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

by Deborah Hopkinson

  “It was a strange and unfamiliar experience to see enemy land lying black and sinister on the port hand, to feel the enemy planes always near us, and yet it was invigorating,” he said. “Contrary to all tradition on the Wahoo, we kept to the surface during daylight hours … though we were never out of sight of land and often within close range of enemy airports.”

  George knew Mush was willing to take risks—now he discovered exactly how far the skipper would go. “He wandered up for a bit of conversation when I was on the bridge, and suddenly as we talked we sighted a plane about eight miles away. About the same time, the radar picked it up and confirmed the range,” said George. “We had always dived when we sighted a plane in the past, so I turned for the hatch. Mush’s big hand landed on the back of my collar just as I reached the ladder.

  “ ‘Let’s wait till he gets in to six miles,’ he said softly.

  “I turned and went back. Great Lord, I thought, we’re under the command of a madman. We stood and watched as the plane closed the range. At six and a half miles his course began to take him away from us, and in a few minutes he had faded from sight.

  “By gambling that he hadn’t seen us, Mush had saved us hours of submerged travel, but even though it had worked, I wasn’t sure I was in favor of it.”

  Dudley Morton (left) in the conning tower of the Wahoo.

  George stayed on the bridge. Another hour passed. He sent down for his sunglasses, then sunscreen lotion. They were within twenty miles of the enemy airfields when Mush finally gave the order. “ ‘All right, George, you can go ahead and take her down now.’

  “Two blasts practically punctuated the captain’s statement,” recalled Dick, “and Wahoo slipped quietly under the sea.”

  Submarine sailor on the lookout.

  When Yeo Sterling had awakened to realize that Wahoo was now running submerged, he went into the messroom to ask cook John Rowls what was going on.

  “ ‘We’ve been laying off an unknown harbor and looking it over. The Old Man thinks it might be Wewak Harbor—the one we’ve been hunting for,’ ” Rowls told him.

  A little later, seaman Delville “Moose” Hunter appeared, poured himself some coffee, and sat down to relay the latest from the conning tower. “ ‘The Old Man spotted the masts of something on the other side of the peninsula. He’s all excited. It might be that submarine tender he’s been dreaming about. We’re going in to find out.’ ”

  Yeo wished he could be closer to the action. Wistfully he asked, “ ‘How’s things up there?’

  “ ‘Different, lot’s different, now that Mush has taken over. Why, for one thing, he lets O’Kane handle the ’scope and he stands around directing everything. I think he does the mathematics in his head,’ ” Hunter told him.

  Yeo’s next words broke the tension. “ ‘I guess he’s like me,’ I said. ‘I got a photographic memory, too.’

  “ ‘Huh?’ ” His crewmates gazed at him skeptically.

  “ ‘The only thing is my film never seems to develop.’ ”

  The men chuckled, but soon returned to waiting tensely, ears alert to any new sound. “The atmosphere was heavy with danger all about us,” Yeo said. “Our heightened senses were quick to interpret the slightest Wahoo change or noise. An outburst of excitement in the conning tower carried down to us and we listened until it subsided.”

  Yeo suddenly remembered something a teacher had once told him: “ ‘Every person is the center of his own universe. If a straight line were drawn from the center of the moon to the center of the earth, it would have to pass through the person drawing the line.’

  “I thought about that and about myself. That meant the imaginary line was passing right through the crew’s mess on the Wahoo. If I were the center of the universe, then everything radiated away from me in circles.”

  And right now he was in the center of danger, hidden under a vast, treacherous sea, and very far from home. Yeo tried to imagine the circles that spread out from the familiar world of the messroom, where he sat on the green plastic cushion of the bench, to the unknown threats above him in a placid island harbor.

  “Wahoo was my cocoon, which, in turn, was wrapped in a body of water. I tried to visualize the water, and my picture of clear tropical waters with a sandy bottom was not reassuring. Surrounding this body of water must be beaches with straw-thatched huts and maybe Japanese installations with natives and soldiers, and perhaps native boats drawn up on the beach or in the water.”

