FOURTEEN
The submarine was the USS Hagfish. We were hustled down the forward hatch, surprisingly wobble-legged, while somebody topside tried to sink the life rafts with a submachine gun. A chief petty officer led us aft to the control room, where the skipper, a lieutenant commander, welcomed us on board. I was amazed at how unsteady we both were. I’d felt we’d been relatively safe in the raft, with food, water, and even a tarp, but the crew members around us were looking at us with obvious sympathy. I introduced myself and Rooster to the captain and told him we’d been on the Hornet.
“Word was they got everybody off,” he said.
“Everybody who could walk or be carried,” I replied. “We were up near the signal bridge when a Jap bomber decided to commit suicide in our faces.” Then to my surprise, I asked if I could sit down. My knees were trembling and the lights in the control room had taken on a hazy appearance. There was a sudden stir of people and then we were being hustled forward.
The next thing we knew we were in bunks with a hospitalman first class in attendance. He came over to me after looking at Rooster and appraised my clotted scalp. They’re gonna call you zipper head once that heals, he pronounced. A lieutenant who identified himself as the boat’s exec asked if we’d be able to tell him what happened to us so they could get a report out. I looked at him for a moment and then said that we’d both been knocked unconscious by a Jap bomb.
“When I came to, the ship had been abandoned,” I told him. “I remembered a big yellow flash. Then everything went black. I woke up with this big cut on my head and I could hardly move. Felt like a steamroller got me. Radioman Baynes was bleeding from the mouth and he was unable to move.”
On signal from the XO, the hospitalman moved back in and checked us both for concussion symptoms. I was declared okay; Rooster was less so. I explained that we’d probably been left for dead when the ship was abandoned. The island had taken a bomb hit and then a suicide plane, so the structure was a shambles by the time they decided to abandon ship. I also told him about the two Jap destroyers who’d showed up and put four final torpedoes into the Hornet.
“Got it,” the exec said. “We’re here because a PBY pilot reported seeing what he thought was a flare in the area where Hornet went down. We were on our way to a patrol area near the Philippine island of Talawan, which is north and west of here. They diverted us to check out the flare report.”
“Thank God you did,” I said.
“The question now is what to do with you guys. We’re trying to arrange a rendezvous with a Catalina somewhere out here while we’re still relatively close to Guadalcanal, but they’re kinda busy now moving casualties to Nouméa.”
I told him I had no idea of where we were at the moment. I’d known that the Hornet had been operating somewhere between the Santa Cruz Islands and the Solomons, but, in general, carrier pilots only needed to know where their home plate was in reference to the target they’d flown out to get. The exec nodded his understanding.
“Everything out here is separated by thousands of miles,” he said. “People have no idea of how big the Pacific Ocean is. I guess what I’m telling you is that you might have to become submariners for a while. We’re supposed to take a look at the waters around Talawan, which is like the southernmost island in the Philippines, see what’s there, and then head south to Australia.”
“Well, hell, XO,” I said. “We’re fresh out of SBDs, so I’m game. How can we help?”
He grinned. “Get some rest,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.”
The exec found some new dungarees for Rooster and a set of wash khakis for me. Our oil-soaked flight suits had been thrown over the side. I was also provided with a Hagfish ball cap and a pocketknife with the boat’s insignia. I learned the next day that he hadn’t been kidding about distances in the Pacific Ocean. It was almost 3,600 miles between the Santa Cruz Islands and Talawan. The boat could run 20 knots on the surface at night, but during the day we had to submerge to stay out of sight of the Japs’ long-range seaplane patrols. That meant creeping along at about five knots so as not to use up something reverently called The Battery, so we were going to be submariners for at least ten days, maybe even longer. The exec explained to us that we were going to the waters around Talawan because Jap warships were supposedly using one of the bays there as an afloat logistics base. It provided a deep-water anchorage and a place to rendezvous with oilers and supply ships before pressing on to Rabaul, their base in the Solomons. The island was thought to be occupied by a Japanese army unit. Foreign occupation was nothing new for the Philippines; I learned that, beginning in the thirteenth century, the Arabs, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and finally the Americans had all claimed it at one time or another. Talawan was a small island, 20 some miles long and 12 wide, pockmarked by volcanoes, some of them active.
