Dust on the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

  Keith put it into words. “Skipper,” he said, “they’d give you ten TBTs on the bridge if you wanted them, or fifty torpedoes. If you asked them, I think these guys would jack up the periscope and build a new submarine underneath it for you!”

  It was true, and the amount of work agreed to be accomplished upon Eel in the period of two weeks was nothing less than prodigious. The clue—it was more than a clue, it was a plain statement—came as the conference was ending, as the base repair officer shook hands with Rich. “All of us lost some friends in AREA SEVEN,” was what he said—and then his face showed dismay as he realized that somehow he had said the wrong thing.

  The biggest problem concerned the hydraulic plant and what to do about it. Eel was a new submarine. The patrol just finished had been her first. She was also, however, one of the first to have the new enlarged hydraulic system. There had been no previous experience with this particular design. Much was known about the older hydraulic plants, which involved a smaller hydraulic accumulator and an entirely different hydraulic pump, but Eel presented completely new problems.

  Al Dugan had carefully maintained the operational history of the plant, especially after difficulties had begun to appear. It was apparent that there was gradually worsening leakage of some kind taking place, perhaps in the accumulator itself, very likely elsewhere too. The expenditure of replacement hydraulic fluid had increased alarmingly in the last few days of the patrol, and the time between recharging cycles of the accumulator had reduced correspondingly.

  It was agreed that the hydraulic plant would be completely disassembled and carefully tested. This was to be the principal job of the refit.

  Richardson also found, to his surprise, that apparently as an afterthought Keith had requested a survey of the officers’ shower with view to restoring the head room. If the heating control panels for the electric torpedoes could be relocated anywhere else in the compartment, Keith pointed out dryly, it might be possible to do away with the commanding officer’s discomfort while bathing. Richardson had not spoken of the shower design, or joked about revenge upon the designer, for weeks. Changing the heating panels would be a large job for a marginal result. Keith must have done some negotiating with the base repair shop. Clearly, he expected the base to agree to do the work. He must have considered the job important.

  Another conference was scheduled for the following morning, at which only Keith, as the ship’s personnel officer, need be present. This was to review the rotation of crew members. Even though Eel had finished only one patrol, in order for the crew rotation policy to work it was necessary to replace some 20 percent of Eel’s complement by new people.

  Richardson remembered his conversation of the previous evening with Admiral Small’s driver, He fumbled for the page in his notebook where he had written his name. Lichtmann. “It’s as good as done, Skipper,” said Keith. “I told you they’ll do anything they can for us around here. If we wanted Captain Blunt himself to go out with us next time, I bet he’d come.”

  “He is coming!”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to the Yellow Sea on a three-boat wolfpack, with Blunt as wolfpack commander. This is all confidential, for now, so don’t repeat it around where you can be overheard. We’ll be flagship, so he’ll be riding with us. You and I are going to be his right and left hand, I suspect, to help put this thing together.”

  “Oh, hell, Skipper, I was hoping to have another chance to go off by ourselves.”

  “Me too, Keith, but that’s the way the ball bounced this time. Anyway, you know Blunt’s an old friend and ex-skipper of mine. It will be great having him along with us.”

  The look on Keith’s face showed his doubt. Clearly, Keith shared his skipper’s silent reservations.

  The chief problem of coordination between submarines, as all parties to the wolfpack well knew, was that of communication, Submarines patrolling close to an enemy shore spent their days submerged, surfacing to recharge their batteries under cover of darkness. When well away from land they might extend their daylight patrol radius by remaining on the surface, but they had to be ready to dive instantly if in danger of detection.

