Submarine!

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Submarine! Page 27

by Edward L. Beach


  Ed was calling up the hatchway again: “Final trim, sir. Depth, six-oh feet, one third speed.” There was a barely perceptible tone in his voice. To hit the final compensation so closely on the very first dive of a new ship smacked of the miraculous. On Triggers first dive it had taken us an hour and a half of pumping and flooding before we were satisfied.

  My new skipper was not one to pass by the moment, either; that was one of the first things I had begun to like about him. In a few well-chosen words shouted down the hatch, he let Ed know that he was without doubt the world’s finest diving officer, and that we were extraordinarily fortunate to have him aboard.

  Tirante’s character developed rapidly, even before the training period was complete. Her radar was the most powerful I had ever encountered; her engines ran best when loaded to more than full rated power; she made 21 knots with ease whereas other subs of the same design struggled to reach 19. She carried four more fish than Trigger, and her torpedoes had been modified to eliminate the frustrations of the earlier war years. Many of Tirante’s crew were already veterans of the Pacific, some of them from Trigger herself. We built upon the virtues and mistakes of those from whom we had learned the business.

  The prologue of Tirante’s first war patrol states laconically: “Ship completed on November 23, 1944, and commenced training in fog, storms, and freezing weather off Portsmouth. Tirante’s builders did a wonderful job.” Somehow, starting with that first dive, everything seemed to work right the first time for us. After two and a half years fighting a ship which had gradually had more and more things wrong with her—whether the result of enemy action or just plain misadventure-despite which she had performed magnificently, it was an unprecedented delight to me to have everything go right.

  During our two-week training period at New London prior to departure for the Pacific we worked out our fire control, our damage control, and all the other phases of submarine technique. Tirelessly, Ensign Bill Ledford, onetime chief torpedoman of Trigger, now assistant torpedo officer of Tirante, tinkered with his fish, and every torpedo we fired in practice hit the target. By the time we were ready to leave, Tirante had become a perfectionist, and we had no doubt of being able to pass any readiness inspection Admiral Lockwood cared to toss at us.

  Then the day before setting out for Balboa and the Pacific our preparations were interrupted by an unexpected summons for the skipper. When he returned, he motioned Lieutenant Endicott (Chub) Peabody II and me into his stateroom.

  “It was the Force Gunnery Officer,” he said without preamble. “He’s got a hot potato on his hands and wants us to take it over.”

  “What is it, Captain?”

  George chuckled. “It seems that the employees of the Westinghouse Corporation plant at Sharon, Pennsylvania, which makes electric torpedoes, got together and donated one special torpedo for the war effort. It’s up in the torpedo shop now, tested and ready to go, and they want somebody to take it out with them.”

  “We’ve already loaded all our fish, sir,” said Chub. “We’d have to take one back out . . .”

  The skipper’s grin widened. “Wait till I tell you the rest. This torpedo is painted up like a highway billboard sign so nobody can possibly mistake it. It’s been photographed at least a dozen times, at least once at every stage of its construction and trials. Two admirals have publicly told Sharon that the fish will be delivered to the enemy with their compliments, and now—somebody has got to make good on all the bragging.”

  “You mean,” I interjected, “they want us to take this particular fish out and plant it in the bottom of some Jap battleship? Don’t they know battleships don’t grow on trees and that even with a perfectly aimed salvo some of the fish are bound to miss?”

  “Oh, they’re not unreasonable. They’ll settle for any decent-sized maru.”

  Chub said, “We’d sure look foolish if we took it out and then had to report we hadn’t hit anything with it, wouldn’t we?”

  This didn’t faze George. “You’re right,” he said, “and that’s why taking it along is purely voluntary. A couple of ships have already declined the honor for that very reason. So the Force Gunnery Officer is getting right anxious to get rid of it, and I told him we’d see that it reached the desired destination.”

  We might have known our skipper would never pass up this kind of challenge. There was a gleam in Chub’s eyes, and I, too, felt a little pleased with the Old Man.

  “It’s on its way down right now,” George added.

