As Richardson gave orders to secure all guns, ammunition, and personnel topside, and to proceed into the center of the wreckage to search for any possible survivors, he heard Yancy asking permission to speak to him.
“I’ve got bad news, Captain,” he said. Richardson waited numbly. This was bound to be the final result of his decision to fight on the surface, but there had been no other choice. The gods of war must be given their sacrifice. Doubtless all had died aboard his adversary—probably as many as a hundred men. Eel carried eighty—eighty-one, counting the wolfpack commander—and it was too much to hope that they would all escape scot-free.
“We have three men killed, sir. Wyatt, Quin, and Johnson; and ten wounded. Two fairly seriously—Thompson and Webber, and . . .” Yancy seemed to be in doubt as to how to phrase the next item. He hesitated a long moment. “The commodore is dead.”
“What!” The startled cry was the antithesis of Yancy’s carefully studied, bold statement of fact. Blunt had not even been topside during the battle. He had spoken to him only a few hours before, just before surfacing; automatically he looked at his watch, saw to his astonishment that from surfacing until this moment had been less than fifteen minutes.
“You don’t look so good yourself, Captain,” said the pharmacist’s mate. “You have blood all over your face and head.”
Still overwhelmed by Yancy’s surprise news, Richardson removed the telephone earphones and mouthpiece. “I’m all right,” he said, “I took these from Quin. This must be his blood that’s on me.” Unaccountably, Quin’s death seemed far more personal than that of Blunt, more like that of Oregon. Quin and Oregon had both followed him from the Walrus to the Eel. Quin, in fact, had been with him even before, in S-16.
Still, Blunt’s death was the big surprise, the greatest shock, because there was no reason for it. “What happened to the commodore? What do you mean, he’s dead!”
Yancy swiveled away his eyes. “We brought him to the wardroom, the way you told us, and that’s where we found him. His head was down on his arms on the table as if he was asleep. Sometimes he used to catnap that way. We were bringing some of the hurt men in there, and when he didn’t move, I looked at him and saw he was dead.”
“But my God, man! A man doesn’t just die. . . . What happened? . . . Are you sure . . .” The sentence went uncompleted, the question lost. It made no difference. Suddenly all Richardson’s exhilaration over the successful outcome of the battle evaporated. All was gall in his mouth. His eyes ached, wanted to close. He forced them open. He was so stupefied with exhaustion that he could feel nothing beyond the burning in his eyes and the overpowering need to lie down. His mind told him his body ached as much as his eyes, and would ache more after a few hours’ rest. He had proved a nemesis to so many people. Jim Bledsoe and the entire crew of the Walrus. Bungo Pete. Oregon. Quin, Wyatt, Johnson, and now old Joe Blunt, whose own dolphins, given him so many years ago, he still wore on his best uniforms.
He looked up, saw Yancy staring at him gravely. “Where is he, Yancy?”
“I got some men laying him out in his bunk, Captain. Like I said, he looks okay. There’s not a mark on him except his neck is all swelled up.”
“What do you think could have happened?”
“I haven’t really had a chance to check him. Don’t know. Maybe a heart attack. Maybe a stroke. Most likely he hurt himself falling down the hatch. He could have broke his neck and not know it. Then, maybe, walking around, bending over and all, he might have pinched the spinal cord.” Yancy hesitated. He wanted to say something more. “He hasn’t been acting normal, sir. Not for a long time. I knew when you and Mr. Leone were reading my books, and I read them too. There was something else wrong with him, sir. I’m no doctor, and it’s just a guess, but I think there was something wrong in his head. He would blow hot and cold, like, and he could never take any pressure. Maybe there was something wrong with the blood to his brain. That and a broken neck could have finished him easy.”
“Any chance that he’s just conked out and will come to a little later? . . .”
“No, sir. He’s dead.” There was a note of finality in Yancy’s voice which Richardson recognized he would have to accept.
But he could not go below just yet, and Al Dugan was waiting to make his report. There was the damage to be checked. The submarine to make seaworthy again. The rig for dive to be rigorously gone over once more. Numbers three and four main engines to be checked out, and the situation in the after engineroom itself to be considered. Could a plug be placed in the cooler intake line? If not, how could Eel submerge—or could the drain pump handle the leak so she could submerge safely to shallow depths for a short time?
What about the hydraulic system and the air compressors? Al Dugan would report on those. The periscopes. They would have to be checked carefully, not only because of the depth charging but also because something, perhaps only a small-caliber projectile, had struck the periscope shears. It might have distorted the alignment of the bearings.
Those concussions when the four-inch shells hit. Was Eel’s pressure hull still sound? Number one five-inch gun, jammed in train: that was where at least one of the enemy’s large-caliber projectiles had struck. Any shell holes in the hull would have to have temporary plugs. The gun should, if possible, be trained back fore and aft before the ship dived again.
If she could dive. If Eel could not dive, then what about enemy aircraft in the morning?
There was so much to consider, so many decisions to be made. He was so tired, and the night had just begun. The loss of life, the damage, might be worth it—could only be worth it—if Whitefish reported destruction of the last troopship. He must send Whitey a message, ask about the transport, announce that Everett was now in command of the wolfpack. . . .
