Hellcats (22 page)

Greer radioed Pearl with the results: ninety-seven densely packed mines in a field just north of Formosa, accounted for and mapped. With his mission accomplished, Greer made tracks for his next patrol station outside the Tsushima Strait, where the
Bonefish
would later conduct her lifeguard assignment.

The
Seahorse
arrived in the area on April 9 and within hours Greer heard distant exploding depth charges. There was, he noted in his patrol report, a heavy presence of enemy antisubmarine patrols.

Days later, Greer tangled with two crafty patrol boat skippers south of the Tsushima Strait.

Japanese patrols dogged the
Seahorse
for days as she shadowed potential targets, which, like galloping ghosts, faded away into misty coastal shallows or at times, it seemed, into thin air. Greer parleyed with Edge early in the morning on the sixteenth, when the
Seahorse
's appearance proved that she hadn't been sunk. Greer warned of the heavy coverage by radar-equipped patrols sniffing around the strait. Edge acknowledged the warning, then departed for the
Bonefish
's assigned lifeguard station in those very waters. Greer headed off to carry out a mine recon of the strait's southern approaches. His experience with patrol boats gave him good reason to believe that the Japanese knew the
Seahorse
, if not the
Bonefish
, was patrolling south of the strait. “The Japs probably wondered why I didn't go in or go away,” he said.
⁵

Midday on the seventeenth, Greer saw a telltale wobble of interference shimmer across the
Seahorse
's SJ radar screen. He assumed it was coming from a friendly SJ radar, most likely the
Bonefish
's or
Crevalle
's, though a challenge keyed from the
Seahorse
's SJ went unanswered. Greer ignored the interference and moved on. Two hours later another wave of interference, stronger than the one before, ghosted across the
Seahorse
's radar screen. It should have warned Greer that he was sailing into a trap set by the Japanese; somehow, it didn't. After the
Seahorse
submerged at daylight, Greer's sonar watch even reported intermittent pinging on the same bearing as the interference, as well as distant explosions, possibly depth charges, a sure sign that patrol boats were in the area. Back on the surface late in the day, the
Seahorse
picked up more SJ interference, which this time Greer attributed to a radar-equipped escort.

A day later the
Seahorse
picked up yet more radar interference. Despite the known presence of radar-equipped patrols, for some reason Greer thought the interference was coming from the
Crevalle
.
^o
Almost too late, Greer discovered that he'd made a big, possibly fatal mistake. As he later said, “They were Japs.”

The
Seahorse
hauled out on four mains with water spouts from the escorts' guns rising in her wake and then all around her.

Greer pulled the plug, ordered the
Seahorse
to three hundred feet, rigged for silent running and depth charge. He changed course ninety degrees to get off the escorts' inbound track, then fired two pillenwerfers to confuse them. A half minute later the pinging patrol boats passed astern, only to come about and launch an accurately aimed salvo of nine depth charges that exploded above and on either side of the fleeing submarine.

The salvo slammed the
Seahorse
down to four hundred feet as if she were a toy submarine, not one made of fifteen hundred tons of steel. Greer stopped the motors and put her on the bottom to wait out the attack and to take stock of the damage the initial depth charging had caused. It was bad.

Seawater pouring into the control room through the SD radar mast's shattered packing gland, and into the forward engine room through the warped main air induction valve endangered the submarine. Ruptured main fuel ballast tank vent fittings and hydraulic lines had sprayed diesel oil and hydraulic oil into damaged compartments, their noxious odors permeating the ship. Acid slopping from cracked battery cells threatened to form deadly chlorine gas. Cork insulation knocked from bulkheads and glass from shattered lightbulbs littered the decks, crunching underfoot. The most serious damage was yet to be discovered as men went to work in the eerie silence of a dark, half-dead ship, groping to make repairs to smashed equipment by the light of portable battle lanterns.

“All in all,” said Greer, “things looked pretty grim. The ship was a shambles. Another pattern of depth charges like the one already delivered could possibly have finished us.”
⁶
When he said that, he didn't know that a crack had opened around the ship's steering wheel mounted on the pressure hull in the conning tower. Given the submarine's great submerged depth and the enormous weight of water pressing against her, the crack could lead to hull collapse. A thick-skinned
Balao
-class submarine, the
Seahorse
was nevertheless bottomed in mud below her test depth of four hundred feet. A depth charge exploding close aboard in an uncompressible medium like seawater could easily finish her off.

Around dawn, sonar reported the arrival of a third pinging patrol boat that delivered two depth charges that drove the
Seahorse
deeper into the mud. After this cracking bombardment the three patrol boats drifted away, their screw noises fading. Greer and his crew waited in silence, all movement, all repair work suspended. Time passed slowly, the seconds ticked off by the ship's chronometers, those that still worked, and by the steady drip, drip, drip of water into the bilges from leaking sea valves, cracked freshwater engine cooling lines, and packing glands. The ship's breathable air, already thick with oil fumes and carbon dioxide, turned foul: eighty-plus men consume a lot of oxygen and respire a lot of CO
₂
. Greer wasn't fooled into taking action by the patrol boats' disappearing act. He knew that they could be up there lying to, engines silent, ready to bore in with their guns and depth charges, just waiting for the
Seahorse
to stir from the muck and poke up a periscope.

