March 19, 1945: The war in the Pacific approaches its apocalyptic climax. The largest wartime armada ever assembled, Task Force 58, is closing in on Okinawa; once taken, it will finally put American B-29 bombers in range of the home islands of Japan—and victory.
At the heart of the fleet are fourteen Essex-class aircraft carriers, including the USS Franklin, known as "Big Ben"—a 27,000-ton behemoth, home to 3,500 crewmen and 100 aircraft. Just after dawn, while crewmen prepare for battle, a single Japanese Yokosuka D4Y breaks through the clouds and drops two 500-pound bombs on Big Ben. The first rips through the flight deck's three-inch armor to the hangar deck, exploding amidst two dozen planes carrying thirty tons of explosives. Rockets and bombs howl in all directions. Hundreds of men are forced to leap into the sea to escape, leaving the captain with only one third of his crew; there are more dead, wounded, and trapped men left onboard than able-bodied sailors.
Trial by Fire is the gripping novelization of how, against all odds, the sailors of the Franklin were able to save their ship, after three agonizing days of battling the flames that ultimately claimed the lives of 832 men and injured 300 more. Listeners will be astounded and humbled by the heroic actions of a few brave sailors in the face of catastrophe.
Release date:
July 13, 2021
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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THREE MONTHS EARLIER, ABOARD USS FRANKLIN (CV-13), PUGET SOUND NAVAL SHIPYARD
JANUARY 1945
C’mon, Billy,” George said. “We’re sailing in two weeks. There’s a big difference between guys going over the hill for a honey or a ten-day toot and actually jumping ship. They’ll be back.”
Billy shook his head. “I don’t think so, XO,” he said, getting up and starting to pace around the cabin. “My chiefs don’t think so, either.”
George Lowry Merritt, Commander, USN, and executive officer in Franklin, didn’t want to pursue this conversation. There was every chance that Billy-B Perkins, also a three-stripe commander and the air boss in Franklin, might be right. Billy was a fidgeter. He simply had to be moving, all the time. He had skippered a squadron of fighters on the Big E before becoming the air boss in Franklin. He’d been aboard only three weeks back in October when that kamikaze had torn the ship up, sending her all the way back to the Ulithi anchorage. Once the Ulithi repair people had seen the extent of her damage, the decision had been made to send her to a shipyard on the West Coast for repairs. “Bad enough that we’ve got practically a brand-new crew,” Billy continued. “But this new captain—”
George raised a hand. “That’s enough,” he said. Whatever his own thoughts about the ship’s new commanding officer might be, he wasn’t going to allow any of that kind of talk, especially from the third most senior officer in the ship. Besides, as a three-striper and academy graduate, Billy-B knew better than to indulge in talk like that.
“Yes, sir,” Billy said. “Sorry about that. But just ’cause we can’t say it, everybody knows what the problem is.” He sat back down; the exec’s cabin wasn’t big enough for serious pacing.
George fell back on a tried-and-true excuse. “We’ve had almost a fifty percent crew turnover since November, Billy,” he said. “The Navy’s putting a new carrier into the water just about one every month. They need experienced hands at all levels, so when one comes into the yards, they rape and pillage to seed the new construction with some experienced people. The captain knows he’s got a boatload of greenies on his hands. They’re all new to a big-deck and they’re all new to him—and him to them. He’s taking a hard line because you only get one chance to do that, and that’s right at the beginning. You start easy and then try to tighten up later? Doesn’t work. Not in a ship of this size. You start with an iron fist; you can always relax a bit later. And keep in mind: once the air group joins, there’ll be thirty-six hundred men aboard. This isn’t anything like running a fighter squadron.”
“Yes, sir,” Billy grumped.
George waited. He knew Billy still had something to get off his chest.
“It’s just what he said at the change of command,” Billy said, finally. “I cannot believe he said that. That wasn’t taking a hard line on discipline. That was just plain rude.”
George wished his cabin had a porthole. He’d have loved to be able to look outside, even if the view was mostly a forest of steel masts, pier-side cranes, and the ever-present Puget Sound rain. Better let him have his say, he thought. It’s not like he’s entirely wrong.
“I’ve always been told that there’s a traditional format for a change of command,” Billy continued. “The outgoing skipper makes a speech, praising the ship and thanking his officers and crew. The new guy then gets up, says he’s glad to be here, congratulates the outgoing CO for doing a fine job, and then he reads his orders. He doesn’t go criticizing the ship and the crew and making the departing skipper look bad. That was totally un-sat!”
George nodded. The change of command had happened at the Ulithi fleet anchorage in the Caroline Islands, thousands of miles from here, following a kamikaze strike, which had caused great damage to the carrier. The change of command had been scheduled for months, and Captain Shoemaker had been widely praised for his actions after the kamikaze hit, so it hadn’t been as if he was leaving under a cloud. George had been as shocked as the rest of the carrier’s 3,600-man complement at what the incoming captain said when he finally stood up prior to formally announcing that he was now the skipper. Instead of the customary polite words, the new captain had glared out at the assembled multitudes arrayed by department and division on the still-blackened flight deck. “Franklin is here,” he’d said, “because you, the ship’s company, failed to defend her from Japanese attack. I intend to address that failure and your obvious lack of training until I’m satisfied that you are fully prepared to resume wartime operations in the Western Pacific theater of operations. I will now read my orders.”