“We’re gonna go to a patrol area just east of the island,” the exec told us. “See if we can get on the route between this anchorage and Rabaul. We haven’t had any of our boats in the Celebes Sea so far, so we might get lucky.”
It ended up taking twelve days not ten due to a problem with one of the boat’s four main engines. We mostly tried to stay out of the way, which was hard to do because there was absolutely no spare room anywhere. Rooster’s concussion was receding, but he was clearly uncomfortable in the confined spaces of the boat and especially with being 200 feet underwater half of the time. I didn’t really mind being submerged and actually appreciated the fact that, when we were “downstairs,” the sea was always calm and the entire boat was air-conditioned.
Hagfish was a relatively new boat and this was her first war patrol. Her crew was a mixture of experienced submariners and brand-new guys. They didn’t call them nuggets, apparently, but it wasn’t hard to tell which was which. We, of course, were useless supercargo, consuming food, fresh water, precious air, and contributing nothing. The exec had told us that the boat had reported picking us up, but, so far, there’d been no instructions from Nouméa as to what to do with us. Rooster informed me that I was really going to like Australian beer.
Not only was the Pacific a really big ocean but it was also an empty ocean, at least in these parts, which made me wonder why we didn’t just stay on the surface to make better time. We didn’t encounter a single ship during the transit, and even when we arrived off the coast of Talawan there was nothing but the occasional brightly painted fishing boat. We changed our routine once we entered the eastern boundary of our designated patrol area. The boat maintained radio silence to avoid the Japs’ Pacific-wide HF radio listening networks. We stayed submerged during the day after nearly getting caught by one of those monster seaplanes the day we arrived off of Talawan. We would come up every night to recharge the battery and get navigation fixes with the boat’s radar, but we stayed away from fishing boats in case they’d been augmented with a Jap soldier and a handy-dandy field radio.
The sub’s crew was tense now that we were in enemy waters. In the meantime Rooster and I wondered if we would ever fly again. Here we were, experienced carrier dive bombers, locked up underwater in a steel tube. The only break we got was at night, when we were allowed to come up to the bridge, a small platform just in front of the periscope stack. Behind the periscope structure was an even smaller platform that housed a 20mm cannon and a steel box marked “life jackets” that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in some time. This was called the cigarette deck, where crew members could come up two or three at a time to get some fresh air if the tactical situation allowed. The rest of the crew had to be content with the rush of fresh, if warm and humid, air that was being sucked down into the interior to both feed the diesel engines and flush out a half day’s worth of oxygen-depleted air from the all-day submergence. They posted as many as four lookouts up above the bridge platform to make sure we didn’t get surprised. In a way we two were privileged characters, being allowed to go topside for a couple hours each night.
We got a scare on the third day, just after dawn. W
e’d submerged an hour earlier, as usual, but then the Sound shack reported high-speed propellers approaching. The boat went to GQ, which meant that every one of those heavy steel interior watertight hatches was dogged shut. The exec had told us to go to the officers’ wardroom when GQ was sounded, yet another reminder that the two of us were mostly in the way. We barely made it; the crew had been drilled incessantly to close all those hatches within sixty seconds of the alarm. The wardroom, unlike the carrier’s, was tiny, no more than six feet wide by nine feet long. It had a table which could accommodate only six officers at a time. Rooster, being enlisted, was uncomfortable being in what he called officers’ country, but I reminded him that they were being nice to us even if we were useless. He was visibly agitated at not knowing what was going to happen, especially now that we were back to being 200 feet under the surface. Then I remembered that ships at general quarters communicated among the various battle stations via sound-powered phones. There was one of those phones mounted under the captain’s end of the wardroom table, complete with a selector switch allowing one to dial into any of the boat’s battle circuits.
