War Beneath the Waves (4 page)

Men who serve on ships have no vote on whom their superiors will be, any more than soldiers can choose their commanders or platoon leaders or airmen can pick their pilots or squadron leaders. Charlie Rush’s new skipper was a graduate of Harvard, class of 1919, with no wartime experience at all. He was a steam engineer who spent more time idly working theoretical math problems or designing vents and piping for nonexistent ships than he did practicing antisubmarine warfare or running aircraft drills to prepare his crew and existing ship for battle.

The skipper seemed blithely unconcerned about such things. Tactics and training were of no interest to him.

That was not the only problem. Rush quickly noticed that the man had no leadership skills at all. The rest of the crew was well aware of it when Rush got there. He heard the rumblings, suppressed as they were. Yet they could do nothing about it either.

Even more discouraging, each time the ship returned to port after a patrol, their incompetent skipper routinely received commendations and glowing support from his bosses. Judging from the patrol endorsements from his superiors, the steam engineer was easily one of the war’s best destroyer captains. Whether it was ignorance or the captain’s political savvy, no one who counted seemed aware of the captain’s inadequacy.

Everyone on board the destroyer knew the truth. They knew it was they and their executive officer who made the guy look good to those back at headquarters. And there was no easy way to make aware anyone who counted or who could make a change.

That would not be the only time that Charlie Rush encountered an officer who was so unsuited for his command, a skipper placed in a position for which he was not prepared based on political connections, or, as was often the case, because nobody better was available for the job.

The next time, though, he found a way to do something about it.

There was one bright light on his initial duty station. The executive officer on the destroyer seemed to be a competent officer. He was equally frustrated with their unfortunate draw of captains. However, when Charlie subtly approached him with his concerns about his new CO, the XO only shrugged and brushed him off.

“I know. I know,” the XO told Rush, once he was sure no one else could hear their exchange. “Somebody up the chain of command sees ‘Harvard’ on an officer’s résumé, that guy gets the bridge even if he can’t even spell ‘skipper.’ We have a good crew here, but the old man won’t allow me any authority. We get in a scrape, I’ll do what I have to do to protect
Enterprise
and try to save our bacon while I’m at it.”

“Do what you have to do? How far would you go, XO?” Rush really wanted to know if the exec would actually tell the commanding officer to stand down—or take even more drastic action.

The officer only shrugged again, quickly glancing around them again to ensure that nobody might overhear.

“Far as I have to go to do what has to be done.”

Charlie thought about that conversation often during his long hours on duty. Would he back the XO if it came to it? That could mean an end to his naval career before it had even started. It could spell jail time or worse. But it could also be a matter of life and death, too.

It was also true that the fitness of his CO to command a ship was not all that bothered Charlie Rush about serving on the destroyer. On his first and only patrol aboard the “tin can,” they were at sea for one hundred days. One hundred days and nights riding the wake, steaming through the bow spray of the aircraft carrier they were assigned to protect. Skittering across the wave tops like the spindly “snake doctors” who danced on the still water on the cattle ponds back in south Alabama.

They were constantly on the lookout, listening, watching the radar, using binoculars to search the sky and sea, scanning for aircraft that might be sneaking up on them from inside a tropical squall or coming out of the sun. Trying to catch a glimpse of a submarine’s slender sliver of a periscope, a hint of smoke on the horizon that might be an approaching enemy gunboat. It was frustrating, nerve-jangling duty.

Though not quite seasick, Rush still stayed queasy most of the time he was on duty, his eyes stinging and his head aching from constantly scanning the horizon as the ship rocked unceasingly beneath his feet.

As torpedo officer, and as ordered by his CO, he was, quite simply, always on duty. At sea for one hundred days, he never once sat down for a meal. He ate standing up, usually at his duty station. One hundred nights and he never got more than three or four hours of sleep at a time before somebody was rousting him from his bunk, sending him back on watch.

He suspected there was a better way to handle duty such as his, but he knew better than to approach his commanding officer with any suggestions. Others, including the XO, had tried. Their input was not welcomed.

Rush did not mind hard work or discomfort. He was a farm boy, accustomed to long, difficult labor. But he knew he might not be his best in a tight situation if he was tired and hungry, sick and half-blind. Neither would the others with whom he served.

Charlie Rush had never quit at anything in his life, but when his convoy got back to Pearl Harbor, he immediately approached the duty officer and requested a change of scenery. Impulsively, and with only a little information to go on, he asked for submarines.

There would be complications, he knew. First, there was doubt he could even find an officer’s spot on one of the boats. Surprisingly to some, it was desirable duty. It could be quite a while before a slot came open.

There was a certain scorn for the submarine service, too, among other Navy personnel. They called submarines “eel boats,” “plunging boats,” “devil divers,” “pig boats,” and worse. Submariners chalked it up to jealousy, but the attitude led to many fights at shore-leave hangouts.

No matter. He had already made up his mind. There were a number of compelling factors for why submarines became the course he wanted to set for the balance of his Navy career.

First was the simple fact that an officer lives and works side by side with his crew. With a typical complement of sixty or seventy crew members aboard the submarines of that era, and with all of them operating in such close quarters, an officer quickly learned the names of every man aboard. The names, the hometowns, the names of girlfriends, wives, and kids.

If he took the time, the officer also learned each crew member’s strengths and weaknesses, whom he could count on and who might not be able to handle his job when things got rough. That aspect of submarine service greatly appealed to Rush.

He figured there was a chance for quicker advancement on the diesel boats, too. He was ambitious, sought greater responsibility, and there was plenty of demand for good submarine skippers in the “Silent Service.” If the Navy was looking for other destroyer commanders like the one he was running away from, then Rush wanted no part of the surface Navy!

