Submarine!

by Edward L. Beach

  Sound listens intently for the sound of the proper functioning of the deadly fish. A white-faced operator turns to the skipper. “Can’t hear the first two!” he gasps. “Last four seem to be running O.K.!” Two sinkers! Damn those undependable torpedoes! But four out of six are still all right. They should do the trick, barring extraordinary luck and skill on the part of the Jap.

  We’ve simply got to see what he’s doing. Up with the periscope again. Time stands still for the members of the fire control party—as it does, indeed, for every man aboard. You have no way of knowing what is going on except through the eyes of the Captain. From his attitude and his actions, plus what few words of description he might remember to say, you make up your own picture of the topside.

  This time they do not have long to wait. Dealey’s figure stiffens. “He’s seen them! He’s turning this way! Take her down!” As the submarine noses over in obedience to the command, Sam gets a last sight of the enemy ship twisting radically as he avoids the torpedoes. Almost inaudibly he mutters, “Good work, you son of a bitch!”

  And that is as far as Sam Dealey’s accolade of the enemy’s maneuvers goes, for he has much to do and a very short time in which to do it. Harder is immediately rigged for depth charges and for “silent running.”

  The sound man has suddenly become the most important man in the ship. All hands hang upon his words, as he deliberately turns his sound head control wheel. “Target is starting a run!” You might have thought the sound operator was reporting a drill instead of a life-and-death battle. “Target,” indeed!

  “He’s shifted to short scale.” The enemy destroyer has speeded up his pinging, shortened the interval between pings as the range closes. All hands unconsciously brace themselves, awaiting the first shock of the depth charges. It doesn’t take long.

  Harder is just reaching deep depth as five depth charges explode in her face. This veteran ship and crew have received many depth charges in the past, but a depth charge is something you never get used to. The whole ship shudders convulsively as the explosions rain upon her, and the vibration of the hull swiftly fills the air with clouds of dust particles and bits of debris from broken light bulbs and other fragile fixtures.

  In the control room a new man is on the stern planes. This is his first patrol and he is doing the best he can, straining perhaps a bit too hard in his anxiety to have everything perfect. The stern plane indicators stop moving. He instantly deduces that the electrical control for the stem planes has been damaged. Quickly he shifts into hand power, nervously tugging at the slow-moving change gear. Then, panting heavily and a little flustered, he rapidly spins the wheel—the wrong way! It takes less time to do than it does to tell about it. The power to the stern planes had not been lost—merely the indicating circuit. And as Harder reaches maximum submergence, she has full dive on her stern planes instead of full rise.

  In a second everyone realizes that something is wrong. Instead of gradually decreasing its angle, the ship tilts down even more, as though going into an outside loop. The deck slants at an impossible angle and the depth gauge needle goes unheedingly past the 300-foot mark.

  “All hands aft on the double!” The diving officer’s harsh command starts everyone moving, with the exception of those who are required to remain at their stations. In the meantime he quickly checks the situation, and reaching across the struggling stern planesman’s shoulders, flips a tiny switch which cuts in the emergency stern plane angle indicator—which should have been energized previously. The emergency indicator shows Full Dive. Grasping the wheel, the diving officer puts his whole body into countering the frenzied effort of the now-frightened stern planesman, wrests the wheel away from him and commences to spin it counterclockwise. He works silently with the furious speed of urgency. When he finally has the planes corrected to full rise, he turns them back over to the trembling sailor who has been the cause of the trouble.

  “Watch this,” he says, pointing to the emergency angle indicator. No time now for investigation or instruction. The angle is coming off the ship. She finally levels off, far below her designed depth, and then commences to rise again. Forty-odd men huddled in the after parts of the ship create a rather large, unbalanced weight. The stern planes in hand power are slow to turn, the bow of the ship continues to rise, and the deck now tilts again in the opposite direction. The men sent aft understand what is going on and stream forward as soon as the ship commences to rise, but it is not until she is halfway back to the surface that she is finally brought under control.