“Put one and two main engines on a battery charge,” he said.
-12-
Letting down from the high excitement of personal combat was like dying. There was no bottom to the toboggan slide of consciousness, no limit to the trancelike sluggishness that gradually, but so surely, engulfed him. Despite the myriad problems which now insisted on his personal attention, each stumbling over the heels of the one preceding, despite his consciousness of the responsibility which rested upon him, for the first time in his life Richardson found himself totally unable to make even the simplest decisions. Agonizingly, viciously, he flogged himself to stay awake, stay alert, deal with them. Nothing else to do, except attend to the hundred or so details needed to make Eel seaworthy again, fit to submerge. Nothing to think about, except how to keep from sleeping. But he could feel the juices of his faculties ebbing away, draining out of him. A sluice valve had been opened. He was an empty vessel. The brownout of fatigue was turning into a blackout.
He was totally unaware of the stratagem by which Keith inveigled him to sit on his bunk, and then, without a word, lifted his feet and placed them also upon it. There was not even anything to dream about, not even the dead, who once were alive and vital and quick, and now were so quiet, so rested, so evermore sealed in their shattered bodies.
Sleep was deep, dreamless, forever, and its restorative powers worked their magic. When he began to see living, sensate beings: Laura, Admiral Small, Keith, Eel herself—though she was sensate in a different way—he managed to will himself awake. Even while asleep he somehow was normally always aware of any change in Eel’s condition, but not this time. She had been surfaced at his last recollection, and now was submerged, riding quietly.
There must have been someone watching him, for in a moment Keith came in with a cup of steaming coffee, a sandwich, and some papers. A quick glance at the clock on the bulkhead—how long had he been sleeping? It must be only a couple of hours past midnight; he could not believe the hands of the clock had not somehow become interchanged, that it was late morning, that he had been more than eight hours unconscious.
Webber, the most seriously injured of the wounded men, had died in the night without regaining consciousness, Kei
th reported. Yancy had told Richardson that there was nothing he could do for him except ease his suffering if he regained consciousness (none of this could Rich recall), and his death had occurred only a few hours later. His body had been placed in its zippered leatherette bunk cover like the others, and stowed in one of the two unoccupied torpedo tubes in the forward torpedo room.
It had taken nearly until dawn to make emergency repairs so that they could submerge, Keith went on to relate, but there had been no complications and no need to call him. No additional holes had been found in the pressure hull, other than those Richardson had already seen, and an air test before diving had been satisfactory. Keith exhibited the message he had sent to Whitey Everett informing him that as next senior he had succeeded to command of the wolfpack. Another of the papers was Everett’s acknowledging message directing return to base through the least frequented part of the Yellow Sea, with all daylight hours spent submerged until clear of the Ryukyus.
Then came the bad moment. Keith silently handed him the intercepted report by Whitefish to ComSubPac of her engagement with the convoy, the sinking of two of the troopships, the rupture of a vent riser gasket from a close depth charge, and the unusual actions of an unknown set of heavy merchant-type propellers about two hours later. Richardson could feel the bitterness rise up in him as he read the message. It was for this they had sacrificed Quin, Wyatt, Johnson, Webber, and—yes—Joe Blunt! And there had not even been an attempt to attack the last transport! Keith, he saw, mirrored his feelings.
“Who knows of this message?” he asked, taking a deep sip of coffee to quiet himself.
“Nobody, sir. The decode, I mean. Everyone was so busy, I just decoded it myself. I figured you would want to see it first. . . .”
Richardson thought a minute. His mind was beginning to function clearly again. “Let’s leave it that way. This won’t go down well with anybody in this ship. There’s no need to have it talked about. ComSubPac will get our log and patrol report, and he’ll have to decide what more, if anything, ought to be done about it. After all, Whitey has sunk five ships in his first command patrol.”
“I know, Skipper, but you set him up for every one of them, and there should have been six! That last troopship was a perfect sitting duck for anyone with the guts to come up to periscope depth to see what was going on! It cost us five of our shipmates for nothing, and now at least one of those two Kwantung Army divisions will be shooting at our Army and Marines on Iwo and Okinawa!” Keith’s repressed passion suddenly blazed through. “Why don’t we send our own message to ComSubPac and tell him what really went on!” Abruptly, Keith became aware that the red-rimmed eyes seemed deeper sunk, the half-buried black eye in the haggard face so close to his own more covered than before by the swollen, darkened flesh.
Richardson must have been more at odds with himself than anyone knew. More tired than anyone could have thought. He felt a surge of anger welling within him, directed not at Whitey Everett, but at the bearer of the unpleasant tidings. It was not logical. He should not blame Keith. Keith, of all people, had a right to feel this way. Barely he contained himself, trembling with the effort, tried to answer in an even tone. After all, Keith was the most loyal one aboard. He, too, had been through a lot. “No!” he barked. “Absolutely not!”
Richardson should not have sounded so peremptory. Keith was only doing his duty. The shock of hearing his own flash of anger enabled him to continue more normally: “Neither would I have gotten anywhere if I hadn’t had Joe Blunt to teach me all he knew about submarining, and you and Jim Bledsoe and some of the others to help me when I needed it. The only thing I’m sorry about is that five good men died trying to do something important, and it didn’t work.”
