Wahoo
Page 19
By afternoon, we were south of the Kii Suido, the eastern entrance to the Inland Sea. Off that passage Plunger had received a thorough drubbing. Built before certain materials had become scarce, 9-inch-diameter vent risers in the torpedo rooms were made of copper, which could be more easily formed to follow the interior curvature of the hull. One very close Japanese depth charge found that they were more easily formed too, and expanded the after port riser with an enormous aneurysm. This jammed the hand-control shafting to the stern planes. Plunger’s skipper, Lieut. Comdr. David C. White, called this depth charge close to number 178, his boat’s hull number. Would our stronger steel risers have cracked, and had Plunger survived because hers could expand? The way Captain Morton operated, I would expect Wahoo to leave most opposition and depth charges far behind, so we’d not put that to a test.
Bungo Suido, the southwestern straits into the Sea of Japan, was now back on our starboard quarter, and our passage continued to go unchallenged. At midafternoon on March 10, a call of “Land ho!” came from Torpedoman’s Mate Bair, a volunteer on the search scope. There was probably a pool involved, and this was one way to keep the regular lookouts guarding their sectors and not favoring the area ahead.
The landfall was the peak of Yaku Shima, which Wahoo would round before entering the strait. “Right where it’s supposed to be,” injected Krause, implying a bit facetiously that any errors would have been the island’s or on the chart; after all, Buka had been shown erroneously. The island continued to rise steadily out of the sea, and soon appeared much like pictures of Mount Fujiyama, near Tokyo, but with steeper sides. After another hour, a submerged run would reach Yaku Shima during evening twilight. Two blasts took Wahoo down and we were assured of reaching Colonet Strait undetected, and unless one should come in view of our scope, of not seeing even a plane since Midway.
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Other islands that were shown on our chart rose above the horizon as Wahoo approached Yaku Shima. With true bearings of their peaks, we kept our position accurately plotted on the chart until well into evening twilight. Only a few fishermen and one trawler had come in view, and they had all passed clear before we surfaced into a black, quiet night. There were two options: to race through the strait and identify ourselves as a warship should the enemy have land-based radar; or to proceed at one-engine speed and, if spotted, to be identified as a trawler. The captain chose the latter, for the two engines that had already gone on charge could instantly be shifted to propulsion should speed be needed.
The dark, conical shape of Yaku Shima, now broad on our starboard bow, towered into the night, while her 6,000-foot peak still caught the sun’s fading rays. Our attention, however, lay to port, where Kuchino Shima lay ahead and on the southern side of the strait. With time to spare, the island was positively identified, and continuing along the track, Wahoo entered the East China Sea. The time was 0110 on Thursday, March 11, and clear of the Nansei Shoto, we came to course 005 true, which led to the area our captain had selected for the first day’s patrol. It lay on the natural Nagasaki-Formosa shipping lane, and unaware of any United States submarines, the enemy might use it this day.
The whole island chain, extending from Japan’s westernmost island, Kyushu, to Formosa was labeled the Ryukyus on our chart. Although they were not clearly labeled, the Nansei Shoto apparently included the northern islands; the Sakishima Gunto those to the south; with other islands, including Okinawa, in between. Beyond the Bashi Channel south of Formosa lie the Philippines, so altogether, these islands gave Japan a somewhat protected shipping route to the areas that she had captured.
At dawn, Wahoo would be patrolling the northwestern terminus of that route.
A lookout, in his normal watch rotation, had a freshly baked roll between his teeth as he came up the conning tower ladder. Baking had followed a full battery charge on this first day in our patrol area, and was a couple of hours late. No longer absorbed with piloting, Krause and I suddenly felt hungry and headed on below while the supply lasted. He was fortunate, for many hands had stayed up for the transit and celebrated becoming China Sailors with Rowls’s extra baking, but our chief cook had not forgotten him. Similarly, Jayson had sequestered two rolls in the pantry’s warming oven and had only to turn on the switch. Such thoughtfulness always received my thank-you and would be reflected in his quarterly marks.
