Sledge completed his run, he saw that the ship was stopped and the fire was out. He cursed, thinking that his hits had caused the fires and the towering spouts of his near-misses had quenched them. But the fires were from an altogether different cause: the incompetent zeal of the Japanese field gun crews on the Dai Moji Maru.
Charley Pryor figured it was the dense mass of coal filling the ship’s hull that had kept it from collapsing below the waterline. “Up above the water line,” Pryor said, “and above the coal bunkers, it just caved the whole side of the ship in. If we’d been an oil burner, it’d have torn all the seams loose and we’d have been sunk right there.” The Japanese gun crew on the fantail seemed just as intent on scuttling the ship with their flak barrage. On one of their first volleys at the Liberators, they failed to lock the breech of their field gun properly and produced a back blast that set the gun’s wooden platform and after magazine afire. At least thirty Japanese were killed. Flames engulfed the stern of the ship, threatening the aft hold, full of Australians. As those sailors fought the fire, the medical people on board, including Dr. Lumpkin, Staff Sgt. Jack Rogers of the 131st’s medical detachment, the Houston ship’s doctor Cdr. William Epstein, and pharmacist’s mate second class Raymond Day, tended to more than a hundred wounded and dead on deck.
The B-24s turned and came around yet again. Spotting them at a distance,