All That Is (2 page)

Bowman had no girlfriend, faithful or otherwise. He’d had no experience of love but was reluctant to admit it. He simply let the subject pass when women were discussed and acted as though Kimmel’s dazzling affair was more or less familiar ground to him. His life was the ship and his duties aboard. He felt loyalty to it and to a tradition that he respected, and he felt a certain pride when the captain or exec called out, “Mr. Bowman!” He liked their reliance, offhanded though it might be, on him.

He was diligent. He had blue eyes and brown hair combed back. He’d been diligent in school. Miss Crowley had drawn him aside after class and told him he had the makings of a fine Latinist, but if she could see him now in his uniform and sea-tarnished insignia, she would have been very impressed. From the time he and Kimmel had joined the ship at Ulithi, he felt he had performed well.

How he would behave in action was weighing on his mind that morning as they stood looking out at the mysterious, foreign sea and then at the sky that was already becoming brighter. Courage and fear and how you would act under fire were not among the things you talked about. You hoped, when the time came, that you would be able to do as expected. He had faith, if not complete, in himself, then in the leadership, the seasoned names that guided the fleet. Once, in the distance he had seen, low and swift-moving, the camouflaged flagship, the
New Jersey
, with Halsey aboard. It was like seeing, from afar, the Emperor at Ratisbon. He felt a kind of pride, even fulfillment. It was enough.

The real danger would come from the sky, the suicide attacks, the kamikaze—the word meant “divine wind,” the heaven-sent storms that had saved Japan from the invasion fleet of Kublai Khan centuries before. This was the same intervention from on high, this time by bomb-laden planes flying directly into the enemy ships, their pilots dying in the act.

The first such attack had been in the Philippines a few months earlier. A Japanese plane dove into a heavy cruiser and exploded, killing the captain and many more. From then on the attacks multiplied. The Japanese
would come in irregular groups, appearing suddenly. Men watched with almost hypnotic fascination and fear as they came straight down towards them through dense antiaircraft fire or swept in low, skimming the water. To defend Okinawa the Japanese had planned to launch the greatest kamikaze assault of all. The loss of ships would be so heavy that the invasion would be driven back and destroyed. It was not just a dream. The outcome of great battles could hinge on resolve.

Through the morning, though, there was nothing. The swells rose and slid past, some bursting white, spooling out and breaking backwards. There was a deck of clouds. Beneath, the sky was bright.

The first warning of enemy planes came in a call from the bridge, and Bowman was running to his cabin to get his life jacket when the alarm for General Quarters sounded, overwhelming everything else, and he passed Kimmel in a helmet that looked too big for him racing up the steel steps crying, “This is it! This is it!” The firing had started and every gun on the ship and on those nearby took it up. The sound was deafening. Swarms of antiaircraft fire were floating upwards amid dark puffs. On the bridge the captain was hitting the helmsman on the arm to get him to listen. Men were still getting to their stations. It was all happening at two speeds, the noise and desperate haste of action and also at a lesser speed, that of fate, with dark specks in the sky moving through the gunfire. They were distant and it seemed the firing could not reach them when suddenly something else began, within the din a single dark plane was coming down and like a blind insect, unerring, turning towards them, red insignia on its wings and a shining black cowling. Every gun on the ship was firing and the seconds were collapsing into one another. Then with a huge explosion and geyser of water the ship lurched sideways beneath their feet—the plane had hit them or just alongside. In the smoke and confusion no one knew.

“Man overboard!”

“Where?”

“Astern, sir!”

It was Kimmel who, thinking the magazine amidship had been hit, had jumped. The noise was still terrific, they were firing at everything. In the wake of the ship and trying to swim amid the great swells and pieces of wreckage, Kimmel was vanishing from sight. They could not stop or
turn back for him. He would have drowned but miraculously he was seen and picked up by a destroyer that was almost immediately sunk by another kamikaze and the crew rescued by a second destroyer that, barely an hour later, was razed to the waterline. Kimmel ended up in a naval hospital. He became a kind of legend. He’d jumped off his ship by mistake and in one day had seen more action than the rest of them would see in the entire war. Afterwards, Bowman lost track of him. Several times over the years he tried to locate him in Chicago but without any luck. More than thirty ships were sunk that day. It was the greatest ordeal of the fleet during the war.

