Run Silent, Run Deep

by Edward L. Beach

  It took us two days to drive across its broad expanse. Two days during which we doubled the lookout watch on the bridge and kept all watertight doors continuously closed, not dogged, but latched shut, ready for instant dogging down.

  Nor were there any complaints from the crew at this temporarily increased watch load or the inconvenience caused by latching shut the five-hundred-pound doors.

  A period of even higher tension came as we neared Cristobal, the harbor on the Caribbean Side of the Panama Canal, where, if anywhere, German submarines would be concentrated, but where also our defense forces were massed in strength. A long-range, two-engine flying boat first spotted us.

  A little later another joined and we were continuously under air coverage for the last hundred miles of our approach. A few miles outside the harbor an escort vessel, a converted yacht similar to the Vixen but smaller, came out to meet us, flashing a signal searchlight insistently from the bridge. We had the recognition answer ready, flashed it in our turn.

  "MIKE SPEED FOURTEEN," spelled out Rubinoffski, as an- other series of flashes came from the yacht. "What shall I tell him, Sir?"

  I paused for a moment, trying to think just how to word it. "Send him 'MIKE SPEED TWENTY REQUEST PERMISSION TO PROCEED AHEAD OF YOU.'"

  The signal searchlight clattered as Rubinoffski banged away on the shutter handle. As the answering message came back, Rubinoffski shouted the words one by one.

  "HELL YES THIS OLD TUB WAS BUILT FOR SEX NOT SPEED."

  Rubinoffski didn't get the ninth word, had to have it repeated twice more, by which time everyone on the bridge had recognized the letters with loud delight.

  "Maybe that's the yacht I heard about a little while ago,"

  Jim commented.

  "Which one's that?" I said, inspecting her through my bin- oculars. "She's a mighty neat-looking craft, I'd say."

  "Neat is right. The story is that a little while after the Navy took her over they found that if you pushed the right button the bulkhead between the skipper's and Exec's state- rooms turned out to be an electrically operated sliding door."

  The spectacle of a pajama-clad skipper confronting his startled half-undressed Exec was too much for my straight face and I joined the guffaw of laughter.

  "Send him 'THANK YOU,'" I called to Rubinoffski as soon as I managed to regain my composure. "Jim," turning to him, "lay us a zigzag course for the harbor entrance."

  As Jim disappeared below I took another good look at our escort. Here and there streaks of black paint showed through the seat of wartime gray. Although salt spray encrusted her sides and delicate yacht fittings and she looked considerably the worse for wear, there was no doubt she once had been a and lovely yacht.

  We passed fairly close aboard without slackening our pace.

  I watched her until the wash of our screws set her rocking in our wake, then tamed to search for the passage through the Cristobal breakwater to the sheltered waters beyond.

  Going through the Panama Canal is a thrilling and never- to-be-forgotten experience, even to those who have done it many times. The great locks, one thousand feet long and one hundred ten feet wide, were planned to take the largest ship anyone might conceivably want to build. Now streaked with moss and green with slime on their inner sides, they still performed the function perfectly-a testimony to the competence of the Army Engineers who built them. That only recently had any vessels tested their size was a testimony also to the vision of their designers.

  It was still early on the morning of June sixth that we passed into the breakwater at Cristobal, there to be met by a message directing us to proceed to the entrance of the Panama Canal and make transit that same day. There was something in the wind. No one seemed to know what it was.

  It was not exactly hushed expectancy or worry, more an attitude of waiting for news. Our pilot, whom we queried as soon as he came aboard, knew nothing at all. Dave Freeman searched the schedule sheets, but beyond discovery of an unusually large group of messages all in the same code- which Walrus had not been issued-he could furnish no enlightenment.

  It took us most of the day to travel the forty miles of canal from Atlantic to Pacific. When we got there we were met on the dock by the Commanding Officer of the Naval Station, another old-time submariner, now a Captain, U. S. Navy, but still known as Sammy Sams. His car was waiting, and he whisked me off in it to his office.

