Seven-Tenths Read online

  It is a positive relief for the visitor to Honolulu to be reminded of war, of anything serious and historic to set against a local culture which is so aggressively frivolous. The dignity of the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor is a profound contrast. The Arizona, which had served with the Atlantic Fleet towards the end of World War I, was one of eight battleships sunk or damaged in the surprise Japanese air attack on 7 December, 1941. When the attack began a few minutes before eight on a Sunday morning the Arizona had aboard 1,447 of her full complement of officers and men. When she sank, 1,177 had died on the ship, including the division commander and the ship’s captain. Some 800 are still there. It was decided to turn her into a National War Grave together with a second battleship, the USS Utah, which lies half submerged on the other side of Ford Island from the Arizona and still has fifty-eight bodies on board.

  The memorial attracts something like 1.5 million visitors a year. What might have degenerated into just another attraction is remarkably sombre. The effect is achieved by an organisation which suggests that visitors have temporarily passed out of the indulgent cajolery of civilian guided tours and into the gaze of military discipline. One is ushered into a cinema by a trooper who introduces a short film with some background information about what was happening in the world in 1941. The film then shows the attack itself, grainy, jumpy, tilting pictures of hectic black-and-white action intercut with modern underwater footage of the ship as she is now: rusty chains and barnacled capstans. At the end, suitably subdued, the group is led out through another door straight on to a wharf and aboard a launch which heads out towards the Arizona’s resting place. In this way no ordinary visitor can see the ship without first entering its solemn context.

  From a distance one sees the white, perforated memorial building, half bridge and half observation platform, which spans the sunken ship. The guide emphasises that at no point does this building touch the Arizona. (It was clear from the underwater footage that the ship may only be looked at, never touched. No gloved diver’s hand had reached out to wipe away rust from a hatchway or algae from a porthole.) If anything, this launch trip intensifies the solemnity, not least because the tourist’s prerogative of continuous smoking and eating and drinking is forbidden. Once at the memorial the group wanders reflectively around, not talking very much. The older they are, the quieter. There are the ship’s bell and a marble wall inscribed with all the names of the dead (as always, men may be sent carelessly to their deaths in wartime but their names are meticulously recorded); yet it is the sunken ship herself which commands attention. The memorial straddles the hulk and on both sides the ship tapers away, its ends marked by distant orange buoys. A few chunks of corroded steel poke up above the surface, notably a great circular drum, the barbette of a gun turret. Otherwise, the Arizona remains shadowy, bluish, submerged. Schools of damsel fish nose around the coral growths which have taken hold on her decks, looking for plankton. They are familiar black-and-yellow-striped sergeant majors, though I thought I saw another variety as well, Abudefduf. The flitting of these creatures between the observers’ eyes and the object of their reflection did not have the same effect as of pigeons circling a cenotaph. They were not tokens of a natural world blithely indifferent to human pieties, but drew attention to the medium into which the victims had passed. The skeletons, the events of 1941 and the fish now inhabited the same world, no part of which had been retrieved for the redemption of daylight and the upper air. We who stood looking down through the fish arranged ourselves in the relaxed, slightly unfocused attitudes of those who musingly watch golden carp in a pond – a quite different posture from the stiff upward gaze of someone confronting a monument.

  And herein lies the USS Arizona’s unique effect. We are accustomed to look downwards at gravestones but never downwards at public monuments. This sunken battleship is probably the only example of a monument which is viewed from above. The bowed head is at once a gesture of private grief, public respect and national mourning.

  On the journey back in the launch our escort told us that the slight oil slick we might notice came from the two or so gallons of fuel oil which still leak daily from the Arizona. Legend has it that it will stop seeping on the day the last survivor from the ship is buried. ‘I guess the ship is weeping,’ said a fellow traveller on the bench next to me. He was a man in his fifties with a moustache, who told me he had come because he had been a boy at the time of Pearl Harbor and remembered it partly for the emotion and partly because no one at home in Connecticut had known where it was. He had not expected to be so moved, he said, but he retained a sound middle-aged asperity, remarking on the irony of our guide’s homeward commentary being full of platitudes about peace, friendship and the lessons of war when only the previous day the UN Security Council had passed a resolution which President Bush was interpreting as giving him leave to go to war in the Persian Gulf.*

  Back on land I visited the nearby submarine museum. Dotted around outside on concrete plinths and pedestals was a display of missiles, all of which looked oddly small and rudimentary. There were very few visitors and the place had a pleasantly mournful air. There was also a large black ‘Kaiten’-class Japanese one-man suicide torpedo. Apparently this was never a successful weapon, proving temperamental and difficult to control. Essentially a huge bomb with a little seat in it, it sat on its cement bed and bled rust from rivet heads. A notice said that one successful ‘Kaiten’ pilot had gone to his death wearing a white bandanna and with the urn containing the ashes of his friend killed in training jammed into the cockpit with him.