  By the time it had arrived in a specially built torpedo carrier, accompanied by a bevy of high-ranking officers and half-a-dozen photographers, and we had tucked it aboard, we realized we had carried out the most thoroughly documented torpedo loading in history. And, as Ed Campbell commented after watching the performance, if we came back from patrol without having made good with it, we had better throw our hats in ahead of us wherever we entered.

  On January 8, 1945, Tirante set forth from New London for Pearl Harbor. The passage took us thirty-three days, including eight days of exercises at Balboa, Canal Zone, and we drilled every day and part of every night. We had been out of the war zone for so long that there was a lot of catching up to do, and Street and I pored over our file of war patrol reports as we sped into warmer seas and through the canal.

  We were in a hurry, too, for it was already obvious that the war had not much longer to last. Our boats were crisscrossing the waters off the coast of Japan haunting the harbor entrances, or staying on the surface with impunity just offshore during daylight. One of our submarines had even entered Tokyo Bay on the surface during daylight to rescue an aviator who had ditched there during a carrier strike.

  The Japanese merchant marine—what was left of it—lived in terror of the American submarines. In 1944 approximately half of the ships departing from the empire found their final destination at the bottom. Our executions at night had been the most horrendous of all. Once Admiral Lock wood had straightened out the torpedo fiasco, the heartbreaking failures and unexplained “misses” had been greatly reduced, and convoy after convoy had been wiped out in the hours between sunset and sunrise. The Japanese were now holing up at night, and running ships across the open sea only during daylight, when they figured our submarines would have to attack submerged, thus sacrificing mobility and giving them a better chance of getting their ships through.

  So we worked our way through the training program at Balboa and Pearl Harbor with a vengeance and a will, finishing both of them in the minimum possible time, and then there remained only one thing before we could be on our way—the selection of our patrol area.

  To us this meant a lot, for ComSubPac never gave a sign of how well or how poorly trained he considered any particular submarine. If she passed the stiff requirements he had set down, he sent her on patrol; if she did not, he held her up for more training; in extreme cases, he had been known to relieve the skipper and others of her crew. You could tell what Uncle Charlie thought of you only by where he sent you: the hottest ships went to the hottest spots, for obvious reasons. Finally our assignment came: the East China and Yellow seas—just about as hot an area as he could hand out.

  Once more the luck of the Tirante had proved good. We carefully loaded our “Sharon Special” into number-six torpedo tube. Since we always fired in inverse order, with the first torpedo aimed at the MOT (Middle Of Target), this location would give it the maximum chance of hitting with our first salvo from the bow tubes. And after that particular salvo had been fired, we would all feel much better.

  Exchanging the play-acting of training for the reality of bombs, depth charges, warheads, and sinking ships is probably the most massive change which comes to an individual or a ship. At the same time, it is one of those things which cannot be approached by degrees. No matter how realistic the training, there is still the comforting knowledge that all participants will eventually find their way back to harbor. It is a common phenomenon to discover that the most expert, aggressive, farseeing person dur
ing training exercises somehow never quite finds the same opportunities open to him in battle. And an individual who never made much of an impression before might rise to astonishing heights of effectiveness under the stimulus of extreme danger. So is it with ships—especially submarines.

  A psychologist could probably explain why it is that the first action on any patrol so often sets the tone for the whole cruise, and why the manner in which a new submarine handles her first contact with the enemy sets the character of the entire ship from then on. George Street and I did not know why, though we used to argue the reasons, but we knew it was so.

  On the southern tip of Kyushu lies a huge bay, Kagoshima Kaiwan, protected by several small islands offshore. Our information indicated that many coastal freighters used the harbor. The chart of previous patrols off Kyushu showed few submarine tracks here, no doubt because of the restricted waters, but the water was deep all the way up to the shore line. Not at all bad, if you didn’t mind fairly close quarters.

