Silent Sea

CHAPTER 13

Captain Mealey stood quietly on the cigaret deck of the Eelfish as Mike Brannon eased his ship out from between the submarine tender and another submarine. Once clear of the submarines alongside the tender Brannon maneuvered through the harbor toward the open sea.

On the main deck Chief Flanagan was securing the topside for sea. He could feel the cold eyes of the grim-faced Captain on the cigaret deck watching his every move. When he had finished he patiently double-checked his work and asked the Bridge for permission to go below. He climbed to the cigaret deck and murmured a polite “Good morning, sir” to the austere Captain in his heavily starched khakis. Captain Mealey nodded, raised the binoculars hanging around his neck, and studied the submarines that were jostling back into position alongside the tender. Flanagan went below to the Crew’s Mess, where Scotty Rudolph put a cup of hot coffee and a freshly made doughnut in front of him.

“Gonna be something different this time, huh?” the ship’s cook asked. Flanagan bit into the doughnut and nodded. He chewed slowly and then washed the doughnut down with a swig of coffee.

“Wolf-pack operation with the Hatchet Fish and the Sea Chub,” he said. “They’re waitin’ for us in Exmouth Gulf. The three of us will operate in a wolf pack, like the Germans do. Only they do it with ten to twenty submarines in one pack. This four-striper who’s ridin’ with us, Captain Mealey, he’s the Flag.”

Rudolph sipped at his coffee. “Don’t envy our Old Man having to operate under his eye. I knew him in Panama, years ago, when he had an R-boat. Tough son of a bitch. Hell of a seaman.”

“Tough fighting man, too,” Flanagan said. “There’s a mustang in the relief crew, name of Botts. I knew him when he was a Chief Torpedoman before the war. He was on the Mako when Mealey took the Mako out and dove under twelve destroyers at Truk and slipped about eight fish into a battlewagon.

“Botts told me that this guy is made of ice water and chilled steel. Went through the most hellish depth charging any submarine ever took, came up once and sank a big Jap destroyer with one fish, and then went down again to seven hundred feet, get that, seven hundred feet, and got away from the other eleven tin cans.”

“Too damned bad they didn’t keep him on the Mako,” Rudolph said. “Maybe if they had done that the Mako wouldn’t have got sunk.”

“Could be,” Flanagan replied. “But he made four stripes while he was on that patrol run, and they don’t keep four-stripers on submarines. Only way he could get back to sea, I guess, is to do something like this, take out a wolf pack of submarines.

“But like you said, I wouldn’t want to be the Old Man with him looking over my shoulder. I don’t know how many times in my life I got the topside of a submarine ready for sea, and when I was doing it a little while ago, with that dude standing on the cigaret deck, I felt like a seaman deuce. I double-checked everything, and then I began to worry that I’d missed something and started to do it all over again. He can sure make you feel funny when he looks at you with those eyes.”

During the 800-mile trip north to Exmouth Gulf along the west coast of Australia Captain Mealey made several trips through the Eelfish, stopping to talk when he saw a face he knew from other submarines, other duty stations prior to the war. In the Wardroom he was a pleasant enough visitor, listening far more than he spoke. He unbent only once, the evening before Eelfish was due to arrive at Exmouth Gulf to top off her fuel tanks.

Sitting at the Wardroom table after dinner, Lieutenant Bob Lee suddenly asked Captain Mealey to tell the officers seated around the table about his strategy in attacking the battleship that was guarded by twelve destroyers and aircraft. Mealey looked at Lee for a long moment and then asked Pete Mahaffey to bring him a plotting board and a fresh cup of coffee.

With the plotting board in front of him he marked in the position of the battleship and the twelve destroyers guarding it and the position he had maneuvered Mako into before the attack began. Then, as he penciled in each stage of the attack, he paused to fire pointed questions at Bob Lee, Perry Arbuckle, and Jerry Gold, asking them to tell him why he had done this, why he had done that. Mike Brannon and John Olsen sat quietly, saying nothing, watching their junior officers squirm under the sharp questions. At the end of an hour’s give and take Captain Mealey sat back, stuffed his pipe with tobacco, and lit it. When it was drawing to his satisfaction he let a small smile show ender his white mustache.

“All three of you seem to have a good grasp of the fundamentals of the attack problem,” Mealey said. “I will credit Captain Brannon and Mr. Olsen for that. The knowledge you have gained will stand you in good stead in your careers. Assuming, of course, that you are Regulars?”

“No, sir,” Lee said. “All three of us are Reserves. I’m a lawyer, that is, I passed my bar exam in California before I enlisted for the duration. Perry is an architect.” Mealey nodded and looked at Jerry Gold.

