Pacific Standoff, page 17
“Go ahead.”
“Bridge, engine three is off the line. I am reducing speed to balance the load.”
“Charlie, Jack here. How soon can you get number three on the line again? Can you use the auxiliary to take up some of the slack? We need every knot you can give us.”
“Sorry, Skipper, but it’s no can do to both. Number three is blown for the rest of the trip, and without some quick load-shifting we run the risk of blowing another engine. We’re good for fifteen knots, and that’s pushing it.”
Jack leaned heavily on the chart shelf, his head bent over in thought. After a moment, he said, “Acknowledged. Do what you can, then. Bob? You heard?”
“Yes, Skipper.”
“Can we intercept with a maximum of fifteen knots?”
In the silence he knew what the answer must be. “No, sir. The target is making a little better than fifteen knots himself. Recommend we break off the pursuit.”
“Very well, we’ll—No, By God, we won’t either! The son of a bitch might change course toward us or have a breakdown of his own. Give me an intercept course at our new top speed!”
* * * *
The unequal chase continued until the stars began to fade in the eastern sky. Finally Jack made a noise of disgust and said, “Clear the bridge. Prepare to dive.” As the others scurried for the hatch, he stayed where he was, staring moodily in the direction of the vanishing tripod masts. It was not to be, this time, but the next Jap to cross his path would not escape so easily, bum engine or not! With a last glance he climbed slowly down the ladder to the conning tower. “Okay, Chief,” he shouted to the control room, “pull the plug. Periscope depth.”
Bob Church was waiting near the useless radar console. “Your watch?” asked Jack. Bob nodded. “Okay, standard patrol pattern, periscope watch at three-minute intervals. You have the conn. Call me if you see anything. I’ll be in my bunk.”
The long summer day turned out to be almost a repetition of the day before: smoke on the horizon, and no targets within range. At the beginning of the first dog watch Charlie Andrews appeared in the doorway of Jack’s cabin. His khakis and skivvy shirt, like his hands and arms, were black with engine oil, and there was a broad smudge on his left cheek. “We just finished field-stripping number three,” he said tiredly, “and it’s every bit as bad as I thought. Fixing it will take three or four days and access to a machine shop. The other engines should be looked at, too, but I wanted to check with you first.”
“What’s involved?”
“Each one would have to be off the line for a two-hour stretch, less if there’s no problem.”
Jack considered briefly. “We’ll probably patrol submerged tomorrow during daylight, and you can go ahead then. For now, why not forget about number three and catch a shower before chow-down?”
Charlie grinned. His teeth were a startling white against his grimy face. “Will do, Skipper!”
The only excitement that night came not on the bridge but in the crew’s mess. Jack missed most of it. By the time Gold, the yeoman, thought to send for him, only the strains of “Sentimental Journey” were coming over the loudspeaker, but the men were quick to fill him in.
“We’re all dead, Skipper!” Antonelli announced. “Yeah, and our wives and girlfriends are all shacked up with war profiteers,” Black added.
“I’d like to see the war profiteer who’d want your girl!”
“Aw, blow it out your ass, Hickman! You been dead from the neck up for years!”
“Hold it, hold it!” Jack called. Antonelli and Hickman turned to face him, abashed. “Okay, Yeo, what happened?”
“Well, sir, we were listening to Tokyo Rose on the radio, not paying any attention except to the music, then she started talking about the American submarine in the Sea of Japan.”
“She said submarine? Singular?”
“Yes, sir. There was a lot of guff about how we were attacking the Jap homeland and killing innocent sailors, then she said the sub had been sunk by a lightly armed patrol plane, and let that be a lesson to you. That’s when she put in the crap about wives and sweethearts. Then she started that record. It’s like a theme song; she plays it whenever she claims one of our ships has been sunk.”
“Was there anything else?” Jack looked around the crowded mess room. Most of the men shook their heads, and a few muttered, “No, sir.”
“Okay, Gold, you did right to send for me. The rest of you men, listen up! I’m not going to try to stop you from listening to that crap, even though it’s pure Jap propaganda, because now you know how reliable it is. According to Tokyo Rose, we’re all bunking with Davy Jones. With a little luck and some sharp work by our lookouts, we’ll show the Nips that mantas are hard to kill!”
