Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2)

by Harry Homewood

  “I know you can, John,” he said.

  A half-hour later Mike Brannon ordered Eelfish brought up to two-thirds speed. There was no response from the sea above. He ordered Eelfish brought up to 300 feet at full speed. There was no indication of enemy retaliation.

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, my mother used to say,” Brannon said. “Shift to hydraulic power on the bow and stern planes and the helm.” The hydraulic pumps in the Pump Room below the Control Room began to hum. A gusting sigh of relief came from John LaMark on the bow planes. Doc Wharton, who manned the stern planes on Battle Stations, looked over at LaMark.

  “If you could do this all night, you peckerhead, why don’t you tell the man we don’t need hydraulic power?”

  “Don’t want to see a Chief pill pusher pass out on me,” LaMark said. “You left arm rates got no stamina like us right arm rates.”

  A half-hour later Brannon cautiously eased the Eelfish up to periscope depth and ran the periscope upward. The sea, bathed in the white light of a full moon, was empty. He ordered the ship to forty feet and swept twice around with the radar.

  Eelfish surfaced, and as the big diesels began to thunder, drawing a small cyclone of fresh, sweet air down through the bridge hatch and aft to the engine rooms the crew began to relax.

  “That nice new deck they gave us at Fremantle,” Mike Brannon said to Jerry Gold, who had the OOD watch. “Most of it’s gone. What a beating this damned ship can take.”

  “Don’t forget the beating we can take, Captain,” Gold said. “All I want once this war is over is to get a Jap in my dental chair. Then we’ll see who can take a beating.”

  CHAPTER 24

  John Olsen watched the relief-crew officer, who was approaching down the deck. The seamed face and the grizzled patches of gray at the temples were far too old for the pair of silver Lieutenant’s bars on his collar tabs. Probably a Mustang, Olsen thought, a former Chief Petty Officer elevated to officer’s rank. The Lieutenant came up to him and gave Olsen a perfunctory salute.

  “You people specialize in losing things we don’t have in spare parts,” he growled. “First you lose the outer door to a torpedo tube. Now both sound heads. I sent a priority message to Pearl Harbor asking for two sound heads, shafts, and associated parts. Haven’t got an answer yet.”

  “I’d like to say we’re sorry,” Olsen said, “but we didn’t have much choice. Three destroyers caught us in some shallow water after we sank their oil tanker and drove us down until we hit bottom.”

  “I know,” the Lieutenant said. He eyed the gold oak leaf on Olsen’s collar tabs. “I’m Arnold Lever, sir. I used to be a Chief Shipfitter before they hung the gold on me.”

  “John Olsen,” Olsen said and stuck out his hand. “Am I out of order in asking when you expect to get the new sound heads?”

  “Nah,” Lieutenant Lever said. “I just don’t know. I do know that I looked at a chart of where you hit the bottom. The chart showed mud and shell bottom, but that doesn’t mean that maybe there weren’t a few rocks. You’ve got to go in the dry dock to fit the new sound heads, and when you’re there we’ll check the hull, the screws, ballast-tank openings, the works.”

  “What are you talking about in terms of time?”

  “Maybe five, six weeks,” Lever said. “I don’t know that, either. I’ve learned to say I don’t know when I don’t know. This place here is about as screwed up as a Navy base could be.”

  Mike Brannon scowled when Olsen told him the news about how long they might be in port.

  “I don’t like being around that long,” he said slowly. “I’m afraid to open my mouth in the O-Club for fear some white rat will overhear what I’m saying and take it to the Admiral or someone else.” He looked at his wrist watch. “I’ve got to see Admiral Christie in an hour. How about dinner this evening? I want to talk to you about something. I think.” Olsen nodded, wondering what was on his Captain’s mind.

  At dinner that night he found out. Brannon made a little design on the tablecloth with his fork, his eyes intent on the fork’s tines. Then he looked up.

  “I made a strong pitch today to Admiral Christie that you have your own ship, John. He agreed. You’ll make this next patrol with us and then you’ll go back to the States, to attend Prospective Commanding Officers’ School, which is a damned joke because you’ve had the experience, you have the intelligence, the time in rank to command your own ship. After PCO School I assume you’ll be sent to new construction.”

