Submarine! (38 page)

Late in November the new ship stood out to sea. Her engines ran throatily, her stem breasted the waves daintily, her sleek length droned effortlessly on the cold, restless sea. Only the less-than-perfectly-ordered bustle of her crew below decks betrayed her newness as time drew near for her first dive.

“Standby to dive.” The uncustomary order pealed through the ship's announcing system. The crew stood to their stations, fingering the controls with which, in a moment, they would send her below. I was glad to see they were a little keyed up.

Ed Campbell, engineer and diving officer, looked inquiringly at me. As I nodded to him, he held up his hand, motioning as though opening a valve. High-pressure air whistled into the control room. A moment—he clenched his fist. The whistle cut off abruptly, as the auxilaryman behind us whirled shut the stop valve. Ed and I inspected the barometer; it held steady, showing about half an inch more atmospheric pressure than before.

I climbed a few rungs of the ladder to the conning tower, far enough to speak to George Street at the periscope. He was already using it, though the ship was still on the surface. The conning tower hatch was shut tightly, I knew, because the ship had held air, and its “Christmas Tree” light was green. “Pressure in the boat. Green aboard. All set below, Captain.”

George took his eyes from the 'scope and grinned at me. “Take her down, then,” he said. “We can't learn any younger.”

I reached over my head, grasped the conning tower diving alarm, and swung the arm twice through its short arc. Stiff with newness, it did not return to the off position of its own accord, and I had to push it back each time. As the familiar
reverberations died away—they, at least, sounded exactly as they had in
Trigger
—I seized the general announcing microphone. “Dive, dive,” I called.

The vents popped as D. W. Remley, Chief Torpedoman and Chief of the Boat, pulled their hydraulic control handles toward him one after another. We could hear the rush of air escaping from the ballast tanks. The helmsman clicked his two annunciators over to Ahead Standard, and centered his rudder amidships.
Tirante's
gently heaving deck seemed to change its motion; tilt ever so slightly down by the bow. Beneath me in the control room I could hear Ed quietly coaching his planesmen as they leaned into their big nickel-steel wheels. I could feel
Tirante
start to break surface and her down inclination become greater as I steadied myself against the side of the conning tower and made a note to have the diving alarm worked over.

George was going around and around with his periscope, alternately watching bow and stern. After a moment he spoke. “Bow's under.” Then, in a few seconds, “Stern's gone.” The sloshing sound of the water in the superstructure was replaced by the noise of the sea climbing swiftly around the bridge coaming and up the periscope supports. I thought I could feel the angle of inclination decrease imperceptibly.

“All ahead two thirds.” That was Ed's gentle voice calling up from the control room. The helmsman clicked the annunciators, got an answering click as the electricians in the maneuvering room responded.
Tirante's
bow began to lift.

“Flood forward trim from sea.” Ed again. She was coming up a bit too fast to suit him. “Secure flooding.” The faintly heard rumbling of water flowing stopped. The deck continued to return to normal. “All ahead one third.” It is submarine custom for the diving officer to control the speed until he is satisfied with the submerged trim.

Ed was calling up the hatchway again: “Final trim, sir. Depth, six-oh feet, one third speed.” There was a barely perceptible tone in his voice. To hit the final compensation so closely on the very first dive of a new ship smacked of the
miraculous. On
Triggers
first dive it had taken us an hour and a half of pumping and flooding before we were satisfied.

My new skipper was not one to pass by the moment, either; that was one of the first things I had begun to like about him. In a few well-chosen words shouted down the hatch, he let Ed know that he was without doubt the world's finest diving officer, and that we were extraordinarily fortunate to have him aboard.

Tirante's
character developed rapidly, even before the training period was complete. Her radar was the most powerful I had ever encountered; her engines ran best when loaded to more than full rated power; she made 21 knots with ease whereas other subs of the same design struggled to reach 19. She carried four more fish than
Trigger
, and her torpedoes had been modified to eliminate the frustrations of the earlier war years. Many of
Tirante's
crew were already veterans of the Pacific, some of them from
Trigger
herself. We built upon the virtues and mistakes of those from whom we had learned the business.

The prologue of
Tirante's
first war patrol states laconically: “Ship completed on November 23, 1944, and commenced training in fog, storms, and freezing weather off Portsmouth.
Tirante's
builders did a wonderful job.” Somehow, starting with that first dive, everything seemed to work right the first time for us. After two and a half years fighting a ship which had gradually had more and more things wrong with her—whether the result of enemy action or just plain misadventure-despite which she had performed magnificently, it was an unprecedented delight to me to have everything go right.

During our two-week training period at New London prior to departure for the Pacific we worked out our fire control, our damage control, and all the other phases of submarine technique. Tirelessly, Ensign Bill Ledford, onetime chief torpedoman of
Trigger
, now assistant torpedo officer of
Tirante
, tinkered with his fish, and every torpedo we fired in practice hit the target. By the time we were ready to
leave,
Tirante
had become a perfectionist, and we had no doubt of being able to pass any readiness inspection Admiral Lockwood cared to toss at us.

Then the day before setting out for Balboa and the Pacific our preparations were interrupted by an unexpected summons for the skipper. When he returned, he motioned Lieutenant Endicott (Chub) Peabody II and me into his stateroom.

“It was the Force Gunnery Officer,” he said without preamble. “He's got a hot potato on his hands and wants us to take it over.”

“What is it, Captain?”

George chuckled. “It seems that the employees of the Westinghouse Corporation plant at Sharon, Pennsylvania, which makes electric torpedoes, got together and donated one special torpedo for the war effort. It's up in the torpedo shop now, tested and ready to go, and they want somebody to take it out with them.”

