“I talked to a Chief in the relief crew here who said he was in Pearl Harbor when you came back to port, and a Chief on the Mako said that as scary as that whole operation was, no one was really afraid because you were in the Control Room. I mention that because if you didn’t know it I think you should, sir.”
Mealey looked at Olsen, and the smile appeared briefly under his white mustache. “That sailor didn’t know how scared I was during that depth-charge attack. I had a fine ship, a well-trained crew. Part of that was due to you, Captain Brannon. You were the Executive Officer aboard the Mako before I took over. And let that be the last of the mutual admiration society. We have a lot of work to do once we get under way.” The waiter appeared with three chilled cups of vichyssoise.
“When did you arrive in Australia, sir?” Brannon asked.
“I arrived in Brisbane two weeks ago,” Captain Mealey said. “I flew over here five days ago.”
At the end of the meal Mealey pulled out a pipe and a worn tobacco pouch. “I see no need to disturb you aboard ship any more than necessary,” he said as he filled his pipe. “I’ll report aboard at zero seven hundred, day after tomorrow.”
Back aboard the Eelfish Brannon gave Pete Mahaffey orders to draw bed linen for the unused bunk in his stateroom. He listened to the noise of the people in the Forward Torpedo Room finishing their work. He closed the cloth drape that served as a door and sat on the edge of his bunk.
Captain Mealey was a fire eater, and he was a master at surviving prolonged depth-charging attacks. How would Lieutenant Commander Michael P. Brannon measure up against the standard that Captain Mealey had set and would undoubtedly expect him to equal?
He wondered, as he had wondered so often about the late Captain Hinman, did men like Mealey ever really feel the fear that he felt when he went into action? At lunch Mealey had said he was frightened during the depth charging at Truk. Did he say that to make him and Olsen feel better, to show himself as no different than they? And why had Captain Mealey chosen the Eelfish for his flagship? The Captains of the Hatchet Fish and the Sea Chub were both senior to Brannon. Both men were close to promotion to four-stripe Captain.
There was the point John Olsen had raised; what was Captain Mealey doing in Brisbane for over a week? And even more importantly, why had he been sent to the Australian command to take command of a wolf pack when he could just as easily have formed a wolf pack with Pearl Harbor boats?
There must be a reason, he mused, a reason for all of this. He got up and combed his thick black hair in front of the small steel mirror above the washbasin. The next six to eight weeks could determine the fate of his entire Naval career. If he failed in any way with those cold blue eyes watching him he could figure on being relieved of command and relegated to a desk job ashore until he had his time in for retirement.
CHAPTER 13
Captain Mealey stood quietly on the cigaret deck of the Eelfish as Mike Brannon eased his ship out from between the submarine tender and another submarine. Once clear of the submarines alongside the tender Brannon maneuvered through the harbor toward the open sea.
On the main deck Chief Flanagan was securing the topside for sea. He could feel the cold eyes of the grim-faced Captain on the cigaret deck watching his every move. When he had finished he patiently double-checked his work and asked the Bridge for permission to go below. He climbed to the cigaret deck and murmured a polite “Good morning, sir” to the austere Captain in his heavily starched khakis. Captain Mealey nodded, raised the binoculars hanging around his neck, and studied the submarines that were jostling back into position alongside the tender. Flanagan went below to the Crew’s Mess, where Scotty Rudolph put a cup of hot coffee and a freshly made doughnut in front of him.
“Gonna be something different this time, huh?” the ship’s cook asked. Flanagan bit into the doughnut and nodded. He chewed slowly and then washed the doughnut down with a swig of coffee.
“Wolf-pack operation with the Hatchet Fish and the Sea Chub,” he said. “They’re waitin’ for us in Exmouth Gulf. The three of us will operate in a wolf pack, like the Germans do. Only they do it with ten to twenty submarines in one pack. This four-striper who’s ridin’ with us, Captain Mealey, he’s the Flag.”
Rudolph sipped at his coffee. “Don’t envy our Old Man having to operate under his eye. I knew him in Panama, years ago, when he had an R-boat. Tough son of a bitch. Hell of a seaman.”
