after him.
[FOUR]
ABOARD HMS CHARITY 33 DEGREES 10 MINUTES NORTH LATITUDE, 129 DEGREES 63 MINUTES EAST LONGITUDE (THE EAST CHINA SEA) 0635 16 AUGUST 1950
Lieutenant Commander Darwin Jones-Fortin, RN, saw the face of Lieutenant David R. Taylor, USNR, peering through the round window in the interior bulkhead. He waved at him, then pointed first at the door in the bulkhead—Taylor nodded his understanding—and then at the sailor standing behind the helmsman, indicating that he should go to the door and help undog it.
Undogged and unlatched, the heavy steel door swung open as Charity buried her bow in the sea, and it was all the sailor could do to hold it. Taylor came onto the bridge and leaned against the bulkhead, then was followed by McCoy.
“Permission to come on the bridge, sir?” Taylor called out.
“Permission granted,” Jones-Fortin said. “Both of you.”
Taylor waited until the moment was right, then came quickly across the deck to where Jones-Fortin sat in his captain’s chair. McCoy followed him. The ship moved, and McCoy half slid, half fell across the deck, ending up crashing into Taylor.
“Smooth as a millpond, what?” Jones-Fortin said. “Seriously, is this weather going to be a problem? I’m afraid we’re in for a bit of it. Possibly, very possibly, worse than what we’re getting now.”
“Are we?” Taylor said.
“And Charity is of course a destroyer,” Jones-Fortin added. “She doesn’t ride as well as the Queen Mary, or, come to think of it, better than any other man-of-war that comes to mind.”
“Try a destroyer escort sometime, Captain,” Taylor said. “Or even better, an LST. Although calling an LST a man-of -war is stretching the term considerably.”
“Is that the voice of experience speaking?”
"I had a DE during the war,” Taylor said. “And LSTs since.”
“I was the first lieutenant on a DE some time ago. I’ve always thought the RN assigned to DEs people they hoped would get washed over the side. I’ve never been aboard an LST in weather.”
“Truth being stranger than fiction, when I was sailing LSTs through these waters after the war,” Taylor said, “I used to think back fondly on the smooth sailing characteristics in rough seas of the Joseph J. Isaacs, DE-403. In weather like this, the movement of an LST has to be experienced to be believed.”
“I wonder how my men took to waking up in a storm like this,” McCoy said. “They were still feeling pretty good when we came aboard.”
“Didn’t someone once say, ‘the wages of sin are death’?” Jones-Fortin said. “I suspect that a number of my crew are in the same shape.”
McCoy chuckled.
“But I’m afraid, McCoy,” Jones-Fortin went on, “that I have to correct you. This isn’t the storm. This is what they call ‘the edges’ of the storm. The storm itself is farther north, coming down from China into the Yellow Sea.”
“Right on our course to Inchon, right?” Taylor said.
“I’m afraid so,” Jones-Fortin said. “There’s an overlay of the latest weather projection on the chart. Perhaps you’d like to have a look. We have a decision to make.”
He indicated the chart room, aft of the wheel.
“Thank you, sir,” Taylor said, and went for a look.
“Did you see what I saw?” Jones-Fortin asked when Taylor returned.
“I think so, sir,” Taylor said, and turned to McCoy: “Ken, the way the storm is moving—and as the captain said, it’s a bad one—I don’t think we can put the boats over the side tomorrow morning. And maybe not even the morning after that.”
“You mean it would be risky, or we just can’t do it?”
“Tomorrow, we just can’t do it. Period. The morning after that, maybe, with more of a chance of something going wrong than I like.”
“So what do we do?” McCoy asked.
“That’s up to Captain Jones-Fortin,” Taylor said.
“It’s a bit over six hundred miles,” Jones-Fortin said. “I think Charity can make fifteen knots, even through the storm. A little less when it gets as bad as I suspect it’s going to get, a bit more when there are periods of relative calm. That would put us off the Flying Fish Channel lighthouse in forty hours—sometime before midnight on 18 August. As Mr. Taylor saw, the storm will still be in the area at that time. Whether or not it will have subsided enough for us to safely put the boats over the side—or for you to be able to safely make Tokchok-kundo in them—by 0300 of the nineteenth is something we won’t know until then.”
“And if it doesn’t clear, sir, then what?” McCoy asked.
“Then we shall have to spend