Near the same place just a few days later, the death knell of the Imperial Navy was sounded. For more than forty years, ever since their astonishing victory over the Russians at Tsushima, the Japanese had been increasing their strength. An island empire required a powerful fleet, and Japanese ships were designed to be superior. Because their crews were made up of shorter men, less space was needed between decks as well as fewer comforts, and this could allow heavier armor, bigger guns, and more speed. The greatest of these ships, invincible, with steel thicker than any in existence and design more advanced, bore the poetic name of the nation itself,
Yamato
. Under orders to attack the vast invasion fleet off Okinawa, it set sail along with nine accompanying ships as escort, from a port on the Inland Sea where it had lain waiting.

It was a departure of foreboding, like the eerie silence that precedes a coming storm. Through the green water of the harbor, late in the day, long, dark, and powerful, moving slowly and gravely at first, a bow wave forming, gathering speed, almost silent, the large dock cranes passing in silhouette, the shore hidden in evening mist, leaving white swirls of foam trailing behind it, the
Yamato
headed for sea. The sounds that could be heard were muted; there was a feeling of good-bye. The captain addressed the entire crew massed on the deck. They had plentiful ammunition, lockers filled with great shells the size of coffins, but not the fuel, he told them, to return. Three thousand men and a vice admiral were aboard. They had written farewell letters home to their parents and wives and were sailing to their deaths.
Find happiness with another
, they
wrote.
Be proud of your son
. Life was precious to them. They were somber and fearful. Many prayed. It was known that the ship was to perish as an emblem of the undying will of the nation not to surrender.

As night fell they sailed past the coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese main islands, where the outline of an American battleship had once been drawn on the beach for the pilots who would attack Pearl Harbor to practice bomb. The waves shattered and swept past. There was a strange spirit, almost of joy, among the crew. In the moonlight they sang and cried
banzai!
Many of them noticed there was an unusual brightness to the sea.

They were discovered at dawn while still far from any American ships. A navy patrol plane radioed urgently, in the clear,
Enemy task force headed south. At least one battleship, many destroyers … Speed twenty-five knots
. The wind had risen by morning. The sea was rough with low clouds and showers. Great waves were rumbling along the side of the ship. Then, as had been foreseen the first planes appeared on the radar. It was not a single formation, it was many formations, a swarm filling the sky, 250 carrier planes.

They came from out of the clouds, dive and torpedo bombers, more than a hundred at a time. The
Yamato
had been built to be invulnerable to air attack. All of its guns were firing as the first bombs hit. One of the escort destroyers suddenly heeled over, mortally stricken and, showing the dark red of its belly, sank. Through the water torpedoes streamed towards the
Yamato
, their wakes white as string. The impregnable deck had been torn open, steel more than a foot thick, men smashed or cut in two. “Don’t lose heart!” the captain called. Officers had tied themselves to their station on the bridge as more bombs hit. Others missed closely, throwing up great pillars of water, walls of water that fell across the deck, solid as stone. It was not a battle, it was a ritual, the death as of a huge beast brought down by repeated blows.

An hour had passed and still the planes came, a fourth wave of them, then a fifth and sixth. The destruction was unimaginable. The steering had been hit, the ship was turning helplessly. It had begun to list, sea was sliding over the deck.
My whole life has been the gift of your love
, they had written to their mothers. The code books were sheathed in lead so they would sink with the ship, and their ink was of a kind that dissolved
in water. Near the end of the second hour, listing almost eighty degrees, with hundreds dead and more wounded, blind and ruined, the gigantic ship began to sink. Waves swept over it and men clinging to the deck were carried off by the sea in all directions. As it went under, a huge whirlpool formed around it, a fierce torrent in which men could not survive but were drawn straight down as if falling in air. And then an even worse disaster. The stores of ammunition, the great shells, tons upon tons of them slid from their racks and slammed nose first into the turret sides. From deep in the sea came an immense explosion and flash of light so intense that it was seen from as far away as Kyushu as the full magazines went. A pillar of flame a mile high rose, a biblical pillar, and the sky was filled with red-hot pieces of steel coming down like rain. As if in echo there came, from the deep, a second climactic explosion, and thick smoke came pouring up.

