A gripping and authentic World War II naval adventure by a master storyteller The Hooligans fictionalizes the little-known but remarkable exploits of “The Hooligan Navy” that fought in the Pacific theatre of World War II. Loosely-organized in fast moving squadrons, PT (patrol torpedo) boats were the pesky nemesis of the formidable Japanese navy, dubbed “the mosquito fleet” and “devil boats” for their daring raids against warships, tankers, and transport ships.
After the Pearl Harbor raid plunges America into war, young surgical resident Lincoln Anderson enlists in the Navy medical corps. His first deployment comes in August 1942 at Guadalcanal, when after a brutal sea battle and the landing of Marines on the island, Anderson finds himself triaging hundreds of casualties under relentless Japanese air and land attacks.
But with the navy short of doctors, soon Anderson is transferred to serve aboard a PT boat. From Guadalcanal to the Solomon Islands to the climactic, tide-turning battle of Leyte Gulf, Anderson and the crew members of his boat confront submarines and surface ships, are attacked from air by the dreaded Kawanishi flying boats, and hunted by destroyers. In the end, Anderson must lead a division of boats in a seemingly-impossible mission against a Japanese battleship formation—and learn the true nature of his character.
Informed by P. T. Deutermann’s own experience as a commander of a patrol gunboat in Vietnam, The Hooligans is first-rate military adventure fiction.
Release date:
July 28, 2020
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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Rain. Pounding, tropical rain. Not comforting; more like scary. Sounding like a waterfall on my steel shipping-box home. My brain telling me: It’s just rain. Go back to sleep. But it wasn’t just rain: someone or -thing was also pounding on the side of the box.
Go away! I don’t know if I said it, but God! I was so tired.
“Doc,” a voice shouted over the roar of the rain. “We need you. Now. Unlock the hatch.”
Can’t make me, my evil, sleep-deprived brain whispered. I looked at the radium dial of my watch: 0330. I’d gone down for a quick nap at 2300. Almost four hours. An extravagantly long time, and a whole lot more than the perimeter snuffies were getting.
“Okay, okay, keep your shirt on,” I shouted back. The banging on the door stopped.
The Marines had taken steel shipping containers, formerly filled with 75 and 105 mm artillery rounds for shipment across the Pacific, and made one-man sleeping quarters for each of the docs. The box was ten by six by six feet, with a hatch at one end. There were screened holes on the top sides for air, a makeshift bamboo rack for clothes, clean surgical gowns, and a Springfield rifle. There was a crude interior lock bar to keep any sleepers safe from infiltrating Japs intent on murder. The boxes lay just outside the maze of ropes and cables supporting the main hospital tent, like a row of olive-drab beehives.
Typical of tropical rain, it stopped when I finally unlocked the hatch and stumbled out into the sauna-like atmosphere of Henderson Field. I was wearing a relatively clean set of “Johnnies,” or surgical-gown tops and bottoms, and GI-issue combat boots. I also carried a government-issue 1911 M1 .45 semiautomatic on my right hip in a very non-sterile holster. As a Navy doctor, I was a commissioned officer with the rank of lieutenant (junior grade), US Naval Reserve, in the Navy Medical Corps. The Marine general commanding at Guadalcanal had issued standing orders: all officers will carry a sidearm, even doctors. We’d dispose of our hand-cannons when we got inside the main hospital tent, nicknamed the Big Top, but they were never very far away. Just like the Japs.
A Navy hospitalman was standing outside, holding a red-lens flashlight and looking like a drowned rat. I couldn’t remember his name, but I knew he was a new guy. Together we slogged through the red mud toward the cluster of medical tents, accompanied by the sounds of muted thunder, intermittent rifle fire, and the occasional thump of an illumination mortar. The tents containing the surgical unit were about fifty feet away from the sleeping containers, partially concealed in a stand of bedraggled coconut trees. I could see them each time an illumination round lit up the sky in a blaze of magnesium, which unfortunately lasted only fifteen seconds or so. Once it burned out the resulting darkness seemed even more intense. I’d caught a glimpse of several litter-jeeps parked around the Big Top, which meant more casualties. Nothing new there.
Another flare went off, behind us this time, and in a single horrifying instant a Jap soldier stepped out of the darkness and bayoneted my hospitalman in the stomach. The youngster went down with a mortal scream, which continued each time the Jap pulled the bayonet out and then stabbed him again. I’d seen lots of dead Japanese in various stages of deconstruction. I’d never actually seen a live one, and this little man was shorter than his rifle but making up for his lack of stature with his zeal for homicide. I stumbled backwards to get away from him just as another flare popped over our heads. I completely forgot to draw my .45, but by then the Marines standing around the casualty jeeps were running toward us, firing as they came. My brain finally engaged and I hit the dirt to avoid the rounds coming in “our” direction. By the time I gathered my wits the Jap was dead and three Marines were pulling me up from the mud.
“Sorry, Doc,” one of them said. “Don’t know how that bastard got by us.”
Nobody spoke the obvious—you with the .45: why didn’t you do something? Then I realized they knew that my .45 was mostly for show, and as a doctor, I couldn’t be expected to be much of a soldier and most certainly not a Marine. Still, I was embarrassed. I bent briefly to examine the hospitalman, but it was pretty obvious he’d bled out. There was a flare of yellow light as someone in the surgical tent opened a flap and yelled something at the cluster of Marines helping me toward my tent. I assumed that meant: hurry the hell up.
The Big Top was a PSH, a portable service hospital. It was square, forty feet on a side, and made of dark green canvas. Several small portable generators were rattling away along the sides. There was a web of guy wires and ropes holding the thing upright and, inside, three large metal poles supported the ridgeline canvas. The “floor” inside was made up of large tarpaulin sections that undulated when you walked across the interior of the tent. The sanitary condition of the floor did not bear examination, even though two hospitalmen were assigned to constantly sweep, mop, bag, and remove all the bloody medical litter that emergency surgery in an active combat zone produces.
There were four operating tables, each with its own surgical light and the usual clutter of IV stands, instrument trays, a stool for the hospitalman anesthetist and his helper, and the operating table itself. All of this had come ashore from the supply ships once the initial invasion fleet returned to Guadalcanal after the sea fight they were calling Savo Island, and the big bosses regained their nerve. There was a fan in each corner of the tent running on low to keep down cross contamination of the four tables. The fans offered the surgical teams a smidgen of relief from the ninety-degree heat, and that was at night. During the day they’d spray water on the tent in an attempt at evaporation cooling. All of the surgical team members wore masks with Vicks VapoRub smeared on them to deal with the charnel-house smell inside the tent.
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