“Tough fighting man, too,” Flanagan said. “There’s a mustang in the relief crew, name of Botts. I knew him when he was a Chief Torpedoman before the war. He was on the Mako when Mealey took the Mako out and dove under twelve destroyers at Truk and slipped about eight fish into a battlewagon.
“Botts told me that this guy is made of ice water and chilled steel. Went through the most hellish depth charging any submarine ever took, came up once and sank a big Jap destroyer with one fish, and then went down again to seven hundred feet, get that, seven hundred feet, and got away from the other eleven tin cans.”
“Too damned bad they didn’t keep him on the Mako,” Rudolph said. “Maybe if they had done that the Mako wouldn’t have got sunk.”
“Could be,” Flanagan replied. “But he made four stripes while he was on that patrol run, and they don’t keep four-stripers on submarines. Only way he could get back to sea, I guess, is to do something like this, take out a wolf pack of submarines.
“But like you said, I wouldn’t want to be the Old Man with him looking over my shoulder. I don’t know how many times in my life I got the topside of a submarine ready for sea, and when I was doing it a little while ago, with that dude standing on the cigaret deck, I felt like a seaman deuce. I double-checked everything, and then I began to worry that I’d missed something and started to do it all over again. He can sure make you feel funny when he looks at you with those eyes.”
During the 800-mile trip north to Exmouth Gulf along the west coast of Australia Captain Mealey made several trips through the Eelfish, stopping to talk when he saw a face he knew from other submarines, other duty stations prior to the war. In the Wardroom he was a pleasant enough visitor, listening far more than he spoke. He unbent only once, the evening before Eelfish was due to arrive at Exmouth Gulf to top off her fuel tanks.
Sitting at the Wardroom table after dinner, Lieutenant Bob Lee suddenly asked Captain Mealey to tell the officers seated around the table about his strategy in attacking the battleship that was guarded by twelve destroyers and aircraft. Mealey looked at Lee for a long moment and then asked Pete Mahaffey to bring him a plotting board and a fresh cup of coffee.
With the plotting board in front of him he marked in the position of the battleship and the twelve destroyers guarding it and the position he had maneuvered Mako into before the attack began. Then, as he penciled in each stage of the attack, he paused to fire pointed questions at Bob Lee, Perry Arbuckle, and Jerry Gold, asking them to tell him why he had done this, why he had done that. Mike Brannon and John Olsen sat quietly, saying nothing, watching their junior officers squirm under the sharp questions. At the end of an hour’s give and take Captain Mealey sat back, stuffed his pipe with tobacco, and lit it. When it was drawing to his satisfaction he let a small smile show ender his white mustache.
“All three of you seem to have a good grasp of the fundamentals of the attack problem,” Mealey said. “I will credit Captain Brannon and Mr. Olsen for that. The knowledge you have gained will stand you in good stead in your careers. Assuming, of course, that you are Regulars?”
“No, sir,” Lee said. “All three of us are Reserves. I’m a lawyer, that is, I passed my bar exam in California before I enlisted for the duration. Perry is an architect.” Mealey nodded and looked at Jerry Gold.
“And you, sir? I noticed that when we made our first trim dive out of Fremantle that the ship was in almost perfect trim. That is quite a feat, sir, after weeks in port, after dry-docking. What is equally commendable is that I noticed in my walks through the engineering compartments that ever
ything there is spotlessly clean and in excellent condition.”
“I thank you, sir,” Gold said with a grin.
“What are your civilian credits?” Mealey asked.
“I finished dental school and was getting ready to sit for my license when the Navy reached out and grabbed me,” Gold said. “I think being a diving officer is good training for a dentist. I fill and empty variable ballast tanks as a diving officer. When I get out and open an office I’ll be filling cavities and emptying abscesses.” Mealey’s frosty smile came and went.
“I have been in the Navy for eighteen years,” Mealey said. “I never cease to marvel at the way the Navy works. In time of war they seem to act without any thought when it comes to the assignment of personnel, and yet what they do seems to work out for the best. I had an Executive Officer aboard the Mako, a Reservist. The first, I believe, to ever be an Executive Officer. He was an engineer in civilian life, mechanical engineer I believe. He was an absolutely superb Naval officer. And a first-rate navigator as well.” He turned his pale blue eyes on Olsen.
