On August 11, O’Kane had selected a spot off the coast of Honshu known as Miki Saki for a submerged patrol. It soon became evident that he had correctly gauged a hot spot, for a modern gunboat, which he described as “loaded with depth charges,” cruised in the area, while a nondescript motorboat wandered about with six lookouts keeping a sharp watch. All day was spent in avoiding these two characters, but at about 1500 the motorboat, by great good luck, sighted the periscope of the questing submarine, and tailed her from then on.
Not good, this, but Tang is not one to give up just because a little boat latches on to her. Surfacing and giving him a quick going over would not be advisable because of the gunboat which had been sighted earlier and the possible presence of planes. Apparently the motorboat is not positive about its contact, for no heavier anti-sub forces come out to help, so Tang nonchalantly keeps patrolling the area, although this little fellow is annoying.
Shortly before 1700 smoke is sighted. Tang starts the approach, and the smoke resolves itself into two heavily laden ships, escorted by the gunboat, and another escort. Both ships are running as close to the beach as they dare, and Tang goes right on in after them, followed by the ubiquitous motor-boat. The approach develops normally, and it is not long before O’Kane finds himself just where he wants to be, broad on the leading target’s beam, ready to shoot. Just then there is an excited report from the sound man:
“Fast screws, Captain! Bearing two one five!” The sound man has been obeying the standing order for torpedo approaches to search continually all around unless specifically directed otherwise. These screws are on the port quarter; the targets are on the port bow, coming up on the firing point.
O’Kane spins the periscope around for a quick look. Damn that motorboat anyway! He has evidently warned the gunboat, and that worthy is now charging down on Tang with a bone in his teeth and a look of fury suffusing his sleek hull. A minute and a half to get here. There is time—barely—to fire the fish.
Tang’s periscope turns back to the enemy. The situation has suddenly changed dramatically, for the worst! There may be just enough time to shoot the torpedoes, but, oh-h-h-h, are we going to catch it! Dick O’Kane is a marvel of concentration. Although the tension has suddenly leaped up to a terrific pitch he calmly goes through all the many motions associated with firing torpedoes. But his voice is clipped, short, and sharp. He expects every man to get it the first time, and no repeats.
“Standby forward!”
“Final setup!”
“Bearing.—mark!”
“Set!” From the TDC operator.
“Fire!” Three torpedoes, properly spaced, are fired at the leading ship.
“Shift targets! Second ship! Bearing—Mark!”
“Three four one!”
“Set!”
“FIRE!” Even before the second fish of this three-torpedo salvo is on its way, O’Kane turns back to the gunboat, JUST in time to see him charge across the stern at full speed. Evidently he had misjudged the sub’s direction of motion, which is a lucky break. Another minute free, at least. In the meantime, as soon as the last torpedo is fired, the word is passed through the ship: “Rig for depth charge!”
Back goes the periscope toward the targets. Many a man would have pulled his down in this juncture, but not O’Kane. He simply must see these targets sink! “Take her down!” he orders, but he keeps the scope up.
“Come on! Come on!” He has only a few seconds left to see the hit—he must see it—WHANG! Right in the middle. It must have caught his old-style boilers, for the ship virtually disintegrates. Dick has time to see the explosion, and the ship breaking into two pieces, before the periscope goes under as Tang seeks the shelter of the depths.
Two more explosions are heard. One of the members of the control party is assiduously logging the times and characteristics of all explosions—proper evaluation of results requires that some record be kept—and these are later identified as the fourth and fifth torpedoes striking into the second freighter. But the log of the attack merely lists two explosions, ten seconds apart, which “sounded like torpedoes.”
But this is by no means all for this merry afternoon. The Jap gunboat has quickly realized his mistake and has reversed course. Sound carefully keeps on him, and soon his bearing is steady. His screws slow down—he is listening and probing with his echo-ranging gear. The high-pitched ping of his sound gear coming in over Tang’s receiver—Peep—peep—peeeeeeep—peeeep—searches relentlessly this way and that, growing louder when he is on the bearing, diminishing when he is off.