  “I appreciate that, sir,” Olsen said. “But I have to say that I’d just as soon stay aboard with you as your number two boy. I want you to know that.”

  “I’m grateful that you feel that way, John. But you’re a career officer. Command will look good in your record later on. Now I’ve got other business.

  “We’re going to have two weddings in the next day or so. Bob Lee is getting married and Paul Blake is, too. I had to interview both women the last time we were in port. Both are first rate.”

  “So what’s there to worry about?” Olsen asked. “You look as if this is something to be upset about.”

  “Well, damn it, both Lee and Blake have asked me to be their best man. I don’t know anything about being a best man. The only wedding I ever went to was my own, and I was so scared that time that I didn’t know what was going on.”

  “Well,” Olsen said, “you can cut the load in half by asking the two of them to have a double wedding.”

  “That’s a sound idea,” Brannon said. “All right, if you don’t know about the privileges of command here’s a lesson. You argue the case for a double wedding with the two wedding parties and get hold of the chaplain to write out a short brief of my duties as a best man at a double wedding.” He grinned at Olsen.

  The wedding was held in the chapel of a church just off St. George’s Square in Perth. The crew of the Eelfish, cold sober by order of Chief Flanagan, were in attendance. Later, at the reception in the hotel where the crew was quartered, Steve Petreshock nudged Jim Rice.

  “There’s ol’ Bob Lee’s new wife. Got himself one hell of a good-lookin’ broad. She’s what, five, six inches taller than he is? She’s got that look in her eye. Swings her ass right nice, too. That skinny old Bob Lee is like to be nothing but skin and bones when the honeymoon is over. If he can go the course at all. He looks outmatched.”

  “Don’t worry about skinny Bob Lee,” Rice said, a smile splitting his black beard. “I was on watch one night in the Forward Room, and he took a shower in the officers’ shower and forgot his towel. Came out buck-naked, and that skinny old boy is all horn, let me tell you. Don’t sell skinny little guys short, because most of them ain’t.”

  Over on one side of the room Mike Brannon was talking with Paul Blake’s new in-laws.

  “Our only regret is that Constance will be so very far away,” Mrs. Maybury said. “But we love Paul, he’s such a sweet boy. Don’t you think so, Captain?”

  “I don’t think of him as ‘sweet,’ ” Brannon said with a grin, “but I know what you mean. I think of him as a very brave young man, very skilled in his work and an asset to our crew. What you should do, Mr. and Mrs. Maybury, is to visit Paul and Constance in the States when the war is over.”

  “Oh, we intend to,” Maybury said. “One of the privileges of being port director, y’know, is being able to travel on the liners at no cost. We intend to visit them and then go on to England. Both of us are second-generation Australians, and neither of us have seen where our people came from.” Brannon excused himself as John Olsen came toward him, beckoning. He walked back across the room with Olsen to where Bob Lee was standing with his bride and Jerry Gold. The new Mrs. Lee walked up to Brannon and stopped, her eyes level with his.

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you since you were last in port and had to do that interview with me to see if I was fit to be the wife of an American Navy officer.” Her eyes were glinting with laughter. “I’m so glad I passed your inspection, and I want to thank you for
the lovely letter your wife wrote to me.

  “She did?” Brannon said.

  “She did. A lovely letter.”

  “Well,” Brannon said awkwardly, “I did write her before we left port last trip. I felt embarrassed, having to interview you and Blake’s fiancée, and I told Gloria about that. I didn’t think she’d write you.”

  “But you knew she would if you put my name and address in your letter,” Mary Ann Lee said softly. “Bob has told me that you’re a very tough captain, a regular sea dog. I think you’re a sentimental Irisher and I love you for that.” She stepped closer and kissed him, and Brannon felt the blood rushing up his face. Mary Ann Lee chuckled and turned away.

  Time passed slowly for Mike Brannon as he waited for the Eelfish to be dry-docked and the new sound heads fitted. For Brannon it was a critical time. Ashore a vicious political war was being waged, and Brannon wanted desperately to be able to avoid taking sides, something that was becoming more difficult by the day.