  Yeo couldn’t help asking himself: “What kind of Japanese warships were anchored here?”

  All at once, the answer to that question spread like wildfire throughout the submarine.

  The Wahoo had submerged two and a half miles off the mouth of the uncharted waters of Wewak Harbor at about three thirty in the morning of January 24, 1943, just as the first hints of gray smudged the dark horizon to the east.

  “We spent the entire morning nosing around that harbor, trying to find out what was in it and where the safe water was,” said George Grider. “As Dick spotted light patches of water in the scope, he called off their locations and we noted them on our chart as shallows. From time to time we could pencil in landmarks. One of these we called Coast Watcher Point.”

  That landmark got its impromptu name when the current swept Wahoo so close to land that “all of us in the conning tower, taking turns at the periscope, could see a Japanese lookout, wearing a white shirt, sitting under a coconut tree right on the point,” George said. “We saw him so clearly, in fact, that I am sure I would recognize him if I passed him on the street.”

  Unlike Yeo Sterling in the messroom, George had a front-row seat in the conning tower as assistant approach officer. He was about to witness the first instance of Mush’s unique attack strategy, with executive officer Dick O’Kane handling the periscope during the approach. George thought that “few captains other than Mush ever had such serene faith in a subordinate that they could resist grabbing the scope in moments of crisis.”

  The Wahoo control room.

  Right now, Mush didn’t seem worried—far from it. His confidence was infectious. “For all the tension within us, we managed to reflect his mood … Mush even kept up his joking when we almost ran aground,” said George.

  The near-accident happened when Dick reported that they were getting too close to shore. Dick said, “ ‘I have the periscope in high power, and all I can see is one coconut tree.’ ”

  George thought they would be dangerously close if one tree, even magnified six times, filled the scope. Then Mush spoke up. “ ‘Dick … you’re in low power.’ ”

  Instantly, Dick flipped the handle to high power and cried, “ ‘Down periscope! … All back emergency! My God, all I can see is one coconut!’ ”

  The Wahoo backed away in record time.

  Mush had kept his cool then, but by early afternoon, even the skipper’s nerves began to fray. The crew had spent tense, dangerous hours creeping below the surface, seeking a target—with no results. Then, at last, Dick spotted something in his periscope lens that appeared to be the bridge of a ship. It might, he reported, be a freighter or a tender of some sort at anchor.

  “ ‘Well, Captain,’ somebody in the conning tower said, ‘we’ve reconnoitered Wewak harbor now. Let’s get cracking out of here and report there’s a ship in there.’

  “We all knew it was a joke, however much we wished it weren’t,” recalled George.

  “ ‘Good grief, no,’ said Mush, coming to life. ‘We’re going to go in and torpedo him.’ ”

  The harbor was calm and smooth as glass. Wahoo’s periscope would be easy to spot against that mirrored surface. Periscope sightings had to be quick and precise.

  “We would not leave a telltale periscope feather at our approach speed of 3 knots, but on each observation, water was lapping the lens of the scope,” said Dick. Seconds later, the enemy ship took on a distinct shape. Dick asked Mush to have a look.

  “The two of them stood there like a couple of schoolboys,
” said George, “peering through the scope each time it was raised, trying to decide what kind of vessel lay ahead. At last they agreed, and Mush looked happily around the conning tower.

  “ ‘It’s a destroyer,’ he said.”

  The skipper got a fierce, excited look in his eyes George would never forget. “ ‘We’ll take him by complete surprise,’ he assured us. ‘He won’t be expecting an enemy submarine in here.’

  “Mush was right about that,” George thought. “Nobody in his right mind would have expected us.”

  In the crowded conning tower of the Wahoo, voices dropped to whispers. The temperature was now close to a hundred degrees. To avoid detection, sound was kept to a minimum. All auxiliary motors, including the air-conditioning, had been turned off. Perspiration dripped from the men’s faces.

