Submarine! Page 4

  A smile plays around the corners of Warder’s mouth. “For the next torpedo, set depth eight feet and have that witnessed and logged also!” If he’s going to break specific instructions, Fred Warder is going to do it properly, with malice aforethought.

  “Standby TWO. . . . Range—mark! . . . Bearing—mark!

  “Standing by TWO, sir! Depth set, eight feet!”

  “FIRE TWO!” The cross hair of the periscope exactly bisects the single vertical stack of the target.

  Again the wait for the explosion, but this time it is not so long. As the impact of the explosion reaches the submarine, the skipper grins and motions to Deragon to take the ’scope for a look. “I think we really did hit him that time, Bill.”

  Through the tiny periscope eye can be seen a cloud of spray and mud thrown into the air, accompanied by what looks like pieces of debris. The ship rolls far over toward them, approximately thirty degrees, and immediately returns to an even keel.

  Stare as they may, Seawolf’s skipper and exec must admit that there is no conclusive evidence of damage. Despite an obvious hit and the subsequent wild rolling, the target has suffered no appreciable increase in draft.

  “How long did that torpedo run?” Warder suddenly asks.

  Bill Deragon looks at his stop watch. “Forty-four and a half seconds, Captain.” The two men look at each other thoughtfully.

  Warder speaks first. “Let’s see, now. Torpedo run . . . torpedo speed . . . Why, the earliest that fish could have got there is forty-five seconds, probably a little longer! It must have gone off just before hitting the target!”

  The exec nods in agreement. “That’s why he rolled over so far. What’ll we do now?”

  “Do? We’ll let him have another one, that’s what! Set depth FOUR feet!”

  And so a few moments later fish number three goes on its way, set even closer to the surface. Again the torpedo track is observed to run straight to the target, but this time there is no explosion whatsoever. Sound hears the torpedo running perfectly normally long after the time it should have hit the target. Suddenly it stops.

  “Standby FOUR! . . . FIRE FOUR!”

  Again nothing. Seawolf has expended all her bow tubes, and Sagami Maru still rides at anchor in Talomo Bay—unharmed. And now the submarine has drawn upon herself the quite understandable wrath of Sagami. Two large guns on the Jap’s bow and stern have been manned and are lobbing shells at Seawolf’s periscope. The explosions of gunfire on the surface of the water are remarkably loud, and possess a characteristic entirely their own. If Seawolf ever had any idea of trying her luck with the deck gun, this battery effectively changes it. But Warder has no thought of quitting with his target still afloat. The Mark XIV torpedoes have failed. Now he will try the old Mark X fish.

  Working against time, “topping off,” checking and reloading torpedoes in the four bow tubes, the men of the Seawolf silently perform a miracle of effort, in spite of a room temperature hovering around the 120-degree mark. And half an hour after the fourth torpedo was fired the submarine stealthily creeps back into Talomo Bay for another try.

  Having lost sight of the periscope when it was lowered, the gun crews of Sagami Maru are firing blindly and rapidly in all directions. Again Warder approaches as close as possible before shooting—if anything a little closer this time—again gyro angle is zero, and the camera ready, and so are the obsolete torpedoes.

  “FIRE ONE! . . .” This one does it. The torpedo explodes in the stern of the ship. When the smoke clears away the after gun crew has disappeared and Sagami is sinking at last, with bow up and stem down. Time for the coup de grâce.

  Seawolf has approached so close to her enemy by this time that it is necessary to turn around before shooting again. Besides, this will enable her to fire a stem tube, and will tend to equalize expenditure of torpedoes, always a concern of the provident skipper.

  Sagami’s forward gun crew have deserted their posts, and Seawolf is allowed to complete her reversal of course within the harbor unmolested. Twelve minutes later she is ready with the stern tubes, and fires one torpedo.

  “WHANGP!” A solid hit, in the bow. A fire sends billows of smoke into the air, and the target now sags down by the bow, with the more slowly sinking stern up. Several backward looks from Seawolf—snaking her tortuous way seaward—confirm that Sagami Maru is on the way to Davy Jones’ locker with a whole cargo of essential supplies for the Japanese occupiers of Mindanao, and in plain sight of hundreds of native and Japanese watchers from the shore.

