Pacific Standoff, page 12
Jack chuckled and called Bob over. “Check your earlier projection of the convoy’s course against Deegan’s bearings and ranges. I want a course that will keep us outside their visual perimeter but within radar range; in these latitudes we won’t have darkness for hours yet.”
“You’re going to try an end-around?” asked Bob.
“Damn right I am. I want those freighters.” He raised his voice. “Helm, come left to 0-3-5, all ahead flank.”
“Course 0-3-5,” the helmsman repeated. He pushed the handle of the engine telegraph over to “full” twice. “Flank speed answered, sir.”
“Control, commence low-pressure blow.” Moments after this command a high keening sound was heard in the submarine. In order to surface, high-pressure compressed air had been bled from the steel air flanks into the four main ballast tanks, forcing the water out of them. But the compressed air was precious and had to be conserved; the chief used just enough to bring the boat to the surface. The water still in the ballast tanks kept the submarine low in the water, added to her weight, and cut down her top speed. The low-pressure air from the whining compressor would finish the job, blowing the tanks nearly dry and adding at least a knot to Manta’s surface speed.
By Bob’s calculations the race to get ahead of the Jap convoy again would take nearly two hours. Jack ordered the crew to stand down from battle stations and get some dinner; it might be a long, strenuous night. He took the opportunity to make an informal tour of inspection and assess the mood in the boat. The days of inactivity and bitter cold seemed forgotten in the excitement of the sub’s first engagement and first kill. Jack met nothing but eagerness. In the after torpedo room, one sailor, more daring than the rest, demanded, “When are you going to give us a chance at them buggers, Skipper?”
Jack made a show of consulting his watch. “If everything goes according to plan, in just over an hour. Is that soon enough, or do you want me to radio the Nips to slow down?” It wasn’t much of a joke, but the men grinned as if his last name were Benny.
After a few minutes of banter in the crew’s mess, he made his way to the forward torpedo room. That hot run in number five still worried him. It had not only spoiled the attack, it could have so easily sent them to the bottom. George Rose, the chief torpedoman and an old-timer by Sub Force standards, blamed the mishap on a faulty circuit. The tube was seemingly undamaged, but until they had time to check its complex mechanisms thoroughly, it might be better to take it out of service. The other tubes were reloaded and ready for action, but he had waited to speak to Jack before reloading number five.
In an instant Jack had weighed the loss of one-twelfth of Manta’s firepower against the danger of another hot run. “Okay, Chief,” he replied, “but start working on it right away. I’ll send an electrician’s mate for’ard with test gear.” He noticed as he left that someone had chalked a fierce-eyed Manta ray on one of the torpedoes and made a mental note to find out the artist’s name. The boat would need a battle flag soon.
A platter heaped with ham sandwiches beckoned from the table in the wardroom. He glanced again at his watch, took one, and ate it standing up, then continued through the control room and the conning tower to the bridge.
Lou had the watch. Jack stepped up beside him, leaned over the fairwater, and took a deep breath.
The sharp, clean air felt good in his lungs. It was only when he came up to the bridge that he realized how smelly it was belowdecks. From the time they left port until the day they returned from patrol, as much as two months later, the narrow hatch between the conning tower and bridge was practically the only opening to the outside. Even the most advanced ventilating and air-conditioning equipment could not make up for that fact. He and the rest of the men worked in an atmosphere heavy with the stench of fuel oil and seasoned with the acrid hint of chlorine from the batteries. In the background, almost unnoticed, was the odor of seventy-five active bodies in close quarters that no amount of showering could eliminate.
He took another deep breath, then turned to Lou. “Anything new?”
Lou shook his head. “Radar reports that they’re still on the same base course, thought they’ve changed their zigzag pattern. We’re about abreast of them now, or a little ahead, and we’ll reach our attack position in half an hour.”
Jack glanced up at the western sky. A low-hanging layer of gray clouds hid the sun, but he knew it would not set for another three hours. This would have to be another submerged attack, then, and this time the escorts would be on their guard.
The bridge loudspeaker crackled. “Aircraft contact. Aircraft contact.”