  In the meantime, the destroyer has reversed course and returned to the vicinity, and lets fly with another severe hammering.

  You have to hand it to this destroyer. He has taken the initiative away from the submarine and has effectively protected his convoy. Sam Dealey’s only thought by this time is to get away from him. It takes a few hours to do so, but finally Harder comes to the surface several miles away from the scene of the attack. These have been an eventful four hours.

  Late forenoon of the next day Harder’s crew is still resting from the strenuous previous evening. The ship is patrolling submerged, and everything appears to be calm and peaceful, when the musical “Bong! Bong! Bong!” of the general alarm shatters the quiet of the sleeping crew. The word flashes almost instantly through the ship: “Another destroyer!”

  This is a fast one. There has been a slight haze on the surface and the range at sighting is 4000 yards, angle on the bow port twenty. Harder turns and heads toward the enemy, preparing all torpedo tubes as she does so. At 3000 yards the destroyer turns and heads directly toward the submarine as though he had sighted the periscope in the glassy smooth sea. He commences weaving, first to one side and then to the other, and increases speed rapidly as he roars in. No question but that he has detected the submarine. Sam will have to fire right down his throat in order to get him. If he misses—well, he’d better not. If the destroyer catches the submarine at shallow depth, things will be pretty tough.

  The range closes quickly—2000 yards; 1,500 yards—sound has been listening intently to the target’s screws coming in and speeding up as he does so, but, like all good sound men, he trains his gear from side to side to check on all sectors. Suddenly he sings out, “Fast screws bearing zero nine zero, short-scale pinging!”

  This can mean only one thing, but there is no time to look now. Keep calm, keep cool, one thing at a time, this bird up ahead is coming on the range. Get him first and worry about the other later.

  One thousand yards. Standby forward! Standby one! Angle on the bow ten port, increasing. Wait a second until he has come to the limit of his weave in that direction and is starting back. Angle on the bow port twenty, range, 700 yards. He stops swinging.

  “Bearing—mark,” snaps the skipper. “Standby!”

  Sam Logan on the TDC makes an instantaneous but careful check of his instrument and observes that the generated target bearing on the TDC is exactly the same as the periscope bearing.

  “Set!” he snaps back at his skipper.

  “Fire!” Logan takes up the count at the TDC, spacing his torpedoes deliberately so that they cannot possibly run into each other and so that they will diverge slightly as they race toward the destroyer. One after the other two more torpedoes stream out toward the careening destroyer.

  “Right full rudder, all ahead full,” Dealey hurls the orders from the periscope as he stands there, his eyes glued to his instrument, watching for the success or failure of his daring attack.

  Suddenly he shouts, “Check fire!” Almost simultaneously a heavy explosion is felt by everyone in the submarine. There is no need to pass the word to explain what that was. They have heard plenty of torpedo explosions by now.

  With full speed and full rudder Harder has already started to gather way through the water and turn away from the destroyer. Dealey continues watching, however, and is rewarded by seeing the third torpedo smash into his stern. Clouds of smoke, steam, and debris rise from the stricken enemy high over the tops
of his masts. He is so close that he continues coming, although his directive force and power are both gone, and Harder must get clear.

  Suddenly there is a tremendous explosion, far more violent than the others. The submarine trembles from stern to stern and the noise is almost deafening. Surprisingly, there is less cork dust and debris tossed about inside in spite of the seemingly much-greater-than-usual shock. The destroyer’s magazines have let go at a range of 300 yards, and within a minute after first being hit, his gutted, smoking remains sink beneath the waves. From time of sighting to time of sinking has taken nine minutes.

  But what about this other set of screws on the starboard beam, which Sound has been nervously reporting for the past two minutes? The skipper starts to swing his periscope to that bearing but is interrupted by the sound man’s cry:

  “Fast screws close aboard! He’s starting his run!”

