Dive! World War II Stories of Sailors & Submarines in the Pacific

by Deborah Hopkinson

  In fact, even before they set out on their first patrol as skipper and exec, Mush sat down to share his innovative ideas about teamwork with Dick. In traditional submarine warfare, the captain took total charge during an attack: handling periscope sightings, positioning the sub, and gathering all the data necessary to successfully launch a torpedo at a moving target.

  Mush wanted to do things differently. He believed sharing responsibilities would increase success rates. (Submarine war patrol reports were posted and discussed among officers, and the innovations developed by the two men rapidly caught on with other results-oriented submariners, becoming known as the Morton-O’Kane technique.)

  “ ‘Now, you’re going to be my co-approach officer, not my assistant,’ ” Mush told Dick. “ ‘You’ll make all of the approach and attack periscope observations…. I’ll conn [e.g., maneuver] Wahoo to the best attack position, and then you’ll fire the torpedoes.

  “ ‘This way I’ll never get scared.’ ”

  Even before the Wahoo left the dock on her third patrol, the crew sensed things were about to change. “I could feel the stirring of a strong spirit growing in her. The officers acted differently. The men felt differently,” said Forest “Yeo” Sterling. “There was more of a feeling of freedom and of being trusted to get our jobs done.

  “It was a feeling that Wahoo was not only the best … but that she was capable of performing miracles.”

  The morning of their departure, Mush called the men together to share his view of their mission: The men of the Wahoo would pursue every sighting possible and stay with each target until that ship was on the way to the bottom.

  “ ‘Every smoke trace on the horizon, every contact on watch will be investigated,’ ” Mush told the crew. “ ‘Now, if anyone doesn’t want to go along under these conditions, just see the yeoman. I am giving him verbal authority now to transfer anyone who is not a volunteer…. I must know within half an hour who will be leaving, so that I can get replacements.’ ”

  After the men were dismissed, Yeo went to his small office and nursed a cup of coffee, waiting to see if anyone would show up to request a transfer. The captain soon poked his head in. “ ‘Any customers, Yeo?’

  “ ‘Not a one, Captain,’ ” Yeo told him.

  Mush grinned. “ ‘That’s the kind of stuff I like in a crew.’ ”

  Yeo inserted the sailing list into his typewriter and dated it: January 15, 1943. He didn’t need to make a single change to the names already on the roster. Wahoo got under way.

  Some hours later, after waking from a nap, Yeo wandered into the messroom and settled on one of its green plastic-covered benches to read a magazine. Around him, crew members buzzed about a promise their new captain had just made: Any sailor who sighted a target while on lookout would get promoted if the Wahoo managed to sink the ship.

  One man rose, ready to sign up for extra watches. The cook, who was puttering in the galley, called out, “ ‘Wait a minute … I’m going with you.’ ”

  The messroom of a submarine.

  All the men burst out laughing. “This was the first time I had ever known of a ship’s cook volunteering for watches,” Yeo wrote later.

  Yeo was still in the messroom a little later when all banter halted. The captain appeared. Yeo looked up, startled. “The thing that caught our attention and made us speechless was the way he was dressed. He had on an old red bathrobe and go-ahead slippers [rubber slippers or flip-flops with no heel support so you can’t back up]. He also had a navigational chart under one arm and a bucket of soapy water in the other hand.”

  Mush greeted the men and asked if he could join them. He set his pail down, then thumbtacked a navigational chart of the islands of New Guinea onto the bulletin board. This strategic area just a few hundred miles north of Australia had been contested territory since January 1942, when the Japanese established a military base on the island of New Britain. (Today the western half of New Guinea Island is part of Indonesia, while the eastern half and nearby islands make up the independent country of Papua New Guinea.)

