Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  When Byron brought back his report to the wardroom, Aster and Hoban had their heads bent over a sketch for the battle account. The captain was diagramming his attack in omnge ink for the enemy track, blue for the Devilfish, and red for the torpedoes. Hoban's diagrams were always textbook models. "I saw those wakes, goddamn it, Lady," he said wistfully, inking ruled lines. "Those new magnetic exploders are defective. I'm going to say so, by God, in the war diary and in the action report both. I don't care if I hang for it. I know our range was long, but we had an excellent solution.

  The wakes went directly under the first and third ships. Those ships should have had their backs broken. The torpedoes never exploded."

  "Better check in with plot before you take the watch," Aster said casually to Byron. "We're heading for the entrance."

  "The entrance?"

  The captain's dark-ringed eyes gleamed at the puzzled note. "Of course. The whole landing area is on submarine alert now, Briny. We can't accomplish anything there. Up at the entrance we might find some fat pickings."

  "Yes, Captain."

  Over Hoban's head, as he bent over the diagram, Aster grotesquely winked again. The implication was clear and jarring to Byron. The mission of the Devilfish, the only way it could now justify twenty years of maintenance and training, was to oppose the Japanese landing at the beachhead, no matter what the risk. They were being paid for extrahazardous duty! Byron had assumed that, once out of the attack area, Hoban would unquestionably circle and make for the troop transports. This was the submarine's moment, the reason it had been built and manned. Giving prudent arguments, Branch Hoban was abandoning the mission with an intact submarine, still loaded with twenty torpedoes.

  They had evaded but not shaken off the destroyer. Its long-scale pings still shivered sadly and faintly in the Devilfish's sonar receiver.

  On Derringer's plot the Japanese search plan soon became clear: a pattern of widening squares, much as in American antisubmarine doctrine.

  Off Pearl Harbor, in the peacetime exercises, a submarine that had gotten clear of its pursuer would send a sonar signal, and the destroyer would speed over for another attack run; the search phase being a tedious boring process that wasted time and fuel. But now the process was far from boring; it was the real thing, ugly, tense, and ,perilous' The searcher above intended to find and -sink the Devilfish.

  Fris- chances still were good.

  For though -the scorpion was out of the flashlight beam now, and crawling away in the dark, there was no satisfactory place to hide.

  Hoban had heavily depleted his batteries. The pursuer, fresh from Japan with full oil bunkers, could steam eight or ten times Hoban's normal underwater speed. In another few hours the Devilfish would have a "flat cAn" -no battery juice left. Much now depended on brute luck.

  Hoban was making a beeline away from the point where the destroyer had lost him. That was doctrine, though Byron (and obviously Aster, too) thought he should not be heading for the entrance. The destroyer captain, having completed two tight squares was heading out on a wider sweep. If he happened to choose the right turns, he might pick up the unseen crawler again. But the night sea was a gloomy tossing blank, the choices were infinite, and failure was discouraging.

  Also, he might be called off to other duty. -These were the hopeful factors in the problem; except that "problem" was a peacetime word, somewhat to)o bland for, the dogged pursuit by this anonymous menace.

  Standing watch in the conning tower, Byron heard the captain and the exec discuss tactics. The time of sunset had passed, and Aster wanted to surface. Running on the diesels, they could race out of the destroyer's searchpattern at flank speed, and charge up the can for imre underwater action; perhaps for an attack on this very pursuer.

  Hoban roundly vetoed the idea."Goddamn it, Lady, surface? How can we gamble on unknowns? What's the weather like up there?

  Suppose it's a calm crystal-clear night? We might be up-moon from him -ever think of that? A black tin duck in the moonlight! Even the periscope could show up in binoculars.

  How reliable are our sonar ranges? Plus or minus a mile, we figure, but with five-inch guns waiting for us up there, maybe we'd better make that two miles, hey? All right. Plot has him at what now-seven thousand?"