  And then come the countermeasures. Three aircraft direct two anti-submarine vessels to the vicinity of the submarine. Seawolf is forced deep and into evasive maneuvers, but receives only a portion of the licking which by this time she so richly deserves.

  A few hours later Fred Warder composes the concluding Words to an official report. He has expended six torpedoes, of which the four new Mark XIV were defective. The ship was sunk by the old torpedoes. He has photographic proof of the whole thing. And so he contents himself with a simple statement of fact, leaving much more between the lines than in them: “The failures of the first attack are typical, and merely add weight to the previous complaints of other C.O.s and myself as to the erratic performance of the Mark XIV torpedo and its warhead attachments.”

  On December 1, 1942, Seawolf observed her third birthday as she entered Pearl Harbor after seven consecutive war patrols under the command of Freddie Warder. Less than a month before, thousands of miles away, she had fought her battle with Sagami Maru—or perhaps it should have been said that she had fought her battle against ineffective American torpedoes, with Sagami as the prize. The contribution she thereby made to the war effort was far greater than merely the sinking of one vessel.

  The torpedo problem was not solved yet, for it takes more than one documented report to change the mind of a whole naval bureau. But the weight of evidence continued to mount.

  There was a new idea for Trigger’s third war patrol: we were to plant a mine field in the shallow coastal waters of Japan before starting a normal patrol. So early in December of 1942 Trigger appeared off Inubo Saki, a few miles north of Tokyo. Penrod and the skipper had spent many long hours planning just how we would lay our mines, and where, so as to do the greatest damage to the enemy. We picked a bright moonlight night, so we could see well through the periscope, and selected a spot a few miles to seaward from the Inubo Saki lighthouse, where traffic was sure to pass.

  One of the problems in laying a mine field has to do with the excessive air pressure built up inside the submarine. Our poppet mechanism was designed to swallow the impulse bubble made when firing a torpedo tube, and since we were to eject a large number of mines from the tubes, we would swallow lots of air. The problem came because as the air pressure built up within the submarine, the depth gauges, which measured the difference between water pressure outside and air pressure inside, would show a progressively shallower depth.

  My job on the mine plant was one worthy of the assistant engineer that I was: I constantly measured the barometric pressure and calculated the change in the depth gauges so that our planesmen could maintain the prescribed depth.

  It was a nervy business laying a field of mines in shallow water right under the noses of the enemy, and I know that Penrod and Captain Benson were much concerned over what we should do to defend ourselves in case we were detected in the process. With our torpedo tubes full of mines, there was not much we could do until we had unloaded them and put torpedoes in their places.

  Up in the conning tower, Roy Benson kept watch through the periscope. Beside him Penrod checked our course, while standing alongside me in the control room my boss, Steve Gimber, the engineer, coached the planesmen. We laid our first line of mines; all went well. Then we turned around to lay the second line. Halfway through—Benson’s voice from the conning tower:

  “Bear a hand down there.”

  We laid a few more mines. Benson’s voice again: “How much longer?”

  Ano
ther mine went out. “About ten minutes,” Steve Mann, the torpedo officer, reported from the forward torpedo room.

  “Make it as fast as you can,” from the skipper.

  “What is it? Why the sudden hurry? What’s happened up there?”

  I ran up the ladder to the conning tower to find out. A large ship and a destroyer escorting it had come into view and were heading directly for us. I whispered the word to Gimber, then ran forward and told Steve Mann. As rapidly as possible we pumped out our remaining mines.

  Relieved of our mission, we slunk away, in the meantime hurriedly shoving torpedoes into the now-empty tubes. When that had been completed, we felt better.

  Benson had been keeping a watch on the two ships. Suddenly word came down from the conning tower: “Looks like he’s going right into our mine field.”

  We wondered whether he would go over one of our mines, whether any of them had had time to arm, whether they were any good anyway.