“Your navigation on this patrol will be tested, sir. We are going to run Sibutu Passage between Tawi Tawi and Borneo and then run the Balabac Strait, south of Palawan, and then go north along the west coast of Palawan to our area.”
“Mines!” Olsen said suddenly. “Isn’t Balabac Strait heavily mined, sir?”
“It is,” Mealey said calmly. “But there are several passages through Balabac. The Japanese periodically sweep up their mines in one passage and then mine another. The Ultra decoders in Pearl Harbor have been very successful in keeping up with that information. Over thirty submarines have made a transit through Balabac Strait without incident, following the Ultra information. We will get the latest information on the mined and cleared areas the day before we make the transit.” He turned to Mike Brannon.
“While Mr. Gold is topping off our fuel tanks tomorrow we’ll have a conference aboard this ship with the Captains of the Hatchet Fish and the Sea Chub and their Executive Officers. If Mr. Olsen will oblige me, Captain Brannon, I’d appreciate it if he’d lay down our course to Sibutu Passage. Give me an ETA, Mr. Olsen, bearing in mind that we will be cruising at our most economical speed while on the surface at night. It’s a very long way to Luzon Strait, and longer coming home, if you run out of fuel oil. You’ll find two extra sets of charts in your chart locker, Mr. Olsen. When you have laid out our course I would appreciate it if you would mark the other two charts similarly for the benefit of the other members of the wolf pack.” He rose.
“If I may, Captain Brannon, I’ll go topside. I want to have a few words with young Michaels about radar and sonar. He has the OOD watch, I believe?”
“Yes, sir,” Brannon said. The younger officers around the table filed out of the Wardroom as Mealey left. Olsen came back from the Control Room with his charts and spread them out on the table.
“I was wondering,” Olsen said as he spread a chart out flat, “I was wondering why we didn’t do this in Fremantle? Sit down, all of us, and figure out the navigation, the courses and speeds, and all the rest of it?”
“I wondered, too,” Brannon said. He looked at the chart in front of Olsen. “Going through Balabac and then north, that’s quite a bit shorter than the easy way, across the Celebes Sea and out into the Pacific and then north, isn’t it?”
“Looks to be quite a bit shorter,” Olsen said. “But that’s a damned dangerous area to navigate in, where we’re going. Maybe that’s why he waited until now before he told us which way we’d be going. Maybe back in Fremantle the other skippers would have raised some heat about going this way. Out here they can’t do anything except bitch a little.”
“He’s a strange man,” Brannon said slowly. “He makes me feel like I’m a snot-nosed Ensign again. When I was backing out of the nest alongside the tanker I kept expecting him to walk forward and take the Conn away from me.”
“That’s why you didn’t let me take the ship out, huh?” Olsen said with a grin. “Afraid that if I made even one small mistake old Mealey would come down on me like a ton of bricks.”
“I wasn’t afraid of him gigging you,” Brannon answered. “I was afraid he’d come down on me for not training you well enough. I just figured if he was going to gig anyone it might as well be me for something I did.” He chewed his lower lip.
“I wonder how this damned operation is going to work out. Chet Marble in Hatchet Fish and Jim Shelton in the Sea Chub are both damned senior Commanders. They’re about ready for four stripes themselves, and neither of them has the reputation of being easy to get along with.”
“Neither one of them has ever sunk a ship,” Olsen said, his eyes flicking to the door opening of the Wardroom to make sure no one overheard him. “I talked to their Executive Officers in Fremantle before they got under way, and both of them told me they’d put in for transfers.”
“That’s odd,” Brannon said. “With both their skippers ready to be promoted they’d fleet up to command. Why would they put in for a transfer?”
“The polite way to put it, Skipper, is that Captain Marble and Captain Shelton are not quote aggressive unquote submarine Captains. Both the Executive Officers are aggressive. The result is that neither Executive Officer has been recommended for command by their Captain. And that makes living aboard both ships very rough for the two Execs.” His right eye blinked almost imperceptibly and he bent over the chart as Captain Mealey passed by the Wardroom door opening on his way to the Forward Torpedo Room.