  "Seventy-five hundred and opening, sir, with strong down Doppler."

  "All right. Even so! At three or four thousand yards a lookout can pick us up with binoculars. It's all poppycock that Japs can't see in the dark. If that destroyer spots us surfaced with a flat can, we've had the course. Now if we could open the range to twelve or fourteen thousand, surfacing might make some sense. In fact, that's the thing to try for. Byron! Go to seven knots."

  "Seven knots, sir?"

  "Are you deaf? Seven knots."

  "Seven knots. Aye aye, sir."

  The decision baffled Byron. Aster's face went dead blank.

  At seven knots the Devilfish had little more than an hour of underwater propultion left. Captain Hoban, in an attempt to be cautious, seemed to be invading the last margin of safety.

  Plot reported the Japanese destroyer making a Turn; and after a short interval, another Turn. Sonar announced, "Up Doppler." The destroyer was now closing the Devilfish.. While power-consuming time dragged on, while in the conning tower Aster and the captain speculated on the pursuer's last action. Had the Jap picked up a stray sonar echo? Had he by bad luck gotten an echo from a school of fish, in the submarine's direction? Should they change course? Hoban elected to bear on toward the entrance. The sonar range gradually dropped to seven thousand yards; twenty minutes later, to six thousand-three miles.

  If the night was dark or rainy, Byron thought, they still might surface and flee at twenty-one knots. Why didn't the skipper at least chance a periscope glimpse of the weather? As the range dropped to four thousand, the option to surface was dimming. Sonar pings now began reverberating Laintly through the hull itself.

  Byron's remaining hope was that the destroyer would pass without picking up an echo; but this faded too, when he heard Derringer announce below, in a sepulchral voice, that the destroyer was turning to a collision course.

  Aster came scrambling up the ladder, eyes narrowed, dead gray cigar clenched in his teeth. "Battle stations, Briny."

  "What now?"

  "Well, he's found us, all right. The captain's going to the bottom."

  "Will that work?"

  "Depends."

  "On what?"

  "For one thing, on how good his sonar is. Maybe he can't screen out bottom return.".

  Byron remembered this tactic from submarine school exercises off New London. Echo-ranging on a vein on the was inexact; the random return diffused:the readings.

  Hurrying-down the ladder to his position as diving officer, he saw Captain Hoban staring at the plot, where the destroyer's pencilled course was curving in, dot by dot, toward the white moving point of the Devilfish.

  "Flood negative! -Retract sonar head!" Hoban plunged for theladder, shouting up through the hatch. "Lady, give me a fathometer reading and pass the word for all hands to stand by to ground! Hard right rudder!"

  The submarine mushed downward, slowing and turning.

  Byron levelled off, well above fathemeter depth. Shortly there came a jolt, another jolt, and the Devilfish settled, rocking and grinding, on the mud; according to the depth gauges, at the exact figure of the fathometer reading-eighty-seven feet.

  Silence, dead waiting silence, in the Devilfish; outside, loud long-scale pings, and the mutter of ptopellers- On the dead reckoning tracer, the destroyer track moved closer and closer to the halted point of light. The propeller noise intensified.

  Derringer was getting no sonar ranges now, the attacker was too close; he was projecting the destroyer's track by using his ears and his judgment. As Byron's breath all but failed him, the pencil line passed the point of light, and slowly moved away. A sharp fall of pitch of the long-scale pings to down Doppler confirmed Derringer's guesswork plot. All the men in the con
trol room heard it-the young sailors, the young officer, the old chief-and all looked around at each other with wan hope.

  How totally a submariner depended on the captain, Byron thought, how crucial was confidence in him! Though he had once hated Hoban, he had never until now doubted his skill; he had in fact resented his crushing superiority. Now the rat of panic was gnawing at Byron's spirit. Was he in, shaky or amateurish hands, after all, a hundred feet down in the sea in a long vulnerable metal tube, waiting for a ship on the surface to dynamite him to a violent death by drowning?

