Dust on the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

  Five seconds, ten seconds. . . . Click, WHAM! Click, WHAM! Click, WHAM! The depth charges sounded right alongside, tremendously loud in the tense stillness inside the submarine. A slight pause, then a crashing cacophony of brutal, ear-smashing noise as a whole barrage went off almost simultaneously. A cloud of dust was thrown up in the conning tower. The deck plates under their feet were shivering. The entire submarine hull resounded, reverberated, intensified the concussions. The long thin hoist rods of the periscopes vibrated madly, almost passing out of sight. Richardson could have sworn the periscopes themselves sprang out of shape and then returned. He was shaken so violently that for a second he must have become hallucinatory. He thought he saw the steering wheel knocked loose from the forward bulkhead of the conning tower, where Cornelli stood holding it, arms rigid and muscles bulging under his sweaty dungarees. Then, just as swiftly, Rich realized the wheel was still intact, in place where it should have been.

  WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM! Six more depth charges going off almost together! Again the shivering of the steel, the bewildering effect of heavy equipment apparently disoriented, which, if it were true, would signal the destruction of the submarine. Pieces of cork flew off the sides of the conning tower. Dust rose throughout. Miraculously, the lights stayed on, dancing on their short wire pigtails. Quin, standing just forward of the opening of the deck which led to the now closed control room hatch, was knocked to his knees, fell into the cavity.

  “All compartments report,” said Richardson. “All stop!”

  Quin painfully picked up his telephone mouthpiece, spoke into it.

  Cornelli clicked the annunciators to stop. The follower pointers, actuated from the maneuvering room, clicked over also to stop. Good, thought Richardson. At least they’re okay back there.

  “All back two-thirds! Speed through water!”

  Scott, who had been recording with a pencil on one of the pages of his quartermaster’s notebook, read the dial for him. “Five knots,” he said. “Twenty depth charges.”

  “Let me know when speed reaches three knots,” said Richardson. “Tubes aft, bear a hand with number seven tube.”

  “All compartments report no damage,” said Quin. There was relief in his voice. “Tubes aft will be ready with number seven in a minute.”

  “Three knots,” said Scott.

  “All stop,” said Richardson. “All ahead one-third! Number two periscope!”

  He grabbed the handles as they came out of the periscope well, savagely spun the periscope all the way around until it faced aft, put his eye to it. “There he is!” he said. “Bearing, mark!”

  “One-eight-one,” from Keith.

  “Angle on the bow one-eight-oh,” said Richardson. Range, mark!” He turned the range dial.

  “Two hundred,” said Keith.

  “Open outer doors aft,” ordered Rich. “As soon as he turns one way or the other, we’ll shoot. Buck,” he went on, “give him a one-seven-nine-degree port angle on the bow, speed nineteen!”

  Once more, for a few seconds, Eel had the initiative. He spun the periscope around rapidly, flipping it to low power in order to get a larger field of view. As before, heightened with the perceptions of imminent danger and immediate combat, his mind took in everything almost photographically. His first target had sunk perceptibly lower in the water and had rolled over even farther, so that, although not quite turned turtle, it might well be on the way to doing so. Its stern had sunk beneath the water, but the bow, probably held up by an air pocket, remained partly above the surface. Crowds of men were standing on the curved plates where her side joined her bottom, and crowds of black dots, the heads of men, were in the water around her. The second freighter was straight up and down, her bow silhouetted against the western horizon. Deck equipment, displaced from its normal position, was falling from a height of a hundred feet on both sides. Most of it fell into the area where her now submerged smokestack and deckhouse lay, and where most of the survivors also must be. One of the objects moved as it fell. Perhaps he had jumped.

  The third ship, still more or less on an even keel, was sinking too, but more slowly. Her stern had sunk to the water’s edge, and around the bow Rich could see ten feet or more of red underwater paint. She had had time to get lifeboats out, and Rich could see two of them already in the water, apparently picking up other crew members.

  Most important of all, however, was the appearance of the lead escort. The frigate which had been patrolling ahead of the two-stacked passenger cargo ship had headed over in the direction of her consort. Still some distance away, she was heading directly for Eel, zero angle on the bow, would be dropping her own depth charges in a couple of minutes. He swung back to the destroyer which had just depth charged him.