I removed the handset and then began cycling through the selector switch buttons until I heard voices. They couldn’t know that I was listening as long as I didn’t press down on the handset’s press-to-talk button. This way I could listen in to the stream of orders and acknowledgments, and tell Rooster what I was hearing. The ventilation shut down all at once and the word came over the phones to rig for silent running.
“They think it’s a Jap destroyer, transiting through the area,” I told Rooster. “He’s going fast enough that they don’t think he’s sonar-searching, which is good news for us, apparently.”
“So what’s the big deal?” Rooster asked. “Why GQ?”
“Captain thinks something big is coming into that anchorage and that this destroyer is headed out to escort him back into the bay. The skipper has ordered the boat to periscope depth once this tin can goes by.”
It became very quiet in the boat with the ventilation off. We could actually hear the propeller sounds of that destroyer hurrying by up on the surface. It was a scary sound. Rooster mouthed the words what are we doing here? at me. I just shook my head. Diving down into a Jap carrier formation through the AA bursts and with Zeros flashing by had been exciting, even scary, but in the air we could evade, jink, bob, and weave. Being down here underwater with a Jap destroyer passing overhead was much scarier because there was nothing we could do about it. The name “destroyer” originated from their mission, torpedo boat destroyers. Initially the torpedo boats they had in mind were German PT boats, but it still applied, since Hagfish was certainly a torpedo boat.
Hagfish began to tilt in the up direction. We were running on the battery-powered electric motors so there was no noise from the machinery rooms, just the creaking and crackling noises of the hull as we came up from depth. Those noises were probably comforting to the submariners, but not to us. They reminded us of where we had just been, deep in the ocean, which was no place for a couple of flyboys. Our nemesis was gravity; theirs was something called hydrostatic pressure.
The ventilation was restored once we came up to periscope depth, whatever that actually was. The good news was that we could no longer hear that destroyer. It had to be midmorning, but would we surface? No, hell, no—it was daylight. I longed for a cigarette and some fresh air, as incongruous as that sounds, but I knew we wouldn’t expose ourselves in broad daylight. Sure enough, the boat tilted down as we again sought safety in the depths of the ocean. There was a depth gauge in the wardroom, positioned where the captain could see it. Past 100 feet the hull began to acknowledge the pressure outside, as if glad to be back in its proper element.
They finally secured from GQ and now we were condemned to yet another day of sitting around trying to stay small. I hung around the control room, talking to the officers and enlisted men who cycled through the nerve center of the boat. They were interested in hearing about Midway and Guadalcanal, since all they knew about those battles was what the fleet broadcast news service told them, and those contained enough propaganda to make even the crew wonder if any of it was true.
We surfaced that night well after sunset. It was, as usual, a great relief to have fresh air streaming down through the conning tower hatch into the boat. This was the time the cooks could prepare meals for the entire crew without filling the submarine with heavy-duty cooking smells. People could smoke as much as they wanted to. Rooster had become a popular figure down on the crew’s mess decks as he related stories of carrier warfare and his own adventures at Midway and other carrier battles. I found that the boat’s officers, on the other hand, staunchly believed that they, the submarine force, had been doing more damage to the Japanese navy than anyone else. As I learned of their exploits it occurred to me that their determination to be the Silent Service had probably denied them the credit they deserved.
There was one other aspect to submarine service that was unique to them: if an aviator got shot down and seemed to have survived the crash, other aviators would probably see it happen, so there was at least a chance that a PBY or a friendly destroyer would come looking for you. If a submarine was mortally damaged and went down, that was that. Nobody would be looking for you. The boat simply became “overdue and presumed lost.” I could see where that stark fact could create a certain fatalism in their beloved Silent Service. I didn’t share any of those thoughts with Rooster, who was already antsy enough being in a sub.