“We've already loaded all our fish, sir,” said Chub. “We'd have to take one back out . . .”

The skipper's grin widened. “Wait till I tell you the rest. This torpedo is painted up like a highway billboard sign so nobody can possibly mistake it. It's been photographed at least a dozen times, at least once at every stage of its construction and trials. Two admirals have publicly told Sharon that the fish will be delivered to the enemy with their compliments, and now—somebody has got to make good on all the bragging.”

“You mean,” I interjected, “they want us to take this particular fish out and plant it in the bottom of some Jap battleship? Don't they know battleships don't grow on trees and that even with a perfectly aimed salvo some of the fish are bound to miss?”

“Oh, they're not unreasonable. They'll settle for any decent-sized maru.”

Chub said, “We'd sure look foolish if we took it out and then had to report we hadn't hit anything with it, wouldn't we?”

This didn't faze George. “You're right,” he said, “and that's why taking it along is purely voluntary. A couple of ships have already declined the honor for that very reason. So the Force Gunnery Officer is getting right anxious to get rid of it, and I told him we'd see that it reached the desired destination.”

We might have known our skipper would never pass up this kind of challenge. There was a gleam in Chub's eyes, and I, too, felt a little pleased with the Old Man.

“It's on its way down right now,” George added.

By the time it had arrived in a specially built torpedo carrier, accompanied by a bevy of high-ranking officers and half-a-dozen photographers, and we had tucked it aboard, we realized we had carried out the most thoroughly documented torpedo loading in history. And, as Ed Campbell commented after watching the performance, if we came back from patrol without having made good with it, we had better throw our hats in ahead of us wherever we entered.

On January 8, 1945,
Tirante
set forth from New London for Pearl Harbor. The passage took us thirty-three days, including eight days of exercises at Balboa, Canal Zone, and we drilled every day and part of every night. We had been out of the war zone for so long that there was a lot of catching up to do, and Street and I pored over our file of war patrol reports as we sped into warmer seas and through the canal.

We were in a hurry, too, for it was already obvious that the war had not much longer to last. Our boats were crisscrossing the waters off the coast of Japan haunting the harbor entrances, or staying on the surface with impunity just offshore during daylight. One of our submarines had even entered Tokyo Bay on the surface during daylight to rescue an aviator who had ditched there during a carrier strike.

The Japanese merchant marine—what was left of it—lived in terror of the American submarines. In 1944 approximately half of the ships departing from the empire found their final destination at the bottom. Our executions at night had been the most horrendous of all. Once Admiral Lock
wood had straightened out the torpedo fiasco, the heartbreaking failures and unexplained “misses” had been greatly reduced, and convoy after convoy had been wiped out in the hours between sunset and sunrise. The Japanese were now holing up at night, and running ships across the open sea only during daylight, when they figured our submarines would have to attack submerged, thus sacrificing mobility and giving them a better chance of getting their ships through.

So we worked our way through the training program at Balboa and Pearl Harbor with a vengeance and a will, finishing both of them in the minimum possible time, and then there remained only one thing before we could be on our way—the selection of our patrol area.

To us this meant a lot, for ComSubPac never gave a sign of how well or how poorly trained he considered any particular submarine. If she passed the stiff requirements he had set down, he sent her on patrol; if she did not, he held her up for more training; in extreme cases, he had been known to relieve the skipper and others of her crew. You could tell what Uncle Charlie thought of you only by where he sent you: the hottest ships went to the hottest spots, for obvious reasons. Finally our assignment came: the East China and Yellow seas—just about as hot an area as he could hand out.

Once more the luck of the
Tirante
had proved good. We carefully loaded our “Sharon Special” into number-six torpedo tube. Since we always fired in inverse order, with the first torpedo aimed at the MOT (Middle Of Target), this location would give it the maximum chance of hitting with our first salvo from the bow tubes. And after that particular salvo had been fired, we would all feel much better.

Exchanging the play-acting of training for the reality of bombs, depth charges, warheads, and sinking ships is probably the most massive change which comes to an individual or a ship. At the same time, it is one of those things which cannot be approached by degrees. No matter how realistic the training, there is still the comforting knowledge that all
participants will eventually find their way back to harbor. It is a common phenomenon to discover that the most expert, aggressive, farseeing person during training exercises somehow never quite finds the same opportunities open to him in battle. And an individual who never made much of an impression before might rise to astonishing heights of effectiveness under the stimulus of extreme danger. So is it with ships—especially submarines.

A psychologist could probably explain why it is that the first action on any patrol so often sets the tone for the whole cruise, and why the manner in which a new submarine handles her first contact with the enemy sets the character of the entire ship from then on. George Street and I did not know why, though we used to argue the reasons, but we knew it was so.

On the southern tip of Kyushu lies a huge bay, Kagoshima Kaiwan, protected by several small islands offshore. Our information indicated that many coastal freighters used the harbor. The chart of previous patrols off Kyushu showed few submarine tracks here, no doubt because of the restricted waters, but the water was deep all the way up to the shore line. Not at all bad, if you didn't mind fairly close quarters.

Our object was twofold: to blood the ship as quickly as possible; and to get rid (honorably) of our VIT (Very Important Torpedo). So we resolved to venture into the precarious place, right off the harbor entrance, and patrol between the offshore islands and the mainland. I stayed up all night navigating, and shortly before dawn—on the morning of March 25—dived in the spot the Captain had selected, five miles off the entrance. But this did not satisfy George; during the morning, while I caught up on my sleep, he closed the coast within less than two miles, and shortly after noon a ship was sighted coming out of the bay.