As Jack turned to go, one of the men said, “Skipper, the patrol plane that she said sank us—she was talking about the bastard that did for Outerbridge, wasn’t she?”
A growl greeted his words. Jack hesitated. “That’s my guess,” he said finally. “Whether the pilot really thought we were right there or just wanted to make himself sound better when he got back to base, I couldn’t say. Either way, in case any of you have forgotten Pearl Harbor, he gave us a good demonstration of what the Japs are capable of. Our opponents are ruthless and wily, but they’re going to find out that Americans have what it takes to handle anybody who’s dumb enough to tangle with us.” He was again turning to go, amid an approving hum of conversation, when the intercom blared.
“Captain to the bridge! Captain to the bridge!”
He raced up the ladders, cursing his failure to wear his red goggles. “What is it, Lou?” he said to the darkness.
Lou’s voice, heavy with embarrassment, answered from behind him. “Sorry, Skipper, false alarm. The starboard lookout thought he saw smoke, and so did I, but there’s nothing there now. I should have made sure before I called you.”
Jack suppressed his irritation and said, “Maybe it’s just as well. I want to shift position. The Japs seem to think they sent us to the bottom yesterday morning, so we may find targets in the area we were patrolling then. Bring her around to 0-4-5, standard speed. I’ll send up a more exact course after I’ve checked the charts.”
Moments later the Manta’s phosphorescent wake was curving to the right and widening from the increase in her speed.
* * * *
Near midnight of the next day Jack stood on the bridge, staring into the misty darkness and softly pounding his fist on the gyro repeater. He had been through dry spells before, when enemy ships seemed to be everywhere except within attack range of his boat, but never under the triple handicap of a dead engine, an inoperative radar, and a strict time limit. They had already used up two-thirds of their ninety-six hours, and all they had to show for it was a rusty old tub of no more than two thousand tons and the loss of a man. When they got back to Pearl, Garfield was going to ream him out good. Yet he hadn’t done anything wrong. Manta was squarely athwart a major shipping lane and maintaining an extra-careful watch, but the targets weren’t there. Maybe the floatplane report and the loss of that freighter had put a scare into the Japs, made them restrict traffic or divert it around this area. If so, he hoped unselfishly that one of the other boats was getting the benefit of it.
The mist was thickening. Even the bow, less than 150 feet away, was fuzzy and hard to discern. He pounded his fist again. Why the hell did they have to lose the radar like that? He might as well be cruising in Lake Michigan for all the harm he was likely to do to the Nips! Lost in his sense of frustration, he hardly noticed as Bob relieved Lou of the watch. The formal phrases of the turnover drifted right by him. Even the complicated dance as fresh lookouts took over did not touch him.
Half an hour later he straightened up and discovered that the damp mist had made him stiff. Sam kept hot coffee ready in the wardroom at all hours—maybe that was what he needed. Up here he was just getting in Bob’s way, not that he had much to do, either. He was turning to Bob to tell him he was going below when a call from above electrified him. “Ship ahoy!”
“Where away?” Bob demanded.
“On the starboard beam,” came the reply. At the railing Jack and Bob stood side by side, trying to pierce the mist with their large-objective night glasses. After half a minute Jack said, “No good, Bob. I’m going up in the shears. Maybe I can get above the mist.”
“Roger. Should I come about?”
“Not until we have an idea of his course.” He tucked his binoculars inside his light jacket and zipped it up, then started climbing the steel rungs on the side of the superstructure, up, past the crow’s nest, until he was perched awkwardly on the very top of the structure that supported the two periscopes. His height made the rolling of the submarine much more apparent, and for a moment he thought of the poor bastards on sailing ships who had had to climb a hundred feet above the deck in any weather. Then he cleared his mind of irrelevancies and started searching the area to starboard. Just when he was ready to question the lookout’s sighting, he saw a faint regularity on the horizon that could be a stack or superstructure. He strained his eyes, but the image grew weaker instead of stronger. Damn that radar! And damn his eyes, too—here he was, only thirty-two years old, and obviously over the hill!
