The boat’s propellers thrummed suddenly as we bolted from the area. I had no idea of how deep we were and was afraid to look at the depth gauge. It felt as if the skipper had ordered full power, something I’d not seen during any of our long daytime submergences, because it meant the battery would be depleting rapidly. After a few minutes we felt a small up-angle. Soon the hull’s complaints began to diminish. I looked over at Rooster, whose face was regaining some composure as those crushing noises diminished. I felt so useless that I began to pick up the pieces of broken crockery and right the chairs. Then the ventilation came back on, which was a wonderful relief. It wasn’t fresh air but it was chilled air that drove away the stink of seawater which had come in from all the broken gauges or other piping leaks in the boat. The propellers finally slowed after about twenty minutes and the boat began to tilt upwards again. I thought I heard more distant underwater explosions but I couldn’t be sure.
It was an hour before we came back up to periscope depth. Apparently the boat’s radar revealed only one small contact, 15 miles to the west of us and headed in the away direction. The men in the control room were celebrating, much like we had done after the first day at Midway. I overheard the captain telling the exec that the Japs would be out in force at daylight so we needed to run at full speed to clear the area while recharging the dangerously depleted batteries. The navigator pointed out that there was a deep-channel strait between Talawan Island and an even smaller island to the south. We could run on the surface tonight, cut through that channel, and take up a patrol area on the other side of the island, which had the advantage of being even closer to where the Japanese anchorage was. The captain wondered aloud whether that channel could be mined. The navigator said that the water depths in the strait ranged between 400 and 1,000 feet deep, which argued against there being mines. Navy Intel claimed that 200 feet was the Japs’ depth limit for placing moored mines, so the skipper agreed. We would make the passage from our current position about an hour and a half before first light and then submerge.
Rooster and I found out later that the target had indeed been a Jap cruiser. Since the skipper never saw it actually go down he couldn’t claim more than damage, but everybody was convinced that she’d sunk, especially after hearing those horrific noises. He said that our torpedoes were almost puny compared to the Japs’ fish but they still packed a punch—when they worked. I didn’t pursue that comment. I couldn’t imagine taking all those risks to get set up for a torpedo attack and then wonder if the damned thing was going to work. Rooster reminded me that not many of our torpedo bombers’ fish worked, either, like at Midway. That’s because they all got shot down before they could get their fish away, I replied. The slaughter of Torpedo Six was still very fresh in my mind, especially after we’d found out that Admiral Halsey had vetoed any more torpedo bomber attacks against carriers. Trouble was, Halsey hadn’t been there on the big day and Admiral Spruance felt he had to throw everything he had against a force of four fleet carriers.
The cooks took advantage of the open hatch to make hamburgers and deep-fried potatoes, so everybody ate too much. Those who could hit their racks. I slept for maybe four hours but then something woke me up. I think it was the sound of voices from the control room as they began the task of navigating through the strait by radar. In peacetime there would have been channel buoys or a lighthouse or two, but the Japs had doused every navigation aid in their blood-soaked Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The strait was only about ten miles long and four to five miles wide, so this transit shouldn’t take long, although the skipper slowed the boat down to 10 knots as we entered. He took station on the bridge, along with the torpedo officer, who was standing officer of the deck, and four lookouts. I asked the exec, who was down in the control room, if Rooster and I could go topside and watch from the cigarette deck. He hesitated.
“If we get jumped by a Jap gunboat, we might have to crash dive,” he said. “The fewer people on the bridge, the quicker we can do that.”
“Please, XO,” Rooster said. “I’m…”
He didn’t finish, but the look on Rooster’s face told the exec that this aviator was desperate to get topside, if only for a half hour.
“Okay,” he relented. “Cigarette deck. No smoking, though—the Japs are always watching and a ciggy-butt can be seen literally for miles at sea on a clear night. Any shit starts, the two of you drop, and I mean drop, down that conning tower hatch, because the captain, the lookouts, and the entire Pacific Ocean will be right behind you, got it?”