  “He’s swinging to his left. Stand by aft. Open outer doors aft. Range, mark!”

  “Four-seven-five,” said Keith. “Bearing one-eight-zero.”

  “Angle on the bow, port one-seventy. He’s turning left. Crank in port one-two-oh, Buck.” The TDC dials whirled.

  “No spread, Keith. We’ll shoot on periscope bearings as soon as you get your correct solution light.”

  “Tubes ready aft,” announced Keith.

  “Set,” from Buck.

  “Correct solution light aft!”

  The computer in Richardson’s brain was in command. His cross hair exactly bisected the bridge of the tincan. She was a war-built escort, nearly the equivalent of a destroyer. Designed particularly for antisubmarine work. Diesel-powered. Capable of at least twenty knots, maybe more. She was swinging left now, swinging a little more.

  “Echo-ranging from aft. Long-scale pinging.” Stafford. “Echo-ranging forward also. Long-scale pinging forward and aft.” This must be the second escort.

  “Stand by number ten,” said Richardson again. “. . . Fire!” The jerk as the torpedo started on its way. “Stand by number seven,” he said. “I think he’s slowed down. Give him fifteen knots!” The probability was that the tincan had reduced speed more than this, but her initial way would carry her on. He was gratified to see that she continued to turn to the left, that her angle on the bow had now approached his advanced estimate of 120 port. “Set in angle on the bow port ninety,” he said.

  “Set!” from Buck.

  “Light!” from Keith.

  “Mark the bearing!”

  “One-seven-two-a-half!”

  “Set!”

  “Fire!” he snapped a second time.

  Maybe there would be time to do something about the other escort. He swung the periscope around. “New setup,” he said. “Angle on the bow zero, bearing, mark!”

  “Zero-zero-five,” from Keith.

  “Range, mark!”

  “One thousand yards!”

  “Stand by forward.” There was some delay. Buck must be cranking his dials like mad. Keith’s voice in his ear: “Outer doors opened forward, Captain. Ready to shoot forward. Tubes one and two. Ready with tube one.”

  “Set,” again from Buck.

  “Shooting observation!” said Richardson. “Bearing, mark! . . . Fire!” Again the jolt as the torpedo went out. Again the hiss of air, the rumble of water counterflooding the tube. One torpedo left. He aimed a little right of the onrushing escort. “Fire!” he barked for a fourth time in the space of forty seconds. He swung the periscope around once again, passed the sinking ships in a blur of kaleidoscopic disaster, settled on the escort vessel astern. He got there just in time to see a plume of water rise up amidships. At the close range, the reverberating roar of four hundred pounds of torpex arrived almost simultaneously with the sight. The torpedo must have gone off directly underneath the center of the ship, for it lifted her up amidships, irresistibly, like a huge, powerful plunger. She broke into halves. Her bow plunged downward on one side of the plume. Her stern slid down the other. In the middle of the catastrophe a mixed cloud of smoke, water, steam and debris continued to rise into the heavens. Then the water, and what had been a fine new ship, subsided, shrank swiftly dow
n into nothingness, leaving only a pall of black smoke and huge ripples rapidly eddying from the center of the disaster. Black dust on a white disk in a mud-gray sea.

  No time to play the spectator. He swung the periscope rapidly around—the other way this time (still all clear)—to the other escort coming in from ahead. She had put her rudder hard over, was already heeling far to starboard, swinging sharply to her left, in a violent emergency turn. He should never have fired at her. He should have known she would maneuver in automatic reflex to the hit on her consort. The geometry of that hastily conceived last-minute shot was totally destroyed, the torpedoes wasted. He swung the periscope farther left; as he expected, there came the third Mikura, hastening over to join her fellows, now reduced from two to only one.

  Time to do one more thing. “Here, Keith,” he said, “you have time for a quick look.” He swung the periscope to the leading ship. Only a small section of her bow still protruded above the surface.

  “Commodore,” he called. Blunt was alongside of him. Keith swung the periscope back and forth twice, lingered for a moment in the direction of the fourth and last ship in the column, now fleeing in the distance accompanied by a single escort. He stepped away from the periscope. Blunt fixed his eye to it, eagerly duplicated Keith’s maneuver.

