Submarine!

by Edward L. Beach

  One day toward the end of the overhaul, Stinky sought me out.

  “We want to install an ice-cream freezer on board,” said he without any preliminaries.

  “You mean one of those wooden hand-cranked jobs?”

  He nodded.

  “Who in hell ever heard of an ice creamer in a submarine?” I demanded.

  “Well, we think we know where we can get one. Besides, wouldn’t you like a nice cool dish of ice cream sometime when it’s good and hot, like right after charging batteries or running silent for half a day—like two months ago when those two tin cans were after us?”

  “My God, man, you’re fat enough already. How are you ever going to lose weight with an ice creamer on board?”

  Stinky grinned. “Speak for yourself. But just think how good a big heaping bowl of cool raspberry ice or peach melba would taste. All you have to do is push the pantry button, and in comes Wilson with a big double scoop of it on a dish, all round and firm and cool, just starting to melt a little on the edges, maybe with a dab of whipped cream and a cherry on top——”

  I could taste the saliva starting to drool into my mouth. “Sounds swell,” I growled. “Just where do you think you’re going to stow this contraption, and where will you get the ice, and who’s going to turn the crank—you? Or will you put a special man on watch?”

  “It’s going to be automatic. We’ll take the motor off the ship’s lathe——”

  “The hell you will!”

  “—and we’ll hook it up to the ship’s main refrigerating system so we won’t have to bother either with ice or cranking it.”

  Submariners are born gadgeteers, and if anyone could rig up this kind of contraption, they could. I felt myself weakening.

  “If you connect it to the refrigerating system, it will have to be permanently installed—just where have you planned to put it?”

  Stinky’s self-assurance for the first time appeared to wane a little. “Well,” he confessed, “the only place we could think of where there’s enough room is on deck between the periscopes—”

  My outraged bellow nearly blew him from the wardroom, but he continued doggedly:

  “So we thought maybe you would help us find a place for it.”

  The vision of the skipper carefully stepping over the ice-cream freezer while he made a periscope observation was too much. My thought must have been mirrored in my face, for Stinky quickly went on:

  “We’ve already got it half finished, if you’d care to see it.”

  I might have known it. One submarine had already been reputed to have dismantled a jeep and stowed it away below decks just before starting patrol. I myself had once connived at stashing away the essential parts of a motorcycle behind the main engines. By comparison an ice-cream freezer was a cinch.

  Sincavich led me to the forward engineroom, where there was a steel worktable and vise. Five sailors, among them the Chief of the Boat—the senior enlisted man on board—were crowded about the two-by-three-foot bench. At our approach they showed us what they had been doing with a delighted conspiratorial air.

  When we set out for Trigger’s sixth patrol, in an out-of-the-way corner of the control room rested the fruit of Stinky’s efforts. My first sample of its product had the distinct flavor of hydraulic oil superimposed on that of the ice cream, and I noticed particles of metal in it from the grinding of the gears. But neither oil nor metal filings reduced our pleasure. We ran the machine almost continuously, and had ice cream at least once a day.

  It was a good thing, too, that the installation happened to be in the control room, within sight and supervision of the chief in charge of the control room watch. In addition to his primary duties of handling the hydraulic main vent manifold, rigging the bow planes in and out when surfacing or diving, opening and shutting the main induction, keeping a watch on the condition of the “Christmas Tree”—as we termed the panel of red and green lights indicating whether our principal hull openings were open or closed—checking the trim of the ship hourly, and supervising the radar watch standers, this worthy now inherited the extra chore of making sure the ice creamer was properly operated. Such extra duty he took on without complaint, for it also included testing the product—in soup bowls.

  We soon found that as the ice cream slowly froze into the desired consistency, the paddles became harder and harder to turn, while the motor ran slower and slower. Without careful supervision, there would obviously come a time when the motor could turn no more.

