Submarine! (28 page)

The skipper was of the same mind, and so a few minutes later, having attained a position broad on the bow of the zigzagging
convoy's base course,
Trigger
turned her lean snout toward the enemy.

This was always the crucial part of the night surface attack—the run in. You kept your bows on the enemy to give him as little to see of you as possible, and you came in fast to get it over with quickly. Then, just before shooting, you had to slow down to let the fish get away properly. Having put your torpedoes in the water, you spun on your heel and ran, trusting to the confusion generated by exploding warheads to help you get away. If there were escorts present, the problem was complicated by the necessity to come in more or less under their sterns, where they would have to turn all the way around to get at you.

The engines were still wide open, and now we and the Japs were approaching each other at our combined speeds. At a closing rate of 35 knots it didn't take long.

“Range, three five double oh!”

“All tubes ready forward!”

“All ahead one third—standby forward!” The last from the skipper.

I had been keeping my eyes on the nearest escort, a large mean-looking destroyer. No sign yet of his having seen us, but he surely knew his job, for he was patrolling the convoy's quarter and thus making our shot at the big ships very difficult. To get at the big fellows we would have to shoot right across the tin can's bow—then we would have to let him have it also, because he was too close and would be upon us in a matter of minutes. Radar gave range to the tin can as seven hundred yards—broadside to, dead ahead.

A ticklish decision, quickly made. The first three fish at the nearest big ship and the next three at the tin can. That would not give us much time. . . .

“We're shooting now, Bridge!” That wasn't necessary, for I could hear Dusty shout, “Fire!”
Trigger
lurched three times, as three times a ton and a half was ejected from bow tubes. Three streaks of bubbles in a long, thin fan reached for the last transport. Now for the destroyer. “Fire four! . . . Fire five! . . . Fire six!”

“Right full rudder!” I screamed. Number four barely missed ahead. Number five ran erratically to the left, and number six circled to the right. No hits! The destroyer fired three green flares off his stern, started to turn toward us. From somewhere amidships a gun went off, and there was a sharp ripping sound overhead.

Two things to do: avoid those deadly circling torpedoes, and get out of the immediate vicinity. I put my face against the bridge speaker, pressed the button. “Maneuvering, he's after us! Pour it on!” A rather unorthodox order, but it got results.

In the engine room one man knelt by each engine governor, holding it in by hand as he increased engine speed beyond the limits. In the maneuvering room the already overloaded motors and generators were loaded down even more. A cloud of black smoke poured out of our exhaust pipes as
Trigger's
stern skidded across the slight chop.

“Rudder amidships!” We steadied with our stem dead on the destroyer. With the smoke riding high into the air astern, we could hardly see him.

“Standby aft! Bridge, give me bearings on the tin can!”

“Bearing—mark!”

“Fire!” And four torpedoes sped from our stern.

We had to hand it to that tin can skipper for a neat job of side-stepping. Not one touched him though they must have streaked by on both sides.

But at any rate they held him up for a bit, and in the meantime
Trigger
was showing a shade under 22 knots. And then came a most welcome sound—depth charges! Not realizing that we could not possibly have dived, that we must have run off on the surface, the destroyer had ceased gunfire and was depth charging the area. Our respect for his acumen diminished appreciably.

Meanwhile, our first three fish had evidently not hit their target, perhaps due to a zig executed when the flares went off. But as we watched—and ran—a heavy flash of light suddenly showed up alongside one of the other escorts, a cloud of smoke appeared over him, and he disappeared. Not what we
had been after, but at least we were not completely empty-handed.

Suddenly I realized that Dusty was standing beside me on the bridge. I pointed out the locations of the enemy convoy, the sunken destroyer, and our friend sowing ash cans astern.

He took it all in in an instant, then leaned against the speaker button. “Plot, give me a course to intercept the main body!”

“One six five, Bridge!” Plot was right on its toes.

“Left full rudder! New course one six five!” Dusty bawled the order down the hatch to the helmsman.
Trigger
heeled to starboard, and off we dashed after our fast-escaping quarry.

It soon developed that the Japs had upped their speed about 2 knots, and that we would be lucky to get close enough for another shot before dawn. Dornin set his jaw in characteristic fury, hurled imprecations into the murky grayness, and drove on insanely after the three plainly visible transports. We had been nearly an hour in chase when the radar, which we had kept periodically checking on the Nip destroyer left behind, reported that he was now under way at high speed in our direction. In a few minutes, however, Plot announced that he was apparently not chasing us, but merely rejoining the main body.

Sure enough, this particular Jap evidently still could not see. He swept past us at moderately long range with never a sign of recognition and took station with his convoy once more.

Trigger
continued to pound along, hardly hoping to attain another firing position before daybreak, but Dusty was unwilling to give up while some chance remained. It looked pretty hopeless, because the light in the east was becoming too obvious to be ignored. But suddenly the three large silhouettes, which had been quite foreshortened as we viewed them from astern, broadened sharply. Zig left, in the direction of Truk. Just what we had been hoping for. It was now or never.

“Bridge! Bearing on the nearest one!” That was Dusty
down below again, and from the preparatory commands floating up the hatch, he was getting ready to shoot. The biggest and nearest target happened to be the right-hand ship, the last one in the column. I trained the TBT exactly on his fat stack—and put the finger on
Yasukuni Maru
.