  “Kerblam!” Three of our questions were answered at once. Through the periscope Benson could see the ship hoisted irresistibly upward on a sudden blossoming of white water beneath him. When it subsided, the ship lay wallowing, broken in half, bow and stern high, center section under water.

  Fascinated, our periscope stared at the destruction. Then, recollecting itself, it turned to look for the destroyer, and found him racing rapidly around his broken charge like a hound looking for a scent. Over the sonar gear we could hear him echo ranging, not routinely as he had been, but purposefully, alertly. The same thought struck several of us: “Say—he probably thinks that ship was torpedoed! What if he finds us here?”

  The incongruity of our being attacked for torpedoing the ship didn’t seem particularly amusing, and we had to admit that it would make little difference anyway if he found us. We could hear the destroyer’s propellers flailing the water as he sped around.

  Steve Gimber leaned over to me and said quite seriously, “You know, Ned, things could be worse. That little s.o.b. is still in the mine field. If he looks hard enough, he might find another one!”

  Hardly had Steve finished speaking when another huge kerblam was heard and the propellers and echo ranging frighteningly stopped.

  Having gone as deep as we could in the shallow water in our attempt to evade the destroyer, we didn’t have the pleasure of actually seeing him sink; and, sure enough, when we later reported the incident, Trigger received credit for sinking one large freighter only. When we surfaced about an hour later, we could see dead astern of us a tall column of black smoke where the two ships had been.

  Three more ships we sank on this patrol. One, a freighter just at the entrance to Tokyo Bay; the destroyer Okikase evidently returning from an anti-submarine sweep outside the harbor; and a large freighter loaded with seaplanes on deck farther offshore. This last ship went down on the 31st of December, 1942—with our very best wishes for the New Year.

  All ammunition expended for the second time in succession, Trigger returned to Midway for refit. When we arrived, Penrod Schneider and Steve Gimber were detached—Steve to report to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, to put the new submarine Rasher into commission as Executive Officer—a nice promotion. Penrod got an even better one, for he was ordered to the Electric Boat Company, at Groton, Connecticut, as prospective commanding officer of the submarine Dorado, under construction there.

  This also was good news to Steve Mann and to me, for though we were sorry to see Penrod and Gimber leave, Mann moved up to Executive Officer and I became engineer. A large party was thrown for our two departing shipmates, and a couple of days after our arrival in Midway we saw them off in the motor launch which was to take them to the airfield.

  A few days later one of their replacements arrived, an Ensign fresh from the Naval Academy, John W. Sincavich by name, who unsuccessfully tried to conceal the fact that his nickname had been “Stinky.” In particular I appreciated his arrival. I had been assistant engineer for almost a full year, but now I was Engineering Officer, and, as such, rated an assistant. Stinky was it.

  To tell the story of USS Wahoo, it is necessary also to tell the story of Mush Morton. More than any other man, Morton—and his Wahoo—showed the way to the brethren of the Silent Service. He was positive, intolerant, quick to denounce inefficiency if he thought it existed; but he was precise by nature, absolutely fearless, and possessed of a burning desire to inflict damage upon the Japanese enemy.

  Just why Morton felt that destruction of the Japanese merchant marine was his own private job will probably never be explained, for he and Wahoo sleep forever somewhere in the Sea of Japan. But all that is immortal of both of them is indissolubly paired in the archives of a grateful (but forgetful) nation and in the minds and hearts of a few men who knew them.

  Morton died, perhaps believing that his message had not been received by those for whom it had been intended, perhaps with a bit of bitterness that he could convince no one to follow where he led. But he need not have worried, for after him came a host of names which, by their very fame, proved that his ideas had fallen upon fertile soil. Trigger, Tang, Barb, Tirante, Harder—these were some of his disciples: the school of “outthinking the enemy”; the believers in the coldly logical evaluation of chances, followed by the furious, slashing attack; the devotees of the competition to bring back the most ships.

  Morton believed that there was a certain way in which the job should be done. He would have nothing to do with any other way. There is no question but that his search for perfection in his science brought about his own undoing.

