by Herman Wouk
This lack bothered Tudsbury. He quizzed the governor. “Watery subsoil, dear fellow,” said the governor. Tudsbury pointed out that at the naval base he had seen giant concrete bunkers deep in the earth endlessly stacked with cannon shells, food, and fuel. What about the watery subsoil? The governor smiled at his sharpness. Yes, those caverns had been sunk in the swampy ground at great cost, for the security of the Empire. But in the city such a drastic measure, quite aside from the expense, would alarm the Asiatic populace. Adequate instructions existed for taking shelter in cellars and stone buildings. If required, an elaborate evacuation plan was ready. Tudsbury reluctantly accepted all this. He was the lion of the Tanglin Club, Singapore’s reassuring radio voice to the world.
But he had trouble filling his broadcast time. In the first army communiqués the Jap invasion vessels were reported retiring, leaving a few troops behind on surrounded beachheads, and these stranded invaders were being wiped out according to plan. Since then the information had been getting sparser. The place names had been sliding strangely southward. One day the communiqué in its entirety read, “Nothing new to report.” A theory began circulating at the white men’s clubs. Like the Russians fighting Hitler, the military command was cleverly trading space for time, wearing the Japs out in the equatorial jungle, which was as hard on troops as the Russian winter.
Then there was the “monsoon” theory. Army experts had long held that after October, Singapore could rest easy for half a year, since the enemy could not land during the northeast monsoon. But the Japs had in fact landed. The experts now were explaining that any rash military plan could be tried, but the Japanese invasion, fatally weakened by losses in monsoon surf, was bound to peter out in the jungle. Though Tudsbury broadcast these theories, the absence of hard news gnawed at him. The way he had been welcomed, and the impact of his first broadcast, had pushed upon him the role of optimist, but he felt he was getting out on a limb.
Then came the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Here was hard news! Disaster at the outset, with a strong odor of blundering; sickening, yet familiar in British war-making. Two correspondents returned alive from the Repulse, shaken and ill, with historic scoops. Tudsbury had to compete. He burst in on his high military friends, demanded the truth, and got it. The brave little admiral had steamed north, intending to surprise the invasion force, smash it up fast, and escape from the Jap land-based bombers. He had had no air cover. The nearest British carrier was in India. The local RAF command had lacked the planes or had missed the signals; that part was vague. Japanese torpedo planes and dive bombers had roared in and sunk both capital ships. The admiral had drowned. The Empire lay open now to a Japanese navy that included ten battleships and six major aircraft carriers, with only a much-weakened American navy at its back to worry about.
Tudsbury rushed to the Raffles and dictated this hot story to Pamela, centering it on one theme: air power. His broadcast was half an editorial. England had just bought with blood the knowledge that warships could not stand up against land-based air. He pleaded: turn the lesson against the enemy! The Royal Air Force was the world’s greatest air arm. Quick massive air reinforcements of Malaya could cut off and doom the Jap invaders. Here was an opportunity worth any sacrifice on other fronts; a turnabout that would redeem the disaster and preserve the Empire.
He sent the draft to the censor’s office by runner. Three hours before broadcast time, the censor telephoned him; the broadcast was fine, except that he could not say the ships had lacked air cover. Not accustomed to such interference, Alistair Tudsbury sped to the censor’s office in a taxi, sweating and muttering. The censor, a frail blond man with a pursed little smile, shook with terror at Tudsbury’s roars, staring at him with round moist little eyes. His military adviser was a navy captain, plump, white-haired, pink-skinned, clad in faultless tropic whites, who gave no reason for his ruling except a reiterated, “Frightfully sorry, old chap, but we can’t have it.”
After long arguing Tudsbury thrust quivering grape-colored jowls right in his face, bellowing, “All right, before I go directly to Air Chief Marshal Brooke-Popham, WHY can’t you have it?”
“It’s vital military information. We must deny it to the enemy.”
“The enemy? Why, who do you suppose sank those ships? My broadcast can bring Singapore such a cloud of fighter planes that nothing like that will happen again!”
“Yes, sir, that part is splendidly written, I grant you.”
“But unless I say there was no air cover, the story is pointless! Can’t you see that? Incomprehensible! Idiotic!”
