“Sounds like a swell guy,” Larry said. “Why couldn’t he have gone into submarines, too?”
“No—he’s swell, but he’s not right for pigboats,” March said. “Too much of an individualist. He’ll take orders fine, do a swell job, but he’s best when he’s on his own. Flying a fighter plane off a carrier is just exactly right for Scoot.”
“Well, you never can tell—maybe we’ll run into him,” Larry said. “Stranger things have happened in wartime.”
They sailed from Pearl Harbor looking for action, but several days went by without a sign of ship or plane of any kind.
“We’ve got to run into something,” Larry said one day in the wardroom. “I’d hate to show up at the base with all my torpedoes intact, without a single Jap ship accounted for. Why, we’re going through about nine hundred miles of enemy waters and we’ve got to get something on the way.”
“The boys out here have been scaring them into their ratholes,” McFee said. “They don’t come out any more than they have to.”
“But that’s the point,” Larry said. “They’ve got to come out sometime. They’ve got garrisons on a lot of these islands, and garrisons need to be supplied.”
“Well, they’re just letting the garrisons on lots of those islands starve to death,” Stan said.
“Sure, in the Marshalls and a few other places where we’ve got ’em surrounded,” the Skipper said. “But they’re still supplying and reinforcing plenty of places around these parts. They lose some ships every day. I just want them to lose a couple to us, as we’re passing by on our way to more important things.”
“What about Wake Island?” March asked.