The Terrible Hours

by Peter Maas

  McLees and Batick were assigned, respectively, to duck down through the passageway hatches to monitor the forward and after batteries during the dive. Afterward, Naquin intended to push the Squalus at her maximum speed beneath the surface for one hour. McLees joined Batick for coffee and asked him which compartment he wanted to cover. Batick said he’d just as soon stay where he was. If Naquin ordered a second dive, they’d switch around.

  Beyond the after battery were the two engine rooms, the only compartments that weren’t separated by a watertight door, the deep throb of the four surface diesels beating steadily, fed by air through the big ducts from the open high induction valve, while wisps of brownish smoke from their exhaust vents trailed over the water outside her hull. In the second engine room, there were also the motors that turned over the sub’s propellers. When the Squalus submerged, these motors, now working in tandem with the diesels, would be hooked up instead to the twin battery groups. Besides Harold Preble, there were two additional civilians back there. One was an inspector from General Motors, which had manufactured the diesels. The other was a veteran yard electrician, on hand to make sure the circuitry continued to perform properly.

  The sub’s tail packed a lethal wallop. Along with the four torpedo tubes in her bow, she had four more in the after torpedo room—for firing TNT warheads, instead of the dummy ones she was carrying this morning, at any target that might lie astern of her.

  Sherman Shirley from North Little Rock, Arkansas, would be stationed in it for the dive. Shirley was the bridegroom-to-be for whom Lloyd Maness was to be best man. Maness hadn’t thought the kidding he’d gotten from McLees and de Medeiros on Saturday night was so funny. Maness would be taking voltmeter readings in the after battery. This was old hat for him, but he’d never been a best man before and he had asked Shirley if he was supposed to say something during the ceremony. “Hell, no,” Shirley replied on his way to his dive station aft, “You just give me the ring.” That had brought on another worry. Maness remembered a movie he’d seen where the best man couldn’t find the ring at the critical moment.

  Another man in the after torpedo room had his mind on a wife. Bobby Gibbs had met and married a Rumanian woman in Shanghai while serving with the Asiatic fleet. Reassigned to the Squalus, he had dropped her off temporarily with his parents in Lexington, South Carolina. But her English was sketchy and it had been an awkward arrangement. So she was on her way by train to Portsmouth, and Gibbs was to meet her that night. There was some scuttlebutt that the skipper might follow the morning dive with more torpedo-firing practice, and Gibbs fretted during breakfast that if they missed the right tidal conditions in the Piscataqua, the boat might wind up anchoring downstream again instead of returning to the yard.

  The youngest commissioned officer on board, Ensign Joseph Patterson, whom everyone called “Pat,” supervised operations in the after compartments. It was a plum assignment for Patterson, only three years out of Annapolis, with every prospect for a brilliant career. He had already passed his exams for junior lieutenant and daily awaited official confirmation. He was highly popular with the crew, even among some of the old-timers who had joined the Navy when he was barely out of diapers. He had close-cropped blond hair and a barrel chest, and moved with the easy grace of an athlete. He had, in fact, captained the Naval Academy’s track team and was good enough to have finished fourth against the world’s best in the 400-meter hurdles at the 1936 Berlin Olympic games.

  It had been nearly a year since he had married Captain Halford Greenlee’s daughter, Betty. And tomorrow evening, Patterson was planning to drive to Boston with her to meet his parents, who were flying in from his hometown of Oklahoma City to help them celebrate their first wedding anniversary. Patterson was disappointed when Greenlee hadn’t shown up to go on the test dive. Obviously, something must have come up. But, like his father-in-law, he shrugged it off. As he told Naquin, there’d be plenty of other opportunities.

  3

  ONCE PAST WHITE Island, the last of the Isles of Shoals, Naquin ordered a southeast heading. The sector over the continental shelf that he’d chosen for the dive averaged some 250 feet in depth.