“Frightfully sorry, sir, but we can’t have it.”
Tudsbury catapulted out to the nearest telephone. The air chief marshal was unavailable. The governor was out inspecting defenses. The time before his broadcast shrank. Arriving at the broadcasting studios in a rage, he proposed to Jeff McMahon that he go on the air, read his uncut script, and take the consequences.
“Good Lord, we’re at war, Tudsbury!” McMahon protested. “Do you want us all to go to prison? We’ll have to switch you off.”
The fat old correspondent was running out of indignation and energy. “I broadcast for four years from Berlin, McMahon,” he grated. “Goebbels himself never dared to tamper with my scripts like this. Not once! The British administration of Singapore does dare. How is that?”
“My dear fellow, the Germans only talk about being the master race,” Elsa McMahon’s husband said drily. “You’re on in ten minutes.”
7
IN a heavy sea, in the early darkness of the morning watch, the U.S.S. Devilfish pounded along the west coast of Luzon toward Lingayen Gulf. Byron stood wedged by the gyroscope repeater on the tiny bridge in sticky foul weather clothes, and with every plunge of the forecastle, warm black spray struck his face. The lookouts were silent shadows. They wouldn’t doze tonight, Byron thought. Except for this sense of heading toward trouble, and for running darkened, Byron’s first OOD watch under way in wartime was like any other night watch: uneventful peering into the gloom on a windy wet rolling bridge, through long empty hours.
About the trouble ahead, he knew more than the crewmen. This was less a patrol than a suicide mission; Aster had showed him on the Lingayen Gulf chart the shallow depth figures, and the reefs that nearly blocked the mouth of the gulf. The clear entrance to the east would be crawling with Jap antisubmarine vessels. If an American sub did by some fluke slip past them to torpedo a troop transport, thereby alerting the whole invasion force — well, as Aster put it, from then on life aboard might be disagreeable and short.
Byron accepted all this. Yet Prien’s penetration of Scapa Flow to sink the Royal Oak had been as dangerous a venture. The U-boat captain had brought it off, and come home safe to a hero’s welcome and a medal from Hitler’s hands. Advancing through the dark in a lone submarine, toward a huge enemy force that commanded the air and sea, filled Byron with high-strung zest; possibly a stupid feeling, he knew, but a real one. The exec obviously felt the same way. Carter Aster was smoking a long brown Havana tonight. That meant his spirits were high; otherwise he consumed vile gray Philippine ropes. As for Captain Hoban, he was almost fizzing with combat verve.
Byron’s resentment of his commanding officer was gone. The captain had ridden him hard, but that contest of wills now seemed his own fault; his persistence in sloth had been childish. Branch Hoban was a superb ship-handler. He had proved it again, threading out through the tricky new mine fields laid in Manila Bay to block Jap I-boats. He was a skilled submarine engineer, ready and quick to get his hands dirty on a diesel engine, or to sting them with battery acid. His failings were only those of any Academy eager beaver; anxiety to make a record, tough punctiliousness about paperwork, a tendency to grease four-stripers and admirals. So what? He had won E’s in engineering and torpedo shooting. Those were the things that mattered in combat. Heading toward the enemy, Hoban was a reassuring boss man.
When the east showed a faint graying, the captain came
up on the bridge for a look at the lowering sky. “Lady wants to submerge at 0600. Why the devil should we, with this visibility? We’re a long way from Lingayen. I’m not crawling there at three knots, and let the Salmon and the Porpoise beat me to the attack. Put on four extra lookouts. Conduct continuous quadrant searches of the sky, and go to full speed.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The day brightened. The Devilfish nauseatingly corkscrewed and jarred through gray wind-streaked swells at twenty knots. Hoban drank mug after mug of coffee, and smoked cigarette after cigarette in a cupped hand, ignoring the spray that drenched him. Coming off” watch, Byron found Aster bent over the navigator’s chart in the conning tower, gloomily chewing a dead cigar. To Byron’s “Good morning,” he barely grunted a response.
“What’s the matter, Lady?”
With a side glance at the helmsman, Aster growled, “How do we know the Jap planes don’t have radar? They’re full of surprises, those yellow monkeys. And what about Jap subs? In daylight we’re a sitting tin duck. I want to get to Lingayen fast, too. But I want to get there.”