  Once a radio circuit was established between surface ships, transmission and receipt of messages could be virtually assured. Because one never knew when a submarine might be submerged, however, such certainty could never exist between the members of a wolfpack. Very long wave signals from a powerful nearby shore station could be received to a shallow depth with a specially insulated antenna, but the high frequency radio signal of even a nearby submarine could not be heard beneath the surface; nor could a boat transmit while submerged. Furthermore, a receipting system was mandatory, for otherwise there would be no assurance that a particular message of extreme importance had been received by one’s wolfpack mates. A submarine required to make an important transmission, for example an enemy contact report, very likely might have only seconds available before combat or initimate danger. But she could never be sure the message had been received until at least one other boat transmitted a radio receipt signal. She would have to wait, possibly repeat the message, and thus further compromise herself.

  The longer the radio message, the greater the chance of its interception by an alert enemy. This could lead to location of the transmitting submarine by a direction-finding station, even to breaking down the code of the message. The result would be a paucity of enemy traffic through the suspect area and a greater likelihood of antisub sweeps. Some wolfpacks had developed special codes to reduce the lengths of their radio transmissions. Keith had been an interested follower of the systems devised, and several times he had stated they did not go far enough. Communications between its members, he said, was the crucial weakness of all wolfpacks. It had been left almost entirely to the communications officers and senior radiomen, whereas clearly it should receive the personal attention of the wolfpack commanders and skippers. Keith’s impassioned presentation easily convinced Richardson, who had long harbored the same thoughts himself. The interview with Blunt ended as Keith and Rich had hoped, with Blunt’s approval of Keith’s ideas. But, beyond giving support to the project in general terms, the prospective wolfpack commander had displayed surprising passivity, almost disinterest.

  “You’d think he thinks it’s easy!” burst out Keith, once safely out of earshot.

  “He’s just depending on us, especially you, since it’s your idea. He’s paying you a compliment.”

  “I don’t read him that way at all. He just doesn’t realize how tough it is to talk to another boat out in the area!”

  “Come on, Keith. Neither have we experienced the problem so far. He knows what he’s doing. Anyway, we’ve got his backing. Isn’t that what you wanted?” Richardson’s words were mild enough, but there was a snap of finality to them. His protective instinct regarding Blunt had overreached; he had overdone it. Keith had felt the slight degree of asperity and was giving him a troubled look.

  Two days after the new Chicolar had been welcomed from Mare Island, the three skippers and their wolfpack commander met for their first formal conference. Blunt had decided, he said, that the first submarine to detect a convoy would not attack. It would instead trail the enemy and send position reports to help the other two boats to make contact also. The second submarine to make contact would be the first to attack. Then it would fall astern to perform the trailing duties. Not until at least one other sub had attacked and had fallen behind, out of the immediate vicinity of the convoy, was the original “trailer” released to make an attack of her own.

  Attacks were to be made on the surface at night as a matter of preference, with due regard for the location of the trailer, who would presumably be keeping station from a sufficiently great distance that no one could mistake her on the radar for a patrolling enemy escort. In addition, narrow sectors directly ahead and directly astern of the convoy center were designated as safe sectors. No submarine could attack another ship in such a sector without positive visua
l identification. Other larger sectors were designated as unlimited attack zones, where attack on any target was permitted no matter how it might have been detected.

  Whenever possible, day or night, Blunt stressed, all submarines should stay on the surface in order to facilitate both communication and positioning for attack.

  Richardson found that the ideas of the other two skippers as to how to carry out night attacks in the surfaced condition were quite at variance with his own. Les Hartly of the Chicolar, a rotund and very intense officer, the senior of the three submarine captains, had only one method, to which he held strongly. At the beginning of the war he had commanded an S-boat in the Asiatic Fleet, undeniably an experience to confirm anyone’s latent qualities of self-sufficiency. Lack of a TDC in the S-boats had led to development of more rudimentary approach techniques, based mostly on time-honored concepts of the “seaman’s eye.” Even though Les had later commanded the more modern Porpoise for several patrols, the presence of an early TDC in her control room had not caused him to modify his notions. After three runs in the Porpoise he had been granted leave, to which all Asiatic submariners were clearly entitled, and had then been sent to Mare Island to commission and bring out the new Chicolar.