“And you, sir? I noticed that when we made our first trim dive out of Fremantle that the ship was in almost perfect trim. That is quite a feat, sir, after weeks in port, after dry-docking. What is equally commendable is that I noticed in my walks through the engineering compartments that everything there is spotlessly clean and in excellent condition.”

“I thank you, sir,” Gold said with a grin.

“What are your civilian credits?” Mealey asked.

“I finished dental school and was getting ready to sit for my license when the Navy reached out and grabbed me,” Gold said. “I think being a diving officer is good training for a dentist. I fill and empty variable ballast tanks as a diving officer. When I get out and open an office I’ll be filling cavities and emptying abscesses.” Mealey’s frosty smile came and went.

“I have been in the Navy for eighteen years,” Mealey said. “I never cease to marvel at the way the Navy works. In time of war they seem to act without any thought when it comes to the assignment of personnel, and yet what they do seems to work out for the best. I had an Executive Officer aboard the Mako, a Reservist. The first, I believe, to ever be an Executive Officer. He was an engineer in civilian life, mechanical engineer I believe. He was an absolutely superb Naval officer. And a first-rate navigator as well.” He turned his pale blue eyes on Olsen.

“Your navigation on this patrol will be tested, sir. We are going to run Sibutu Passage between Tawi Tawi and Borneo and then run the Balabac Strait, south of Palawan, and then go north along the west coast of Palawan to our area.”

“Mines!” Olsen said suddenly. “Isn’t Balabac Strait heavily mined, sir?”

“It is,” Mealey said calmly. “But there are several passages through Balabac. The Japanese periodically sweep up their mines in one passage and then mine another. The Ultra decoders in Pearl Harbor have been very successful in keeping up with that information. Over thirty submarines have made a transit through Balabac Strait without incident, following the Ultra information. We will get the latest information on the mined and cleared areas the day before we make the transit.” He turned to Mike Brannon.

“While Mr. Gold is topping off our fuel tanks tomorrow we’ll have a conference aboard this ship with the Captains of the Hatchet Fish and the Sea Chub and their Executive Officers. If Mr. Olsen will oblige me, Captain Brannon, I’d appreciate it if he’d lay down our course to Sibutu Passage. Give me an ETA, Mr. Olsen, bearing in mind that we will be cruising at our most economical speed while on the surface at night. It’s a very long way to Luzon Strait, and longer coming home, if you run out of fuel oil. You’ll find two extra sets of charts in your chart locker, Mr. Olsen. When you have laid out our course I would appreciate it if you would mark the other two charts similarly for the benefit of the other members of the wolf pack.” He rose.

“If I may, Captain Brannon, I’ll go topside. I want to have a few words with young Michaels about radar and sonar. He has the OOD watch, I believe?”

“Yes, sir,” Brannon said. The younger officers around the table filed out of the Wardroom as Mealey left. Olsen came back from the Control Room with his charts and spread them out on the table.

“I was wondering,” Olsen said as he spread a chart out flat, “I was wondering why we didn’t do this in Fremantle? Sit down, all of us, and figure out the navigation, the courses and speeds, and all the rest of it?”

“I wondered, too,” Brannon said. He looked at the chart in front of Olsen. “Going through Balabac and then north, that’s quite a bit shorter than the easy way, across the Celebes Sea and out into the Pacific and then north, isn’t it?”

“Looks to be quite a bit shorter,” Olsen said. “But that’s a damned dangerous area to navigate in, where we’re going. Maybe that’s why he waited until now before he told us which way we’d be going. Maybe back in Fremantle the other skippers would have raised some heat about going this way. Out here they can’t do anything except bitch a little.”

“He’s a strange man,” Brannon said slowly. “He makes me feel like I’m a snot-nosed Ensign again. When I was backing out of the nest alongside the tanker I kept expecting him to walk forward and take the Conn away from me.”

“That’s why you didn’t let me take the ship out, huh?” Olsen said with a grin. “Afraid that if I made even one small mistake old Mealey would come down on me like a ton of bricks.”

“I wasn’t afraid of him gigging you,” Brannon answered. “I was afraid he’d come down on me for not training you well enough. I just figured if he was going to gig anyone it might as well be me for something I did.” He chewed his lower lip.

“I wonder how this damned operation is going to work out. Chet Marble in Hatchet Fish and Jim Shelton in the Sea Chub are both damned senior Commanders. They’re about ready for four stripes themselves, and neither of them has the reputation of being easy to get along with.”

“Neither one of them has ever sunk a ship,” Olsen said, his eyes flicking to the door opening of the Wardroom to make sure no one overheard him. “I talked to their Executive Officers in Fremantle before they got under way, and both of them told me they’d put in for transfers.”