The time was 0610 when Wahoo dived for the first day of submerged patrol since Fais Island. To be factual, this was a day of reconnaissance rather than patrol, the first under Commander Morton. There would be changes that we had first discussed at Brisbane, and we both looked forward to the crew’s reaction. The area had been clear on diving, so first we came up to SJ search depth as soon as Roger had reported, “Satisfied with the trim.” At periscope depth a few minutes later, the search scope was kept up and manned continuously as long as sampans or other small craft remained clear.
Patrolling a line, rather than an area, we continued along the track from the strait towards Bono Misaki, the promontory on the southwest coast of Kyushu that all north-south Nagasaki shipping must clear. A half hour had passed with nothing in sight when the captain ordered a search with Wahoo at 50-foot keel depth. That would expose 17 feet of scope and treble the distance to the horizon. All was clear and we returned to normal search depth, which was now 64 to 60 feet. This would be a half-hourly procedure unless sampans or other craft were sighted, and then the captain or executive officer would modify it appropriately. It was a new and meaningful search that would detect any north-south shipping across a 15-mile front, with the visibility we enjoyed this day. The watch loved it, especially when they found that after the OOD’s initial sweep-around, one scope was theirs with an initial sighting quite possible.
Searching through a periscope is not natural, and even though you can switch eyes, it soon becomes tiring. You are not just gazing at the sea, but literally examining every portion of the horizon and the clouds that jut up beyond but seem to be a part of the sea. It is there that a tiny cloud formation that doesn’t change becomes a ship, or one that elongates can be a wisp of smoke above a ship that is still hull-down beyond the horizon. The experienced officer or quartermaster, even though spelling each other at the scope, will have flushed cheeks if they’ve been doing their best, and so it was with our seamen and volunteers. Though their combined effort had produced no sightings this day, a continuation surely would locate the enemy before many watches had passed.
Our daylight run had taken us 60 miles to the north, and probably to the west of any shipping, but that would not be the case tomorrow. On surfacing, two engines had gone on charge, while the other two were driving our submarine to the northwest towards the Koshiki Islands. Jutting out from the west coast of Kyushu, they formed an extended promontory. Since the Sailing Directions classifies the passage between the islands and Kyushu—the Koshiki Strait—as dangerous to navigation, we could expect major shipping to round these islands, and the captain selected a position to the southeast of the southernmost island for the morrow’s patrol.
After surfacing, the crew had Tokyo Rose, the turncoat disk jockey, to amuse them in their mess room. Her remarks were corny, perhaps quite intentionally so, and cast doubt that she was really a defector. In either case, the records were all popular ones, the same that the crew would have heard stateside, and we found no objection.
More important to all hands was the evening Fox, for Buckley, always on the ball, hustled forward with an encoded message for members of the coding board. This now included any officers not on watch or without urgent business, and they gathered in the wardroom to use the ship’s cipher. Since we would soon be in very salvageable waters, our secret electric coding machine had been turned in to the Submarine Base. Though breaking messages encoded in strip cipher takes longer, it is frankly more fun, much like a game: Twenty numbered strips each contain full alphabets, but with the letters in different scrambled order. The order in which strips are slid into grooves in the board is stipulated in a boo
klet, a different order for each day of the year. The letters from the message’s five-letter groups are set against a vertical tape by sliding the strips to the left. Somewhere to the right, the plain language will appear in a vertical column. Including some padding, it took four setups to complete the decoding, but the message was worth the waiting:
LARGE SHIP DAMAGED BY SUNFISH MAY PROCEED RYUKYUS NAGASAKI TOMORROW
According to the Japanese monograph, the damaged ship could just as well proceed eastward through the Bungo Suido and then via the Inland Sea to Kobe for repairs, but ours was a fifty-fifty chance. Morton considered a high-speed run back to the Ryukyus, but the Japanese current, or Kuroshio, setting to the northeast at 2 knots would make submerged patrolling amongst the islands difficult. So he chose a new position off the southern entrance to the Koshiki Strait where Bono Misaki would still be in sight to the northeast. Another engine went on propulsion, insuring that Wahoo would be on station waiting before the enemy could pass, and we moved on into the night, concentrating our searches in the sectors ahead and to starboard.