When Greer thought it was safe to move around inside the ship, he gave the okay to restart repairs, but quietly, and he cautioned the men not to drop any tools. Meanwhile, a stem-to-stern survey disclosed yet more damage: The reduction gear lube oil cooler had ruptured but was repairable; the air-conditioning system's Freon lines had ruptured, too—Freon gas is as deadly as CO
₂
; both periscopes were flooded and useless; the gyro compass was out of commission; both service radio transmitters were dead, their topside antennas and grounds carried away by the force of exploding depth charges; the ship's food storeroom had flooded. And on it went. The forward and after torpedo tubes and their outer door interlocks had jammed; all four inboard engine exhaust valves leaked seawater into the engine rooms.

When sonar reported the buzz of fast screws a few miles north of the
Seahorse
's position, men froze in their tracks; repairs came to an abrupt halt. Greer could tell from the screws' fast-changing bearing rates that the patrol boats had lost the scent and were searching for the
Seahorse
inside a large circle several miles away from where she lay. As the sonarman, drenched with sweat and laboring for breath in the fetid atmosphere, listened to the patrol boats make a circuit, he heard them drop almost two dozen depth charges. Even though the drop was far off the mark, its thunder rattled the
Seahorse
and shook up her weary crew. How close would the escorts and their depth charges come? they asked. The men waited expectantly, until the thunder slowly faded away to ringing silence. Minutes passed. When it was all clear, the men resumed their work.

 

 

An exhausted Greer toured the
ship to see for himself what repairs had been made. What he found was nothing short of a miracle, given the conditions the men had to deal with. They had done everything in their power to restore, repair, and jury-rig the ship's systems to get her off the bottom and back to the surface. As Greer said later, “[The] men were not defeated, on the contrary they were just beginning a long and successful fight.” Back on the surface they could start for home—if the Japanese didn't return in force.

Toward midnight Greer made a circle in the air with an index finger, indicating a 360-degree sweep on the listening gear. Had the Japanese departed or were they still up there, waiting? After completing a slow, careful sweep, the sonarman gave Greer a vigorous thumbs-up—
All quiet, Captain
.

But would the leaking batteries have enough current to drive the motors and turn the props? Would the props even turn, or were their bearing collars misaligned and jammed? Was there sufficient compressed air in the high-pressure bottles to blow the main ballast tanks dry and lift the partially flooded sub from the bottom? The
Seahorse
was saddled with tons of water that couldn't be pumped overboard until the noisy trim and drain pumps became fully operational.

Greer looked around at the sweat- and oil-burnished faces of his exhausted crew, men who had given the
Seahorse
everything they had to save her and themselves. It was time to put their courage to the test yet again. He gave the order to blow the ballast tanks, to get the ship up and off the bottom.

High-pressure air roared into flooded tanks. For a minute the
Seahorse
refused to budge, to acknowledge that the time had come to rise from the muddy sea bottom and shake herself free. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, she lurched up bow first. Frames and hull groaning in protest, she rose to a chorus of cheers from her crew. They were going to live! They would breathe fresh air again! They would get the rusty old bitch back to Guam in one piece after all!

It seemed a lifetime before the
Seahorse
reached the surface. Her one working depth gauge still registered seventy feet, but seas breaking over her main deck as she rolled and pitched like a surface ship on long ocean swells said that she was there. The bridge hatch and main induction clanged open. A hurricane of fresh air so sweet that it was almost intoxicating swept through the ship, purging the poisonous atmosphere and filling the men's lungs.

Motor macs started the engines and ran them up. The starboard reduction gear was far too noisy but turned its propeller shaft. SD radar was a wreck, flooded just like both periscopes. Somehow SJ radar, with its delicate innards, had survived the depth charging. Switched on, it immediately picked up the now-dreaded interference, a sure sign that radar-equipped Japanese patrol boats, maybe even the same ones that had almost killed the
Seahorse
, were somewhere in the area.

 

 

Greer hugged the western coast
of Kyushu, limping along at the best speed his damaged sub could manage. He was careful not to sweep for targets with SJ, using it only to register bearings on the interference, which grew weaker as the
Seahorse
headed south, hugging Kyushu for cover. A little past dawn of the twenty-first Greer submerged “gingerly,” as he put it, to test the ship and to make more repairs, some of which required welding cracks in the main engine-cooling system.

Heading southeast, away from the East China Sea, making for Guam, the realization dawned on Greer that the damage to his ship would require major work to repair: work only a shipyard like the one at Guam could provide. Clearly the
Seahorse
could not be repaired in time to join Operation Barney. Another sub would have to take her place. Preoccupied with his current plight, Harry Greer didn't have time to worry about Lawrence Edge's
Bonefish
running into radar-equipped patrol boats. In fact, Edge was busy trying not to run afoul of mines.

 

 

While the
Seahorse
limped home,
the
Bonefish
, submerged west of Danjo Gunto, began her approach on the northeastern end of the line of mines Edge intended to survey. Almost immediately hell's bells, as if trying to clear their throats, issued a garbled bell tone. A few dim and shapeless green blobs appeared on the PPI scope, only to fade out. Edge wasn't fooled. The contacts' poor shapes, poor tones, low persistence, and erratic movement told him that FMS had homed in on a school of fish, not mines.