  Our object was twofold: to blood the ship as quickly as possible; and to get rid (honorably) of our VIT (Very Important Torpedo). So we resolved to venture into the precarious place, right off the harbor entrance, and patrol between the offshore islands and the mainland. I stayed up all night navigating, and shortly before dawn—on the morning of March 25—dived in the spot the Captain had selected, five miles off the entrance. But this did not satisfy George; during the morning, while I caught up on my sleep, he closed the coast within less than two miles, and shortly after noon a ship was sighted coming out of the bay.

  Our approach did not work out quite the way he had intended. We had stationed ourselves close to the beach, so that we would be on the shoreward side of any target coming out of the bay and heading up the coast. Thus we would be heading out to deeper water during the attack, and would be sure of firing our VIT from her bow tube. But the target, a small freighter, came by on our land side, apparently within inches of the rock-strewn shore line. Submerged, our draft was so great that we could not turn toward him for a bow shot for fear of striking the bottom. So we fired a salvo from the stern tubes. The first torpedo blew the guts out of him less than one minute after we had let her go, and the other two exploded upon striking the shore. It took about a minute for our victim to sink.

  The VIT still languished in the lower port forward torpedo tube, however, so we picked out a new spot well up the coast from Kagoshima Kaiwan—a precipitous cliff called Oniki Saki—and dived within a mile of it next morning. Three days we haunted the place, and right after lunch the third day our next victim came along.

  The general alarm was still sounding as I reached the control room. I jumped up the ladder and crowded into the conning tower behind Chub Peabody where I could navigate if necessary, coordinate the fire control solution, and assist the skipper as might be required. Street was already at the periscope.

  “Looks like a torpedo target,” he said. “Take a look.”

  I could see an object resembling a small square building with a large black chimney slightly to the right of its middle. A cloud of smoke belched from the chimney and was carried flat to the right. Shimmering haze made the lines difficult to distinguish.

  “Mark the bearing,” I said, and snapped the handles as signal for the periscope to start down again. “Small, old-type freighter,” I said to George. “Angle on the bow port ten. Seems to be making all the speed he can, probably ten knots.”

  George nodded. “That’s my guess, too, Ned. We’re using ten knots, and I put his angle on the bow as port fifteen.” He glanced over Chub’s shoulder to where the dials of the TDC reproduced a picture of the relative positions of the enemy ship and ourselves.

  “Here’s our chance to get rid of the VIT,” I observed. Everybody in the conning tower nodded, and I checked the camera.

  Several observations later George turned to me. “Make ready three fish, Ned, and spread them one to hit, one ahead, one astern.”

  We had already talked this over. Doctrine called for a spread of torpedoes equal to more than the length of the target, but this had been developed in the days of faulty torpedoes. Our first attack had proved that our torpedoes were all right. I ordered the spread, but aimed them so that all three ought to hit—one at the bow, one under the stack, and one at the stern. The VIT would go at the stack.

  We had been twisting and turning, following the target’s zigzag plan, maintaining ourselves in position while he approached. George, veteran of many patrols in the old Gar out of Australia, certainly knew how to handle a submarine. We never made a waste motion, and his periscope technique was perfection. Now he put down the ’scope, gave several quiet orders. Tirante ceased maneuvering and slowed down.

  “Standby forward.” George pointed to the telephone talker, who was already relaying the word.

  “Range.” He pointed to the sound operator.

  “One two double oh,” from the latter. Chub tapped his range dial and grinned tightly at the firing panel. Number six fish showed “ready,” and the switch was turned to On. The fire controlman stood with his hand on the firing key. I turned to Chub’s setup. The TDC showed the enemy just coming into the optimum firing position. It was humming softly, and the Correct Solution lights were glowing for the forward tube nest. The Gyro Angle Order switch was in the right position.

  “Gyros matched and ready!” announced Gene Richey, assistant TDC operator.

  “Set!” I told the skipper. He rose with the periscope halfway—“Mark!”—and signaled for it to go down.

  “Zero four three-a-half,” sang out Karlesses, the periscope jockey. I saw that it checked exactly with the angle on the TDC.