Lighted sampans, operating in pairs, gave our new lookouts practice in making the proper reports, and then before dawn the loom of the light on Bono Misaki showed over the dark horizon with characteristics, the seconds of light and occult periods, just as shown on our chart. The light’s burning at all assured that our presence was unsuspected, and we dived at dawn confident that if Sunfish’s damaged ship were routed through this sea our scopes would spot her.
Sampans were in sight most of the day, and even two tall masts that seemed worthy of an approach. Beneath the masts, however, were two trawlers of about 60-foot length. But they served to check again Richie’s TDC and to give the fire control party a moving target for its warm-up drill. On surfacing, we gave the area a thorough search and then headed for Saishu To, the great island that lies about 50 miles off the south coast of Chosen, or Korea. Within this passage, we expected to find shipping; for in his shirt pocket, following a final briefing at Pearl, Captain Morton had brought the various coordinates of a known shipping route connecting Shimonoseki, at the western entrance to the Inland Sea, to the great city and port of Shanghai to the west across the East China Sea.
The troops, as expressed by Pappy, had taken the minor disappointment of the day in stride, and would rather sink their own ship than share one with another boat. It could be that after just one day of participating in the periscope search they had a better appreciation of the work involved, but this in no way lessened their confidence in Deadly Dudley’s ability to find ships and sink them.
At morning twilight, Wahoo was south of Mara To, a small island that shipping would round when passing to westward of Saishu To. This also included southbound ships from the small harbor on the western tip of Saishu To. Now 6 miles from the small island, the captain pulled the plug, and Wahoo would proceed to the known shipping lane, avoiding the possibility of being sighted. Ships were probably just as likely to pass within sight during this 25-mile run as they would if we were on the shipping lane, and we went to breakfast with a general feeling of confidence.
Mayberry, our new seaman, fairly burst through the wardroom’s after doorway. Though seemingly out of breath from having raced 30 feet, he announced in a measured and clear voice, “We have smoke on the horizon, Captain.” The time was 0814 on this Saturday, March 13. The captain saw me starting to rise, and nodded; this contact would be mine to investigate, and I went aft with a piece of toast in hand. By the time I had completed my first periscope observation, Manalesay had brought a cup of coffee.
The ship under the smoke became a will-o’-the-wisp: sometimes in sight, and moments later not, our changing identifications ranged from a circling, large, coal-burning trawler to a Q-ship. Whatever, she gave Richie and his fire control party conniptions. Captain Morton settled this by dubbing her a Smoky Maru, and we had to conclude that an atmospheric inversion layer was bending the light rays intermittently and thus giving us a wild fire control drill.
We finally gave up on this target, but she was not through with Wahoo. At 1640 the same Smoky Maru came over the horizon heading directly for us, and the Bells of Saint Mary’s rang in earnest for the first time on our fourth patrol. The problem was simple; the captain conned his boat away from her path, and she came on to present us with a 90 track. She was worth one torpedo, especially if it hit, but not worth the two that could assure the sinking of a large ship. Accordingly, Morton ordered a single after tube made ready for firing; this would preclude a natural impulse to fire more.
The Smoky Maru’s angle had opened nicely. Richie and Chan agreed on an enemy speed of 12 knots; and on my call of port 70, the captain gave his assuring, “Any time, Dick.”
“Constant bearing-Mark;” “Set,” from Richie; and “Fire!” as her stack amidships touched the wire, sent our torpedo on its way. The smoke and bubbles seemed to be leading the small ship properly, but then the torpedo itself broached and disappeared just ahead of the enemy, who gave no indication that she had seen it or the wake.
We had used a masthead height of 75 feet in determining the range, but now on reviewing the books and Gudgeon’s sketch of her similar Q-ship, the height should have been 55 or 60. At the start of the approach, the ship was closer, and her speed to the firing point had been about 10 instead of 12 knots, so our TDC and its angle solver, performing as directed, had sent our lonely fish too far ahead.
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Knowing our mistake lessened the pain of wasting a torpedo that we had brought thousands of miles, and this was further eased by the knowledge that our presence was still unsuspected. The whole day was not lost, however, for our extensive maneuvers had emphasized the limitations imposed by our failing storage batteries.