  “We had the element of surprise on our side, and nothing else,” said George Grider, who had turned over his diving officer duties to Hank Henderson for the approach phase. “We were now six miles inside an uncharted harbor, with land on three sides of us, and in a minute or so the whole harbor would know we were there.”

  Mush had decided on an attack range of about three thousand yards. The outer doors of the six forward torpedo tubes were opened. An instant later, everything changed. Through the periscope, Dick O’Kane saw that the destroyer had left anchor and was under way.

  “Now our plan to catch this sitting duck was gone,” said George. “Later, perhaps, we could get a shot at her in deep water. But Mush was in no mood to be reasonable.”

  Yeo Sterling and a few other crew members were getting a play-by-play from radioman James Edward Carter, who was in touch with the conning tower through headphones. Carter reported, “ ‘She’s up-anchored and heading toward us, all fifteen hundred tons of her.’ ”

  Yeo felt his heart beginning to pound; his mouth got dry. He waited, knowing exactly what it would feel like in the Wahoo when a torpedo left the tube.

  In the conning tower, with his eyes glued to the periscope, Dick had a clear view of the destroyer. Mush hadn’t moved to take over the periscope sightings. “I believed it was his way of showing confidence in me,” said Dick, “and I would not let him down.”

  Dick was lining up the torpedo shots using the TDC (torpedo data computer). Shooting a torpedo at a moving ship is not like shooting an arrow at a still target. Dick had a lot to take into account: the speed and angle of Wahoo relative to the target, the speed and course of the target, and, of course, the motion of the torpedo through water.

  Beside Dick, Mush stood with his finger on the firing plunger, cool and confident. As soon as Dick called out the command to fire, the first torpedo was on its way with a shudder and zing. It was quickly followed by two more. Everyone in the boat could feel what was happening.

  “Wahoo’s hull bucked as a torpedo shot out to try and intercept this terrible menace to her safety. Another left its tube at a slightly different angle, followed shortly afterward by a third torpedo. Wahoo settled down to a brief agonizing wait to learn the results,” said Yeo. “Without realizing it, our eyes were glued to the second hand of the clock.”

  “ ‘All hot, straight and normal,’ ” reported Jim Buckley, on sound.

  Seconds passed. No explosions. The first three fish—then the fourth—missed. Only two more remained in the forward torpedo tubes. Dick would have to make them count. There wouldn’t be time to reload the forward tubes or swing the boat around to fire the four torpedoes in the stern tubes.

  Wahoo had lost the advantage of secrecy. Like a beast in the wild, the destroyer wheeled toward them, heading into the fanlike pattern in the water created by the wakes of the torpedoes.

  “The situation had changed drastically,” recalled George. “A destroyer is named for its ability to destroy submarines, and this one was coming at us now with a deck full of depth charges.”

  “ ‘All right,’ said Mush. ‘Get set for a down-the-throat shot.’ ”

  “We had talked about down-the-throats in wardroom bull sessions, but I doubt if any of us had ever seriously expected to be involved in such a shot,” said George.

  “It is what the name implies, a shot fired at the target while he is coming directly toward you. No one knew for sure how effective it would be, because as far as I know there was then no case in our submarine records of anyone’s having tried it.

  “But it had one obvious virtue, and two staggering disadvantages. On the one hand, you didn’t have to know the target’s speed if the angle was zero [in other words, straight on]; on the other hand, the target would be at its narrowest, and if you missed, it would be too late to plan anything else. In this particular case, we would be shooting a two-ton torpedo at a craft no more than twenty feet wide, coming toward us at a speed of about thirty knots.”

  Moments before, George had been thinking what a fine story about their success in locating Wewak Harbor he’d have to tell his wife, Ann, and son, Billy, when he got home. “Now I remembered with relief that I had left my will ashore at the beginning of the patrol.”

  It was hard for George to imagine getting out of this fix, especially since his fate was in the hands of someone undertaking his first submarine combat attack: Dick O’Kane.

  “For a fleeting moment,” recalled Dick, “I thought of the prewar orders covering like situations. At this range … we went deep and fired on sound information.”

  That was then.