With a chorus of yessirs we gratefully climbed the ladder up into the conning tower, ignoring the mildly surprised stares of the navigation team, and then one more ladder up to the bridge itself. That hatch was held open with a small hank of rope which the last man down was supposed to yank to seal the boat in the event of a crash dive. The current of fresh air coming down through the hatch made our eyes water. To our surprise, there was a full moon, which was probably why the skipper had slowed the boat down to minimize our wake. He was busy talking to the navigation team so Rooster and I crawled as quietly as we could around the periscope stacks and down onto the cigarette deck. Just being on the cigarette deck made me want a smoke but I wasn’t about to do anything that might jeopardize our privileged position. The platform had a grating for a deck, so we could actually see our wake bubbling pleasantly alongside.
The shoreline on either side was invisible, even in the moonlight. I wondered if the Japs posted sentries on the shore itself, because our diesels seemed really loud out here on the calm waters of the strait. The radar antenna squeaked into motion every ten minutes for a couple of revolutions. I knew about radar from carrier operations, but it had never occurred to me that a submarine might have one. The antenna on the carrier had been the size of a baseball backstop. Hagfish’s radar antenna was a small, curved piece of metal only about three feet long.
The diesels suddenly shut down and the boat began to slow. I wondered if Rooster and I should start making our move toward the main hatch but none of the other shadowy figures up on the bridge were moving. After a few minutes we could see that the boat was still moving, so we must have been using the electric motors now. The wake astern had almost disappeared. The captain and his OOD were staring intently through binoculars at something in the dark on the port bow. Had that last radar sweep detected a surface contact?
Suddenly I experienced what felt like a sinking sensation and then I noticed that the black water sliding by on either side of the boat was washing across her main deck instead of below it. Rooster’s eyes got wide as he saw it, too, and yet there’d been no Klaxon alarm for a dive. One of the lookouts perched up on top of the sail said something into his sound-powered phones, and both the officers down on the bridge swung their binocs to the right a little. The boat seemed to settle even deeper down into the sea but then it came back up. It was as if she was skimming the surface through some balancing operation between being surfaced and submerged. Rooster quietly un-dogged that metal locker marked “life jackets” and fished out two bulky kapok life jackets. He dogged the lid back down and handed me one of them. He put his on, but I kept mine off, thinking that I’d never fit down that hatch with one of those on if they did call for an emergency dive. Besides, the jackets reeked of mold and dry rot. Rooster didn’t seem to notice.
We slowed even more to maybe just a few knots of forward movement. There came a sudden rush of bubbles all along the hull and we could feel the boat rising back up to a normal surfaced level. Then we began a slow, very slow turn towards whatever it was out there the lookouts had locked on to. That made sense: put the boat’s silhouette bow-on and there’d be a lot less to see of her if there was a gunboat or a destroyer out there, searching for us. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be up here or down in the confines of the boat, safely behind that thick, steel hull if a gunfight erupted. I wondered why we didn’t just submerge but then realized that submerging would mean spending a whole lot more time in the confines o
f the strait, possibly with unfriendly company. There was just so much I didn’t know about submarines. I saw one of the lookouts above looking at his watch as we drifted silently, barely maintaining steerageway, and then remembered we had to be out of the strait and safely submerged before the sun came up.
And then the sun did come up. Right under the boat.
FIFTEEN
I have never felt such pain in all my life. It was as if God himself had swung a sledgehammer against the grating under my feet, sending a white-hot lightning bolt up both my legs, thighs, and straight into my spine. My body bent completely in half the way someone who’s been groin-kicked does. I was unable to breathe, scream, or even grunt. Coincident with the blast the entire submarine rose up at least ten feet, causing me to crash down on that steel grating with enough force to imprint the metal grid on my forehead. The only things that saved me were that I had been holding that lump of a life jacket against my chest and the fact that the grating deck had bent down almost thirty degrees. Stunned, I was only able to just lie there and try to get a breath into my bruised lungs.