  “Fire!” I shouted. The fire controlman pushed the firing key, and we felt the recoil as a sudden jolt of air squirted out the first fish. Two more jolts followed.

  “All torpedoes running normally,” reported the sound man. Ensconced in a corner out of the way, a seaman was counting time. It seemed to take hours before he got to thirty seconds.

  The periscope started up again. If all went well, the first torpedo would be hitting about the time it got up. Time stood frozen. I could feel the palms of my hands sweating, and wiped them along my trouser legs. They still felt damp.

  WHRRRANG-G-G-! A tremendous explosion shook the heavy steel of Tirante’s frame. The periscope quivered in George’s grasp, and he seemed to press his forehead even deeper into the rubber buffer. I was standing beside him, waiting for my chance, and in a moment he turned the ’scope over to me.

  I could not see the center of our target, for it was obliterated in a column of water which had risen high above the tops of his masts. The bow and stern, as I watched, rose out of water and came toward each other. Then the water fell back, but the middle of the ship had disappeared.

  As the skipper jostled me out of the way, I had a split-second picture of the hapless vessel cocked up, twisted away from us, and sliding under.

  “Camera,” suddenly called out George. Quickly I handed it to him; helped him fit it in the periscope. Just as he snapped the shutter, another, lesser, explosion in the target vibrated through our ship. Evidently a boiler.

  When my next turn to look came a second or two later, there was just time to see the tip of the stern slide out of sight. Thirty seconds from the moment of the initial explosion, the ship had ceased to exist. The two extra torpedoes, running a few seconds after the first one, were robbed of their target and, neatly bracketing the stricken hulk, sped on beyond into the empty sea.

  The date was March 28, and we made a special note in our log for that day that the torpedo which had wrought such devastating effect was torpedo number 58009, donated to the Navy as a contribution to the war effort by the employees of the Westinghouse torpedo factory at Sharon, Pennsylvania. It still bore its special paint job as it streaked through the water on its final errand. Sharon received pictorial proof of its special contribution about four months after the Navy had accepted it.

  That night, well offshore, I
spread out the charts for the Captain as we debated where next to carry our hunt. However, a message on the submarine Fox radio intercept schedule brought a change to our plans. Trigger, which had completed two unproductive patrols since I left her, and was currently on her third, had been ordered to join Tirante in coordinated patrol in the East China Sea. On her present patrol—on which she had sunk two ships—she had a new skipper, David Connole, whom I had known slightly when he was a junior officer in the old Pompano before she was lost.

  Trigger was due to rendezvous with us that very night. We should raise her by radio in a few hours. I became rather excited at the prospect of seeing my old home again. Since there would be some coordination to accomplish, someone would have to go aboard for a conference. This was too good a chance to miss, and there were plenty of volunteers from men who had once served in Trigger to help man our tiny rubber boat.

  Several times that night we called Trigger by radio, but there was no answer. Silence. As morning drew near we dashed for the coast, submerged in a likely-looking spot, and waited impatiently for darkness again. Then we moved offshore once more to call my old ship. Trigger from Tirante. Trigger from Tirante . . . S 237 from S 420 . . . S 237 from S 420 . . .

  All night long the call went out. Carefully we peaked our transmitter to the exact frequency; gently we turned our receivers up and down the band to pick up the answer in case Trigger were a bit off key. All during that long and sleepless night we heard nothing.

  The third night was a repetition of the second, except that I spent nearly the whole time in the radio room. At irregular intervals Ed Secard tapped out the unrequited call. His face was inscrutable, his manner natural and precise. But Secard had made many patrols in Trigger, and when the time came for him to be relieved, he waved the man away. Fine beads of sweat broke out on his forehead, and a spot of color burned on his youthful cheekbones, but his right hand steadily and precisely pounded the coded call letters over and over again: S 237 V S 420 . . . K . . . S 237 V S 420 . . . K . . . S 237 V S 420 . . . K . . . Trigger from Tirante . . . I have a message for you . . . Trigger from Tirante I have a message for you . . . Trigger from Tirante . . . Come in please . . .

 

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