  Making himself comfortable at the end of a bench, Mush began to wash a khaki shirt in his pail, kneading it with his large hands. Nodding at the chart, he asked, “ ‘Any of you men ever operate in this area before?’ ”

  No one had. Mush went on. “ ‘We have a special mission to try and locate a harbor along this coast that the Japanese seem to be using pretty heavily. Some of the army planes out of Australia have reported a lot of shipping.’ ”

  He added, “ ‘Would you guys like to go in and look around? Maybe we will find a submarine tender with a lot of submarines alongside. I sure would like that.’ ”

  Yeo and the others agreed, catching his enthusiasm. Then Mush rose and picked up his bucket. “ ‘Guess I’ll go back and hang this shirt up in the engine room to dry out.’ ”

  After he left, crew members looked at one another in astonishment. Someone whispered, “ ‘Rowdydow.’ ”

  Mush could hardly be more different from their previous, standoffish captain.

  A crewmate asked Yeo, “ ‘Do you think he’s crazy?’

  “ ‘Yeah, like a fox.’ ”

  When it was time for Yeo’s next watch, he grabbed a pair of red goggles used for night vision, then climbed up to the starboard lookout station on deck.

  “It was an awe-inspiring night with big bright stars overhead,” he remembered. “Wahoo was moving through the water at a steady clip, and the only noise to disturb me was the music of the waves created by Wahoo’s bow pushing through the water.

  “Not too far away was land. The air was musty with the rich fragrance of tropical underbrush and strange flower scents. It seemed altogether too peaceful for there to be a war in progress and death lurking someplace in those jungles and at sea also.”

  Yeo returned below to take his turn at the wheel, keeping the boat on her set course. It gave him a different perspective. “The whole universe, of course, was shut out to me, but it was a pleasant change watching the indirectly lighted gyrocompass. When it would start moving in a circle jerkily to the right or left, a slight twist of the wheel and a short jerk back to check the ship’s swing would bring Wahoo back on the course.”

  After a break for coffee, apple pie, and cheese, Yeo was back on lookout duty as night turned to dawn. This time, while topside, he happened to notice the “Mae West” life jacket strapped to the periscope. It was a flat belt that could be inflated into a tube. “This was another innovation of Captain Morton’s, a safety precaution that might save someone’s life if they did not clear the bridge on diving.”

  At that moment, Ensign George Misch shouted, “ ‘Clear the bridge.’ ” As the diving siren bellowed, the bow instantly dipped below the waves.

  Tired as he was, Yeo sprang into action for Wahoo’s standard morning dive, which was usually done at dawn to check the trim, or buoyancy status, of the submarine and make any necessary corrections to the weight in the various compartments and ballast tanks.

  He dropped his binoculars, letting them hang loosely from the strap around his neck. Swinging down from the lookout platform to the deck ten feet below, he raced past Misch to the hatch. Although Yeo was quick, David Veder, the other lookout, got there first.

  Yeo leaped, mostly ignoring the ladder and letting gravity take him through the hatch to the deck of the conning tower below. Halfway down, Misch, “all two thousand pounds of him,” or so it seemed to Yeo, landed on his shoulders and “rode me the rest of the way piggyback. How he managed to close the hatch after him was a trade secret.”

  A sailor peers down the hatch of a submarine.

  From the conning tower, Yeo then dropped down onto the floor of the control room and bent to catch his breath, bracing himself against the steep angle of the submarine’s dive. When finally able to speak, he told David Veder, “ ‘I bet you don’t beat me to that hatch next time.’ ”

  Captain Morton was standing nearby, stopwatch in hand. “ ‘Attaboy, Yeo, but you’ll hav
e to get the lead out of your pants.’ ”

  Turning to Dick O’Kane, Mush added, “ ‘We clipped three seconds off our diving time…. We’re making progress.’ ”

  Everyone on board knew his life might one day depend on just how fast Wahoo could disappear beneath the sea.

  Each day of Wahoo’s third patrol brought more changes. “Most of them could be traced back to Captain Morton’s stateroom,” reflected Yeo, “but the initiative fever was catching and we all began to have ideas. Communication between officers and men became increasingly easier.”

  Yeo still couldn’t quite manage to beat crewmate David Veder to the hatch during the early morning trim dives. A few days later, bruised from having Misch ride his back again, Yeo found the other lookout smugly eating a platter of scrambled eggs in the messroom. All Yeo could do was glower at Veder and sit down at another table, rubbing his sore muscles before turning in for a nap.

