Which went both ways. He and Hooker fired both of the boat’s remaining stern torpedoes, but the nimble destroyers evaded them easily. That was okay. It bought him the breathing room he needed to make his run at the Yamato.
After that, he shot his bubblers from their ports on the beam. Thinking they were torpedoes, the destroyers scattered again, offering a clear path to his target.
Charlie returned his attention to the TBT. The Sandtiger was closing in on the giant battleship. She was performing beautifully. After so many failures during the patrol, the battered sea wolf was now hunting at her best efficiency.
Another shell struck the water close aboard, hurling a wall of water across the deck.
Then a destroyer sliced across his path, blocking his view.
“Keep her so,” Charlie snarled. “Steady on this course.”
More splashes soared around the boat, raining back down. The enemy destroyer grew larger by the second. A shell ripped the air overhead.
Rusty gripped the coaming. “You aren’t going to ram him, are you?”
“All guns aimed to port!” Charlie said. “Right full rudder!”
The boat turned hard to starboard, bringing the Sandtiger parallel with the enemy destroyer under a smoke-blackened sky. Only a hundred yards separated the two ships. Blue-uniformed Japanese sailors scrambled on the decks, gaping and screaming. The Americans roared back.
They couldn’t miss.
“Commence firing!” Charlie cried.
“Fire!” Morrison bellowed.
The Sandtiger opened up with every gun she had, raking the destroyer’s flank from bow to stern with devastating shellfire. Bodies and clouds of debris flew into the water.
Smoking, the destroyer drifted away without steering.
“Left full rudder! Well done! Rusty, conn us back to a ninety track. Target is still the Yamato.”
Planes howled overhead. Charlie glanced up in time to see a Japanese Zero dive from the clouds and shriek toward the Sandtiger.
“Zeke-type plane, near! Shoot it down!”
The Bofors and Oerlikon guns cranked skyward and poured a stream of shells into the sky. The Zero shied at the tracers but didn’t veer off. Nor did it fire.
It carried a bomb.
The plane wobbled under the withering AA fire, trailing smoke.
Something about its angle was wrong.
“He’s coming right at us,” Charlie said.
Rusty shrank from the coaming. “Christ, he’s—he’s going to ram!”
They ducked as the plane screeched overhead. Its wing disintegrated as it sliced off the shears. The impact rocked the men to the deck. Shards of metal sprayed the bridge like shrapnel as the plane cartwheeled into the sea with a terrific splash. The bomb exploded, launching a massive spray.
Shaking, Charlie rose to his feet on the wobbling deck. The shears were just gnarled stumps. The lookouts who’d been perched on them were gone. The two petty officers who’d been standing behind him lay groaning on the deck.
“Men overboard,” he gasped, knowing they couldn’t have survived the impact. “Casualties! We need Doc up here on the double.”
Morrison was still firing, so the gun crew was all right.
“Hook’s dead,” Rusty said.
The man lay on the deck, his head obscenely missing. Blood splattered the deck and coaming.
He looked up. They were just 3,000 yards from the Yamato. The three remaining enemy destroyers were making a desperate dash to cut him off.
He wasn’t going to let the ship get away.
“We’ve almost got him!”
The Sandtiger raced the destroyers toward the Yamato. The range closed.
This was it.
At last, David was ready to do battle with Goliath.
The crisis off Samar, October 25, 1944.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
FIRE ALL TORPEDOES!
The Yamato loomed in Charlie’s binocular view. Charlie centered the TBT’s crosshairs under the massive smokestack belching black smoke.
“Stand by, Forward! Helm, all ahead one-third!”
The battleship’s eighteen-inch gun turrets swiveled in his direction. David had Goliath’s full attention.
One hit by those massive shells would obliterate the Sandtiger and send her wreck plummeting to the bottom.
Too late, he thought. I’ve got you.
He pressed the transmit button, sending the target bearing down to the TDC. “Constant bearing, mark! Range, 1,700 yards!”
As close as he’d be able to get and still get his shots off.