At that moment, miraculously, a stray breeze thinned the mist and for a moment he saw the superstructure and cargo booms of a big new freighter on a course parallel to Manta’s and no more than six thousand yards away. As the mist closed in again, he scrambled down to the bridge. “Call battle stations torpedo!” he snapped to Bob. “Right rudder, all ahead flank! This one’s our meat. I’ll stay on the bridge. I want you below, on high periscope.” Extended, the night periscope might reach above the mist and give Bob a better view of the target than Jack had from the bridge.
“Aye, aye, sir.” He jumped from the hatch.
“The boat is at battle stations, Skipper,” the quartermaster reported.
“Very well.” Jack raised his voice. “Lookouts, any sign of the target?”
“Broad on the starboard bow, sir.”
Jack unlimbered the TBT and swung it to the right, stopping at a darker shape in the darkness. Yes, there he was! He pressed the button to signal the bearing, waited two minutes, and pressed again. Now Lou and his computer had a preliminary fix on the Jap ship. Moments later the third officer’s voice came over the speaker.
“Range forty-five hundred yards, distance to track six thousand. Recommend new course 1-3-0.”
“Make it so. Does Bob have him on the scope?”
“Yes, sir. Target is a sixty-five-hundred ton freighter, course 1-0-5, estimated speed twelve knots, not zigzagging.”
Damn! If the lookout had seen the ship only minutes later, the crippled submarine would have had no chance to get into firing position. As it was, it would be close, and this was a target well worth sinking: large, new, and probably returning to the Home Islands laden with war materiel from Japan’s conquered provinces in China.
“Estimated time to intercept?”
“Fifteen minutes, Skipper.”
“Ready the forward tubes, three fish, standard spread.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
As the minutes crept by, Jack kept the TBT fixed on the center of the form in the mist. It was clearer now, but they could hope that the low-lying profile of the submarine would go unnoticed until they were in position. Finally the word came, “One minute to intercept. Recommended course 1-8-5.”
“Very well. Open the outer doors and shoot when you have a solution.” The bow of the Manta now pointed at a spot just ahead of the merchantman, and moments later the boat shuddered three times in succession as the deadly fish were launched.
“Torpedoes away!” At the instant the report came over the bridge speaker, a ship’s horn split the night and the bow of the Jap ship started to lengthen almost imperceptibly. An alert lookout must have seen either Manta or her torpedoes, but why the horn? Moments later a shout from the periscope shears answered Jack’s unspoken question.
“Ship ahoy! Tin can on the starboard beam!”
Jack’s thumb reached for the push-to-talk button even as he swung the TBT to starboard. “Hard right rudder, all ahead emergency!” he shouted. “New setup coming down!” The Asahio-class destroyer looked huge in the TBT’s binoculars, and the bone in her teeth said she was making better than twenty knots already. “Clear the bridge!” He kept the glasses fixed on the charging tin can while the lookouts brushed by him.
“Solution!” Even distorted by the speaker, Lou’s voice betrayed a mixture of excitement and nervousness.
“Shoot! I’m coming down.” As his foot touched the top rung of the ladder, he glanced left, toward the freighter, just as a column of water erupted forward of her bridge.
Wham! The sound reached him seconds later, and he watched in fascination as the ship broke in two and the bow and stem independently started to settle in the water. The jolt of new torpedoes leaving the Manta reminded him of their peril from the Jap destroyer, and he jumped the rest of the way down the ladder, breaking his fall at the last moment.
“Take her down deep! Rig for depth charge!” The diving alarm resounded through the boat, silencing the cheers of the men. Jack took up a position next to Delancey, the “ping jockey,” and reached for the spare earphones. The high-pitched whine of the destroyer’s screws was all too obvious. Either the Jap captain hadn’t seen the torpedo wakes yet or he was defying them, gambling that he could comb the wakes successfully. Jack glanced at Bob, who held up his stopwatch and pointed to a spot on the dial. Twenty seconds later they knew the fish had missed. They were in for it now.