  “What’s the tincan doing on our starboard bow, Commodore?” said Rich. He grabbed the handles of the periscope on the opposite side from where Blunt was looking, turned it around to the approximate bearing of the last escort.

  “Angle on the bow is starboard ninety,” said Blunt. “Range”—he fumbled for the dial, turned it. Rich performed Keith’s function, read the dial for him. “Seven-five-oh yards,” he said.

  Buck, in his eagerness, could hardly keep himself from reaching for the periscope handles. Gently Richardson pulled Blunt away, propelled Buck to the periscope. Larry Lasche’s eyes were also alight with hope for a view, but regretfully Richardson shook his head. He allowed Buck no more than ten seconds, time for one quick sweep past the destroyed convoy, took it back himself, spun it around twice, lowered it. “Make your depth two hundred feet,” he ordered. “Pass the word to all compartments we have sunk three cargo ships and one escort, and we’ll probably hear many more depth charges before this day is over.”

  He suddenly realized he was sweating profusely. Keith and Buck were no better. Their faces were beaded, as his must be. The temperature in the conning tower had climbed to well over 100 degrees, and the humidity, with all the vapor-producing, perspiring bodies filling it, must be 100 percent. The deck plates beneath his feet, once Scott’s pride for their immaculate condition, were a quarter of an inch deep in muck. Globules of moisture were condensed on the conning tower’s cold sides (anywhere the careful cork insulation was violated) or on exposed metal—the periscopes—which elsewhere was cooled by contact with sea water. Added to this was the perspiration which had dripped off their bodies and the debris which the near depth charges had discovered in the nominally clean compartment. All this had landed on the deck. They had been shuffling through it for what seemed like an age.

  He was astonished to realize that from the time of initially sighting the convoy, only a little more than half an hour had passed.

  At the ordered depth, two hundred feet, there was barely fifty to seventy-five feet of water beneath Eel. Richardson debated taking a sounding, finally decided he would risk it during a depth-charge attack, should another one eventuate. Until then the need to know whether one could go a few feet deeper was less important than the chance that taking the sounding would reveal Eel’s position to a now alert sonarman in one of the two remaining Mikuras.

  But, though the screws and pinging of the two frigates could be heard for some time, Eel gradually crept away to the northwest, running as silently and as deep as she could. There was never any indication that the enemy antisubmarine vessels had ever regained contact, or even had tried very hard. Perhaps, as Al Dugan suggested during one of their postmortems later on, the fate that befell one of their number cooled off the ardor for battle of the other two.

  -8-

  “Here, Nelson,” said Keith, handing the tall chief radioman an encoded message. “See if you can wake up the boys at NPM with this one.”

  Nelson grinned as he took the paper. “There’s about twenty boats trying to wake up Radio Pearl every night,” he said. “It’s not their sleepiness that bothers us. It’s the competition.”

  Keith returned the humorous look. “You radio girls all stick together. Anyway, this one ought to give them a little fun back there in ComSubPac.” He took the spare set of ear phones which Nelson, in anticipation of a message to be sent after surfacing that evening, had already plugged in for him. Instantly his mind was catapulted out of the surfaced submarine into a suddenly expanded geography covering the entire Pacific Ocean. Somewhere—the signal was so clear it was perhaps only a few hundred miles away—another submarine was sending a long varying note as it tuned up its transmitter. The radioman made a grimace of disparagement. Swiftly, as Keith looked approvingly, Nelson completed a few last-minute adjustments to Eel’s transmitter, finally looked over to Keith for permission to make a test transmission. Keith nodded. A few swift taps on the tuning key—Nelson was well aware of the danger from Japanese direction-finding stations—he nodded readiness.

  The other boat was transmitting, using a coded call sign: “NPM v W3AU K—NPM v W3AU K.” Keith had developed sufficient familiarity with Morse code to be able to understand the repeated short message. Nelson waited, his hand poised over his own transmitter key. Much farther away, another boat was calling NPM and, sounding as though it must be at least a thousand miles away, the dim crackle of a distant transmitter could barely be heard: a fourth submarine calling Radio Pearl.