“Set!” Percy called back.
“Fire all torpedoes!”
Below, Percy punched the firing plunger. “Firing one!” The boat shuddered as she hurled her first torpedo into the water. “One’s away!”
Charlie kept the TBT zeroed on the Yamato’s hull.
“Firing two!”
The Sandtiger bucked as her second fish fled the tube and streaked toward its target.
“Firing three! Firing four!”
One by one, the remaining fish shot into the water, emptying the tubes.
“Firing six! Six is away!”
“Secure the tubes,” Charlie ordered. “All ahead flank! Rig to dive!”
The last fish went erratic almost as soon as it launched from the tube. The Mark 18. It broached and banged across the swells, veering off course from the bow to starboard. In silent rage, Charlie watched it go.
He still had five shots reaching for the target, all of them running hot, straight, and normal. He could still do this. What he couldn’t do was worry about it. Extricating the boat from this hornet’s nest demanded every ounce of his ability and energy. He wanted to dive, but the destroyers were within ramming range. He’d have to fight them off until he gained enough room to pull the plug.
He scanned the scene and knew what he had to do. He’d conn the boat between the Yamato and the Musashi, and dive there. The Yamato was trying to pivot away from the torpedoes, which would add to the confusion. The Japanese admiral’s flagship was leaving the line.
Go ahead and turn, he gloated. I’ve got you.
About to give the command to steer the boat, he froze.
The Mark 18 had arced in seconds, guided by its jammed vertical rudder. He traced its future path, ignoring the heavy shells that splashed around him.
“Right full rudder!” he screamed. “Hard-a-starboard!”
A circular run.
“Jesus Christ,” Rusty said.
Their only hope was to swing out of the erratic torpedo’s way. Luckily, the Mark 18 was slower than the Mark 14, giving them a fighting chance.
The crew responded in an instant, but fishtailing a submarine took longer than the few seconds he had.
The four big engines roared. Smoke gushed from the exhaust vents. The submarine fought against its momentum, swinging to the right.
Charlie gripped the bridge coaming. “It’s going to be close.”
“Real close,” Rusty gasped.
Sometimes, you get lucky, Charlie prayed.
The torpedo leaped and splashed through the water.
“Um,” he said.
She wasn’t going to make it.
“Rig for collision!”
Reynolds, the S-55’s exec, once told him your life flashes before your eyes when you face the reaper.
That’s not what happened to Charlie.
Instead, he thought of all the lives he might have led if he hadn’t come here to die in the Pacific.
He might have gone home to Evie ready to live an ordinary life. They’d have bought a house, raised a family, and grown old and contented together. He’d have been a man shaped by war, but he’d have buried the war somewhere deep and let it go.
He might have stayed in Hawaii and waited for Jane. They’d have drank and caroused on the beach until their mutual comfort healed their scars. Together, after finding themselves in war, they’d have found themselves again in peace.
<
br /> So many possibilities, so many lives.
He now wished he’d heard what Rusty wanted to tell him. Wished he’d told Rusty thank you, and sorry, for everything.
Charlie turned to his friend. “Rusty—”
The torpedo struck the hull near the stern and exploded.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
The world lurched. The shock slammed Charlie into the coaming. He grabbed and held on to keep from plummeting overboard.
He came to gasping for breath. His binoculars were gone. The world wasn’t lurching anymore, but something wasn’t right. It was tilting.
And something else. The Sandtiger was slowing, almost dead in the water in a dissipating haze of exhaust.
He shook his head to clear it. “Rusty!”
“Men overboard!” Morrison howled at the deck gun. A moment later, it began firing again, hurling shells at the destroyers.
Rusty sat dazed on the deck, gripping his forehead. “What happened?”
Charlie gazed back at where the Mark 18 had plowed into the starboard quarter and detonated. In an instant, he knew the Sandtiger was dying, shrieking as water gushed into her wound. The sea fountained like a geyser above the stern, which was already submerged and shrouded in black smoke. Aft Torpedo was certainly flooded, its crew dead, and possibly Maneuvering and the aft engine compartment.