  The sun continued to play a losing game of peekaboo with the lowering clouds. As the Squalus bucked ahead, the swells cascaded over the teak grating of her deck and streamed down the sides of her black steel outer hull. On the bridge, Naquin felt the slap of salt-water spray in his face. He wanted, in fact, to conduct an afternoon torpedo drill and he hoped the weather wouldn’t worsen. The previous day all eight dummy torpedoes had been recovered after firing and he knew that Admiral Cole especially lauded such money-saving efficiency.

  At thirteen minutes after eight o’clock, according to the sub’s log, Naquin ordered that notification of the precise spot where the dive would take place, its longitude and latitude, be dispatched back to Portsmouth. In his tiny cubicle off the control room, a radioman, Charles Powell, tapped out the message in Morse code. Somehow, either in transmission or reception, the figures got garbled. Nobody was aware that they reported a position about five miles east of where the Squalus would actually disappear into the ocean.

  On May 23, nearly every man on board had a station for the dive. Normally, this would not have been so. Once with the fleet, the crew would be divided into three watch sections—each on rotating duty for four hours. But during these test runs, practically everyone was pressed into service. Those not tasked would observe their counterparts in action or stand by to take down statistical data for the sub’s records.

  Naquin ordered the Squalus rigged for diving.

  Directly below, in the control room, his executive officer, Lieutenant William Thomas Doyle, Jr., himself a track star at Annapolis, passed the word for the crew to man their stations. A tight-lipped black Irishman, Doyle would be operationally in charge of this morning’s dive. He’d been accepted at West Point as well, but chose the Navy after hearing about the realities of life in the trenches from his father, a World War I Army major. Now the Squalus presented the final stepping-stone to a command of his own.

  The men in the forward torpedo room were already on the move. In case Naquin unexpectedly called for a firing after the dive, junior grade Lieutenant John Nichols, the gunnery and torpedo officer, had them swing a torpedo into its reload position. They were about to start on a second torpedo when Doyle’s order came through, so the twenty-eight-year-old Nichols called a halt until the Squalus completed the dive.

  Customarily, he would have been in the control room at his torpedo data computer, roughly equivalent to the range finder on a gun, but he wanted to observe the reload drills. It was one area that Naquin had expressed dissatisfaction with. He had intended to visit the after torpedo room, but there wasn’t time now. Besides, he had every confidence that Ensign Patterson could do the job.

  So Nichols made sure that the torpedo-tube doors were closed and stepped into the forward battery past Naquin’s cabin. A Filipino mess attendant, one of two on board who served meals to the commissioned and chief petty officers, was soaking some dirty dishrags in a sink. A hard-bitten chief electrician’s mate named Lawrence Gainor, who’d been on undersea duty for half of his forty years, was set to announce meter readings for the forward battery group. A seaman stood by to record them. Gerry McLees, meanwhile, was half through the hatch to the space below where he could directly monitor the batteries. Then in the control room Nichols informed Doyle that the two forward compartments were rigged for diving.

  After his 1930 graduation from the Naval Academy, Nichols had been assigned to the battleship Maryland before volunteering for submarine service. “There’s a downside to what you’re doing, you know,” a brother officer on the Maryland told him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, if a sub sinks, you can’t exactly swim away from her.”

  IN THE AFTER battery, only two of the crew had no assignment for the dive.

  One was a cook, Bobby Thompson, from Nashville, Tennessee. Thompson had been up fo
r hours preparing breakfast. Having finished his chores at a quarter to eight, he announced that he intended to sleep through the dive and took to his bunk.

  The other was a pharmacist’s mate first class, Ray O’Hara, the newest member of the crew, who had arrived over the weekend. After breakfast, O’Hara went to his medicine cabinet at the rear of the compartment. A twenty-one-year-old seaman named Rob Washburn was complaining about a cold. The Squalus was O’Hara’s first sub and he was being extra solicitous. He took Washburn’s temperature, saw that it was only slightly elevated and reached into the cabinet for some aspirin.

  Unlike McLees, when the tattooed John Batick descended below to keep an eye on the second half of the battery group, he shut the passageway hatch over him because of all the traffic in the forty-foot-long compartment with its stacked bunks on each side.