A sleek, black column of water rose on either side of the boat like the jaws of a vise. I saw Rooster go flying right overboard. The only reason I didn’t go too was that my head was stuck under one of the steel railings. Then I was literally buried in tons of falling seawater as the column collapsed. I hurt so bad that I wanted to just die and get it over with. Then something wet and heavy hit the back of my legs and immediately rolled off, probably one of the lookouts. As that thundering cataract subsided on either side of the cigarette deck I opened my eyes long enough to see another one of the lookouts, his head lolling on his shoulders at an impossible angle, slide between the railings and into the maelstrom below.
But not that far below, I realized. The boat was going down like a stone. A roar that sounded like a ship’s boiler lifting safeties was coming from the conning tower hatch as the flooding down below drove every bit of air out of the boat. She didn’t tilt one way or the other. She just went down, straight down, and when that howling column of air changed over to a column of debris-laden water shooting 50 feet into the air, I knew I had to get away from her. I screamed soundlessly at my body to move but nothing worked, and then a heavy swirl of warm seawater tumbled onto the cigarette deck and swept me off the boat like a piece of trash.
I went under, knowing this time that this was it, I was going to be sucked down with the sinking submarine. Once again, the life jacket saved me. For some reason I hadn’t ever let go of the cluster of strings with which you tied the thing onto your body, and I felt my left arm tugging the rest of me back to the surface. Right into a large whirlpool, where I began to go round and round, sinking deeper towards that central cone. The moon was still out so I could see other faces on the other side of the whirlpool, some obviously dead, and a couple struggling to breathe and escape the pool.
Then it was over and there was only silence. I felt myself sinking and thrust the life jacket between my legs, which promptly dunked my face underwater. I tried again, hugging it this time, and that was better, much better. Everything hurt. My joints felt like hot and painful jelly and I was bleeding from my nose and the forehead print job. I closed my eyes and tried to just hang on to my new best friend, that grayish life jacket with the words “Deck Division” stenciled on it. I found myself mouthing the words Deck Division softly as the letters went in and out of focus right in front of my face. I thought to myself: Live or die? That’s easy, said my badly rattled brain. Relax. Sleep a little. You’ll feel a whole lot better in the morning. Just let go of this stinking life jacket and this will all be over. Then Rooster bumped into me and I yelled with pain.
“Boss,” he said. “Boss! It’s me, Rooster. Stop fighting me.”
Fighting? I wasn’t fighting anybody. I couldn’t fight anybody. I was Rubber Man, desperate to be gone from this horror. Then Rooster pulled the life jacket out of my death grip and put it on the way it was supposed to go, and now I didn’t have to struggle to keep my face out of the water. I began to calm down until a huge bubble of air filled with bright shiny diesel oil burst about 20 feet from us, filling the night air with the oily stink of a dead ship, especially when some bodies started coming up. Lifeless, boneless apparitions from Davy Jones’ locker flopped around in the confused sea, many with their innards projecting from their mouths. We both looked on in horror as we recognized some of the faces that were popping up around us—the exec, Hospitalman Morris. All dead. All drowned. Their expressions seemed to accuse us of the crime of still being alive. I began to weep. Rooster slapped the shit out of me.
“C’mon, Boss,” he said. “We gotta get ashore before the sharks come.”
Sharks, I thought. Good God. Then something bumped into me from behind.
Shark! I screamed, but it was the body of the captain. His facial expression was one of great sadness, as if in his final moment he’d realized what had just happened. The intel had been wrong about that 200-foot depth limit. The Japs had mined the strait.
Rooster pushed the body away and I bristled momentarily at the lack of respect.
“Boss!” he said, almost shouting. “It’s gonna be daylight soon. We gotta get to the beach. We gotta get out of sight. Japs’ll be out in the morning, looking to see what the hell happened.”