Back in the Bureau of Ships, the experts had surmised that depth charging might crack the conventional hard-rubber battery jars, so a suitable alternative had been proposed. Perhaps, once again, as in the case of the bubble sextants, Wahoo had been selected as a guinea pig. Our battery jars were laminated, having a rubber jar inside a steel jar, and then another rubber jar outside. The design must have withstood shock tests and such, but quite evidently not the internal temperature of about 120 degrees with the outer shell in contact with the colder, lead-lined battery well. The steel didn’t crack, but the rubber, having a different coefficient of expansion, did. The acid then reached the steel insert, and when the outer shell cracked, that individual battery cell grounded to the battery well and Wahoo’s hull. Such cells had to be disconnected immediately lest the current impressed by partial or even total battery voltage start a fire. For this, we carried jumpers to bypass the affected cells and some healthy cells too in order to maintain the same voltage in the forward and after great batteries.
The failure had become progressive, an arithmetic one at present, and not considered vital by those behind the desks who had simply ordered a new battery. The problem of just where, when, and how it could be installed was apparently on the back burner, while Wahoo very nearly had a corner on the jumper market. Though we still had three-quarters of our original battery capacity, there could be little juice to spare for evasion following a long approach and attack. This would be particularly true to the north and west, where the depth of the sea is better measured in feet than fathoms, and where evasion would consist of a horizontal run for it.
These were our considerations as we crossed CinCPac Intelligence’s recommended track, which Krause and Simonetti had neatly laid down as a dotted line on the conning tower chart. Another Smoky Maru came over the horizon for supper, a third for breakfast after we had dived south of Kakyo To light, and then two more before 0800. At least our extra periscope watches had things to see other than birds on this Sunday, March 14; in part as a reward for their diligence, Morton conducted an approach on a pall of smoke lying over the area where they had gone. The scopes soon had five SM’s in sight, and then the one under the smoke made it six large commercial fishermen, perhaps gillnetting. Any large ship would
avoid their nets, and so would Wahoo as the captain asked the course for Hen Sho. I picked 040 off the chart and received Morton’s, “Make it so.” (We were informal in our conversations, but always precise in orders affecting our ship.)
A submerged day off Hen Sho brought an innovation—a bona fide patrol. Her presence might foretell a ship, so rather than evade, we kept her in sight until she finally disappeared amongst the small islands to the east. This left only the passage inside the Daikokusan Gunto to complete our coverage of the provided shipping route. By the following midmorning, with horizon clear, three blasts sent us up for a surface patrol. We had done our part in finding where the ships were not, and now headed where they had to be, first due north.
Upon reaching the latitude where our submarine Haddock had found east-west shipping, the captain directed a course towards the Shantung Promontory, the great peninsula that juts out from China into the Yellow Sea. On Roger’s order, Mayberry brought our bow smartly to port, met the swing with 5 degrees right rudder, and settled Wahoo precisely on 290. Our new seaman was a good steersman, which had been a requirement in peacetime, but now it came routinely with a trick at the wheel on every watch.
Stepped off on the chart, our run would be just over 200 miles, which was good, for the landfall would come after dark, permitting us to gain a likely dawn attack position. But that was tomorrow and today was Wednesday, March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day, and those with Irish forebears outnumbered any other group in Wahoo. So Phillips, Rowls, and our new cook, Rennels, would be preparing the traditional corned beef and cabbage with all the trimmings, while others, except for their watches, would enjoy a rope-yarn Sunday.
During Wahoo’s first two patrols, a key to transfer had laid in qualifying in submarines and making the next higher rate. Then shown in excess of our allowance for that rate, orders would be forthcoming from Force Personnel. So working on their course books and qualifications had required little urging by their division officers. Now, most of Wahoo’s hands were afraid of being transferred before they had the usual five patrols to rate new construction in the States. The captain had entered into this with his personal guarantee and went a bit further: They might be eligible for transfer if they didn’t qualify or complete their course books. A turn through the boat showed the result. For every cribbage or acey-deucey game, there were a half dozen or so studying, some singly and others in groups—a performance usually seen only while returning from patrol. Truly, Morton had his crew eating out of his hand.