The pay was better, too. Ever since President Theodore Roosevelt took a ride in an early submarine, crews on the boats received higher wages than others in the Navy did. They drew the equivalent of hazardous-duty or combat pay all the time, not just when they were at war.

Even the food was superior on submarines. Everyone in the Navy knew that submariners enjoyed better chow—at least at the beginning of their patrols, before stores began to run low and a fresh orange was a luxury.

Rush assumed that meals were served sitting down, too, the way his mother insisted it be done back home.

Eating great meals while sitting at a table! What a way to fight a war!

There was admittedly a bit of glamour involved, too. Adventure.

The submariners tended to be a different breed, and their skippers were akin to fighter pilots, the Navy’s equivalent of “aces.” Some had already acquired reputations as “cowboys.” To be sure, some operated too riskily for their own good. Others led with swagger and flamboyance, but they got the job done while, in the process, bringing their boats and crews home safely, even triumphantly, flying miniature Japanese flags they called “brag rags” and other banners.

Some of the submarine “aces” even tended to carry colorful names befitting their reputations. Names that rang like those of the chiseled-jaw heroes in action-adventure novels—“Red” Ramage, “Moke” Millican, Creed Burlingame, Dick O’Kane, Walt Griffith, “Mush” Morton, Slade Cutter.

There is a tendency to think of submarines as a relatively recent innovation, but that is not the case. Alexander the Great commissioned the building of a submersible vessel as a possible weapon of war. He took a dive in one over three hundred years before Christ, but it was little more than a diving bell, not designed to be propelled beneath the waves.

The first record of a diving boat with a propulsion system and guidance capability was an English effort in 1580. One hundred and fifty years later, more than a dozen submarines had already been patented in Great Britain.

Fast-forward to the Revolutionary War. For the first time, a submersible vessel was used in warfare. It was the
Turtle
, a one-man diving boat propelled by a hand-operated crank that spun a screw propeller. She slipped beneath the HMS
Eagle
and attempted to attach a cache of gunpowder to the British ship’s bottom.
Eagle
had a tough copper sheathing protecting her keel and the submarine’s pilot was unable to attach the explosives. The ability to get beneath an enemy warship without being detected had been proven, though, and it was only a matter of time before such an operation would be perfected.

Robert Fulton, whose name is more closely associated with the steamboat, built a workable submarine in the late 1700s, a decade before he developed the steam-powered surface ship for which he is better known. Fulton’s submersible looked more like what we expect a submarine to look like, but no one seemed interested, especially in peacetime, in pursuing further development.

As is usually the case, war leads to technological advancement. By the time of the American Civil War, a number of experimental submarines were being tested. Crude by comparison to later ships, they often sank and claimed the lives of the men who were aboard them. The
Hunley
was a Confederate boat cobbled together using an old steam boiler and manned with a crew of eight men. This boat, too, relied on manpower to propel her. She submerged and entered Charleston Harbor in South Carolina in February 1864. Her mission was to ram a spar with explosives strapped to it into the side of a U.S. Navy warship, the
Housatonic
.
Hunley
and her crew were able to do that, and then, using foot paddles that drove the screw, they retreated to what they hoped was a safe distance and detonated the powerful charge.
Housatonic
sank on the spot.

Though exactly what happened next is still unknown, the Confederate submersible went down before she could return to her port farther up the coast. Her crew was lost, creating another submarine milestone that evening—though a dubious one—when
Hunley
’s crew became the first submarine sailors to die in battle.

Clearly, if submarines were to be serious warships, they needed a better propulsion system than men paddling or hand cranking the screws. Steam turned out to be the answer, and remains a part of what makes submarines go to this day. Only the way of heating the water to make that steam has changed.

In the late 1800s, though, the major obstacles to overcome were how to safely heat water to make the steam, what to do with smoke and heat that boilers produced, and how to store enough fuel—coal being the primary one—to stoke the fire to make the steam.

Still, even though the need for such a ship was accepted, the problems and compromises led to a lack of enthusiasm for the submarine among the world’s navies. Then along came the improved electric motor. The first electric-powered submarine debuted in Great Britain in 1886, sporting two fifty-horsepower motors. The electricity to run it came from a one-hundred-cell storage battery, one that could be repeatedly recharged using the coal-fired steam engine to run a generator.

That was a major development, but there were still problems. The battery charge had to happen with the boat on the surface. And even with the breakthrough of a reliable, rechargeable battery, it still required frequent boosting, limiting both range of operation and the length of time a submarine could remain below the surface, hiding from a counterattack.

J. P. Holland, an American inventor, is generally credited with working through these types of limitations. After convincing the U.S. Navy to buy a submarine from him, he delivered his boat in 1900. The
Plunger
used the familiar dual methods of propulsion—steam while on the surface and storage batteries anytime she was submerged—but Holland’s technology was far better than anything anyone had seen before. He developed other submarine innovations that are still in use, in some form or another, today, such as buoyancy tanks that could be flooded or evacuated to dive or surface. Holland also introduced the diving planes. These “wings” helped determine the angle of attack as a submarine varied its depth. This made it easier and safer for the boats to alter how deep they were while submerged or dive and surface smoothly, quickly, and somewhat reliably.

By the beginning of World War I, other innovations made the submarine a formidable naval asset. Sir Howard Grubb invented a practical periscope, giving submarine crews eyes on the surface while their ship remained mostly hidden. That was a major step toward being a stealthier and more dangerous adversary for surface vessels. The torpedo underwent more development and became a significant nautical weapon.

There were breakthroughs in what made a submarine go, too. Gasoline and diesel engines, their development driven mostly by automobile manufacturers and the railroads, became more reliable. Still, though, the boats had to do most of their traveling on the surface and were forced to keep short-time batteries charged in case they needed to remain below the surface for any period of time.