  Strict instructions were issued about ice-creamer operation, including names of qualified operators. Nevertheless, about a week after we had left Pearl Harbor the daily ration of ice cream suddenly stopped, and Stinky—now known as Officer in Charge of Ice Cream—was immediately called on the carpet by the skipper. His crestfallen explanation was that someone had neglected to watch the machine, and the ice cream had become so hard that the motor had finally stopped. The first indication of trouble had been the odor of burning insulation, and now, with or without the ice cream, the motor refused to turn at all.

  The strain of unanimous and vocal disapproval by the whole ice-cream starved crew was obviously heavy. At mealtime in the wardroom Stinky sat silent—for him—and developed the habit of bracing himself when the dessert appeared. Someone was sure to make some pithy comment.

  “If we hadn’t filled all our storerooms with that damned ice-cream mix, we wouldn’t have to eat this lousy farina”—as whatever concoction our poor cooks dreamed up was almost Invariably called.

  “Your sparktricians don’t seem to have any trouble with the main motors of this bucket; why in the all-fired hell can’t they fix a simple thing like an ice-creamer motor?”

  When Dornin had first been informed of the casualty he had summarily ordered a general court-martial on Stinky, and every day, with evident relish, he recited the cruel and original punishments he expected the court to adjudge.

  Stinky fought back desperately, but every day we threw out his arguments as specious, irrelevant, and without foundation. The harried look on his face daily became more pronounced.

  Then one day, just before dessert was due, Sincavich suddenly excused himself from the table and squeezed his way out of the wardroom. His departure threw a damper on our spirits, and our consciences twinged us. No dessert came for a few uneasy minutes, and then in came Stinky, carrying a huge baking platter from the galley, in the center of which reposed grandly a tremendous baked alaska!

  We found out that a modification had been made to the ice creamer. Fastened securely to the bulkhead nearby was a large ammeter, to indicate how much electricity the motor was using, and hanging on a hook below it was a card containing a lengthy set of typed instructions.

  Once again ice cream was on our daily menu, and the charges and specifications preferred against Stinky were all dismissed. But our joy was short-lived. Someone coming off watch at 0400 had tried to make a can of ice cream while we were charging the ship’s main storage batteries, and had forgotten about the higher voltage existing at such times. Grim-faced electrician’s mates again dismantled the burned-out motor and took it, the useless instruction sheet, and the ammeter back into the recesses of the engineering spaces. Our morale drooped once more.

  Days passed. The hunted look reappeared on Stinky’s face, and all the once-quashed specifications against him were revived, with some additional ones. We wondered how we could mete out the punishment he deserved immediately, without waiting until we got back to port—a general court-martial required more officers on it than we could supply. It was then suggested that we could easily constitute half a court, and, after hearing all the evidence and finding the defendant guilty, adjudge precisely half of the deserved penalty.

  It took longer than the first time to fix the motor, because, as Stinky said, “the motor armature was much more thoroughly burned out.” But finally came the day when he again disappeared just before dessert was due—and, as our mouths dripped in anticipation, brought in a second baked alaska
, if anything larger than the first.

  Our electrical gadgeteers, realizing the fault with the ice creamer was basically that its safety precautions were over-complicated, had gone all out for simplification. From that day on the ice-cream machine was an unqualified success.

  The ammeter was still there, but the face of its dial now bore only the legend, Condition of Ice Cream. At the one end of the needle’s travel was the single typewritten word: Soft. Slightly past the center of the arc was the statement, printed by hand in large red letters: Hard Enough.

  And we discovered in a day or so that Stinky had left strict written orders that no matter what the circumstances, the time of day or night, even if the Captain himself had ordered it, permission to start a battery charge had to be obtained first from the Officer in Charge of Ice Cream.

  Hit ’em again, Harder! No one in the Submarine Force will ever forget that battle cry. It is ringing still in the halls of Dealey Center, New London; at deserted Camp Dealey, on Guam; and at the submarine base, Pearl Harbor. For the USS Harder was a peer among peers, a fighter among fighters, and, above all, a submarine among submarines. And when she and her fighting skipper were lost, the whole Navy mourned, for her exploits had become legendary. It was characteristic that she gave her life to save one of her fellows, for she interposed herself in front of an attacking ship to give another submarine an opportunity to escape, and in so doing received the final, unlucky, fatal depth charge.

