“Just when the fighting starts I have to be down in the engine room,” he moaned. “Didn’t even see anything, let alone take a shot at those dirty Nips!”
“Well, I saw plenty,” March replied, “but navigation officers don’t get a chance at much shooting, either!”
Scoot, by dint of much pleading and arguing, got Commander Seaton to transfer him to gunnery, but then eight weeks went by without a sight of a Jap. The first shots Scoot fired were into shore installations of the Japs at Munda airfield in the Solomons, after the Marines had consolidated their hold on Guadalcanal and had decided to move forward to another island.
The big battle had come almost ten months after they had shipped aboard the Plymouth, up in the Bismarck Sea northeast of New Guinea. Finally finding the sizable Jap force for which he had been looking, Admiral Caldwell, in charge of the U.S. force, had steamed right into the middle of the bevy of Jap ships and opened fire with everything he had. For seven hours, mostly at night, the battle had raged. Jap planes were attacking overhead, at least until U.S. planes drove them off at dawn. The firing on all sides was so deafening that no one could hear even Scoot’s whoops of glee and happiness. When three of his gun crew went down under a hail of flying fragments from a shell that landed on the Plymouth’s deck not fifty feet away, Scoot carried on with the few that were left, but the rate of fire was cut. So he rounded up a cook and a messboy and turned them into expert gunners in five minutes and knocked three Jap planes out of the sky with his improvised gun crew in ten minutes.
Meanwhile, March had not been idle. The shell whose fragments had laid low part of Scoot’s crew had landed squarely on one of the 12-inch gun turrets forward. March was the first man into the smoking and wrecked turret, pulling out the wounded and dead who were there. At any moment the ammunition below might have exploded—for no one knew if the shell had penetrated that far—but March had no thought of such a thing. Three of the men he lugged from the turret were still alive, though closer to death than March had ever seen anyone. Later, the medical officer told March those three had lived only because they got medical attention so fast.
When it was all over, and half the Jap force lay at the bottom of the sea while the rest ran for cover, pursued by American planes, the men on the Plymouth wearily surveyed the damage done to their ship. It was plenty, but a month in port would fix her up again. As they headed slowly for Pearl Harbor for repairs, Scoot and March got the big surprise of their lives. They had no thought of making heroes of themselves, and they never could figure out how, in the heat of battle, any officer could have seen just what they did.
Yet when the citations came along, Scoot and March both found themselves on the list commended for conspicuous gallantry in action.
“My golly, we didn’t do anything,” Scoot had objected, even though he was beaming all over with pleasure. “Everybody else did the same kind of thing. All the crew were fighting just as hard as we were!”
“Yes, but they didn’t all keep their heads under fire and show the spontaneously clear thinking that you two did,” Commander Seaton said to them in a friendly talk later. “That’s what counts—that’s what makes leaders of men. And the Navy needs leaders these days. By the way, the Skipper asked me if there was anything special we could do for you two—anything you wanted especially. I told him that you, Scoot, had wanted to be a Navy flier and that March had wanted to be a submariner. If you still feel that way, the Skipper’ll recommend your transfer to those branches.”
March and Scoot were dumbfounded! And it had not been an easy thing to decide, though a few months before they would not have hesitated for an instant. Scoot still wanted to fly. March still wanted to go into the pigboats. But they had lived on the Plymouth, gone through battle with her, and they didn’t like the idea of leaving her now.