“Okay, Rooster,” I replied, suddenly filled with a sense of calm logic. I looked around. The moon was headed down by now. “But which way?”
Good question, his expression said. Neither of us had any idea of which way to go to get out of the strait and onto a shore. Any shore. We’d been heading generally west to get around to Talawan’s west coast, but then we’d turned to point our skinny nose at that gunboat, if that’s what it had been out there.
“Boss, look,” Rooster said. He was pointing over my shoulder. I couldn’t turn around. Just tell me, I mumbled. But finally I wrenched myself around and looked while trying not to throw up with the pain of moving. There was a light in the distance. Reddish, not white. Flickering. A torch, maybe? Had someone come down to the beach to see what all that noise had been about? A Jap coastal sentry, already gabbling away on his radio?
“Okay,” I sighed. “Better than nothing. Let’s go.”
Easier said than done. I’d never tried swimming with a kapok life jacket on; as pilots we’d only been trained on the inflatable variety. The best I could manage was a clumsy dog paddle. Rooster kept one hand on my life jacket but I was obviously holding him back with my rubbery efforts. Then we heard a voice.
“Hey,” someone called in the darkness. “Help.”
We stopped our feeble efforts to swim and looked around. A white face emerged, swimming awkwardly. It was Lieutenant (JG) Teller, the boat’s torpedo officer. He closed in on us and grabbed onto my life jacket to catch his breath. “I think both my legs are broken,” he announced and then passed out. As he began to sink I grabbed his shirt front and just managed to hold his head above water. Then we heard splashing noises nearby and yet another face emerged. A very young face. One of the lookouts? He latched onto Rooster’s life jacket, tried to say something, but then just started crying.
We just floated for the next five minutes, pretty much unable to do anything. The youngster finally stopped his sobbing and tried to get control of himself. I wanted to offer some words of encouragement but my mind was a blank. Lieutenant Teller came to finally and then took in a huge breath as the pain from his legs made itself fully known. I was hurting, but not like that. His face was gray. I realized he was in shock.
“Boss,” Rooster said softly. “We still gotta get ashore.”
He pointed with his chin to our right. I looked over and now I could actually make out a darker mass on our local horizon. Then it hit me: if I could see that, daylight wouldn’t be long in coming. Rooster was right. In an hour even a sleepy Jap sentry on the beach would be able to see us. A second thing hit me. We were much closer than we had been to that torchlight. The current must be pushing us asho
re, which was a godsend, because our little four-man jacket-raft of broken humans didn’t have much of a powerplant available. Even so, Rooster and I began kicking in the direction of the beach. Teller couldn’t help, but the youngster could.
Then we heard the sound of a diesel engine approaching from out of the darkness. It was much smaller than Hagfish’s big mains, but it was definitely coming our way. We stopped thrashing around in the water and tried to make ourselves small. The engine slowed down and then searchlights switched on about 400 yards away, maybe even less. If it was a gunboat they’d be searching for survivors. We turned our white faces away from the lights as they swept in our direction but then, thankfully kept going. Then we could hear shouts coming from the gunboat which was still invisible and her engine went to idle.
“Go,” I whispered. “They’ve found debris. They’ll stop to pick stuff up, see what their mine killed.”
We pressed on towards that dark beach with marginally increased energy, fully aware that the more of it we could see, the more the crew of that gunboat would be able to see. An exhausting half hour later I felt my right foot hit something solid. Ahead of us was an impenetrable wall of dark jungle with maybe a five-foot-wide dark sand beach. I stood up and promptly fell over with a loud splash. Rooster stood up into a crouch and began dragging the rest of us up onto the sand, me first. The youngster crawled out of the water on all fours, lay down, and closed his eyes. Rooster and I worked together to pull Lieutenant Teller out of the water on his back, where he collapsed with a silent grimace. Rooster sat down in the sand with a thump and tried to catch his breath.
The Nugget Page 14