There is a loud-speaker mounted near the sound console, but it is not used. The frenetic bleeps of the enemy apparatus are audible throughout the conning tower from the operator’s earphones. Since contact has been so recently lost, it does not take long to regain it, and soon the horrid “Peep, peep, peep!” noise is coming in regularly. It won’t be long now!
“Screws have speeded up!” suddenly reports Sound.
All at once it becomes obvious to everyone that the interval between successive pings has decreased. The sound man’s report—“Shifting to short scale!”—is totally unnecessary. As the enemy approaches, the time necessary for an echo to return from the submerged submarine of course decreases, its length determining the range. But as it decreases, it then becomes possible to send out more peeps, and thus get more echoes. The gunboat’s shifting to a more frequent ranging interval indicates that he has an excellent contact and that he is coming in for the attack.
“Standby! He’s starting a run!” The word is whispered over the ship’s sound-powered telephones, as though the use of full voice might help the enemy in locating the sub.
Tang has not been idle in the short time since the firing of the torpedoes. Preparations for receiving a beating are more or less standard among the submarine force, and it took less than a minute for the well-drilled crew to rig ship for depth charge attack.
The effect upon the various members of the crew would be revealing, were there any way to detect it. Some men secretly pray, as they go about their tasks. Others feel a sort of masochistic pleasure, secure in their own private fatalistic concepts of life and death. All essay a nervous little smile, and watch furtively to see how the others are taking it.
Up in the conning tower, Dick O’Kane has not been idle either. Evasion, like attack, is the skipper’s responsibility in a submarine. He has been twisting and turning, presenting the smallest possible target to the probing fingers of the enemy sound gear. At the same time he has been endeavoring to move away from the coast of Honshu, out to sea, where Tang will have deeper water and more room to maneuver.
But try as he may, the enemy gunboat has far too good a contact to be shaken so easily. The menacing propellers come ever closer, and their beat is speeded up gradually as the attack is developed. Tang has received depth charges before, but never from such a deliberate fellow.
Closer and closer come the malevolent screws, and the bleat of the echo-ranging signals are one continuous “Peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep,” until it seems that the mind must reel. Beads of sweat roll down the forehead and cheeks of the concentrating sound man, curving into the corners of his mouth, and occasionally his nervous tongue licks at the salty taste thus produced. Murray Frazee once wipes off his forehead and the back of his neck, but Sound shakes his head uneasily, and the exec lets it go.
“Coming on the range now!” The report is muttered as though in meditation. “Coming on the range . . . He’s dropped the first one!” The sound man has caught the splash of the depth charge dropping into the water.
“How fast do Jap depth charges sink?” The question hangs pregnantly in mid-air. Frazee tries to remember his destroyer days: about ten feet a second—200 feet—that’s as deep as we can go—twenty seconds—hope he hasn’t got the depth set right . . .
“He’s dropped six of them!” The report sounds oddly loud in the confined conning tower, and O’Kane realizes with a start of sympathy that this operat
or—his best—has been on duty for two strenuous hours without once removing his earphones.
“Ten seconds more, Captain!” Frazee tries to assume the disinterested voice of an observer at a target practice.
“WHAM! . . . WHAM! . . . WHAM! . . . WHAM! . . . WHAM! . . . WHAM! The shock is beyond all expectation, beyond reason. With a scream of agony, the sound man jerks off his earphones and stands up trembling before his instrument. The poor fellow had forgotten to turn down his gain control before the charges went off, and is really in severe pain. Dick O’Kane clutches the steel hoist cable of the periscope to keep from falling down, and with his free hand supports the shuddering sound man, who has been flung off his balance by the succeeding blows. Several cigarette receptacles are flung to the furiously vibrating deck plates of the tiny compartment. The explosions resound throughout the ship like pile-driver blows. The atmosphere is filled with a strumming many-pitched roar, produced by the sudden vibration induced in the bulkheads and all the pipes and fittings. Occasionally a piece gives way with a peculiarly explosive noise of relief which only adds to the discordant uproar.