  Almost two years earlier Admiral Christie, then in command of the largest group of submarines operating in the Pacific, had been summarily relieved of command at Brisbane and summoned to the United States. Christie, an expert on torpedoes, was needed to sort out and break the bottlenecks in torpedo production at Newport Torpedo Station. Admiral Christie’s place at Brisbane was taken by Captain James Fife. Christie left no doubt in anyone’s ears who would listen that Jimmy Fife wasn’t a big enough man to fill Admiral Christie’s shoes.

  Christie had hardly settled in Newport when the over-all commander of Submarines Pacific, Rear Admiral Robert English, was killed in an air crash. In the resultant swirl of political maneuvering for the newly vacant job, Christie was recalled to Pearl Harbor and then sent to Fremantle to take over the submarine base there.

  Meanwhile, Captain Fife, now in charge at Brisbane, had openly criticized the way Admiral Christie had handled submarines when he was in Brisbane. Fife announced that he would “tighten things up.”

  One of the new procedures instituted by Fife was to shift submarines about as if they were pieces on a chess board — and to require submarines to report their positions at frequent intervals. The flow of radio traffic between Brisbane and submarines on war patrol increased heavily. In the course of four weeks four submarines were lost to enemy action, and an investigation was called for. Captain Fife was exonerated of any blame. Admiral Christie disagreed with the findings and began his own investigation. He became convinced that Fife’s demand that submarines report their positions frequently by radio allowed the Japanese to use radio direction finders to locate American submarines — and send antisubmarine forces to sink them.

  Christie made his opinions public, and Fife, incensed, offered to resign. General Douglas MacArthur, who was fond of Jimmy Fife, intervened, and the offer to resign was dropped.

  Now, two years later and across the continent of Australia at Fremantle, Admiral Christie was again being relieved of command and — again — his relief was Jimmy Fife, now a Rear Admiral.

  Rumors about the reason for the change of command were thick, but neither of the principals said a word. Christie, no mean Navy politician, had a few shots left in his locker, and he meant to use them as best he could. His efforts to kill the change of command failed. Admiral Fife, it was said, had friends in high places in Washington. The change of command would go through. The submariners working out of Fremantle began to worry. Admiral Fife was known as a loner, a man who neither drank nor smoked and who disapproved highly of any indulgence in alcoholic beverages, no matter how dangerous or frightening a war patrol had been. Fife was a man dedicated to his work, and he literally lived at his desk, seven days a week from dawn until late at night. By comparison, Admiral Christie was a genial, friendly man who understood submariners and, more importantly, was tolerant of human frailties.

  Admiral Fife arrived in Perth on Christmas Eve of 1944. Rather than depart immediately, Admiral Christie announced that he would be around for a while. He was due some well-earned leave before reporting for duty as the Commanding Officer of the Navy Yard at Bremerton, Washington. He made it a point not to discourage plans to hold a big reception to honor him before he left, and he pointedly did not urge anyone to invite Admiral Fife to the reception. Finally, Admiral Christie left, and the officers on Admiral Fife’s staff sighed with relief and turned to the job of purging those officers who had been friendly with Admiral Christie.

  Mike Brannon did his best to keep a low profile in this jungle of Navy politics, hardly daring to ask when his ship would be dry-docked, not daring at all to ask that the work be expedited. Finally it was finished, and late in February Brannon was summoned to Admiral Fife’s Operations Office, where he was given a sealed envelope.

  “These are your orders, sir,” the Operations Officer said. “You will open them at sea and proceed to your patrol area. Good luck, sir.” He did not rise, did not offer to shake hands.

  Safely at sea, Mike Brannon read his patrol orders and handed them to John Olsen, who rummaged around for the proper chart among those he had brought to the Wardroom.

  “Bonin Islands?” Olsen said. “Lifeguard duty?” He looked at the chart. “The Bonin Islands are directly in line between Tinian, in the Marianas — that’s where the big aircraft, the B-twenty-nines fly out of — the Bonins are directly in line with Tinian and Tokyo. So now we are going to wet-nurse fliers in trouble. Hell of a way to fight a war in a submarine.”