  Black seawater under terrible pressure, gripped the thin hull; one opened seam, one, blown valve, and his life would be choked out by flooding salt water. He would. never again see Natalie, nor even once lay eyes on the baby he had fathered. He would rot on the floor of Lingayen Gulf, and fish would swim in and out of bones.

  This awareness of being in peril under water, which submariners suppress but never for a moment wholly forget, was clamping a cold hold on Byron Henry. Not forty-eight hours ago, just'before reporting to the Marsman building, he had been jolting down a Manila boulevard.in hot sunshine, perched in the back of a truck on a crated mine, jocularly drinking beer with his working party. And nowDerringer said huskily, "Mr. Henry, I think he's turning back."

  The pinging outside shifted to short scale.

  Now fear stabbed Byron's very bowels. This time the submarine was caught; caught dead on the bottom and almost out of power, and he was caught in it, and all this was no dream, dreamlike though the horror seemed. Death under the sea was now coming at him, screaming through the short scale pings in malevolent rising glee, "Found you! Found you!

  Found you!"

  The faces in the control room took on one expressionstark terror.

  Chief Derringer was not looking at the plot, but staring vacantly upward, his heavy mouth wide open, his big fat face a Greek mask of fright; the man had five children and two grandchildren. The propellers came drumming and thrashing directly overhead once again-KER-DATRAMM! TRAMM! TRAMM! Morelli at the bow planes clutched his crucifix, crossed himself, and muttered a prayer.

  Click, click, click, like little pebbles or balls bouncing on the hull; it was the arming of the-depth charges at their preset depth, though Byron did not know that this caused the noise.

  He too was praying; nothing complicated, just, "God, let me live.

  God, let me live."

  THE BLOCK LEADER'S yells and curses rouse the Russian prisoners at 4:30 A.M. from their uneasy dozing. It is the only sleep they can get, jammed three in a bunk in the cold and stench of the quarantine camp blockhouses, on straw pallets crawling with vermin. Getting down from his upper bunk for roll call, Berel Jastrow murmurs the obligatory Hear O Israel morning devotion. He should wash first, but that can't be done, water is a hundred yards away and forbidden at this hour. He adds the Talmud's brisk summary prayer for times of danger, and concludes, "Yehi ratzon sheekhye-Let me live." Next will come an hour or more of standing at attention in ranks, in the icy wind and darkness of the Polish midwinter, clad in a thin prison suit of striped ticking.

  "Let me live" is a practical heartfelt plea. What with the heavy beatings at any provocation or none, and the physical drills that go on till the weakest drop, and the starvation, and the long roll calls of nearly naked men, in subzero frost, and the hard work-digging drainage ditches, hauling lumber, dragging rocks, demolishing peasant houses in the evacuated villages, and carrying the materials, sometimes several kilometers, to the new blockhouse sites-and what with the guards shooting on the spot men who falter or fall, or finishing them off with the butt-ends of their rifles, the roster of Russians in the quarantine camp at Oswiecim is rapidly shrinking.

  The Soviet prisoners of war are in fact proving a major disappointment to the Commandant.

  Draft after draft they arrive sick, emaciated, all but prostrate with exhaustion, in half the promised numbers, the rest having died on the way. With this deteriorated rubbish as a labor force he is supposed to execute not one but several urgent construction projects: to double the size of the base camp, located in the tobacco monopoly buildings and the old Polish army barracks; to lay out and man the ambitious experimental farms and fisheries that Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler plans as the real showpi=s of the Auschwitz establishment; to erect a whole new camp of unprecedented magnitude out at Birchwoods, three kilometers to the west, accommodating one hundred thousand prisoners of war for. labor in armament factories; and to commence surveying and preparing the factory sites! No German concentration camp until now has held much more than ten thousand prisoners. It is a breathtaking job, an assignment to be proud of, a great chance for advancement. The Commandant realizes that well.