Several men are knocked off their feet by the intensity of the barrage. The air within Tang’s tough steel hull is filled with flying bits of dust and specks of paint, plus larger items such as sections of cork insulation and other material not firmly nailed down.
Frazee and O’Kane look at each other with dismay. This birdie certainly has the range all right. Wonder how much of this kind of pounding good old Tang can stand. So far, not much serious damage, but there’s no telling when one of these blockbusters will be a bull’s-eye.
Regaining control over his jumping reflexes and somehow quieting the ringing in his ears to at least bearable level, the sound man returns to his listening equipment, and immediately picks up the gunboat’s screws on Tang’s port bow, where he is heard to slow down, apparently waiting for possible results to his first attack, and no doubt planning another.
The Captain speaks to the conning tower telephone talker. “Check and report all compartments!” The crisp command goes out to all the eight other watertight compartments of the ship, and the reports come back immediately, indicating that the men in each have already taken stock of their situation. So far all is reassuring, although no one in the ship can recollect ever having received a barrage as close as this one before.
O’Kane’s mind is a boiling mass of ideas for evasion; so is Murray Frazee’s, and the two hold hurried counsel. It is probable that the enemy will try to box Tang, in shallow water, against the not-too-distant coast of Honshu.
By this time it is deathly quiet again, even the prolonged swishing noise produced by the depth charges having died down and the querulous “Peep . . . peep . . . peep” can again be heard by the people in the conning tower. O’Kane would like to take a sounding, but dares not, since the signal of his depth finder would furnish the Jap with precisely the information he is seeking—the location of Tang. But after a moment’s thought Dick has the answer for that one. The operator of the depth-finding equipment receives instructions to take one sounding in the middle of each depth charge barrage, and to leave the gear turned off otherwise. The scheme is instantly obvious to all, for naturally the Jap sound man will not expect to hear anything while the depth charges are going off-while Tang’s operator, knowing when to expect the return echo, can probably catch it through the terrific uproar of the explosions. A neat dodge, and one requiring considerable skill.
“He’s turning this way!” The sound man in the conning tower diagnoses the maneuver heralding the arrival of a second attack, the one which Dick O’Kane has been waiting for, during which he will put into effect the evasive maneuver he has planned.
“Here he comes! Shifting to short scale! Screws speeding up!”
“Right full rudder! All ahead full!” Until this moment Tang has been creeping along at evasive speed, which is as slow as she can go and, of course, running as noiselessly as possible, which can only be accomplished effectively while at creeping speed. This full-speed business will surely be detected over the Jap sound gear, though the enemy’s own speed will make this more difficult. But O’Kane is figuring on completely outwitting him. Tang turns quickly and heads straight for the Jap gunboat. Perhaps Dick has remembered something which Mush Morton did one time, in a similar situation when brought to bay by a Nipponese destroyer—only difference now is that Tang has had no opportunity to get any torpedoes ready forward. And Dick’s plan proves to be a modification of the one Morton had used in Wahoo, for Tang rockets along, figuratively laying her ears back alongside her head, and runs at full speed directly beneath the on-rushing Jap.
But though this unorthodox maneuver has caught him somewhat by surprise, the Jap skipper is not napping, and unloads a full cargo of ash cans as the submarine passes beneath him. The deliberate attack he had planned is frustrated, but he makes with a mighty good one, nonetheless.
Sixteen depth charges this time. Because of her high speed, Tang’s sound gear is unable to pick up the splash of the depth charges dropping in the water, and there is therefore no warning as to how many to expect. It is just WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM! One prolonged, unpunctuated, smashing, shattering cataclysm! Nearly everyone in Tang is knocked off his feet by the fearful pounding! Deck plates are hurled about, the very frames ring, and the bulkheads and built-in fixtures resound in a hundred different keys. Tang shakes throughout her length, seems to whip convulsively in fishtailing fashion, every part of her jumping around weirdly and frighteningly. The unfortunate men handling vital equipment, such as the bow planes, stern planes, and steering, grip their large stainless-steel wheels with white knuckles and bloodless joints, for they have come alive in their hands as though electrified, transmitting a shivering vibration into the very marrow of their bones. In the maneuvering room, where the full power of the battery is being fed into the straining propellers, there is continual arcing and flashing in the control cubicle, the heart of the electric-propulsion equipment. If some of those huge switches should fly open, or if an unusually heavy arc were to fuse some errant piece of copper or steel into a dead short circuit, the whole place would go up in smoke. The battering and pounding are terrific, but the electrician’s mates, knowing their lives depend upon it, are holding the most crucial levers and switches in by hand—and lucky is the man who has asbestos gloves.