  Harder’s record, after only three patrols, was already one to conjure with in the Pacific Fleet. Built in Groton, Connecticut, at the Electric Boat Company, she first appeared at Pearl Harbor in June, 1943, and for uniformly outstanding results, dogged courage, and brilliant performance, soon had few equals in our Submarine Force. Her record speaks for itself: First patrol, three ships sunk and one damaged; second patrol, four ships sunk and one damaged; third patrol, five ships sunk.

  On Harder’s fourth patrol Sam Dealey carried off an exploit unprecedented in submarine warfare, an operation epitomizing the competence and daring of the magnificent ship he had molded. Harder was detailed “lifeguard” submarine for an air strike on Woleai Atoll, one of the hundreds of small Pacific islands taken over by the Japs after World War I. To save a downed aviator, Dealey deliberately ran his ship aground, sending three men, including Lieutenant Logan, his torpedo officer, ashore in a rubber boat to effect the rescue. Since the flier was only exhausted and not injured, Sam assigned him a bunk in Officer’s Country, and Harder continued on patrol.

  When Dealey brought Harder into Fremantle, he had sunk one destroyer and one freighter and damaged and probably sunk a second destroyer. As he indicated in his patrol report, his ship now had the pleasure of seeing her total tonnage record of enemy ships exceed the 100,000 tons’ mark—a distinction attained by only a few of our undersea fighters. That it was due entirely to his own efforts, Sam would have indignantly denied, pointing to the outstanding officers and men who served with him, who, he said, were responsible for making Harder what she was. Frank Lynch, his executive officer, and Sam Logan, his torpedo officer, were his two mainstays, and to them he invariably tried to shift the credit. Frank, a behemoth of a man, had been regimental commander and first-string tackle at the Naval Academy. He combined qualities of leadership and physical stamina with a keen, searching mind and a tremendous will to fight. Sam, slighter of build, less the extrovert, was a mathematical shark and had stood first in his class at the Academy. Under pressure of the war years, he had discovered a terrible and precise ferocity which always possessed him whenever contact with the enemy was imminent. To him, operation of the torpedo director was an intricate puzzle, to be worked out using all information and means at his command, divining the enemy’s intentions and anticipating them, working out new techniques of getting the right answer under different sets of conditions.

  “With those two madmen pushing me all the time,” Dealey would say, “there was nothing I could do but go along!”

  It was, however, Harder’s fifth war patrol which fixed her position, and that of Sam Dealey, in the annals of the United States Submarine Force for all time.

  On May 26, 1944, Harder departed from Fremantle, Australia, on what many have termed the most epoch-making war patrol ever recorded. It must be remembered that Sam Dealey, Frank Lynch, and Sam Logan were by now experts who had long served together. Their ship was a veteran, and organized to the peak of perfection in fighting ability. Who can blame Dealey, with this sort of help, for deliberately selecting the most difficult of accomplishments?

  Your submarine is primarily a commerce destroyer. While it will attack any moderate-to-large warship it encounters, its principal objective is the lifeline of the enemy—its merchant carriers. The submarine will spend long hours lying in wait in sea lanes frequented by enemy cargo vessels, and her personnel will spend longer hours trying to outguess their adversaries, to determine where they are routing their ships in their effort to evade submarine attack. The submarine will, of course, similarly try to intercept enemy war vessels. But the destroyer or escort vessel is the bane of the sub’s existence, for it is commonly considered too small to shoot successfully and too dangerous to fool around with. Besides, sinking a destroyer was not ordinarily so damaging to the enemy’s cause as sinking a tanker, for example. Sometimes a destroyer would intercept a torpedo intended for a larger vessel, and sometimes you had to shoot at one in desperation—and sometimes one would give you a shot you simply couldn’t pass up. But ordinarily you avoid tangling with one.