  Once there, he closed the door carefully. "Rich," he said, "have you heard the news from the Pacific?"

  "No, sir."

  "It's a battle. Biggest one yet."

  "Where?" I asked.

  "Midway. The Japs are trying to capture it."

  "Capture it? Not just attack it?"

  "Nope, they're going to move in this time. They muffed their chance at Pearl Harbor. They could have taken Hawaii with a battalion, then, or Midway with a couple of boatloads of seamen. This time they are coming for keeps."

  "What are the latest reports? How's it coming out?"

  "The whole Jap Navy," said Captain Sams, waving at a map of Japan on the wall behind him, "has been steaming across the Pacific loaded for bear. They attacked Midway yesterday, and it has been a hell of a fight. Our forces are badly outnumbered. I wonder how Nimitz scraped together enough carriers and airplanes to stand up to them."

  "I guess it was not so much a question of 'how' and 'have to,'" I ventured.

  "Have to, is right," Captain Sams exploded "If those monkeys ever get a base in Midway we might as well kiss Pearl Harbor good-by."

  We talked on for some time, and it was with an enlarged appreciation of the supremely critical nature of the Pacific operation that I journeyed back to my ship. As I approached the dock where I had left Walrus I had a moment of panic.

  She was not in sight! I had visions of some catastrophe for a split second before I realized that in the interval I had been gone the tide had fallen several feet, concealing her hull from me.

  It was a welcome relief to stretch our legs ashore after a week at sea, but Captain Sams didn't give us much time, only what remained of the day of our arrival in fact, and then solely for the purpose of using it to unload our cargo of "warshots" and take aboard exercise torpedoes. Next morning we were under way again, bound for what he called his "refresher training area," Las Perlas Islands, not far offshore.

  Not many submarines had yet come through his station, the Captain said, but be intended to help us make the most of the few days allotted before we were to start for Pearl Harbor. From somewhere he had collected a motley fleet of boats they could hardly be classed as "ships," to be used in "convoys" as targets, and for three days he kept us at it day and night, making us get under way as dawn flooded the anchorage and keeping us at approach work until long after dark."

  For three days we fired torpedo after torpedo-the same ones over and over again because Captain Sams had only a dozen exercise torpedoes in his entire base and we had ten of them. We would fire a torpedo; then we would surface, pursue it, lift it aboard with our torpedo loading equipment, slide it down the torpedo loading hatch into one of the torpedo rooms, overhaul it, clean it up, refuel it, refill the exercise head with water, test all mechanisms; then we would load it in a torpedo tube and fire again. With six torpedoes 'm the forward torpedo room and four in the after torpedo room, there were always a couple under overhaul while the others were being fired. At the end of our first day our torpedomen simply curled up on the deck or on their zippered, water- proof mattress covers and went to sleep, oily, greasy, filthy, and exhausted. The rest of us were not far behind.

  Sammy Sams drove all of us relentlessly, cajoling, wheedling, threatening, and promising. It was soon apparent that his target fleet either idolized him or was petrified with fear of him, for every morning they got under way before us in order to be ready for the first approach in plenty of time, and they always gave us the favored position, winding up at quitting time much farther away from the anchorage than Walrus.

  At the end of the third day Sammy Sam
s declared our refresher training over, and invited everyone in the ship except the duty section to what he announced was a Hawaiian luau.

  There was no roast pig, no poi, nor any octopus, but we had fish and shrimp and other sea food delicacies, and the piece de resistance was roast beef. Toward midnight the old sub- mariner rapped for quiet and made us a speech.

  "You men are men, not kids, even though some of you are still pretty. young. This is the biggest opportunity you will ever have to repay to the United States some of the debt you owe for having been born there. The enemy is vicious and treacher- ous, but the important thing is that he is also very able-don't ever forget that. That's why, so far, he has had us back on our heels. There aren't enough of us and what we've been able to accomplish hasn't been nearly enough. He is equal to us in equipment and in the bravery of his soldiers and sailors, but the One thing he doesn't have, and never will have, is the tremendous staying power of America." He went on for some minutes, sometimes eloquent, sometimes bone dry. It didn't take me long to sense that he was trying to tell us why we were in a war and pass along to us something of his own philosophy about it.