None of the ship’s company could believe it. The new skipper was openly naming the entire crew and the air group, officers, chiefs, and enlisted men as the reason why Franklin was headed to the yards in the first place, right in front of the outgoing CO, Captain Shoemaker, who’d been their skipper for over a year and a damned good one, in George’s opinion. Truth be told, the entire fleet was reeling from the appearance of the Jap suicide-aircraft corps, whose depredations had been going on since October of last year, at Leyte Gulf. Either way, the new captain’s statement had been nothing short of outrageous and a huge breach of naval protocol. George had had to force himself not to react visibly, even as he and everyone around him had wanted to yell: Hey! That’s not true!
Thus, it had been a resentful crew that had taken Franklin back to the West Coast. During the first weeks in the yard, almost half of them had received orders to pack their seabags and head off to form the pre-commissioning crews on new construction. And now, before the ship had even completed her repairs, guys were jumping ship and deserting? George let out an audible sigh and looked at his watch. It was just after four in the afternoon. He needed to stretch his legs.
“Let’s go take a tour, Mister Air Department Head,” he announced. “I want to see all the new stuff.”
The air boss snorted. “If you can find it in all that damned smoke and staging, XO.”
George saw what Billy meant once they got up to the hangar deck, that steel cavern that stretched almost the entire length of the ship, two decks below the actual flight deck. They stopped at the top of the ladder that went from the second deck to the hangar deck, overwhelmed by a scene of what looked and sounded like industrial chaos: the roar of yellow-gear tractor engines, the hammering of a hundred needle guns on steel, grinders and pneumatic drills showering sparks through the lattice of staging, all lit up by the continuous spat of eye-watering welding arcs, which had created a thin cloud of vaporized metal smoke across the space’s overhead.
Two weeks to go, the yard’s ship superintendent had told this morning’s meeting, George remembered. We’ll have you out of the drydock and starting your onload in two weeks, guaranteed. No way in hell, George remembered thinking. He could see that Billy was thinking the same thing. The hangar deck was almost 700 feet long, and there wasn’t anywhere that was not covered in metal pipe-staging and crawling with shipyard workers. The only good news was that there was no longer much evidence of what that suicide plane had done to Franklin. Nor were there any signs of the fifty-eight men who’d died during that attack. George could still visualize all those blackened lumps scattered everywhere in the hangar once they’d put the fires out.
“Isn’t that the captain?” Billy asked, pointing with his chin.
George looked. Had to be, he thought. The captain was a big boy, so big everyone wondered how he’d ever squeezed into a fighter plane’s cockpit. He was a burly six-five, with a round face, permanently wavy hair, and a cleft, double chin. He was big enough that anyone he encountered when going through one of the ship’s passageways had to flatten himself against a bulkhead and inhale so the captain could squeeze by. He was also one of those big guys who gave off the aura of “move aside or I’ll walk right over you.” He’d taken a reduction in rank, from commodore back to captain, in order to get command of Franklin. Given his obvious disdain for the ship’s company, everyone kind of wondered why. One of the chiefs had summed it up neatly: this new skipper has a perpetual red-ass.
George, the one officer who spent the most time with the captain, couldn’t argue with that, but he also could not permit that sentiment to be voiced out loud. If the captain sensed that the crew didn’t like him, he gave no sign of it. George suspected that he had become accustomed to being someone whom nobody liked very much, but right now, there he was, standing conspicuously amid the frantic repair efforts surrounding him, his two Marine orderlies at parade rest close by, and radiating his displeasure. Interestingly, George observed: there wasn’t a single crewmember within fifty feet of him. When the captain saw George and Billy-B, he beckoned imperiously.
“Oh, great,” Billy muttered, through clenched teeth.
George almost laughed. Almost—the captain was still looking right at the two of them. “C’mon, there, Air Boss,” he said, finally. “This is your fault, after all.”
Billy strangled a laugh, and over they went. The first thing the captain said was: “About time, XO.”
“Sir?” George replied in as neutral a tone as he could manage.
“Look at this mess,” the captain said, having to shout to make himself heard above the clamor of the repair efforts. “They’re getting nowhere. What are you doing about that?”
“The ship’s supe says they’ll be done in two weeks, Captain,” George pointed out.
“Bullshit!” the captain said. “Nothing’s finished. They’re falling all over each other and they’re getting nowhere. And where the hell are our people? They just sitting back, watching this circus?”
“Our people aren’t allowed to interfere with the shipyard’s workers, Captain,” George said. “They can help, but only if they’re asked to. So far, none of the shops’re asking, and because of that, I’ve got them in training in other parts of the ship. We’ve got a lot of boots on board now.”
The captain peered down at his exec in total frustration. His hands, which were disproportionately small compared to the rest of him, were clenched into sweaty fists. He’d been furious when he’d learned of the scale of the transfers when Franklin had first arrived at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton. That had been the exec’s fault, of course: “Goddammit, XO, why didn’t you protest? They’re taking all the experienced hands.” It had become a familiar theme: Do something, XO. Don’t just sit there. George, of course, had had to swallow the obvious retort: You’re the captain—why don’t you do something? You draw a whole lot more water than I do as exec.
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