I was about to request permission to go topside to the cigarette deck when there was a sudden commotion in the control room. The last half-hourly radar sweep had shown two contacts to the east of us, about 12 miles away. The captain was being extremely cautious with his radar, believing that the Japs, whose ships didn’t appear to have radar, did have the ability to detect a radar signal. That meant that the radar operators would take a single sweep once every thirty minutes but no more than that. The two contacts put an end to our fresh-air extravaganza. Once again we stood back out of the way as the boat submerged and began to make preparations for a torpedo attack. The exec pointed Rooster and me towards the wardroom and then Control sounded the GQ alarm for battle stations, torpedo.
There was some more of what my Marine buddies on Guadalcanal had called hurry-up-and-wait while the fire control team up in the conning tower developed a torpedo-firing solution on the approaching contacts. The exec had shown us how they computed a solution for the torpedoes. I’d been surprised at how close they had to get to ensure a good hit. If their target happened to do a zigzag turn away at the last moment the whole firing solution would be compromised and the target might get clean away.
I eavesdropped again and learned that the target appeared to be a Jap cruiser of the Nachi class. Ten minutes later we felt the mushy thumps from the forward torpedo tubes as the boat fired three torpedoes. Finally we heard two distant explosions, and then the boat tilted down and began a light banking turn away from the scene of whatever they’d done. It wasn’t long before we heard the swishing sound of approaching propellers and then, more ominously, the high-frequency pinging noises of a destroyer sonar. Just like someone who’s never seen a rattlesnake recognizes the sound of one immediately, both Rooster and I knew what was probably coming next, but it was a whole lot more violent than we’d expected.
We both found ourselves rolling around on the wardroom deck with the chairs after the first ashcan went off. The explosion had knocked the boat sideways and created a wet mist of fine particles, dust, and bits of insulation raining out of the overhead. My ears were ringing and Rooster had that same stunned look he’d had up on the lifeboat deck on Hornet. The second one was not as bad, but the third went off below us and I thought I felt the whole boat try to bend in half. A fourth blast sounded like it was off to one side, which is when I realized the boat was in a hard turn and headed in the down direction. On purpose, I hoped.
I got up and pulled the wardroom curtain aside only to get
hit in the face with a sharp spray of seawater strong enough to sting my skin. A pipe union had cracked. At depth, what would have been a weep on the surface became a water-drill. The lights flickered out and then the battle lanterns came on, illuminating a dust-filled passageway with a morbid yellow light. I was getting pretty tired of seeing battle lanterns. I pulled myself back into the wardroom when I realized the down angle was increasing. There was a lot of shouting out in the passageway, but it sounded like disciplined shouting, officers giving orders and subordinates reporting what they were seeing or doing. Another series of depth charges started going off but nowhere near as close as the first four. Even so, I winced every time one of them boomed into the sea. The hull was creaking and groaning in earnest, which didn’t do much for our confidence. Finally we felt the deck starting to level off.
I saw Rooster huddled up in one corner of the wardroom, his eyes white with fear. “We got away, Rooster,” I said. “They’re bombing where they think we are, but the skipper turned, went deep, and we got away.”
I wasn’t sure he heard me but then he wet his lips and nodded. I made a mental note to not let Rooster back up onto the cigarette deck tonight because I thought he might be ready to just jump off. A third series of depth charges boomed nearby but these were even farther away. I began to relax. God, I thought. How do these guys stand this shit?
Then there came a different booming sound, followed by several smaller explosions. This symphony of destruction lasted for over a minute before subsiding into a hideous cacophony of rupturing steel beams, imploding compartments, and great gushes of steam escaping underwater. Some of the sounds were almost human: deep groans, the shriek of metal structures being torn apart, and then a frighteningly familiar rumble of air being forced out of a sinking ship. This had to be the cruiser. It was horrible. I kept thinking I could hear men screaming but I knew that wasn’t possible.
The Nugget Page 13