  But he is not being given the tools. The whole thing would be impossible, if he did not have a solid base of Polish and Czech political prisoners who can still put in a good day's work, and a steady supply of fresh ones. Only the strongest Russians, maybe ten percent of each draft, are of any use in the labor gangs. Given any feeding at all, these can still revive and do a job. Hardy fellows!

  But right there is the big problem: confusion from the top down about the true mission of the Auschwitz Interest Area, these forty square kilometers of marshy farmland allotted to the Commandant's rule.

  Conscious of the responsibility entrusted to a mere SS major, he is eager to do a job. For a year and a half he has put heart and soul into Oswiecim. It was just a dismal s I amp With a straggle of buildings and a few scattered villages when he came here in 1940 to start the camp up. Now it is looking like something! But what is really wanted of him? Maximum production for war, or maximum elimination of the nation's enemies? He is still not clear.

  The Commandant considers himself a soldier. He will do either job. He 'cannot do both at the same time! Yet contradictory orders come down in a steady stream. Take the very matter of these Russian POWS, In retaliation for the inhuman treatment of German prisoners in the Soviet Union, they are to be used "without pity." For those with any trace of political responsibility, execution at once; for the rest, swift working to death, at slave labor on rations below what dogs need to survive.

  ... Very fine, Reichsfuhrer Himmler; but how about the hundreds and hundreds of barracks, just by the way, that you've ordered me to build out in Birchwoods (Brzezinka in -the uncivilized Polish spelling; adapted into smooth German as Birkenau). Oh yes, the barracks,- and oh 'yes, the experimental farm; and oh yes, thefactories! Well, well, let Strumbanfuhrer Hoess worry about all that. Hoess is a chap who delivers. He complains, sends long pessimistic reports, declares assignments are impossible. But in the end Hoess carries out orders.

  There's a chap you can rely on...

  "The Commandant values this reputation of his. Even in these heartbreaking conditions he means to maintain it, or kill himself trying. Like the next fellow,"he wants to rise in the service, do well by his family , and all that. But Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler is taking advantage of his outstanding conscientiousness, and this sinks him in depression. It just is not fair.

  On a cloudy Monday, shielded from the knifelike wind by a heavy greatcoat, the commandant waits in the snow outside the crematorium for the arrival of the three hundred Russians. Combed out of several drafts as political officers or ratings, they have been sentenced to death by the military circuit court 'from Kattowitz. The Commandant has no quarrel with the sentence. The life-and-death struggle with Bolshevism is what this war is about. If European culture is to be saved, no mercy can be shown to.the barbaric eastern foe.

  It is just too bad that some of the condemned appear so able-bodied.

  At least their deaths will not be a total waste. They will yield important information. Major Hoess accepts no optimistic reports of subordinates. He learned the hard way, as RapNrtffuhrer in Sachsenhausen, to see things for himself.

  -The tendency in a concentration camp chain of command is to lie, to cover up, to pretend that things are more efficient than they are.

  Reports on a previous g
assing with the camp's strongest insecticide of some condemned Russians in the cellar of Block 11, while the Commandant was off reporting to Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler in Berlin, have been contradictory. One subordinate, whose idea it was, claims they all died almost at once. Others say that it took forever for the Russians to croak; that they rushed one door of the cellar and almost broke it down, even as they were being gassed. What a hell of a mess, if they had actually forced their way out and released a cloud of that smelly poisonous blue stuff all over the main camp!

  Just the usual thing, inattention to detail. The door wasn't reinforced enough, and the supposed airtight sealing of the cellar was done with clay; what stupidity! This experiment in the morgue room of the crematorium is being run under the Commandant's personal supervision. Airtightness has been tested with chlorine under pressure; satisfactory, just a faint sort of swimming-pool odor near the door, which has since had its rubber gaskets doubled up. The crematorium is off in the grassy area beyond the camp, not smack in the middle of the main buildings like Block 11. Just a little common sense!