  Nelson was gently fingering his receiver tuning control. Faintly, Keith could hear through the welter a dim but precise note. “W3AU v NPM 3,” it said. Radio Pearl had answered the unknown submarine whose coded call sign was W3AU, telling it that it was third in line for receipt of a message.

  Keith motioned to Nelson, but Nelson had already begun tapping out, in the smooth, effortless rhythm of a practiced radioman, Eel’s own call-up. “NPM V 68TC OP K,” he repeated several times.

  Radio Pearl seemed suddenly to have a surge of strength. “68TC V NPM K,” said the signal. Keith and Nelson grinned at each other. The Japanese radio station would have to use far better techniques than this to masquerade as Radio Pearl. A sub not alert to the ploy might transmit its message at a time when Pearl Harbor could not receive it, get a routine-sounding receipt from the Japanese station, and secure its transmission thinking its message had been delivered when in fact it had not. This was the simplest of electronic warfare techniques. Once, hearing a boat being taken in, a smart NPM operator disrupted his own orderly procedure to copy the unwary submarine’s message and thus foiled the Japanese station’s attempt at interference. But one could not be sure of this sort of good luck. “. . . NPM 4,” said the distant station.

  “NPM v 68TC OP K,” rapped out Nelson rapidly. The Pearl Harbor operator would very likely have heard the alien station attempting to entice Eel into transmitting its message at a time when Radio Pearl was not ready to receive it, would recognize that Eel had by consequence been unable to hear all of NPM’s transmission and was asking for its repetition. He, too, transmitted more rapidly.

  “68TC v NPM 4,” he sent. Keith would have been unable to read it had he not known what to expect.

  Nelson pushed a button alongside his transmitting key. With a thunk, the power hum in the transmitter standing behind them went silent. Quickly he brought his log up to date on the typewriter in the well before him. Keith noted with approval that he was preparing to copy the message from the nearby submarine.

  The cryptic procedure message from the Pearl Harbor radio station had signaled the unknown nearby submarine that it was third in line to be serviced. Eel was fourth. Keith stared unseeingly at the radio equipment about him. F
ar away in the distance, he could hear the tiny dots and dashes from a distant submarine tremulously pounding out its message. Several times it had to stop and repeat, finally received the sought-for R from Radio Pearl. Then it was the turn of another submarine, perhaps a thousand miles in a different direction, also sending in its vital information to the central gathering point, finally the submarine identified as W3AU. It was not a lengthy message, and Nelson had far less difficulty in copying it, since it was so near, than the NPM operator. Keith judged the unknown sub was not more than two or three hundred miles away. Very possibly it was the Whitefish, an identification which would be discovered when the call was broken down and the message decoded. Nelson, no doubt, could identify not only the sub but also the operator, if it happened to be one of the many whose “hand” he knew.

  The next submarine to transmit would be Eel. Nelson pressed his transmitter button, had it humming and fully warmed up when Radio Pearl receipted to the nearby boat.

  “68TC v NMP K,” said NPM.

  “NPM v 68TC OP—RADIO PEARL FROM EEL PRIORITY ACTION REPORT . . .”

  As Nelson pounded out the coded message, laboriously composed and then encoded while Eel was awaiting the time to surface, Keith could reflect that across three thousand miles of water, bouncing at least once off the ionosphere now lowered over the dark Pacific, this particular stream of rapid dots and dashes carried the news of the death of four ships and most of those on board. It told of Eel’s own escape after minor depth charging, the possibility that some other submarine, possibly Whitefish, might have been in position to pick off the lone straggler which had escaped to the west. It stated that Eel was now down to seven torpedoes, two forward and five aft, and that ComSubPac was undoubtedly correct about ships moving north and south close in to land along the west coast of Korea. On the game board in ComSubPac’s office in Hawaii, the little submarine silhouette marked “Eel” in the Yellow Sea would now have seven tiny Japanese flags attached to it. If W3AU was indeed the Whitefish, it was possible that she might have earned a second little flag added to her silhouette, if she had, as instructed, been patrolling outside the island chain directly westward of Eel.