Give Me a Fast Ship Excerpt from Chapter 10 As the ships of all three "Taffies" headed southeast as fast as they could go--a race they could not win since the CVEs were limited to about 18 knots and the minimum speed for the Japanese ships was nearly double that--Hagen was not surprised that, on his own initiative, Evans was turning his ship toward the enemy. In the past year of serving with this captain, Hagen knew that his commissioning day declaration to "never again run from the enemy" was not mere bravado. Everything he had observed while serving as Evans'' gunnery officer convinced Hagen that Evans would fulfill his pledge to take his ship "in harm''s way." As the bow stopped swinging around and centered on the leading enemy ships, Hagen muttered to himself, "He''s not going to retreat--he doesn''t know how!" Ed Digardi arrived on the bridge to assume his battle station watch as officer of the deck. There was not much need for a briefing from Els Welch since his battle station was junior officer the deck and he wasn''t going anywhere. The two men saluted and quickly assumed their respective duties. As a Japanese round passed overhead, probably headed for the CVEs, Digardi said, "Sounds like a freight train!" Welch just nodded and watched as another geyser--this one green--erupted ahead of them, "Why are they different colors?" he asked. Evans, nearby, said, "The Japs use colored dyes in their shells so that they can distinguish their own shots from other ships.

Helps in their targeting." For the second time that morning, Welch asked himself, "Why didn''t I think of that?" Without orders from above, Evans had ordered the making of smoke, apparently hoping to produce a screen that would make it more difficult for Japanese spotters to see their targets and the fall of their shots. "Making smoke" was accomplished in two different ways. By adjusting the fuel/air mixture to the boilers, the engineers could generate heavy black smoke from the ship''s stacks, and, on the fantail, there were chemical smoke generators specifically designed for this purpose. Normally, the engineers were very sensitive to minimizing the smoke coming out of the stacks to maximize fuel efficiency and to prevent smoke from giving away the ship''s position. In the last war, the famous Battle of Jutland--which Evans had studied in great detail--began when the belligerents located each other in the North Sea by sighting the tell-tale smoke from their coal-fired boilers. When Joe Wolfe first passed Evans'' order to "commence making smoke," the sound-powered phone talker on the engineering end of the JV circuit had misunderstood the captain''s order, thinking he was chastising the snipes for erroneously making tell-tale smoke. A confused exchange followed that was resolved when, in exasperation, Evans grabbed the phone from Wolfe and bellowed, "I want a smokescreen and I want it NOW!" Back on the fantail, Seaman Second Class Bob Deal and the rest of the depth charge crew were struggling to open the valves controlling the chemical smoke generators, which had been corroded by salt spray and would not open by hand.

Ensign Jesse Cochrane called to the nearby torpedo shack for some hand tools, and a few seconds later Torpedoman First Class Jim O''Gorek came running aft, clutching a large wrench and a pair of vise grips. As he neared the group clustered around the port smoke generator, the ship careened sharply in one of her zigzags, and O''Gorek was thrown off his intended track and nearly went over the side were it not for the lifelines that did their intended task and kept him on board. After much effort and even more foul language, Deal was able to force the valves open, and billowing clouds of cottony white smoke joined the black stack-smoke to cast an eerie haze in the ship''s wake. And "in the ship''s wake" was the part that did not please Seaman John Mostowy. The smoky shroud that hung over the surface of the sea was behind the ship! With Johnston heading toward the enemy ships, her smoke was partially shielding the CVEs and the other destroyers, but the veil was doing nothing to hide GQ Johnny and her crew. Mostowy later recorded, "We were making smoke and zig-zagging and heading for the Jap fleet at flank speed and alone!" As the clouds of smoke roiled in the ship''s wake--to Bob Deal looking like "an upside-down chocolate layer cake with white icing"--the Japanese began firing illuminating "star shells," indicating the smoke screen was having some effect. Watching from his battle station, Ensign Jesse Cochrane saw the "miniature suns" bursting above the haze, then slowly descending, first into the black layer and then the white before snuffing out in the sea. Standing next to the depth charge racks, Deal marveled at the colors of the splashing shells, thinking they were "sorta pretty" in a bizarre kind of way.

As the rounds passed overhead, he thought they sounded "like a trouser zipper opening and closing." Hovering over his deck log on the bridge, wishing he could crawl into its pages, Neil Dethlefs was feeling that fate had dealt him a bad hand--literally. Less than a month ago he had been serving in the repair ship Prometheus at Tulagi when USS Johnston entered the harbor. She had not yet moored when her signal lamp began flashing a Morse Code message calling for a quartermaster to replace one who was being put ashore because of a debilitating problem of acute sea-sickness. Dethlefs was one of two QMs on board, and it seemed inevitable that one of them would be sent to the destroyer. Neither was anxious to go, so they decided to cut a deck of cards, agreeing that the lower draw would volunteer to go. Leaning on the chart table in Prometheus'' pilot house, Dethlefs drew an eight of spades and dropped it face up on the chart of Tulagi Harbor. When it was joined by a king of hearts, Dethlefs went below to pack his seabag.

Now, with Johnston heeling over in a tight turn that sent the clinometer pointing to nearly twenty degrees, his feet tingling from the throbbing of the ship''s engines as the greyhound raced along at top speed, and enemy shells passing overhead screaming like the banshees he had feared as a child, Neil Dethlefs thought to himself, "I arrived just in time to get killed." Standing near Dethlefs, not quite sure what to do with himself, was Lieutenant (jg) Joe Pliska. He was the squadron recognition officer and had been temporarily embarked in Johnston to teach the crew how to identify Japanese aircraft and ships. He had never actually seen an enemy ship, working exclusively through reconnaissance photos and diagrams. As he watched the derrick-like masts growing taller on the horizon and massive superstructures punctuated by the blinking lights of gunfire, he could only say, "Jesus Christ!" Evans, who normally discouraged profanity on the bridge, let it pass without comment. Ed Digardi maintained his composure as the incredible scene unfolded around him. Thinking like the excellent officer of the deck that he was, he began calculating in his head. He knew that Johnston --scheduled to refuel later that day--was only marginally ready for a high-speed engagement.

He knew she had only 12,000 gallons of fuel oil in her bunkers, and at normal cruising speed she burned 500 gallons an hour. But at flank speed she was gulping 5,000 gallons an hour and would run dry in less than two hours. He called up Lieutenant Joe Worling, the chief engineer, and told him to mix the remaining oil with the 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel stowed in separate tanks and normally used only by the ship''s generators. Thinking like an engineer, Worling protested that mixing the two fuels would foul the ship''s boiler tubes and require a subsequent painstaking cleaning by his men. When Digardi insisted, Worling charged up to the bridge to excitedly plead his case to the captain. Evans listened with one ear as he continued to monitor the increasingly hazardous situation, then calmly told Worling to do as Digardi had ordered. As Worling stormed off the bridge shaking his head in frustration, Evans smiled and said to Digardi, "He didn''t seem to notice there''s a battle in progress." And indeed, there was a battle in progress! As the range between Johnston and her oncoming adversaries rapidly closed, the pagoda masts that had first pierced the horizon now sat atop what were clearly battleships and cruisers, whose firing was relentless and the thunder of their guns growing louder with each salvo.

The big ships had been concentrating their fire on the fleeing carriers, but it did not take a master tactician to realize that soon they would be forced to engage this plucky little tin can who was charging at them as though she knew something they did not. It would not be long before Japanese gunners would lower their barrels and set their sights on GQ Johnny as she raced deeper and deeper into harm''s way.