We fired at long range, but we hit him fair, and he sank in half an hour. One destroyer remained with him, picking up survivors, else we'd have tried to save a few ourselves. The other two ships turned their sterns toward us and disappeared over the fast-lightening horizon.

We returned to Pearl Harbor rather crestfallen. This was the first time in about two years that
Trigger
had brought back torpedoes from patrol. We had been a little spoiled by success, and this time we experienced some of the frustrations of many of our sisters. Nearing the entrance to Pearl, we decided to slip in with the minimum of bombast, and we flew no cockscomb.

Our idea of not attracting attention while entering did not fare too well. Several ships in the harbor blew their whistles as our weather-beaten ship glided past, and several exchanged calls with us by searchlight. Then as we neared the Navy Yard, and commenced the turn around “Ten Ten” dock to approach the submarine base, we found a great crowd of people gathered around the berth which had been assigned to us. In some consternation we spotted Admiral Lockwood and his entire staff, many of CincPac Staff including the Chief of Staff, and other high-ranking officers in the crowd. Amazed, Dusty and I decided there had been some mistake; but there was none. And after the first few minutes of vigorous hand-pumping we found out why.

There were two good reasons why we had rated such a welcoming committee. Our intelligence service had just discovered that Admiral Lockwood's opposite number in the Japanese Submarine Force, ComJapSubPac, had been on board the ship we had sunk and had gone down with it. This type of blow touched everyone's sense of dramatic values.

The second reason was that Admiral King had asked ComSubPac to send his most outstanding submarine commander
to be his personal aide in Washington. The demise of ComJapSubPac had made the answer to that question an easy one. Dusty's orders were handed him as our gangway was extended to us from the dock.

But Dusty, a great submariner, was not removed from action merely as a reward for services rendered. ComSubPac long ago had decided to relieve his skippers while they still were going great guns, before the terrific physical and emotional strain began to tell. Undoubtedly this policy often resulted in relieving a skipper who had several fine patrols left in him, but this was infinitely better than the reverse—keeping him too long on the firing line. If such a policy had been enforced at the time, the loss of Mush Morton and
Wahoo
might have been averted.

One of the most successful instances of collaboration between our submarine forces and the surface fleets took place at the First Battle of the Philippine Sea. Several subs were involved, but the two principal actors were
Albacore
and
Cavalla
.

Jim Blanchard and Herman Kossler would probably both tell you today that collaboration was furthest from their minds on the 19th of June, 1944. Although each knew of the other's presence in the general vicinity, the fact that together they would deprive the Imperial Japanese Navy of
two of its largest first-line aircraft carriers would have seemed the height of the unexpected to both of them. Curiously,
Taiho
and
Shokaku
were virtually sister ships, although the former was the newer by about two years and carried the latest improvements in design; and they were sunk on the same day—almost within sight of each other—by sister submarines.
Cavalla
was about two years newer than
Albacore
, but our standardization of design was such that the two were almost identical.

To
Albacore
and Jim Blanchard, veterans of many submarine war patrols, fell the brand-new, unseasoned
Taiho
. A few hours later Herman Kossler and his
Cavalla
, both fresh out of the building yard, got the veteran carrier
Shokaku
.

So it was that the First Battle of the Philippine Sea found only three large Japanese carriers opposed to our seven, which perhaps was part of the reason why our airmen knew that battle as the “Marianas Turkey Shoot.”

This story really starts on June 14.
Albacore
was on her ninth war patrol, operating in the area between Yap and Guam. For the past two days she had experienced heavy wind and seas, and consequently was behind schedule. Another submarine had reported damaging a ship in a convoy apparently en route for her area, and Jim Blanchard had bent on everything but the galley range in his effort to get into position to intercept. His chances looked pretty poor because of the bad weather, but he hung on grimly, running at full speed on the surface, hoping that the convoy also might have been delayed.

On the afternoon of the 14th, however, a message from ComSubPac directed Jim to discontinue the chase and to proceed to a point in almost the exact opposite direction. Since the submariner always works on the theory that the bird in the hand is worth several still in the bush, and since there still seemed to be hope of catching the elusive convoy, it was with some disappointment that Jim reversed course.

Not quite seven hours later another message was decoded in
Albacore's
wardroom: she was to proceed to yet another
spot for patrol. Again Blanchard ordered the course changed, and off they went to the new station. By this time there was little doubt in the skipper's mind that something was happening—or about to happen.

All day long, on the 15th,
Albacore
patrolled assiduously back and forth, never straying more than a few miles from her station, and remaining constantly on the surface in order to increase her search radius. All day long also Blanchard drilled his crew at battle stations for what he hardly dared hope might come his way. A careful check of all messages received in the radio room was kept, and many, addressed to other submarines, were decoded. Pieced together—and then scrupulously destroyed, for you aren't required to decode any messages except those addressed to you—they spelled out that something big was in the wind, and that
Albacore
was one of several submarines to be placed in what looked like strategic positions.

At 0800 on June 18th a message arrived for
Albacore
, ordering her to shift position about one hundred miles to the southward. This itself was encouraging, for it showed that whatever was expected had not yet happened somewhere else, and that ComSubPac was keeping his fine hand right in the deal. Jim Blanchard sent his submarine south at full speed.