Over Aster’s shoulder, Byron glanced at the chart. The peninsula projected northwestward of Luzon’s land mass like the thumb of a yellow mitten; the U-shaped blue space between thumb and hand was Lingayen Gulf. The course line showed the submarine halfway up the thumb. Beyond the tip, the projected course was a turn east along the reefs and shoals, then a turn south, back down the whole length of the thumb to the assumed landing beach, the point nearest Manila.
“Say, Lady, did you ever hear of Gunther Prien?”
“Sure. The kraut that sank the Royal Oak at Scapa Flow. What about him?”
“He gave a lecture in Berlin. I was there.” Byron ran a finger along the line of reefs. “He penetrated Scapa Flow through stuff like this. Found a hole and slipped through on the surface.”
Aster turned his long-jawed face to Byron, forehead knotted, mouth corners curled in his strange cold smile. “Why, Briny Henry, you getting eager to polish medals? You?”
“Well, we’d get there faster if we cut through the reefs, wouldn’t we? And we’d duck the destroyers up at the entrance.”
Aster’s satiric look faded. He reached for the coastal pilot book.
A-OOGHA! A-OOGHA! A-OOGHA!
“Dive, dive, dive.” Branch Hoban’s voice, urgent but calm, boomed through the boat. The deck pitched forward. Lookouts dropped trampling through the dripping hatch, followed by the OOD, the captain, and last the quartermaster, slamming the hatch and dogging it shut. Byron heard the old hiss and sigh, as though the boat were a live monster taking a deep breath, and felt in his ears the sudden airtightness, before the chief below called, “Pressure in the boat!” The Devilfish slowed, plowing sluggishly downward with loud gurglings and sloshings.
Hoban wiped his streaming face. “Whitey Pringle spotted a low-flying plane. Or maybe it was a seagull. Pringle has good eyes. I didn’t argue. The sun’s starting to break through, anyhow, Lady. Level off at three hundred.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Aster said.
Byron slithered down to the control room, and walked forward on the downslanted deck. The Christmas tree of small lights on the port bulkhead, flashing the condition of every opening in the hull, showed solid green. The planesmen at their big wheels had calm eyes fixed on the depth gauges; no trace of combat anxiety here.
“Blow negative to the mark!”
The routine procedure scarcely registered on Byron. In the forward torpedo room he found Chief Hansen and his crewmen affixing warheads to two torpedoes newly loaded aboard. Byron’s eyes smarted; he had had no sleep since the departure from Manila, but he wanted to confirm torpedo readiness for himself. Hansen reported all six bow tubes loaded; all fish checked out in working order; the new secret exploders ready for insertion in the warheads. Racked along the bulkheads were yellow dummy warheads, which in peacetime had been filled with water for practice shots; compressed air would empty them, and the torpedoes would float for recovery. Unpainted iron warheads full of TNT now tipped the torpedoes; impossible to detonate without exploders, yet Byron had seen the crew handle these gray warheads with gingerly respect for the havoc and murder in them.
As Byron drank coffee with the torpedomen, crouched on a bunk slung over a torpedo, Lieutenant Aster appeared. “By the Christ, Briny, he’s going to try it.”
“Try what?”
“Why, that notion of yours. He’s been studying the chart and the sailing directions. We’re going to surface and look for a break in the reefs. He wants to talk to you about that U-boat skipper’s lecture.”
In a sparkling noonday, the black snout of the submarine broke the surface. Byron stepped unsteadily out into brilliant hot sunshine on the pitching slippery forecastle, still aslosh with foaming seawater. Lookouts and leadsmen in bulky life jackets stumbled and slipped after him. He could not help a swift glance up at the cloudless blue sky. After the stale air below, the fresh wind was delicious as always, and the pleasure was sharper today because of the danger. Dead ahead, where the dark ocean merged into green shallows, foaming breakers roared against tiny palm islands and jagged brown rocks. White gulls came cawing and screeching over the submarine.
“All ahead one-third! Heave your leads!” Hoban’s shout from the bridge was muffled by the heavy wash on the hull and the grinding sound of the breakers. Coral heads were showing, far down in the deep — pink spires, rounded gray domes. The Devilfish was heading for a notch between two rocky little islands.