  With her rudder hard over, Harder rushes for the depths. She has not quite reached her maximum submergence when the first depth charges go off.

  This new chap is pretty good, too, and he doesn’t waste many. Twisting and turning, always presenting Harder’s stern to the Jap and endeavoring to make away from the area of the attack, Sam Dealey matches wits with the enemy. After four long hours he manages to shake him loose, and the submarine returns to periscope depth. Then, for the first time in more than six hours, Dealey has a chance to leave the conning tower.

  In less than an hour he was back at the periscope with two more destroyers in sight. As Dealey scanned the horizon he sighted a third one, then a fourth—then a fifth, and then a sixth! All six were in line of bearing headed for Harder!

  When Sam Dealey reached this point in his patrol report, he could not resist inserting the comment: “Such popularity must be deserved.”

  It is on record that Harder’s captain was now torn between two emotions: the desire to go after the enemy and tangle with them in hopes of getting one or two more, and a much more prudent and sensible decision to beat it. In the end, the latter judgment prevailed.

  But all was not over yet. Two days later, shortly before dawn, Harder was detected and bombed by a plane, the bomb exploding close aboard as she was on her way down. It is strongly suspected that the subsequent sighting of two destroyers to the westward shortly before noon was a result of a report made by the pilot. Once again, what with air cover and the glassy smooth sea which existed in the locality, Harder decided to play it safe and evade.

  But not so that night. Shortly after sunset, while the submarine is running on the surface off Tawi Tawi, one of the bridge lookouts sights two destroyers dead ahead. Now the conditions are a little more to Dealey’s liking, and the odds not so uneven.

  The battle stations alarm is sounded again, and in a few minutes the submarine slips silently beneath the waves. The destroyers are on a line of bearing, and Dealey hopes to get them both with a single salvo.

  Twenty minutes after being sighted the two destroyers pass in an overlapping formation across the bow of the submarine at a range of about one thousand yards. This is the moment Dealey has been waiting for. He plans to shoot at the nearest destroyer. Any torpedoes that miss will have a chance of hitting the second target.

  “Standby forward.”

  They do not have long to wait. Four torpedoes, evenly spaced, run toward the enemy. Dealey stands staring through his periscope. The first torpedo passes just ahead, and misses. The second torpedo hits near the bow, and a few seconds later the third hits under the bridge. The fourth torpedo misses astern.

  At this juncture Dealey swings his ship with hard right rudder, getting ready for a setup on the second destroyer if that should prove to be necessary. The first destroyer, now burning furiously, continues on his way but slows down rapidly as simple momentum takes the place of live power from his propellers. Behind his stern Dealey can again see the second vessel, just in time to see the fourth and last torpedo crash into him. It is instantly apparent that no additional torpedoes will be needed for either ship.

  Gripping the periscope handles, Dealey swings the ’scope back to the first destroyer which by this time is only 400 yards away, broadside to. He is just in time to observe another explosion take place amidships in the unfortunate ship. The destroyer’s decks buckle in the center and open up with the force of the blast, just under the after stack. Momentarily everything is blotted out, but Dealey gets the impression that the stack has been blown straight into the air.

  In a moment the force of the explosion hits Harder with sufficient strength to make her heel over. But Dealey swings back quickly to the second destroyer, observes an even more powerful and, in the gathering darkness, totally blinding explosion from under his bridge. The explosion in the first destroyer had probably been a boiler reached by sea water; that in the second was evidently his magazines.

  Within a matter of minutes both ships have disappeared, and Harder is once more on the surface, sniffing about at the scene of destruction, and then clearing the area at high speed in the event that planes might be sent from Tawi Tawi to investigate the sudden disappearance of two more tin cans.