  Now Dick calmly went about lining up the last shots. He knew that if Wahoo was more than 1,200 yards away from the target, the destroyer would have time to maneuver out of the way. As soon as the Japanese captain spied the next torpedo’s wake, he would begin to take evasive action. Yet if Wahoo got too close—within 700 yards—the exploding mechanism on the torpedo wouldn’t have enough time to arm.

  Dick had a window: a 500-yard “hitting space.” Taking into account his estimate that the destroyer’s speed was thirty knots, Dick figured he’d have thirty seconds—and only thirty seconds—to launch torpedoes five and six.

  “ ‘Stand by to fire,’ ” called Dick. “ ‘Fire five!’ ”

  Suddenly, there was confusion: Dick couldn’t see above the water. The boat had dipped below periscope depth. Hank Henderson, George realized, had momentarily lost steering control. Mush called down the hatch to the control room, “ ‘Bring her up, Hank, boy, bring her up.’ ”

  Dick clung to the periscope. Seconds later, Wahoo was back in position. The destroyer was still barreling down on them. They’d missed.

  Dick told them what he saw. “ ‘He’s still coming. Getting close.’ ”

  From his seat in the messroom, Yeo broke out in a cold sweat and decided that Mush must have nerves of steel. Yeo tried to keep track of each torpedo as it left the tube. He remembered wondering, “How many were left? Only one left in the sixth tube. Would we have time to use it?” A certainty that he was about to die swept over him.

  Up in the conning tower, George was impressed at how calm and “utterly cool” Dick seemed. He marveled at the change in his fellow officer. Dick had been frustrated and unhappy under their previous captain. It seemed, George thought, as if Dick “had been lost, seeking his true element, and now it was found. My opinion of him underwent a permanent change.

  “It was not the first time I had observed that the conduct of men under fire cannot be predicted accurately from their everyday actions, but it was the most dramatic example I was ever to see of a man transformed under pressure from what seemed almost adolescent petulance to a prime fighting machine.”

  For his part, Dick was determined not to miss the final shot. He wanted to wait until the last moment, when the narrow destroyer would present the widest target possible.

  Dick kept the periscope’s wire bisecting the destroyer’s bow. His target was dead ahead. “I watched her come, already showing a white ‘V’ bow wake…. Her image filled my lens,” Dick recalled. He shifted the periscope lens to lower power. This setting meant the destroyer’s image looked smaller, a
nd “much less disturbing.”

  Dick asked Mush, “ ‘When shall I fire, Captain?’

  “ ‘Wait till she fills four divisions in low power.’

  “ ‘She already fills eight.’ ”

  Even Mush became impatient then. “ ‘Well, for heaven’s sake … fire!’ ”

  Dick called, “ ‘Fire six!’ ”

  Mush echoed him with “ ‘Take her deep!’ ”

  Instantly, George sprang down the ladder to the control room to take over as diving officer. “I couldn’t take her really deep, because we had no idea what the depth of the water there was, and it wouldn’t help to strike an uncharted reef. But I took her as far down as I dared, to ninety feet, and we rigged for depth-charge attack.

  “We were no longer the aggressor. Now our time as well as our torpedoes had run out, and we were helpless to fight back. All we could do was grab on to something and stand by for the final depth-charging of the USS Wahoo. Our time had come, and we waited for the end almost calmly,” said George.

  “The first explosion was loud and close,” he remembered. “A couple of light bulbs broke, as they always do on a close explosion…. We waited for the second blast, each man lost within himself, looking at objects rather than at other men, no eyes meeting, as is appropriate for the final moments of life.”

  The men waited. And kept waiting.

  George Grider found himself counting: “Ten, twenty, thirty seconds.” They should be feeling the destroyer’s next depth charge by now. Still the silence continued. George looked up, and saw the faces around him take on expressions full of disbelief and wonder.

  Someone in the pump room broke the spell, exclaiming, “ ‘Jeez … Maybe we hit him!’ ”

  At that, George heard Mush laugh and holler, “ ‘Well, by God, maybe we did.’ ”