“Mark! Four fathoms, starboard!”
Byron perceived yellow coral sand slanting up, full of immense waving sea fans. Blown dry of ballast, the Devilfish was drawing about thirteen feet.
“Mark! Three fathoms, port!”
Eighteen feet. Five clear feet under the keel. With each swell the boat was rising and falling, staggering Byron’s party and drenching them with spray. The smaller island was drifting so close that he could count the coconuts on the trees. On the bridge, at the bullnose, and on the fantail, lookouts were combing the sky with binoculars. But in this sunlit waste of air, water, palms, and rocks, the only sign of man was the grotesque black vessel risen from the deep.
“All engines stop!”
From the bridge, Aster yelled through cupped hands, “Fathometer’s showing fifteen feet, Briny! What do you see?”
Slipping about, wet to the skin, Byron flailed both arms forward. “Okay! Keep coming!” he bawled, for the water shaded toward blue again beyond the notch. On either side of the submarine, ugly breakers were smashing and creaming on pitted brown rocks. The propellers thrashed; a heavy swell lifted and dropped the vessel. With a crunching clang, clang! the Devilfish shuddered and jolted forward. Byron caught a fragrant whiff of palm fronds as the islands slid by, near enough to hit with a thrown hat.
“Four fathoms, port!”
“Four fathoms, starboard!
Coral heads drifted below the hull like anchored mines, deeper and deeper. The bow was heading into blue water now. Over the crash and slosh of the breakers came the captain’s exultant bellow. “Secure leadsmen and lookouts! Prepare to dive!”
Byron stood in his cabin naked amid sodden clothes piled on the deck, drying himself with a rough grimy towel. Grinning from ear to ear, Aster looked in, green eyes brilliant as emeralds. “How about this? Well done.”
“You found the hole,” Byron said.
“Lucked into it. That chart is goddamn vague. Glad the patrol plane pilots were having their noon sukiyaki, or whatever.”
“What happened there? Did we ground?”
“Starboard screw struck a coral head. The shaft’s not sprung. The captain’s pleased as hell, Briny. Get some rest.”
Yawning and yawning, Byron slipped into the mildewy hot bunk. The Devilfish had sneaked itself into a tight predicament, he thought, with no easy way out. However, that was the captain’s problem. He turned off his mind like a light — Byron could do that, and it contributed much to his health, though i
t had often infuriated his father and his naval superiors — and fell asleep.
A shake and a husky whisper woke him. He smelled the tobacco-chewer’s breath of Derringer, the chief of the boat. “Battle stations, Mr. Henry.”
“Huh? What?” Byron slid aside the curtain, and confronted the jowly smelly face in the dim light from the passageway. “Battle stations?”
“Screw noises.”
“Oh ho.”
Now through the thin hull Byron heard the underwater commotion, and a high faint shuddery ping — a very familiar sound from exercises at sea and from the attack teacher. This echo-ranging was different: shriller, more vibrating, with a peculiar timbre.
The enemy.
They were running silent, he realized. The ventilators were off. The air was stifling. Chief Derringer’s heavy face was tightly lined with worry and excitement. Byron impulsively put out his hand. The chief grasped it with a horny paw, and left. Byron’s watch showed he had been asleep for an hour.
At general quarters he was the diving officer. Hurrying to his battle station, he was reassured by the cool working demeanor of every man in the control room — the bow and stern planesmen at their big wheels watching the depth gauges, Derringer and his plotting team huddled around the dead reckoning tracer, Whitey Pringle on the trim manifold, just as in peacetime exercises off Pearl Harbor. They had been through this a thousand times. Here was the payoff, Byron thought, of Hoban’s stiff monotonous drill schedule. Aster, smoking a long rich Havana, stood with the chief of the boat, watching the plot take form. The echo-ranging was getting louder; so was the confused noise of propellers. Ensign Quayne was at the diving officer’s post. Of all the men in the control room, only he had the wide-open eyes and shaky lips of fear. Quayne wasn’t yet part of the team; he had just survived a sinking; he was not long out of sub school. With these forgiving thoughts, Byron relieved him.