  Hartly by consequence had been more than a year away from the war; but his ideas were nonetheless positive. He spent far more time expounding on their advantages than in listening to those of others. Blunt was the only one who might have commanded his attention, but even the wolfpack commander, with no war patrols to his credit, was at a disadvantage. Only Keith, with eight, topped Hartly’s record of seven war patrols, and Hartly quickly disposed of all suggestions differing from the conclusions he had already fixed on.

  The way to handle a convoy, he said many times, was to attack instantly, if possible as soon as contact was made. In this way the risk of counter-measures would be least. He thought of Chicolar as a huge torpedo running on the surface which he would steer at high speed directly for the enemy, continually altering course to keep bows on to the ship he had selected for primary target. Hartly’s attack course was thus always a long sweeping curve. At the last minute he would shoot his torpedoes and then put the rudder over hard in whatever direction looked best.

  Since Hardy wasted no time in preliminaries, other than seeking a feasible attack position, his method had the undeniable advantage of being finished very quickly. Another strong point was that Chicolar never exposed more than a bows-on silhouette to her intended victims.

  Vainly, Richardson stated the counter arguments. The curved attack course deprived Hartly’s plotting parties of a reasonable opportunity to determine the enemy course, speed, and zigzag plan. The emphasis on immediate attack compounded the plotters’ difficulties. Lack of previous study of the enemy’s movements would prevent them from detecting an unexpected zig until some time afterward, if at all. A large zig away would put the submarine far astern, with a long chase or loss of the opportunity inevitable. A zig toward might put the submarine suddenly dead ahead of the enemy—which usually had one escort out in front—in a bow-to-bow situation with a closing rate equal to the sum of the speeds. This was the most serious of all the contingencies. A surface attack was no longer possible; discovery and counterattack were virtually certain.

  It was a matter of individual submarine tactics, professional expertise. Because of the large divergence in views the subject was tacitly avoided in Blunt’s presence, but several times, until it became an incipient cause of acrimony, Rich brought a more general discussion between the three skippers around to this topic. In desperation, and against his better judgment, he finally began to extole his own procedures, which were to track at about seven miles’ distance, and a little ahead of the beam, until all the variables had been as well determined as could be. Then, immediately after the convoy had settled upon a favorable zig course, so that there would be several minutes before the next zig, he would turn in for a deliberate, calculated attack. An inestimable benefit Rich saw in his method was that anything out of the ordinary on the part of the target would instantly be detected by plot, for by this time the plotters would have nothing else to worry about.

  But there was no convincing Les Hartly. And he roundly condemned Eel’s extra torpedoes and the second five-inch gun.

  Whitey Everett, the new skipper of Whitefish, must have been assigned that particular submarine by someone with a sense of humor. The nickname had been bestowed years ago for his extraordinarily blond hair, now shading into premature gray. The Whitefish was a relatively old submarine, having been completed at the Electric Boat Company yards in Groton, Connecticut, only a couple of months after the Walrus. Rich and Keith had watched her launched and had known many of her original crew.

  She was essentially a carbon copy of Walrus, with slightly greater austerity in her interior appointments because, unlike the Walrus, her construction had been ordered after the war began. Everett, a year senior to Richardson, was in fact her third skipper. This was to be his first command patrol. Slow-moving, taciturn, he had early developed a reputation for wisdom. He had been executive officer of a fleet submarine at the beginning of the war, but had then spent some time in New London as skipper of one of the training boats. Subsequently he had returned to the Pacific for a “make-ye-learn” cruise as a prospective commanding officer—a “PCO”—and now, somewhat to his chagrin, had drawn the Whitefish instead of one of the newer, heavier-built submarines like Eel or Chicolar.

  Whitey had never participated in a night attack on the surface, Rich quickly realized. Perhaps the aura of deliberateness which he had so long cultivated actually masked inner insecurity. Despite all the theory he had been subjected to and all the discussions he had engaged in, he really had no confidence in his ability to engage in a high speed night action. Patently, he felt most comfortable submerged. On the game floor, whenever the choice was left to him, he elected to attack submerged at daybreak, having used up the whole night waiting for this single opportunity.