Lou, momentarily indecisive, glanced over at Jack, who was cursing under his breath. Of course the convoy captain had radioed for air cover, and the Manta, making nearly twenty knots, was leaving a white wake that a blind man could spot. He jabbed his thumb downward, and Lou cried, “Clear the bridge! Dive! Dive!” Jack stood aside as the lookouts scurried for the hatch, then followed them down with White and Lou practically standing on his shoulders.
Like others of her class, Manta had a mysterious tendency to “hang” at thirty-eight feet on crash dives. In fact American submarines in general were notoriously slow to dive, though in the wide sweeps of the Pacific this was not so instantly fatal as it would have been in the Atlantic or Mediterranean. The moment the boat was completely under, Lou ordered a change of course toward the convoy’s projected track and leveled off at sixty feet. That was shallow, but the overcast and a slight chop made it unlikely that the Jap fliers would spot their submerged silhouette, and the boat would be able to surface that much faster when the danger was past.
Five minutes later, after a careful sky search by periscope, the submarine was on the surface again, her four roaring diesels thrusting her toward her rendezvous with the enemy ships. Jack was still in the conning tower, studying Bob’s plot and discussing a plan of attack with him.
“The two marus are huddling together,” Bob was saying, “but the escorts are all over the map. From what Deegan can tell me, one of them is sweeping in front and the other is concentrating on the starboard beam and quarter.”
Jack reached over for the chart and glanced between it and the plot. “They’re not so dumb,” he observed. “They’re riding the thirty-fathom contour. If we try to attack from port, we won’t have much room to hide afterwards, and if we go in from starboard, the kaibokan will probably pick us up on sonar before we get our shots off.”
“So what do we do?”
Jack grinned at him. “Attack from port, of course! The forward escort will have to come back for us, and the other one will have the freighters between us and him. If we can’t manage to use those advantages, we deserve to catch a few depth charges!”
Bob rapped three times on the chart table, to take the bad luck off Jack’s flippant reply. Not long afterwards he was wishing he had a rabbit’s foot as well. They had completed the end-around maneuver by crossing in front of the Jap convoy, and now they were lurking at periscope depth a mile to the left of its projected course with their stern pointed toward the forward escort. Now it was just a matter of waiting.
The mood in the conning tower was oddly calm as the two freighters and their sheep dogs came within periscope range. It was as if the attack earlier that day had used up the day’s supply of excitement and apprehension, and this one was to be simply a job. The first stir came when Jack realized that the freighters would overlap as they passed the sub. That meant they could shoot all four stern tubes and hope to sink both ships without the complication of changing targets. Once more Jack proposed to turn the boat and try for a shot at one of the escorts before running for cover. Only Bob, who had seen the depth markings on the chart, knew how risky that might be, and he kept his mouth shut. He had seen too many of Jack’s outrageous maneuvers pay off.
As Jack made his final observation of the targets, Bob flipped the switch for number seven tube to “on.” His right hand rested loosely on the brass firing handle and his left held a stopwatch. The expected command came, and he pressed the handle and the stem of the watch at the same instant. “Fire seven!” That switch up, the next down, nine seconds…ten… “Fire eight!” Quickly, deliberately, his fingers altered the switches again. “Fire nine…Fire ten!” His shoulders relaxed a fraction of an inch, then tightened again as he heard Jack curse.
“Goddammit, the bastards zigged right! All four fish will miss ahead! Hard right rudder! Starboard back full, port ahead full!” Slowly at first, then more swiftly, the three-hundred-foot long craft began to turn, bringing the bow torpedo tubes to bear on the enemy. But the freighters were out of reach, still unaware of the danger they had escaped by chance. Submerged, Manta could never hope to catch up to them. What was the skipper up to? And why was he leaving the periscope up? If anyone on the Jap ships had seen the torpedo wakes, the escorts could trace them back to the firing point, and when they did, the periscope would tell them immediately where the submarine was.
“Open outer doors forward!” Bob’s stomach felt as if he had just stepped into an express elevator. The skipper was deliberately using the periscope as a lure; he was going to attack one of the escorts. That was bad enough, but it was obvious to Bob that he was going to try for a “down-the-throat” shot. This tactic was often talked about in bull sessions, and it sounded good in theory. As the enemy warship came charging toward you, you fired a spread of torpedoes at him. He presented a very narrow target, of course, so your first fish was likely to miss, but, the theory went, it was also likely to make him swerve away from it. Either way he swerved, he went directly into the path of one of the other fish, and boom! Of course, if he didn’t swerve, if he combed the torpedo wakes instead, then he was on top of you before you had time to run or dive, and you were dead. Two or three submarine captains claimed to have made successful down-the-throat shots, but there was no knowing how many had tried them unsuccessfully, because they weren’t around to tell about it.