  The centrepiece of this display was still afloat: a submarine moored to the quay, USS Bowfin. She last sailed in training in the early 1970s and the interior looked as though it had been kept polished by use as much as for exhibition. She had survived the last war with a distinguished record of ‘kills’. From inside, even moored submarines give a powerful impression of being on the seabed, an effect only partly to do with the way daylight is rationed by a tiny hatch or two. It is one thing to go down into the depths in a bathysphere of one’s own free will, like William Beebe, but surely quite another to go into combat in that blind tube crammed with men and machinery. There was in the Bowfin an air of menace greater than could be explained merely by the ever-present pressure of the sea beyond the curving steel sides. Other men’s fear as well as extremes of discomfort, perhaps. In the engine room with the four huge diesels going for surface running it must have been hot even with the hatches open. When the submarine dived the engines were stopped and she went down under electrical power. In the already hot, confined space the four diesels went on giving up their heat. The engineers were naked but for shorts. Dehydration was a serious problem; men passed out.

  The Bowfin produced a quite different effect from that of the Arizona. Although both ships had been in combat some half a century ago, the Arizona had felt as if she belonged even further back, to another epoch. In the museum were old photos of cocky Bowfin ratings lolling and smoking in port, draped around the very machine-gun up on deck against which I had just been leaning. Young in their 1940s hairstyles, they had none of the remoteness attending the marble names fixed above several tons of bones out in the harbour. For the real subject of Pearl Harbor is time, no matter how well it has been displaced on to trenchant exhibits. This at once became clear in the matter of gunsights. It was possible not only on Bowfin but also in the shore display to look through various gunsights, ranging devices, binoculars, periscopes and so on. Unlike much else these had not been maintained in working order. Since being given over to the public their focusing and other adjustments had become frozen or disconnected. At most there was a speckly view in one eye. Looking through a periscope towards the distant Arizona Memorial across the harbour I half expected to see a grainy, black-and-white clip from the film we had just been shown, as in the M. R. James ghost story about the pair of binoculars through which one could see only violent and desolating scenes from the past.* Indeed, I would swear I saw no colour th
rough any of those eyepieces.

  So the Arizona lies out there for all foreseeable time on the far side of a strip of water which is really too thin as insulation. Crossed as it is by a precise succession of launches bearing (among others) parties of faintly triumphant Japanese pretending to be from Taiwan, it scarcely cordons off the present. It all feels far too close, that nearby coastal strip, the freeways, used-car lots, dune buggies and ‘All the Ribs You Can Eat for $5’ joints. That, roaring by in its oblivion, does not feel like a ransomed world but one which has no use for the past in any other form than in national shrines.

  It was at Pearl Harbor I first appreciated how, once it swallowed something, the sea washes it over less with water than with time, so whatever it engulfs becomes ancient almost immediately. It has something to do with being shut off from the continuity of vision, but in a way which is more powerful than mere burial on land. It felt as though the 800 skeletons contained by the still-leaking hulk of the Arizona had been borne back and out of history until they and the Titanic’s victims and those of the Mary Rose or any Phoenician galley were coeval.

  With its polished metal and ruthlessly closing watertight doors, the Bowfin pulled me back to an event in childhood. When I was between eight and ten years old there was a terrifying disaster involving a submarine. That is, what I remember is my own version in which I imagined what it was like to be a sailor trapped on the seabed in a metal coffin, eyes raised in silence to the curved ceiling in hourly expectation of the first sounds of rescue. I could not remember the submarine’s name, where it went down, or even the year.

  What I am sure I recalled were the solemn tones of the BBC’s news bulletins: the grave, Home Service accents coming through the varnished wooden slats of our old EkCo wireless. Why the submarine had failed to surface was unclear. It was one of ‘ours’, in home waters, lying on the bottom intact but unable to come up and breathe. Memory has stretched the whole affair over many days, during which I invented everything we were not told. I had the impression of maybe 100 ratings being informed by a level-voiced captain that if everyone kept as still as possible, breathing as slowly and shallowly as they could while all unnecessary heating and power were turned off, the oxygen could be eked out for maybe four or five days, even a week. Certainly long enough for rescue to arrive. Were not their comrades in the Royal Navy (up there in the sunlight) the most intrepid in the world? With the most advanced rescue techniques? Sit tight, the captain said; help is on its way. And – yes – pray, of course. More things are wrought by prayer / Than this world dreams of. …

  So we huddled over the wireless and kept pace with the rescue attempt as it grew ever more protracted and the BBC’s voice ever more solemn. There was, we were told, a plentiful supply of ‘oxygen candles’ on board. These could be used at intervals to release fresh quantities of the life-sustaining gas. What these candles really gave off was time, of course: the extra minutes and hours fuming up as the men lay side by side in their bunks in the dim glow of emergency lighting, their whole world canted at an angle and with drops of condensation falling from the ceiling. Only a couple of inches of steel held back the press of black water outside. Some wrote letters home, others played quiet games of chess. Everyone was in good spirits, patient. No one wanted to be the first to say that although their prison was achingly cold, it was also becoming unbearably stuffy.