  “The fliers won’t think of it that way if they’re sitting out in that ocean in a little rubber boat,” Brannon said dryly.

  Olsen read through the patrol orders without further comment until he came to the last page. “Hey, now!” he said. “We’re going back to Pearl!”

  “Good news for you,” Brannon said. “Bad news for Bob Lee and young Blake.”

  “Never thought of that,” Olsen said. “Are you going to tell them?”

  “I don’t want to, not until we’re headed there,” Brannon said. “I think it would hurt both of them, and there’s just no need to hurt either one. So let’s say nothing.”

  “We’ve got to make a pretty big detour to the west,” Olsen said as he consulted the patrol orders. “I guess those people on Iwo Jima are still fighting pretty hard. I talked with some of the officers one night in the O-Club, some guys in intelligence work, and they said the Japanese resistance was way stronger than they figured it would be, that it was a hell of a lot tougher fight than they ever expected. The Marines are supposedly losing a hell of a lot of men.”

  “The Marines almost always get the dirty jobs,” Brannon said. “That’s the price you pay for being good.”

  “Going to be a hell of a long trip there,” Brannon said, staring at the chart. “How long, in days?”

  “About eighteen, twenty days,” Olsen said.

  “Might be a good idea to start some sort of a contest,” Brannon said. “Something to relieve the boredom.”

  “Acey-Deucey?” Olsen asked. “Every sailor I ever knew thinks he’s an expert at Acey-Deucey.”

  “Good idea,” Brannon said. “I happen to be the best cribbage player in the whole Navy, so let’s run two contests. Acey-Deucey and cribbage. First prize will be a fifth of Scotch, courtesy of the ship’s recreation fund.

  “Get Chief Ed Morris to draw up the pairings. He’s an operator, that fellow. Figures every angle there is to be figured. He’ll holler foul if someone else makes up the pairings, but if we ask him to do it he can’t yell.”

  The two contests kept the spirits of the crew high as the Eelfish ran down the long sea miles to its patrol area. Chief Morris, by dint of very careful pairing and the expert use of a pair of loaded dice, took the Acey-Deucey championship from Fred Nelson.

  Mike Brannon worked his way through the cribbage tournament without much trouble until he came to the semifinals. There, in a spirited battle with a young fireman, he managed to triumph, the Engine Room man admitting that the Captain was the best cribbage player that he’d
seen since his granddaddy had taught him the game at the age of five.

  In the finals, with all the off-watch crew members who could jam into the Crew’s Mess, Mike Brannon went up against Chief Yeoman John Wilkes Booth. Brannon lost the fifth and rubber game to Booth, who, some people said later, was the fastest man with a cribbage peg who had ever played the game.

  Eelfish arrived on station off the western side of the Bonin Islands three weeks after leaving Fremantle. Ten days later the radio crackled with the information that the invasion of Okinawa had begun. The fact that thousands of men had died at Iwo Jima, that many thousands more would die at Okinawa, made little impression on the crew of the Eelfish. Invasions, battles on land, were of a different world. Theirs was a world confined to a slim ship that was 312 feet long and 16 feet wide at its widest point. To the uninitiated the submariners on war patrol might seem phlegmatic, without emotion. In truth, most were in a constant state of anger; anger at the Japanese who depth charged them, anger that there was a war and it had been going on for too long a time, anger at their own senior officers, who seemed to care little about them and the officers who served in submarines — and not a little anger at themselves for ever volunteering to go to sea in a submarine.

  “I give us three more days on station,” Doc Wharton said one afternoon as he sat in the Crew’s Mess. “I talked to Brosmer and he said we’re one hell of a long way from Fremantle, over four thousand miles.”

  “Once we start back how long will it take?” Paul Blake asked.

  “About the same as it took to get here, three weeks,” Doc answered.

  “You missin’ that stuff you got married for, Blakey?” Scotty Rudolph asked as he brought a platter of freshly baked doughnuts out of the galley. “Damn it, I don’t see why you wanted to get married. You know that no woman is going to cook you chow like you get aboard this ship.”