Some of the crew that had not been pulled down by the suction were still swimming. They were black with oil and choking in the waves. A few were singing songs.

They were the only survivors. Neither the captain nor the admiral were among them. The rest of the three thousand men were in the lifeless body of the ship that had settled to the bottom far below.

The news of the sinking of the
Yamato
spread quickly. It was the end of the war at sea.

Bowman’s ship was among the many anchored in Tokyo Bay when the war ended. Afterwards it sailed down to Okinawa to pick up troops going home, but Bowman had the chance to go ashore at Yokohama and walk through part of what remained of the city. He walked through block upon empty block of nothing but foundations. The smell of scorched debris, acrid and death-filled, hung in the air. Among the only things that were not destroyed were the massive bank vaults of solid steel, although the buildings that had contained them were gone. In the gutters were bits of burnt paper, banknotes, all that remained of the Imperial dream.

“The hero!” his uncle Frank cried, stretching out his arms to hug him.

It was a welcome-home dinner.

“Not exactly a hero,” Bowman said.

“Sure you are. We read all about you.”

“Read about me? Where?”

“In your letters!” his uncle said.

“Frank, let me!” his aunt cried.

They had come from the Fiori, their restaurant near Fort Lee that was decorated in thin red plush and where music from
Rigoletto
and
Il Trovatore
was always playing until the last, softly talking couples left, the last melancholy couples and the few men still at the bar. Frank was the uncle of his childhood. He was dark with a rounded nose and thinning hair. Stocky and good-natured, he had gone to law school in Jersey City but dropped out with the idea of becoming a chef, and at the restaurant, when he was in the mood, sometimes went back into the kitchen to cook himself, though his real joy was music. He had taught himself to play the piano and would sit in happiness, drawn up close to the keyboard with his thick fingers, their backs richly haired, nimble on the keys.

The evening was all warmth and talk. His mother, Beatrice, his aunt and uncle listened to the stories of where Bowman had been—where
was San Pedro? had he eaten any Japanese food?—and drank champagne Frank had kept from before the war.

“You don’t know how worried we were all the time you were out there,” his aunt Dorothy—Dot they called her—told him. “We thought of you every day.”

“Did you really?”

“We prayed for you,” she said.

She and Frank had no children of their own, he was really like their son. Now their fears were over and the world was as it should be and also, it seemed to Bowman, very much as it had been, familiar and ordinary, the same houses, shops, streets, everything he remembered and had known since childhood, unremarkable, yet his alone. In some windows there were gold stars for sons or husbands who had been killed, but that and the many flags were almost the only evidence of all that had taken place. The very air, untroubled and unchanged, was familiar and the high school and grammar school with their sober facades. He felt in a way superior to it all and at the same time beholden.

His uniform hung in the closet and his cap was on the shelf above. He had worn them when he was Mr. Bowman, a junior officer but respected and even admired. Long after the uniform had lost its authenticity and glamour, the cap, strangely, would still have its power.

In dreams that were frequent for a long time, he was there again. They were at sea and under attack. The ship had been hit, it was listing, going to its knees like a dying horse. The passageways were flooded, he was trying to struggle through them to get on deck where there were crowds of men. The ship was nearly on its side and he was near the boilers that might explode at any minute, he had to find a safer place. He was at the railing, he would have to jump and get back on board further astern. In the dream he jumped, but the ship was traveling too fast. It passed as he swam, the stern rumbling by, leaving him in the wake, far behind.