  His ending was simple. "I know you know this will be a tough war. I know you realize that Walrus may never come back and that maybe some of you men won't come back either, and if that's what it comes to for you, if I can leave you with one thought, one bit of comfort, it's this: it's worth it. It's what America expects of all of us." He sat down. There was silence for a second, then our men were, on their feet with a roar, led by Kohler who was clapping like a man inspired.

  I saw a suspicion of moisture in the old man's eyes, and here again, as in the case of Captain Blunt, the thought sprang into my mind-here was an old submariner who had given his all to the cause of submarines, who, at the moment of their greatest trial, when all the teachings of his younger days were being brought to bear, found himself passed by, too old to participate. A little wistfully, these older men-men like Captain Blunt, Admiral Smathers, and Sammy Sams- were doing their best to support us younger ones who would have the duty, or privilege, of carrying on for them.

  Next morning we got under way for Pearl Harbor with Captain Sams on the dock bidding us good-by. As we made our way into the broad expanse of the Bay of Panama and pointed Walrus' prow south to clear Punta Mala, the right- hand promontory, I could not help thinking that, though angry German submarines prowled the seas within fifty miles of us, except for the remote possibility of a Japanese submarine at this great distance we here in the Pacific might as well be a million miles away from danger. Here our danger was ahead in the home waters of the land of the Rising Sun, our next destination but one.

  As night came I wrote in the Captain's Night Order Book: "Course 200. Transiting Gulf of Panama en route Pearl Harbor. Cruising on three engines 80–90; making about 14- knots, zigzagging. The ship is rigged for dive and darkened.

  Call me if other ships or land are sighted. Punta Mala is ahead and to starboard. Maintain a steady watch on air search-radar and carry out all instructions in the front of this book."

  Then I signed my name, went below, and had the first good night's sleep under way I had had since leaving the Octopus, fifteen months before.

  Our trip across the Pacific was actually a little boring.

  We devoted a part of each day to fire-control and emergency drills and we permitted members of the crew in small groups to come on the bridge to sunbathe. The ocean was beautiful, the water sparkling, and the weather balmy as we forged steadily westward-west by north, actually, once we had doubled Punta Mala. Our progress was measured only by the steady change in our clocks as we kept up with the various time zones through which we passed. It was a peaceful pleasant trip, marred only by the thought that at the other end lay war.

  And then one morning, as Jim had, predicted from his star sights of the previous evening, the headlands of Oahu hove in sight. We had been given a rendezvous position with explicit instructions regarding it, and we were there at the point of daybreak. Barely visible over the southwest horizon was the familiar volcanic outline of Diamond Head and, sure enough, here came a patrol plane to see if we were on schedule.

  The approach to Pearl Harbor was in some respects a repetition of our approach to the Panama Canal with one exception-there was no levity. A PC boat, a steel-hulled sub- marine chaser expressly built for the purpose, came boiling up from the south to meet us, flashed us the recognition signal, and a curt "FOLLOW me." We swung. in astern and, still zigzagging, the two of us raced for Pearl Harbor.

  We skirted close under Diamond Head, ran down past Waikiki Beach where through our binoculars we could see figures lying on the sand or playing in the surf. Well could I remember the few times I had been able to spend a week end off the Octopus here on this beach, or night-clubbing at one of the-beautiful hotels lining it. In those days Waikiki was the height of fashionable play and only the wealthiest could afford to go there. A Navy Lieutenant's pay would last for only one or two evenings.

  Alongside the white, square Moana was the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, gleaming purple-pink in the mid-morning sun, standing on the water's edge as though growing from the sea.