“Zero on the bow, heading 3-6-0. Prepare three fish. Continuous ranges.”
Ryan knelt on the deck and peered at the stadimeter knob. “2-2-5-0,” he chanted, “2-1-0-0, 1-9-5-0, 1-8-0-0…”
“Shoot!”
As Bob fired the three torpedoes, he did the arithmetic in his head. At twenty-five knots the kaibokan covered 830 yards a minute. If their torpedoes missed, the men on the Manta had two minutes to live.
“Ready four. He’s seen the first wake, he’s swerving to port…son of a bitch, he’s straightened out! He’s combing the wakes! Shoot!”
Bob pressed the handle. At a combined speed of thirty knots the keel of the Jap ship would slice right through the conning tower. They probably wouldn’t feel a thing.
“Ready six! Shoot! Control, take her down fast!”
“Number six fired electrically, sir,” the telephone talker reported. What was the point? By now the kaibokan must be so close that the fish didn’t have room to arm itself. The only question was whether they would be rammed or blown apart by depth charges. It hardly seemed to matter.
KERBLAM!
A giant hand shoved the bow of the submarine down and to the right. Bob lost his footing and fell to the deck, cannoning into Ryan’s knees and bringing Ryan down on top of him. The next sound he expected to hear was the ocean rushing in to fill the artificial void of the pressure hull. Instead he heard cheers. The kaibokan had steamed full-tilt straight into their last torpedo. When they surfaced minutes later, there was nothing to see but a few splintered planks from its lifeboats.
By the time they overtook the remains of the convoy, it was full darkness. Jack bore in on the surface, keeping the freighters between himself and the remaining escort, and put three fish into one maru and two into the other at short range. Both sank in minutes, leaving half a dozen lifeboats rowing earnestly for land, while Manta, her torpedo tubes empty, fled southward at her top surface speed. As Bob stretched out on his bunk, he chuckled as he tried to imagine the explanations that the captain of the surviving escort would have to make when he crept back to the Celestial Empire.
Chapter 12
“Station the maneuvering watch. Station the maneuvering watch.” Yeoman Mike Gold pulled on a wool-lined submarine jacket, grabbed a battle telephone headset, and climbed rapidly to the bridge. Barber’s Point was off the port beam. He edged around the periscope shears to the cigarette deck, plugged in the headset, and said, “Maneuvering stations, report to the bridge.”
“Forward torpedo room manned and ready.”
“Control room manned and ready.” The reports came in, one after another, ending with “After torpedo room manned and ready.” He leaned forward and said, “Maneuvering stations are manned and ready, Captain.”
“Very well.”
Signalman Ron Black appeared in the bridge hatch. “Permission to dress ship, sir?”
Jack gave him a boyish grin. “Permission granted.” Black went to the signal halyards and bent on four small Japanese flags, one for each ship they had sunk. The top one bore the rays of the Rising Sun, to indicate a warship. Bob Church had suggested tying a broom to the periscope as well, but Jack turned him down. He was proud of their performance, but they had not made a “clean sweep” of the convoy. If they had had a full load of torpedoes, it might have been a different story.
The submarine made a sweeping curve around the outer buoy and corkscrewed as the currents across the mouth of the channel toyed with her, then let her go. Mike passed the word to secure from sea detail and heard faint cheers over the headphones. Moments later the deck hatches opened fore and aft and the line-handling detail appeared on deck, blinking in the bright Hawaiian sunlight. As they passed Hospital Point with its banks of flowering hibiscus, several patients in wheelchairs waved to them. Then the swing around Ten-Ten Dock, past the towering cranes of the Navy yard, and there, dead ahead, was the submarine base.