  On the last day of 1942 Lieutenant Commander Dudley W. Morton took command of USS Wahoo at Brisbane, Australia. There was nothing particularly outstanding about the new skipper during the first few weeks of his command, except perhaps an almost fanatical determination to get the items of the refit completed and checked on time, so that there would be no unnecessary delay in starting upon patrol.

  Finally, on January 16, 1943, all repairs had been completed, and Wahoo was ready for sea for her third war patrol—Mush Morton’s first in command. In company with her escorting destroyer—necessary in view of the “shoot on sight” order directed against any submarine in those “friendly” waters—the submarine got underway and headed for the open sea. At nightfall the escort turned back, a dimmed signal light blinking the customary farewell: “Good luck . . . good hunting!” Perhaps the captain of the destroyer wished that he, too, could go forth on his own, like some ancient sea rover, to seek out the enemy. Undeniably there was always a strong element of romance at the sight of a small ship setting out alone for enemy waters, bravely inviting the worst the enemy could offer, confident in her ability to best him in all encounters. Perhaps the destroyer skipper sensed this as he watched his signalman flash out his valedictory; perhaps Morton knew a momentary sense of understanding, also, but his answer was an equally simple: “Thank you!”

  Wahoo was on her own.

  It wasn’t long before the first plan churning around in the restless brain of Wahoo’s new captain became evident to the crew, now that the need for secrecy had passed. Only recently had it become known that the Japanese for some time had been using a harbor known as Wewak as a major staging area. The location of this harbor was loosely determined to be somewhere on the northeast coast of New Guinea, but its position was known to our forces only by whole numbers of latitude and longitude. Morton planned to find Wewak, enter the harbor unsuspected, and raise as much fuss as possible.

  The preparations he and his officers made for this little expedition were thoroughly characteristic of the man. The only available chart showing even in vague degree the location of Wewak was contained in a school atlas. Using a camera lens and the ship’s signal light, a homemade projector was rigged up for the construction of a large tracing, designed to exactly the same scale as the ship’s charts of that section of New Guinea. Much study of the Notices to Mariners and of other publications resulted in the accumulation of a considerable body of information which aided in t
he location of the correct spot. After several round-table discussions, the most likely area—between and behind several small islands off the coast of New Guinea—was selected. A large-scale chart was then made showing all pertinent information, and this chart was the one Mush Morton proposed to use for his entry and egress.

  All this time Wahoo was proceeding at the best practicable speed toward the general area where Wewak was known to be. Obviously this new skipper was a bearcat, at least insofar as getting into action with the enemy was concerned.

  Eight days out of Brisbane, Wahoo silently dived, at 0330, just a couple of miles north of the suspected anchorage. As dawn broke, her periscope made continuous and wary observations while her plotting party carefully noted down all landmarks and other data which might aid the attack or the subsequent exit.

  If there were any lingering doubts that the new skipper meant to follow through with his daring plan, they must have been dispelled by this time, for he calmly ventured right into the anchorage area, deftly avoiding a patrol of two anti-submarine torpedo boats which had just got underway for their daily sweep. Nothing was seen here, however, except a tiny tug and barge which Mush did not consider worth bothering with.

  Some tripod masts on the far end of one of the islands excited his interest, for they might belong to a ship, and a warship at that. An attempt to circumnavigate this island was frustrated by a low-lying reef connecting the island to the next in the chain and thus effectively keeping Wahoo from getting around to where the masts had been spotted.

  It is difficult to describe the situation in which Morton had deliberately placed himself. He had entered, submerged, but in broad daylight, a suspected enemy harbor. He was in shallow water—a very bad place to be if your presence is detected. Moreover, there were enemy craft about, and in a position to do something about the submarine once its presence became known.

  But far from worrying Morton, the fact that there were two Japanese patrol vessels active on anti-submarine sweeps in the area actually encouraged his belief that he had indeed found Wewak. So he spent the whole morning quietly cruising about the harbor area, nosing (submerged, of course) into all the suspected and possible anchorages, one after the other. By one o’clock he was quite disgusted, for he had seen nothing to show for his pains except a tug, two Chidori class patrol boats, and those unidentified tripod masts which he was unable to approach, and which, later observations showed, had disappeared.