  Near the watertight door that separated the after battery from the control room, Lloyd Maness got ready to take the same sort of meter readings as Chief Gainor in the forward battery. In the event of an emergency, it was his responsibility to jump into the control room and close and lock the door behind him.

  At one of the mess tables, a seaman first class, Bill Boulton, was shedding his foul-weather gear. Boulton had just left the drenched main deck where he had taken down the flag, made sure there were no loose lines and bolted the main-deck locker. He could relax now until it was time to surface again.

  In the galley, the relief cook on the Squalus, Will Isaacs, aided by two seamen, was busy preparing the noon meal. Because of the limited space, he had to cook and serve in shifts. He would handle the first batch of hungry sailors not long after the Squalus surfaced.

  Manila-born Basilio Galvan, the second of the two mess attendants who tended to the officers and chiefs, came back from the forward battery to ask what was on the menu. “Spaghetti and meatballs,” Isaacs said. But with the dive about to begin he switched off his electric oven. Isaacs had a big pan of the meatballs bubbling inside, and some of the juice might spill when the Squalus started to go down. He was afraid it would cause a short circuit.

  As Galvan hurried forward, he stepped over the hatch cover that enclosed Batick. And as he went by the initial tier of bunks, he noticed the breakfast cook stretched out in one of them. As good as his word, despite all the commotion, Thompson was snoozing peacefully.

  He also slipped past a veteran electrician’s mate, Jud Bland, who was donning his headset and mouthpiece. Bland’s task was to man the after battery’s battle phone during the dive. Each compartment had a talker like him on station to communicate conditions to the control room.

  IN THE FORWARD engine room, a fireman first class, Joshua Casey, had on his headset, waiting to receive the order to cut off the big diesels now barreling the Squalus along at sixteen knots.

  Near Casey was Gene Hoffman, a machinist’s mate first class, who was expecting his chief’s hat any day. As he paced back and forth between the twin forward diesels, Hoffman felt a proprietary interest in them. He’d been sent to the Cleveland plant of the General Motors Corporation where they had been built. For eight months he had watched as they were put together piece by piece, then shipped to Portsmouth and installed in the Squalus. In case anything went wrong during these trials, a General Motors man was on hand to help out. So far, however, they had worked like a charm.

  If there was to be a second submergence in the afternoon, Hoffman was ticketed to switch places with another veteran machinist’s mate, Charlie Yuhas, in the control room. Hoffman’s wife, Mae, had invited the bachelor Yuhas to dine with them at home that night to meet a young woman she thought he might fancy.

  Along with Hoffman, a second man had also been in Cleveland, Chief Machinist’s Mate John Chestnutt. The father of two boys and a girl, Chestnutt had got his chief’s hat only six months ago. When their last child was born, his wife, Ellen, renewed her pleas that he transfer out of submarine service. She told him she couldn’t bear her recurrent nightmares of him entombed in a watery grave, never to be seen again, and finally he agreed to give it serious consideration. Once Hoffman got promoted, there’d be a surplus of chiefs on board anyway. But till then he had to help see the Squalus through her sea trials. And now he stood in the after engine room where Naquin’s speed directives from the bridge were translated into fact. Altogether, the morning of May 23, there were eighteen men in the two engine rooms.

  IN THE AFTER torpedo room, following Lieutenant Nichols’s instructions, Ensign Patterson was conducting his own torpedo reload drills. Then his battle-phone talker, Al Priester, passed on Lieutenant Doyle’s order to rig for diving. Priester boasted tattoos as elaborate as the one John Batick displayed. His left forearm featured Popeye and his right bicep a commemorative wreath encircling the legend “Across the Equator.” When he got orders to report to the Squalus, Priester’s wife remained at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal, where he’d been previously posted. He expected to see her in about a month during a shakedown cruise stopover. Then she would rejoin him as soon as the sub was given a permanent home base. Scuttlebutt had it in the Pacific, either Manila or Pearl Harbor.

  Patterson moved swiftly through the engine rooms and the after battery. In the control room he reported readiness in the aft compartments to Doyle and headed back again to supervise the changeover from the throbbing diesels to silent battery power.