  When he next woke, Yeo sensed something was different. It took him awhile to figure out what it was. Wahoo had been gliding on the surface of the sea. Now, deeper into enemy territory, the submarine was running submerged toward an unknown, uncharted harbor in the distance.

  How Mush Morton found that harbor was quite a story.

  As air fills ballast tanks, water is forced out when a submarine surfaces.

  Just how do submarines dive?

  Journalist Martin Sheridan provided a layperson’s account when he wrote about his experiences in March of 1945 as the only war correspondent given permission to make a war patrol on a US submarine in the Pacific.

  Sheridan joined Lieutenant Commander Walter T. Griffith and his crew during the first patrol of the USS Bullhead (SS-332), which in August of that year tragically became the last submarine lost in the war. Sheridan’s lively account of life on a submarine, Overdue and Presumed Lost, was first published in 1947. Sheridan described a submarine’s dive for readers eager to know more about the silent service.

  “There’s no such command as ‘Crash dive,’ as the motion picture studios would have us believe. Every dive is made as quickly as possible. That’s the only way to achieve speed and perfection. All you have to do is kick out the corks, let in the water, and down you go.

  “Technically, here’s what really happens. Even before the conning tower hatch is shut, water is admitted into the main ballast tanks by opening a series of vents. Diesel engines are shut down and men in the maneuvering room cut over for propulsion to the electric motors fed by tons of huge battery cells.

  “Air pressure is built up within the boat to test her airtightness, and the main induction, which provides fresh air from the engines and the rest of the submarine, is shut. When the proper vents are closed a ‘green board’ shows up on the ‘Christmas tree’ panel in the control room. This consists of a series of small lights—green denoting closed and red for open—which automatically show the condition of valves, vents, and hatches. It’s one of the greatest safety factors aboard.

  “Bow and stern planes resembling fins are always rigged for diving while the boat is underway. These regulate the depth and the angle of dive, just as the elevators of an airplane regulate its altitude and angle of climb.

  “When the captain decides just how deep he wants to go, the diving officer levels off by using the auxiliary tanks amidships, the regular trimming tanks, and the bow and stern tanks to adjust his trim. Our main ballast tanks are located outside the pressure hull, as are the negative and safety tanks, used to speed surfacing or diving.”

  Sheridan also described what a dive felt and sounded like. “It’s an uncomfortable feeling to lie in your sack during a dive, especially if you sleep, as I do, with your head toward the bow [front]. When the boat noses down rapidly you can hear water gurgling in the flooding tanks. There’s an eerie crackling and creaking throughout the boat as both the depth and pressure increase. Your head is lower than your feet, and you experience a sensation of falling.

  “You begin to wonder, ‘When the devil are they going to level off?’ Also, ‘How many fathoms have we below us?’ And, ‘Are there any uncharted pinnacles in this area?’ Then comes the reassuring hissing of the flooding after tanks. You come out of the dive, and soon your body is level again. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief.”

  Captain Dudley “Mush” Morton had informed his crew that the Wahoo’s orders included a request from headquarters to conduct reconnaissance in the vicinity of Wewak Harbor, New Guinea, the possible site of a Japanese supply base. The problem? No one had a clue exactly where Wewak was located.

  “Our charts simply showed a somewhat ragged coastline, with bays, islands, and reefs, without even the name Wewak appearing,” executive officer Dick O’Kane recalled.

  George Grider put it this way: “How could we reconnoiter a harbor whose location we didn’t know?”

  George assumed the most they could—or would—do was patrol the general vicinity and then be on their way. But one night when the captain and officers were in the wardroom studying charts, Mush Morton asked the men what they thought the word reconnoiter meant.

  George offered, “ ‘It means we take a cautious look at the area, from far out at sea, through the periscope, submerged.’ ”

  Mush grinned. That wasn’t quite what he had in mind. “ ‘The only way you can reconnoiter a harbor is to go right into it and see what’s there.’ ”

  Two sailors study a chart.