  The gaming sessions were made as realistic as possible. Each of the three subs was given its own headquarters, with charts, navigation tools, and encoding equipment, and was permitted to communicate with the other submarines only by simulated radio messages. All messages were required to be in the special submarine attack code which Rich and Keith had devised, and no submarine could send or receive messages while it was “submerged.” Players were permitted to view the game floor only when, according to the tactical situation, they were actually in a position to do so. Even then, they could see only that portion of the game floor which, supposedly, would have been in sight through the periscope, or on their radar, under the conditions of the moment.

  By the time the long game days wore to an end, Richardson felt mentally exhausted. It was not so much that he was physically tired. Keith rightly put it to boredom. “Dammit, Captain, this is just a communication drill. All we’re doing is writing messages on pieces of paper. It’s almost a waste of time!”

  “Not quite true, Keith,” said Richardson, again alertly ready to defend Blunt. “We’re getting to know how the other fellows think and work. We’ve noticed quite a difference between Les Hartly and Whitey Everett. Another thing it’s doing is to give all of us a workout in your new code.”

  Again there was the slightly abashed look on Keith’s face. Twice, within a very few days, he had thought he understood what was running through his skipper’s mind only to find that, somehow, he had missed a signal, had gotten unaccountably off the track. “Well, I guess that’s right,” he said uncomfortably. “But you’ve got to admit this is sure tiresome. I suppose it will be a lot different when we try it aboard ship at sea.”

  “It’s pretty tiresome, all right. But it will be better when we take on that convoy from San Francisco.” Richardson was feeling twinges of conscience for not having let his most loyal supporter know more of what had been troubling him, but of this he could not speak. He would, however, have continued with a few more encouraging words had not the a
pproach of the unwitting cause of the misunderstanding, Captain Blunt, cut short the conversation.

  In addition to the preparations for wolfpack operations, a great deal was going on exclusively concerned with the Eel herself. The relaxation and ease of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel could not compare with the supreme interest in seeing that she was properly gotten ready for the forthcoming patrol. Most of her officers, particularly as the two weeks off the ship drew to a close, found more and more reason to spend long hours on board. Al Dugan, heavyset, phlegmatic, methodical, a submarine engineer to his fingertips, nearly matched Richardson’s own devotion to Eel’s reconditioning. The most important thing he had going, he several times told his wardroom mates, was the hydraulic plant. There was no question in his mind that the problem would be discovered and solved, but as the days wore on and the week of refamiliarization training approached, he gradually began to devote most of his time to watching the work and participating in it. His responses to Richardson’s questions on the subject, while still full of confidence, betrayed his concern. To assist Al in his other responsibilities, he was given full use of the new officer just assigned, Ensign Johnny Cargill. In size, shape, and temperament a younger Dugan, Cargill had graduated from the submarine school at New London only weeks before. His orders to Eel in his hand, he had been an unnoticed member of the group which met the submarine upon her arrival in Pearl Harbor and had automatically landed in her refit crew. He was eagerly trying to be useful and, according to the engineer, despite his youth and complete lack of experience was proving to be of real help. It became accepted that he would be assigned under Al as assistant engineer.

  Richardson himself took on the problem of relocating the two Target Bearing Transmitters—one of them new—on either side of Eel’s bridge cockpit. A segment of the bulletproof side plating had been cut out of each side, and new bulged pieces to accomodate the instruments inserted. To get it done right, Richardson went over to the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard with the sections of heavy steel plate which had to be bent into a particular shape to fit his drawings. When the TBTs were mounted he personally supervised their location, height and precise alignment. Finally, with Buck Williams and Keith Leone assisting him, he spent hours carefully “bore-sighting” the transmitters, so that they accurately transmitted the angles of aim to the repeater dials in the conning tower.