  A little to the left, and beyond, rose the rooftops of the city of Honolulu, with the Aloha Tower prominent along the waterline. Backdrop to all this were the mountains of Oahi4 green and verdant, covered with sugar cane, pineapple, and other exotic semitropical plants. It was from here that the Jap planes attacking Pearl Harbor had swept down, over the mountains and through the mountain passes-on our unsus- pecting fleet at Pearl Harbor. There had even been, so the story went, wide swaths cut through the sugar-cane fields pointing in the direction of Pearl Harbor, and we had heard stories of clandestine radio stations hidden in the hills, broad- casting vital information to the enemy.

  As we neared the Pearl Harbor Channel entrance, naval activity increased rapidly about us. On the horizon we could see the tops of two new fleet destroyers evidently on anti- sub patrol. Closer in, another destroyer, an old "four-piper" like the Semmes, cruised about aimlessly. Passing out between the entrance buoys as we neared them was a gray-painted tug, a mine sweeper, — with signal flags flying from her yard- arm, and, several hundred yards astern a float bobbed through the water carrying a small flag signifying the end of her tow.

  And the closer we approached to the entrance buoys, the more aircraft there were flying about.

  "They're sure putting on a show, aren't they, skipper?' said Jim, standing alongside me on our gently heaving bridge.

  "Show is right," I returned, "Only I don't think this is just for appearances.

  "Guess you're right. Wonder if the Japs have any submarines out here? Maybe we can find out when we get in."

  I felt a pang of nostalgia as I swept the countryside with my binoculars, picked out the channel buoys, and surveyed the way into the harbor. It all seemed so much as I had remembered. We had operated from Pearl Harbor for months, and I had taken my turn as Duty Officer, getting the ship to sea and bringing her back again, so many times that I knew the harbor by heart. It was here that we had brought Octopus in that day the Yorktown had rammed us. It was through these buoys that I had taken her out for my qualification for command trials. On the day before I was detached and sent to S-16 I had done the same-and now, only a year and a few months later, I *as back again, now in command of a newer, finer version of the Octopus, a ship not even thought of then, and the Octopus and all my shipmates were gone beyond recall, numbered among the first sacrifices our submarine force had laid-on the altar of war.

  There was something unreal about the scene near the harbor entrance. It was so much the same and yet so vastly different. The urgency of our escort-the determined manner in which the planes overhead flew. their search orbits-bespoke an entirely different atmosphere. I wondered what we would see after we reached the harbor itself.

  Dave Freeman, Officer of the Deck, was standing along- side me. "Permission to station the maneuvering watch and enter the harbor, Capt
ain?"

  "Permission granted," I returned. The feeling of unreality was growing. Dave bent his head under the bridge conning and shouted at the open hatch at his feet: "Station the maneuvering watch! Line handlers stay below." Then a few minutes later, after taking a good look through his binoculars, "Right ten degrees rudder! All ahead standard!" I could feel the rudder take hold gently and ease the ship around into the channel. The black left-hand buoy at the channel entrance swam into my field of view. The forceful beat of our engines back aft subsided just a trifle, and there was a, different motion to the ship as the seas caught her from another direction. it still seemed unreal, too familiar; even the corkscrewlike motion of the ship, as Oregon fought to keep her on her new course, was exactly as I had expected. The unprotected channel entrance, at right angles to the line of the shore, permitted seas to sweep right across it, resulting at times in a peculiar heave to the ship and difficult steering. Once we were free of the ocean effects, however, and inside the sheltered headlands of the harbor itself, the channel was as smooth as a millpond. With her speed reduced, Walrus forged steadily onward past Hospital Point, around the next bend to the left, then to the right, and suddenly I gasped.

  Nostalgia vanished, never to return.

  There indeed were the old familiar landmarks: The Navy Yard with its huge cranes, Ford Island in the center of the harbor, ten-ten dock-so named for its length of one thousand and ten feet-extending rectangularly into the water and blocking view of the submarine piers beyond. And there were the dry docks and tanks and buildings as I had known them. But my brain encompassed none of these.

  The stench of crude oil was everywhere. It struck my nostrils almost with physical pain. The shoreline, wherever it-could be seen, was black; filthy; and the water was like- wise filthy, with here and there a coagulated streak of black grease clinging like relaxed death to bits of oily debris.