  Until finally, after many days, we up there in the bright sunshine were told there was now no further hope for the crew of the lost submarine. The searchers knew where she lay but she was too deep. Or she was at the wrong angle. Or the special cutting equipment was still on its way from Rosyth. And somewhere hidden away in the black and icy depths the captain, his breathing now painfully laboured but his voice still level, would hand round to every man on board a little black capsule. The bulletins stopped abruptly and other news displaced the lost submarine. Ignored, it now lay in silence except for an occasional creaking as it stirred gently to a deep current. After another few days (but how long? Weeks, even?) and in the absence of a living hand to turn it off, the emergency lighting faded to a red glow and finally winked out. Only then did utter darkness cover the dead crew lying in orderly fashion in their bunks, with here or there an outflung arm or scattered chess set to betray a final struggle.

  This was how, as a haunted pre-adolescent, I had imagined the drama to which the whole nation was made privy. Even now, some fifty years later, I can recapture an elusive wraith of the original terror and sadness I carried about at the time, and visiting the Arizona and the Bowfin jolted my memory still further. An atmosphere at once solemn and filmic inhabits one’s contemplations of all sunken tombs, airless but watertight as they might variously be.

  I also remember wanting to know the real details. What happened to the bodies? In the absence of oxygen and in the near-zero temperature, how much would they decay? Would the submarine eventually fill with water from the combined seepages of hatchways and torpedo tubes and sprung plates? Before that would the batteries split, leaking acid to react with whatever seawater had pooled in the bilges and release chlorine? And would that in turn arrest any further bacterial activity, just as in tiny concentrations it could sterilise whole swimming pools?

  Or maybe they had finally salvaged the submarine so that one morning it resurfaced, streaked with rust and shaggy with weed? Perhaps they had been advised to use caution as they released the steel dogs securing the main hatch and, as the last one was thrown, the heavy slab was hurled back on its hinges while a roar of putrid gases blew a column of rotting papers, naval caps and pocket chess sets high into the air. And once this dreadful pressure cooker had been opened, the first brave men wearing breathing apparatus and carrying flashlights would descend. … Was that how it had been?

  So many and efficient are the ways of deferring or obliterating curiosity in adulthood that it was not until visiting Pearl Harbor that I realised I still really wanted to know the answers. The nameless demanded to be named. I decided to track down this doomed submarine, to discover how much I and my friends had embroidered. For instance, it was inconceivable that the BBC would have described a submarine commander having a supply of suicide pills he could dole out when he judged a crisis hopeless enough, as if his men had been spies. After some research I narrowed down a handful of possibilities to a sinking which fitted all the criteria. In April 1951, HMS Affray went down in nearly 300 feet of water off the Isle of Wight. Aboard her were seventy-five ratings and officers. She also, according to a contemporary newspaper report, carried ‘a large quantity of oxygen candles’.

  The Affray had sailed from Portsmouth on the evening of 16 April on a training exercise, part of which was to involve putting four Royal Marine commandos ashore on the Cornish coast. She was last heard of at 21.16 that evening, diving south of the Isle of Wight. Her commander, Lt. Com. John Blackburn, had been ordered to report daily between 0800 and 0900 hours. At 10 am on the 17th, having heard nothing, the radio room at Fort Blockhouse, Portsmouth, alerted the authorities with the executive ‘Subsunk’ code. An hour later a search was under way which over the next two days would involve Royal Navy, US Navy, Belgian and French craft as well as the RAF. It was thought there was enough oxygen on board Affray to support the crew for three days, barring damage to the system. There was a suit of Davis escape gear for each man which included breathing apparatus and immersion suits.

  That night other submarines reported asdic contacts and Admiral Sir Arthur John Power, Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth, announced ‘Affray has been located on the bottom 35 miles southwest of St Catherine’s Point in just over 30 fathoms of water.’ At daybreak an aircraft dropped small explosive charges to tell the submarine’s crew she had been found and that ships were standing by to pick up anyone who came to the surface. Nobody came. Several of the searching submarines reported hearing faint, distorted signals and sounds which might have been made by someone tapping on a hull, but nobody managed to get a reliable bearing. In the afternoon the asdic room of HM
S Ambush picked up the code letters which meant ‘We are trapped on the bottom.’ By this time thirty-four ships were taking part in a search which was becoming desperate.

  Next morning hopes were raised again when an RAF Coastal Command aircraft spotted oil and dropped a smoke canister which was mistaken by another plane for a marker buoy from Affray. That evening, sixty-nine hours after she had dived, the submarine was officially given up for lost.

  Because the Affray was only one of sixteen ‘A’-class submarines it was vital that the reason for her sinking be ascertained. For the next eight weeks the search continued under Captain W. O. Shelford. By early May she still had not been found, and Shelford was reluctantly driven to take notice of the large number of letters and phone calls being received at Portsmouth from members of the public who claimed to know where she was. He plotted these alleged positions on a chart and found to his surprise that they mostly fell within a small area outside the main search zone.* Shelford told Admiral Power, somewhat hesitantly, and a ship was dispatched to investigate. When it arrived at the location it at once obtained a strong asdic echo; yet as it turned out it was not the Affray at all, nor any other wreck or rock.