  Sam Dealey, ever an original man, had a new thought. It was known that the Japanese Navy was critically short of destroyers of all types, first-line or otherwise. Intelligence reports were to the effect that those few they had were being operated week in and week out, without pause for even essential repairs, in their desperate effort to keep their sea lanes open. Add to this the tremendous screen necessary for a fleet movement and the probability that it could be hamstrung—or at least rendered extraordinarily vulnerable—if the number of destroyers or escort ships could be substantially reduced. In short, Dealey decided that the war against merchant shipping was entirely too tame for his blood, and he asked and received for his operating area the waters around the major Japanese Fleet Operating Base of Tawi Tawi in the Sulu Archipelago. He reasoned that once he revealed his presence there, which he planned to do in the time-honored submarine manner, there would be no dearth of destroyers sent out to track him down. And if there were too many in one bunch, he could avoid them; if they came out by ones and twos, he’d deliberately tangle with them.

  And tangle he did. Shortly after sunset of the first day in the area, a convoy was sighted and Harder gave chase. The moon came out during the pursuit, the convoy changed course, and events soon confirmed the submarine’s detection by the enemy. The nearest destroyer emitted clouds of black smoke, put on full speed, and commenced heading directly for her—and there was nothing left to do but run for it.

  At full speed Harder could barely exceed 19 knots, and it soon was evident that the tin can astern was clipping them off at 24 or better. The range inexorably reduced to 10,000 yards, then 9000, then 8,500—at which point Sam pulled the plug out from under his ship and dropped her neatly to periscope depth.

  The moment the ship was under water, Dealey called out, “Left full rudder!”

  Obediently the submarine altered course to the left, drawing away from the path down which she had been running. A tricky stunt, this, fraught with danger. If the DD up there had enough sense to divine what had occurred and suspect the trap laid for him, things would be tough. He’d have little trouble in picking up the submarine broadside on with his supersonic sound equipment, and probably could do plenty of damage with an immediate attack.

  But he suspected nothing, came on furiously down the broad wake left by the sub, blundered right across her stern, and was greeted with two torpedoes which hit him under the bow and under the bridge, and broke his back.

  With his bow to
rn nearly off and gaping holes throughout his stricken hull, the Jap’s stern rose vertically in the air. Clouds of smoke, spray, and steam enveloped him, mingled with swift tongues of red flame which feverishly licked at his sides and decks. Depth charges, normally stowed aft in the depth charge racks ready for immediate use, fell out the back of the racks and went crashing down upon the now-slanted deck. Some of them, reached by the flames, went off with horrifying explosions which effectively nullified any chance survivors of the holocaust might have had.

  Less than two minutes after the detonations of the torpedoes, the lone black hull of the submarine boiled to the surface. Sam Dealey was not one to give up the convoy that easily, and Harder took off once more at full speed after the enemy. But further contact was not to be regained with this particular outfit.

  “Radar contact!” another destroyer, and not far away. From the speed with which the range diminishes, it is obvious that he is heading directly for Harder!

  Battle stations submerged! A few hurried minutes of tracking. No doubt about it: this fellow is a comer! Perhaps he has seen the submarine—although that seems hardly possible, or maybe he has radar information-we’ve suspected the Japs of this for some time. Or maybe he’s merely running down the most probable bearing of the submarine, based on previous information. Whatever the cause, he certainly deserves 100 per cent for effort so far, and Harder had better get out of the way.

  “Take her down! Dive! Dive!” There may still be a chance to go after the convoy, but this new fellow requires attention first. Again the approach. Not so easy as the last time. This bird is wary, and zigzagging. He’s alert, no question of it, and no doubt is fully aware of what happened to his buddy. On he comes, weaving first one way, then the other. It is now fairly dark. Broken clouds obscure the moon and deprive. Sam Dealey of the light he sorely needs to make accurate observations. The destroyer is a dim blur in the periscope. Ranges are inaccurate and estimations of enemy course difficult to make. Finally, with the best information he can set into the TDC, Sam gives the order to fire. Six torpedoes flash out toward the oncoming destroyer.