“Short range,” Delancey announced. “He’s starting a run.”
The more experienced men moved toward the center of the conning tower, away from anything fixed to the structure of the boat. The impact of a depth charge could make high-tensile steel whip around like rubber.
Ka-BOOM! Ka-BOOM! Ka-BOOM! The hull rang like a bell under the force of the quick blows. The air filled with flakes of paint and bits of cork insulation.
One young sailor was pale and sweating, and muttering under his breath, but Jack knew that the depth charges had not even been close. Like so many other American subs, Manta was protected by the Jap habit of setting the fuses for shallow depths.
“Right rudder,” he said to the helmsman. “All compartments report damage.”
“He’s starting another run, sir, but not on us. I think he’s going for the turbulence from his own ash-cans!” Delancey’s guess was confirmed when Manta quivered from half a dozen more distant explosions.
“That should stir up a lot of new turbulence for him to aim at,” Jack remarked drily. In the tense atmosphere of the conning tower the comment got a better laugh than it deserved. Half an hour later, after four more increasingly remote depth charge attacks, it seemed prophetic.
Chapter 16
This time there was no triumphal return to Pearl Harbor. Early one morning Manta limped into Midway lagoon and tied up next to Kraken. Eel and Hammerhead were moored on the other side of the finger pier, and Jack noticed that Hammerhead had taken quite a beating. He wondered morbidly if either Holmes or Hornby had had more luck than he had. Sinking that big freighter had been Manta’s last encounter with the enemy. After that, and after a tense night slipping back through La Perouse Strait, their battle had been with rough seas and with their remaining diesels. Five hundred miles northwest of Midway, number two gave up, and Charlie insisted that he could keep number one and number four working only if the boat made no more than five knots. What should have been a voyage of a day and a half turned into a four-day struggle.
Now came the reckoning. To Jack’s surprise Admiral Garfield was on the pier. He shook hands, explained that he had flown out from Oahu the day before, and invited Jack to a conference at 1000 with the other three skippers. His tone and expression were carefully neutral. To Jack, who had had more problems with the brass than most junior officers, that spelled trouble. The routine business of arriving in port kept him occupied during the next two hours, but in the few idle moments he imagined himself being reprimanded, perhaps even being removed from command. Garfield was reputed to be fair minded, but he had no patience with CO’s that he thought were not aggressive enough. More than one skipper had returned from patrol with an empty bag to find himself booked on a flight to the States and a staff job.
Hornby and Holmes were waiting when he arrived at the briefing room. They looked as despondent as he did. A few sentences told the story. Hornby had accounted for two small coastwise freighters before he was pinned down by three patrol boats and subjected to a five-hour depth charge attack that nearly sent Hammerhead to the bottom for good. Holmes had had an even more frustrating time. He had sighted and approached half a dozen fine targets and had failed to damage one of them. The old dud torpedo problem, that they all thought had been solved, had popped up again.
Garfield, when he appeared, was a lot more cheerful than any of them. He seemed to think the mission had been a success: “We hoped you would account for a lot more tonnage,” he explained, “and with a better run of luck, you would have. But look at what you accomplished. You proved that our boats can penetrate the Sea of Japan—and believe me, others will follow in your path. More important, you put the Japs on notice that we can do so. They can no longer assume that shipping in the Sea of Japan is safe from our torpedoes. They will be forced to divert escort vessels and patrol planes from other areas, where they are already in short supply, and to adopt convoy tactics that will slow up the flow of war material and increase consumption of scarce fuel oil.”
He paused to draw on his pipe. “Perhaps most significant,” he continued, “is the psychological impact on the enemy. I may be stretching a point here, but I think your mission may be almost as important in that regard as the Doolittle raid on Tokyo. You attacked them in what they think of as part of the Homeland, and no Westerner can quite grasp what that means to the Japs. Intelligence says the reaction has been almost hysterical, far greater than the loss of three small and one large freighter would seem to merit. I know you’re all disappointed, but if you look at the larger picture, you’ll understand why I say, Well done!” He stood up. As they scrambled to their feet, he added, “McCrary, will you stay behind for a couple of minutes?”