The SubPac band struck up the “Hawaiian War Dance,” followed mysteriously by “The Eyes of Texas,” as Manta drifted into her berth and the heavy hawsers were tossed across the narrowing gap of oily water and quickly secured to bollards. Mike watched as the skipper saluted an admiral and a captain who stood at the front of the waiting crowd, but he was distracted from the rest of the ceremonial welcome by the sight of a bushel of oranges on the dock. His mouth started to water. Neatly coiling the rubberized cord of the headset, he thrust it into a locker and climbed down to the deck. Smoky, the head cook, was there too, but his best efforts couldn’t save the oranges from the depredations of a citrus-starved crew.
Half an hour later Mike found a seat on the Navy bus and flipped through the small stack of letters he had just received. Four from his mother, two from his little sister, one from his father, and four, no, five, from Sarah, “the girl he left behind him.” He dropped them on his lap and lit a cigarette, gazing out the window of the still-motionless bus at the sub base barracks with its three floors of screened porches. No barracks for them—for the next two weeks the officers and men of the Manta would be quartered at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach. For the exorbitant sum of a quarter a night, they would occupy rooms formerly the haunt of movie stars, shipping magnates, and pineapple moguls. What a funny world, Mike thought, resolving to make off with as much hotel stationery as he could.
“What do you say, Yeo? You bunking with anyone yet?”
Mike turned his head and recognized Fiorentino, a GM2 with previous service in subs. “No, not yet,” he replied. “What’s the setup anyway?”
“Last time I was here we was four to a room. Me, Pulaski, and O’Dwyer figured we’d join up together; you want to come in with us?”
“Sure, thanks.” Mike was pleased by the invitation, but he was also secretly amused. An Italian, a Pole, an Irishman, and a Jew—it was straight out of one of those stupid war movies that were shown, to hoots and jeers, in the forward torpedo room on Sunday evenings. After the war, when he wrote his novel, he wouldn’t have the nerve to put a scene like this in it, but here he was, living it.
On the Manta’s first stay at Pearl Harbor none of the men had gotten beyond the boundaries of the sub base. Now, as the bus rolled toward Honolulu, everyone stared out the windows and chattered, the older hands pointing out the landmarks to the first-timers. The bus turned onto Kalakaua Avenue, and Mike saw the pink-stucco towers of the Royal Hawaiian ahead on the right. He tried hard to stay unimpressed but felt a stir of excitement nevertheless. He had come a long way from Brooklyn!
He fell in with the others to check in, accept a small stack of sheets and towels, and find their new quarters. The four iron-framed cots looked terribly ill at ease in the elegant room with windows framing the ocean and Diamond Head, but the men soon had them neatly covered with sheets and blankets and started drawing straws for first shot at the bathtub. Mike won. His roommates consoled themselves with glasses of Coke and grain alcohol. A long soak was out of the question with three guys waiting, so he was soon out, dry, and dazzling in his liberty whites. A few sips of doctored Coke reminded him that it was well past lunchtime; the others said they would meet him downstairs as soon as they were dressed.
The white hat behind the cafeteria counter heaped his plate with roast beef, mashed potatoes, and peas and carrots, and he carried it out to the patio to an empty table. The warm sun was tempered by an onshore breeze that rustled the fronds of the palm trees. Swimmers and sunbathers dotted the blinding white sand of the beach. Mike noted sourly that every one of them on this stretch was male. On the boat he had gotten used to seeing only other men, but liberty was supposed to be different!
He thought idly about his shipmates, trying once more to fathom their motivations, their psychology. Take politics, for instance. Mike’s parents were fervent New Dealers, and until he was nineteen, he had never known anyone who wasn’t deeply involved in political ideas, either as supporters of FDR or as adherents of one of the many more left-wing currents. His parents’ distress when he dropped out of City College to join the Navy had many sources. Of course they wanted him to finish his education, and they could not really understand someone volunteering to serve in the military. After all, Mike’s grandparents had come to America to save his uncle, his father’s older brother, from being forced to serve in the tsar’s army. But beyond that, his father was appalled by his choice of the Navy, which was reputed to be the most reactionary and anti-Semitic branch of the armed forces. “If you had to run away to sea,” he grumbled, “why didn’t you come to me? I know someone whose cousin is an officer in the NMU. He could have done something for you, and the NMU is a solid progressive union. You could have played a role, instead of going off with a bunch of floating Cossacks!”