  Next morning Harder was a few miles south of Tawi Tawi, reconnoitering the anchorage. At about 0900 two destroyers were sighted, evidently on a submarine search. Perfectly willing to oblige them, Sam Dealey commenced an approach. The enemy’s search plan evidently did not include the spot where the submarine lay, and they passed on over the horizon.

  In the late afternoon a large Japanese task force, consisting of several battleships and cruisers, was sighted, escorted by half a dozen or more destroyers and three or four aircraft circling overhead. Harder was out of position for an attack, but it appeared that here was an opportunity for a contact report which might enable some other submarine to get into position to trap the task force later on.

  While watching the largest battleship, which appeared to be one of Japan’s two mystery ships—huge 60,000-ton monsters—Dealey saw him suddenly become enveloped in heavy black smoke, and in a few moments three distant explosions were heard. It was possible that one of our other submarines already had made an attack.

  Suddenly a destroyer darted out of the confused melee of ships and headed directly for Harder. Perhaps her periscope had been sighted!

  Battle stations submerged!

  At maximum full speed the destroyer’s bow is high out of water. His stem squats in the trough created by his own passage, and black smoke pours from his stacks, to be swept aft by the wind of his passing. Harder turns and swings her bow directly toward the onrushing vessel; lines him up for a shot directly down the throat.

  Things are deathly quiet in Harder’s conning tower. There is no problem to solve by TDC or by plotting parties, except the determination of the approximate range at which to fire. The target’s bearing remains steady. The torpedo gyros remain on zero. The target’s angle on the bow remains absolute zero, and he is echo ranging steadily, rapidly, and right on.

  The range closes with fantastic speed. Dealey makes an observation every thirty seconds or so. The periscope is almost in continuous motion. The sweat peels off his face, drips off the ends of his fingers as they grip the periscope handles—everything else in the conning tower is stock-still, as though time had ceased to function, except for the range counters on the TDC, which steadily indicate less and less range.

  Range, 4000 yards. Only a few minutes to go. The sound man, intently listening to the approaching propeller beats, reports, “He has slowed down.”

  Through the periscope it is obvious that he has indeed slowed down. His bow wave is smaller, and he now appears to be digging his bow deeper into it as the stern rises somewhat.

  From the sound man: “Turn count fifteen knots!”

  Wily fellow, this. He knows he is approaching the submarine’s position, and plans to search the area carefully.

  On he comes. Still no deviation in course, headed directly for the submarine’s periscope. Probably he has seen it, and he no doubt plans to run right over i
t as he drops his depth charges. Not being a submarine man, he probably fails to realize that that periscope has been popping up and down in nearly the same place entirely too precisely and entirely too long. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that the submarine is obviously making no attempt to escape.

  In Harder’s conning tower the range dials on the TDC have reached 1,500 yards; target’s speed is 15 knots, angle on the bow zero, relative bearing zero, torpedo gyros zero.

  “Standby to shoot! Up periscope!”

  The periscope whines softly as it rises out of its well. At this moment another report from Sound: “Fast screws! Close aboard starboard beam!”

  Another ship! Destroyer, of course! The thought flashes through Dealey’s mind with a small shock. He has been so intent on laying a trap for this fellow dead ahead that he has neglected to look about for others who might be coming.

  “Too late to worry about him now,” Dealey mutters to himself, squatting before the periscope well. Aloud he says, “To hell with him! Let’s get this son of a bitch up ahead.”

  “Bearing—mark!” The periscope starts down. “No change,” barks out Dealey, meaning that the situation is exactly as it should be.

  “Set!” from Sam Logan on the TDC.

  “Fire!” from Lynch. As assistant approach officer, Frank Lynch is responsible that all details of the approach have been correctly executed and the proper settings made on the torpedoes. The ship lurches; one torpedo is on the way. Sam Logan deliberately waits five seconds, then he turns a handle on the face of the TDC a fraction of a degree to the right and quietly says again, “Set.”

  “Fire.” A second torpedo speeds on its way. Logan turns the handle again, this time to the left.