The crews of the Hatchet Fish and the Sea Chub greeted the Eelfish with shouts of derision as John Olsen eased his ship delicately into place alongside a fuel barge. Two days of waiting for the Eelfish to arrive, waiting in the hot, arid waste of Exmouth Gulf with only a small supply of warm beer available in a tin hut on the beach, had not been pleasant for the crews of the other two submarines.
The meeting in the Eelfish Wardroom began pleasantly enough. There was the usual heavy-handed badinage from the two senior Captains about Eelfish getting lost on the way north. Pete Mahaffey served a platter of sweet rolls and two carafes of coffee and withdrew. As a Lieutenant Commander, and a junior one at that, Mike Brannon elected to stay silent unless spoken to, to let Captain Mealey do all the talking.
The joviality in the Wardroom faded abruptly when Captain Mealey handed a set of charts to the Captains of the Hatchet Fish and the Sea Chub. Captain Marble of the Hatchet Fish traced the course line to the top of Makassar Strait, where it ended with a small arrow pointing at the Sibutu Passage.
“Not going east across the Celebes and out to the Pacific?” he asked. “Look.” His finger traced a course to the Pacific across the Celebes Sea.
“We could follow this course and have good deep water all the way, sir. No danger of mines, damned little need to even dive during the daylight hours, once we’d cleared the Makassar Strait.” Mealey listened quietly, his right forefinger rising to touch his mustache.
“I could give you the standard Navy answer, Captain Marble,” he said. “I could simply say we are going to follow the course I have laid down because I said we are going to follow that course, and that would be the end of it.
“But since we are going to be working as a team in an operation the people at Pearl Harbor see as a very significant operation, I will explain my reasons.
“The course you indicate is several hundred miles longer than the one I have laid down. That means that we will use more fuel. We may need every drop of fuel we have in our tanks before we get home to Fremantle.
“Now, as to how we will proceed. Eelfish will lead the way. Sea Chub will follow at three thousand yards’ distance. As the senior of the two, Hatchet Fish will follow astern of the Sea Chub at three thousand yards’ distance. Orders to dive and time of surfacing will be issued by me daily. They will be followed to the letter.
“Should we see anything in Makassar Strait that can be attacked I will issue instructions via voice radio, the same as I would do once we are
in our assigned patrol area. Once we reach our area of patrol you will be assigned to positions and patrol courses with the area in conformity with information we receive from Ultra in Pearl.”
“I’ve heard reports, Captain Mealey,” Captain Marble said, “reports that there are elements of the Japanese battle fleet in the anchorage at Tawi Tawi. Your course takes us right past that anchorage, to the south. The water is very shallow there for a submarine if we run into some Jap destroyers.”
Mealey’s eyes seemed to protrude slightly, their cold blue gaze fastening on Captain Marble.
“You seem to be very concerned about deep water, sir,” he said in a low voice. “Correct me if I am wrong, but if I recall correctly you have on several occasions decided not to attack enemy shipping because the enemy ships were in water you decided was too shallow for an attack.”
“I think of my ship, sir.” Captain Marble’s voice was harsh. “I think it is madness to attack a target guarded by escort vessels in water that is too shallow to go to deep submergence to evade. Admiral Christie has not seen fit to question my judgment, sir. I see no need to defend my judgment now.”
“There is no need, Captain,” Mealey said softly. He filled his pipe and lit it. “But if we do see elements of the Japanese battle fleet, sir, why then we shall attack. As long as they have sufficient water under their keels to keep them afloat then there is enough water for me to attack!
“We will communicate by voice radio once we leave this port,” he continued in a calm voice. “Radio silence will be preserved unless you sight a target. Radar will not be used unless I so order.
“Our code name for this operation will be Mealey’s Maulers. We will begin using that designator as soon as we leave. Hatchet Fish, as the senior Captain, will be Mauler One. Sea Chub will be Mauler Two.” His cold stare froze the slight smile that started to form around Captain Shelton’s mouth.
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