  George and the others exchanged glances. “Now it was clear that our captain had advanced from mere rashness to outright foolhardiness,” he wrote later. “Harbors are often treacherous at best…. It would be madness for the Wahoo to submerge and enter an enemy harbor whose very location on the map we didn’t know….

  “Yet here was this skipper of ours, grinning at us under his jutting nose as if he had just told a funny story, assuring us we were going to do it and we’d darned well better find out which harbor was Wewak or he’d just pick the most likely one and go in.”

  Madness, it seemed, was exactly what the Wahoo was now all about.

  Help in pinpointing the exact location of the mysterious harbor came from an unexpected source. As George Grider was passing through the engine room one night, he noticed a machinist’s mate named Dalton “Bird Dog” Keeter looking at a book.

  “ ‘Hey, Mr. Grider, is this the Wewak we’re going to?’ ” Keeter asked. He showed George a school atlas he’d bought for his kids while on leave in Australia. Though the print was tiny, the name Wewak definitely appeared on the map of New Guinea.

  “A couple of months before, the idea of entering an enemy harbor with the help of a high-school geography [book] would have struck me as too ridiculous even to be funny,” said George. “Now I almost hugged the book and charged forward to the wardroom with it as if it were the key to the destruction of the entire Japanese Navy.

  “Mush took one look at it and reached for our charts. The wardroom began to hum with activity.”

  Dick O’Kane said, “The outline of Wewak was much too small. But if we could draw an accurate enlargement, we might find where it fitted on our chart.”

  So that’s what they did, making an outline of the harbor on tracing paper (George recalled that they used toilet paper), then rigging up George’s old Graflex (a brand of camera) as a makeshift enlarger so they could match the shape of the harbor to their navigational chart. The camera had been used by George’s father, a flier in World War I. After George’s father was killed, a fellow pilot had saved the camera and brought it home for his friend’s son. It was one of George’s most prized possessions.

  “When I thought that a chart fashioned with the help of an ancient camera used by my father more than a quarter of a century before on the other side of the world in another war would lead us into Wewak harbor, I … began to believe there was some kind of guiding destiny behind the Wahoo’s third patrol,” George said.

  As they examined the enlargement, the men discovered that the cove itself appeared to be a good size—perhaps nine m
iles long, with a width of about two miles across in some places. From the information they compiled, George and the others also guessed the water might be two hundred feet deep in many areas, making the harbor feasible to penetrate. They were also able to identify some distinguishing geographic features to help guide them. One nearby island was named Mushu, which, of course, everyone immediately abbreviated to Mush. It seemed a good omen.

  The map of Wewak Harbor hand-drawn aboard the Wahoo.

  “Mush was delighted,” George recalled. “He ignored the uncertainties and concentrated on the fact that we would have deep water, if we stayed where it was, and unmistakable landmarks, if we could spot them in time to use them.”

  Time was short, however. Morton and his crew were now heading north from Brisbane, Australia, approaching Vitiaz Strait between the islands of New Guinea and New Britain. But they had orders to head north and be in the area of Palau on January 30, nearly a thousand miles and a week’s travel away. To have enough time to explore Wewak Harbor before their next assignment, Mush and his crew needed to arrive by dawn the next morning.

  Submarines can go faster when not submerged. There was only one problem with Wahoo continuing to speed along the surface of the sea: The presence of a Japanese airfield based on New Britain. Wahoo would probably be able to dive out of danger in time if spotted from the air, but being sighted at all would ruin the element of surprise. And surprise was crucial to Mush’s plan to sneak into Wewak Harbor and attack whatever enemy warships or supply vessels happened to be there.

  “Normal prudence called for submerged cruising,” Dick O’Kane observed. “But the situation was not normal.”

  Mush’s solution was to post extra lookouts using binoculars fitted with protective lenses in the glare of the sun. As they moved along the New Guinea coast, George Grider was on watch. George couldn’t help compare what Wahoo was doing now with her first lackluster patrols.