James Salter - All That Is

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.