O’Kane and Frazee, having had perhaps more warning than the others, have hung on where they were, still on their feet. It seems to both that Tang’s last moments must have come, for how can a simple steel shell, no matter how strongly and honestly built, withstand a succession of near bull’s-eyes? But the unholy barrage finally stops, and a breathless quiet suddenly envelops the ship.
The Jap had been so thrown off balance by Tang’s sudden maneuver that he was unable to regain contact, and searched fruitlessly in the wake left by her mad dash for deep water. Thirty-eight minutes after the torpedoes had been fired, Tang was back to periscope depth, to see her recent antagonist still searching and depth charging the area, planes circling overhead, and the other escort, which had never been involved in the action, cruising about slowly, picking up survivors. There was nothing else in sight.
Eleven days later Tang was back at Miki Saki, with unpleasant memories of the depth charge expert she had encountered there. But the hunting had been elsewhere, and now that the area might be presumed to have cooled off a bit, she was back to try her luck once again. Shortly after midnight the sleek submarine rounded Miki Saki and quietly poked her nose into Owase Wan, a small bay nearby, in quest of a ship. Since by this time it must have become plain to the Japs that they had incurred their worst losses at night, it was logical that at least some of their ships would anchor in a more or less sheltered anchorage to ride the night out, and thus accept the relatively lesser risk of a daylight submerged attack. Tang’s idea was to knock off one of these sitting ducks.
Sure enough! Anchored
right in the middle of Owase Wan, unmistakably pointed out by radar, was a ship, rather small, but certainly worth torpedoes.
O.K., chum. Battle stations surface torpedo! The call rings throughout the ship, brings all hands out of their bunks or away from whatever else they might have been doing—it was not unusual for submariners to “turn night into day,” so far as their sleeping habits were concerned when on patrol, and this particularly was the case with Tang, who made most of her fame at night. All hands go to their stations, and a picked crew of gunners mounts to the bridge, there to make ready the twenty-millimeter guns in case it becomes necessary to shoot their way out of shallow water.
First the plotting parties track the ship, to make sure he is at anchor. Correct—speed zero. Then Tang noses in slowly cautiously. It is necessary to get a look at him, to line him up for a broadside shot, so Dick O’Kane takes his ship completely around the enemy, looking him over away from the dark land background. When finally revealed, his silhouette brings a thrill to the skipper. There is no mistaking that long, low shape. This is the gunboat which had given Tang that tooth-shaking barrage of depth charges on her last visit to this area!
Boys, we’re going to get this bastard! He has it coming to him! Tang twists on her heel, presents her stern to the enemy. One electric torpedo is set for an absolutely straight stern shot, aimed carefully, and fired. It leaves a phosphorescent wake in the water, by which its progress may be followed, but the wake stops after 100 yards of travel, and a loud rumble is heard over Tang’s sound gear, indicating that it has suddenly dived to the bottom. One wasted.
Two minutes after the first one, a second electric torpedo is fired, also from the stern. Surely the Japs must be keeping a watch of some kind. But no sign, and the second phosphorescent wake heads straight for the target and passes exactly beneath him. Two wasted, and how can he fail to notice what is going on?
Something wrong with the electric fish? Maybe he had better quit shooting them, check them over again. Besides, O’Kane wants to keep the three he has left aft for a full salvo against some other ship. So Tang circles, brings her bow around to bear. She is less than half a mile from the target now, but there is still no sign of life on board.
Submarine! Page 17