  UP ON THE bridge with Naquin, the navigation and engineering officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) Robert Robertson, from a speck of a town in the Texas panhandle, took a fix with his sextant and told the skipper that they had less than a mile and a half to go before the Squalus reached her dive point.

  In Navy time, it was 0830.

  In the control room, executive officer Doyle said, “Inform the captain that the boat is rigged for diving.” Yeoman Second Class Charles Kuney, over his battle phone, relayed the message to Naquin.

  Still on the bridge, Naquin ordered, “All ahead, emergency!” He wanted every bit of momentum that the Squalus could muster and she strained forward, past sixteen knots. Next he ordered transmission of his final dive notification. In his cubicle, radio man Powell tapped out his second communication to Portsmouth that the sub was going down and that she would be submerged for one hour. Portsmouth immediately acknowledged. Powell signed off and started retracting his antenna.

  Then Naquin ordered, “Stand by to dive.” He took a final confident look around. Except for the two lobstermen he had passed earlier, now far astern, the Squalus was all by herself. He stepped down through the conning tower hatch, the last to do so, and with the help of his quartermaster, Frankie Murphy, he pulled it shut. You didn’t have to know Murphy’s last name to see all Irish in his freckled face. From the Charlestown section of Boston, he’d been home over the weekend, and his mother had remonstrated him for sleeping through Sunday Mass. “You should be on your knees thanking God you’re still safe in that terrible thing you’re sailing in,” she’d said.

  Just as they secured the hatch, Naquin heard the big klaxon honk the first diving alarm. He started his stopwatch and lowered himself down the narrow steel ladder leading to the control room.

  TEN MEN WERE in the control room to begin the multiple operations that would send the Squalus beneath the waves.

  William Thomas Doyle stood dead center toward the forward end of the compartment. From there, by swiveling his head slightly, he could see every essential diving control and indicator on the sub. Harold Preble was also present to observe the dive performance. By perching himself behind Doyle, one foot on a toolbox and the other braced against the bottom of the ladder coming down from the conning tower, Preble had nearly the same view. In each hand, he held a double-action stopwatch.

  By the time the first klaxon sounded, Doyle had tested the number 1 periscope, had seen to it that the ballast-tank and air-pressure men were in place, and had the operators of the bow and stern diving planes check out the big fins extending out from the hull that worked in the sea like an airplane’s wing flaps.

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sp; He had scrutinized the control board. It was called the “Christmas tree” and it confirmed the reports from Nichols and Patterson that the sub was properly rigged for diving. The board consisted of red and green lights. Each represented a specific aperture in the hull or superstructure. Green meant closed and watertight. Red showed that it was still open.

  On the board only eight lights glowed red at Doyle among all the green. Four of them marked the exhaust valves for the diesel engines. One was for the flapper valve through which the radio antennae rose. Another was for the hatch above the conning tower that accessed the bridge.

  The last two red lights were for the pair of yawning outlets—the main inductions—high up on the side of the conning tower right below the bridge deck that funneled air directly to the diesels and circulated more of it to the crew when the sub rode the surface. Both were covered by a perforated steel plate and they would remain open until the Squalus began her final glide down.

  And that was about to happen. Everything would move very rapidly now. In the control room it grew hushed. Just an edge of tension had crept in.

  Doyle directed the operators of the bow and stern planes to angle them at hard dive. Simultaneously, at his command, the main ballast tanks girdling the sub were opened to the sea. They would drag the Squalus beneath the surface. Still another tank, called bow buoyancy, was all the way up forward between the torpedo tubes there. It pulled her nose down during a dive. In addition, there were several smaller trim and auxiliary tanks for weight adjustment to maintain a steady, even keel under water.

  The sea entered each of these tanks through a valve set in its lower side. On the upper sides there were also vents that allowed air pockets to escape so that the tanks would completely fill. When the sub was surfacing, the process was reversed. After the dive, the vents were closed and blasts of pressurized air from cylinders manned in the control room blew the seawater out through the same valves it had entered.