A few more seconds, and the boat might have evaded her doom. His swing maneuver had resulted in the torpedo striking near the stern rather than amidships. If it had, they’d all be dead right now. At least he’d given the crew a chance.
His head ached as if a hammer had struck it. “Close the conning tower hatch!”
If the boat was going down, they didn’t have time to abandon ship. With their neutral buoyancy, submarines dropped like stones when holed. Closing the hatch between the conning tower and the control room sealed the survivors inside but at least gave them a fighting chance to escape the boat if she sank.
And sinking she was, quickly.
Percy yelled up the hatch from the conning tower, “I can’t reach Maneuvering! We don’t have propulsion or steering!”
“Have you gotten any damage reports?”
“I can’t reach anybody!” the man said. “The 7MC is shot. Nothing works! All the lights are dead. We’re in the dark down here.”
The explosion had hurled half the gun crew into the sea. Morrison fired another round at a distant target then the gun fell silent. He’d had the sense to close the weapons hatch, but in doing so, he’d cut himself off from his ammunition.
They were dead in the water, helpless, unable to dive, move, fight.
“We’re sinking,” Rusty moaned. “We’re done.”
Charlie looked around, his mind scrambling for an option. “We…”
The deck kept tilting as the bow rose. The stern disappeared in the tumultuous foam. Beyond, the Yamato sailed on in indifference, preoccupied with its turn to dodge the torpedoes. Then Charlie spotted an approaching destroyer, the V of its bow slicing the water with a pronounced wake as it raced in to ram.
“God help us all,” he said.
The Sandtiger crackled and groaned. She had only moments before the weight in her stern dragged her to the seafloor.
Five thousand fathoms down.
“Abandon ship,” he said.
He hauled out the soundman, who had a broken arm, followed by Percy and the helmsman.
“Swim,” he told each man as he emerged trembling from the hatch. “If you swim hard, you might make it to shore.”
Nixon gaped up at him in terror.
“Hurry!”
The boat fell from under him.
“Charlie!” Rusty cried behind him. “The sea—”
The water surged over them and slammed Nixon back down the ladder into his shipmates. Charlie fought against the flood until it dragged him away from the hatch and out into the swirling black of the Pacific. He thrashed, fighting to pull off his flak jacket, sinking like a rock into the darkness.
Then he was drowning just like in Evie’s dream.
He broke the surface gasping for air. He yanked the toggles on his Mae West, which inflated with a cracking sound.
Around him, the other survivors swam away from their sinking ship. Charlie alone stayed behind. Treading water, he watched her die, a part of him dying with her as if that part of him were still aboard.
As the sea swallowed his command, Charlie heard a loud boom as the first of his torpedoes struck the Yamato.
HISTORICAL NOTES
The Proteus would not have worked on the Sandtiger or the Harder. This submarine tender supported the Twentieth Submarine Squadron, and these submarines were in the Fourth. The Proteus mostly worked at Midway and Guam. I included the ship in the story so Charlie could meet a crewman named Bernard Schwartz, a young sailor who would go on to become the famous actor Tony Curtis.
On a Gato-class submarine like the Sandtiger, the inclinometer, which measured list, was located in the control room, not the conning tower. For dramatic effect, I placed it there so Charlie could see firsthand how far his boat was listing during the typhoon. Note otherwise that, while submarines operated in accordance with strict procedures and protocols, I took quite a bit of license for the story. Any errors in the story are mine alone, though some may be intentional.
The circular torpedo run that sinks the Sandtiger was a terrifying possibility realized at least thirty times by submarines during the Pacific War. In many cases, the submarine barely escaped destruction. In two cases, it resulted in the torpedo striking and sinking its submarine. These submarines were the Tullibee and the Tang. The Tang was commanded by the submarine ace Dick O’Kane, who’d apprenticed as executive officer of the Wahoo under Mush Morton and was considered one of the greatest submarine skippers of the war, if not the greatest.
The Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 23–26, 1944) was the largest naval battle of World War II and, by some standards, the largest in history. Fought in waters off the Philippine islands of Leyte, Samar, and Luzon, it’s certainly one of the most fascinating. This battle featured one of the only two battleship-to-battleship fights during the Pacific War, the first use of organized kamikaze attacks, and a desperate and heroic fight between American destroyers and Japanese battlewagons.
The Japanese plan (Sho-Go, or Victory Operation) entailed using a task force of carriers to decoy Third Fleet north away from Seventh Fleet, which was staging the invasion of Leyte. Admiral Halsey took the bait, which allowed two strike forces to approach Leyte Gulf through the San Bernardino Strait and the Surigao Strait. The distant battle Charlie and Rusty hear during the predawn hours of October 25 is Third Fleet smashing Admiral Nishimura’s southern task force.
Meanwhile, Admiral Kurita’s strike force proceeded unhindered through the San Bernardino Strait and approached Seventh Fleet’s rear, attacking its “Taffy 3” unit, made up of jeep carriers and destroyers, off Samar. This resulted in one of the most heroic and lopsided battles of the war, as American planes, destroyers, and destroyer escorts fought Japanese battleships and heavy cruisers. The destroyer USS Johnston started the desperate defensive action by attacking on its own, hitting a cruiser with torpedoes. This prompted Admiral Sprague, leading Taffy 3, to give the order, “Small boys attack!” Outclassed and outgunned, the rest of the screening ships attacked in a series of suicidal charges, taking fire and disrupting the Japanese formation. The Hoel and Samuel B. Roberts sank. The Johnston fought to the last, finally sinking after a merciless pounding by enemy destroyers.
The ferocity of these ships, coupled with the battle’s confusion, suggested to Admiral Kurita that he was facing a part of Third Fleet. He would later claim he received word American carriers were to the north, and he hoped to attack them. In any case, he broke off contact and issued orders to steam north and regroup.
The battle crippled the Japanese Combined Fleet, opened invasion of the Philippines, and promised Allied dominance of the P
acific for the remainder of the war.
WANT MORE?
If you enjoyed Hara-Kiri, get ready for the next book in the series, Over the Hill, now available for pre-order and scheduled for release in summer 2018. In this final Crash Dive book, Charlie is taken prisoner by the Japanese Empire, surviving the horrors of captivity until gaining the opportunity to fight back.
Sign up for Craig’s mailing list here to stay up to date on new releases. When you sign up, you’ll receive a link to Craig’s interactive submarine adventure, Fire One. This story puts you in command of your own submarine, matching wits with a Japanese skipper…
Learn more about Craig’s writing at www.CraigDiLouie.com. Craig welcomes your correspondence at [email protected].
Turn the page to read the first chapter of Over the Hill…
CHAPTER ONE
THE FURY
Captain Charlie Harrison watched the Philippine Sea swallow the Sandtiger’s bow. Floating on the surface, his body bobbed on the swells, though his spirit went down with his ship.
A faulty torpedo had sunk his boat.
As the bow disappeared, he hoped the suction of his sinking command might drag him to the bottom with her. There was only a gentle tug, like a farewell, followed by a swirl of bubbles boiling to the surface and a blooming oil slick.
Suspended in the current, Charlie had become a fly on a vast tapestry of violence still playing out all around him. Steel leviathans filled his view, blasting their giant guns. Tremendous splashes soared past their gunwales. Planes roared through the smoky sky, dodging tracers and shedding bombs that fireballed across decks.
The destroyer that had been intent on ramming the Sandtiger raced toward him. In the distance, a heavy cruiser, flying the Rising Sun, exhaled an angry burst of steam as it sank into the foam. Beyond, the Yamato lurched on, blasting its whistle as it continued to veer out of formation.
Hit twice by torpedoes, the battleship had a slight list but was still afloat. Charlie had failed to sink the giant, but he’d put it out of action for now.
He wheeled in the water toward his own side of the conflict and saw the USS Johnston dying.
Hara-Kiri_a novel of the Pacific War Page 14