Keith looked abashed. The emotions of both were near the surface. Impulsively Richardson reached out, gripped him on the shoulder, squeezed with all the strength in his hand. It was the right thing to do. The gesture made it all right again. Richardson felt as though a weight had been partially lifted from him also. Later, after everyone had had a chance to pull himself together, he would arrange a memorial service in front of the torpedo tubes in the forward torpedo room.
The decision as to disposition of the dead, although he could hardly remember having made it, was the only one he had been able to concentrate on before Keith lifted his feet onto his bunk and put out the light. It must have been the trauma of having to view his destroyed shipmates which had enabled him to retain his self-control long enough to consider what to do, but even so it had required great effort to stem the dropping tide of coherent thought. Had Captain Blunt not been one of the dead, they would all have been given a sailor’s burial at sea in the time-honored tradition of a flag-covered corpse gently dropped over the side. But Yancy could give no further information as to the cause of Blunt’s death, despite a second examination. The body of Captain Blunt would have to be brought back to Pearl Harbor for autopsy. He could not bury Quin and the others at sea when the wolfpack commander would be brought home. In the end, each of the four bodies was quietly encased in its own zippered bunk cover. Then—this Richardson insisted upon supervising personally—each was loaded into one of the six torpedo tubes in Eel’s forward torpedo room, after which the tubes were placed out of commission so that they could not be fired, even accidentally. Now, with addition of Webber, there was only a single torpedo tube forward not so labeled. But that was of no consequence. There were no torpedoes left anyway.
The greatest repair problem revolved around being able to submerge. Eel had been struck six times in all by the enemy’s four-inch gun, and a dozen times or more by the smaller calibers. None of the small automatic weapons had been able to penetrate the pressure hull, but the large-size projectiles had done so twice: in the gun access trunk and the forward engineroom. Major repair effort had gone to the engineroom, for the access trunk could be sealed off from below merely by shutting the hatch connecting it to the control room. The hole in the engineroom, a slash some six inches long and four wide with jagged edges bent inside the ship, required ingenuity.
There had been some talk with Al Dugan about the best means of plugging it, though Rich could not remember any of the details they had discussed. Now it was the first thing he inspected. There were two huge bolts down through the hole, passing through heavy bars across its short dimension, each of them capped with a heavy hexagonal nut. Thick gasket material bulging down through the gash concealed what was evidently a heavy plate spanning it on the outside.
“It was easy when we found the right thing to cannibalize,” Al Dugan told him with professional pride. “One of the air compressors is out of commission anyway with a cracked foundation, so we just cut a section of the foundation, bent it to fit the curve of the hull, and slapped her on the outside. Covers the hole with a lot to spare all around. We put Glyptal all over everything, and so far she doesn’t even leak. There’s a watch on it anyhow, with a bucket, just in case. But I hope you’re not planning on any more depth charges till after Pearl Harbor gets a whack at it!”
Rich gravely assured him he would henceforth do his utmost to avoid depth charges, at least until a proper welded patch had been installed. In the after engineroom, things were also cheerful. Through a great deal of hard work, temporary repairs had been effected to the damaged seawater discharge line. A certain amount of steady leakage could not be prevented, and this would increase, of course, at the deeper depths. But unless the situation worsened considerably, the drain pump could take care of it by running fifteen minutes out of every hour. As a precautionary move, a special watch had been set on the cooler also, with a telephone, to give instant warning should the leak increase. Richardson left the engineroom convinced the repair had been handled as well as could be.
Despite Dugan’s pessimistic report during the height of the surface pursuit, the hydraulic plant had again been returned to a semblance of running condition. With everything possible switched over to hand power, it could, if carefully monitored, continue to perform
the few basic operations for which there was no hand-powered alternative. The insoluble problem in the pump room was a new one. One of Eel’s pair of air compressors, as Dugan had said, was permanently out of commission with its bearings out of line and its foundations cracked right across. Even without the section removed from the base, it would need a major repair job in port. The other compressor had also been thrown out of alignment by the same depth charge, but to a lesser degree. It could run and had in fact been running, but after only three hours, long before Eel’s nearly depleted air banks had been recharged, it ceased to jam air. Inspection showed, as suspected, that the misalignment had caused failure of the just-replaced third and fourth stage discharge valves, necessitating their replacement a second time. As Al explained it, the single air compressor remaining could not be relied on for more than a few hours before the new valve disks would also break, or be scored beyond use, and only two additional spare sets were on board besides those he would remove from the other compressor. He did not need to tell Richardson what this meant. Compressed air was vital to a submarine for many small purposes, but its major functions were to start main engines, fire torpedoes, and blow tanks. The mere acts of submerging and surfacing again were now nearly prohibitively costly. Eel’s status as an operational submarine was by consequence greatly reduced. She would have had to leave station in any case, short of emergency.
In midafternoon a call from the conning tower reached Richardson during his second visit to the after engineroom. In a moment he was at the periscope.
Dust on the Sea Page 47