“That’s odd,” Brannon said. “With both their skippers ready to be promoted they’d fleet up to command. Why would they put in for a transfer?”

“The polite way to put it, Skipper, is that Captain Marble and Captain Shelton are not quote aggressive unquote submarine Captains. Both the Executive Officers are aggressive. The result is that neither Executive Officer has been recommended for command by their Captain. And that makes living aboard both ships very rough for the two Execs.” His right eye blinked almost imperceptibly and he bent over the chart as Captain Mealey passed by the Wardroom door opening on his way to the Forward Torpedo Room.

The crews of the Hatchet Fish and the Sea Chub greeted the Eelfish with shouts of derision as John Olsen eased his ship delicately into place alongside a fuel barge. Two days of waiting for the Eelfish to arrive, waiting in the hot, arid waste of Exmouth Gulf with only a small supply of warm beer available in a tin hut on the beach, had not been pleasant for the crews of the other two submarines.

The meeting in the Eelfish Wardroom began pleasantly enough. There was the usual heavy-handed badinage from the two senior Captains about Eelfish getting lost on the way north. Pete Mahaffey served a platter of sweet rolls and two carafes of coffee and withdrew. As a Lieutenant Commander, and a junior one at that, Mike Brannon elected to stay silent unless spoken to, to let Captain Mealey do all the talking.

The joviality in the Wardroom faded abruptly when Captain Mealey handed a set of charts to the Captains of the Hatchet Fish and the Sea Chub. Captain Marble of the Hatchet Fish traced the course line to the top of Makassar Strait, where it ended with a small arrow pointing at the Sibutu Passage.

“Not going east across the Celebes and out to the Pacific?” he asked. “Look.” His finger traced a course to the Pacific across the Celebes Sea.

“We could follow this course and have good deep water all the way, sir. No danger of mines, damned little need to even dive during the daylight hours, once we’d cleared the Makassar Strait.” Mealey listened quietly, his right forefinger rising to touch his mustache.

“I could give you the standard Navy answer, Captain Marble,” he said. “I could simply say we are going to follow the course I have laid down because I said we are going to follow that course, and that would be the end of it.

“But since we are going to be working as a team in an operation the people at Pearl Harbor see as a very significant operation, I will explain my reasons.

“The course you indicate is several hundred miles longer than the one I have laid down. That means that we will use more fuel. We may need every drop of fuel we have in our tanks before we get home to Fremantle.

“Now, as to how we will proceed. Eelfish will lead the way. Sea Chub will follow at three thousand yards’ distance. As the senior of the two, Hatchet Fish will follow astern of the Sea Chub at three thousand yards’ distance. Orders to dive and time of surfacing will be issued by me daily. They will be followed to the letter.

“Should we see anything in Makassar Strait that can be attacked I will issue instructions via voice radio, the same as I would do once we are in our assigned patrol area. Once we reach our area of patrol you will be assigned to positions and patrol courses with the area in conformity with information we receive from Ultra in Pearl.”

“I’ve heard reports, Captain Mealey,” Captain Marble said, “reports that there are elements of the Japanese battle fleet in the anchorage at Tawi Tawi. Your course takes us right past that anchorage, to the south. The water is very shallow there for a submarine if we run into some Jap destroyers.”

Mealey’s eyes seemed to protrude slightly, their cold blue gaze fastening on Captain Marble.

“You seem to be very concerned about deep water, sir,” he said in a low voice. “Correct me if I am wrong, but if I recall correctly you have on several occasions decided not to attack enemy shipping because the enemy ships were in water you decided was too shallow for an attack.”

“I think of my ship, sir.” Captain Marble’s voice was harsh. “I think it is madness to attack a target guarded by escort vessels in water that is too shallow to go to deep submergence to evade. Admiral Christie has not seen fit to question my judgment, sir. I see no need to defend my judgment now.”

“There is no need, Captain,” Mealey said softly. He filled his pipe and lit it. “But if we do see elements of the Japanese battle fleet, sir, why then we shall attack. As long as they have sufficient water under their keels to keep them afloat then there is enough water for me to attack!

“We will communicate by voice radio once we leave this port,” he continued in a calm voice. “Radio silence will be preserved unless you sight a target. Radar will not be used unless I so order.

“Our code name for this operation will be Mealey’s Maulers. We will begin using that designator as soon as we leave. Hatchet Fish, as the senior Captain, will be Mauler One. Sea Chub will be Mauler Two.” His cold stare froze the slight smile that started to form around Captain Shelton’s mouth.

“We are a very small wolf pack, only three of us. What we will do, how we will attack, are decisions I will make when we have targets. If possible I intend to attack on the surface at night.” He looked at Captain Marble.

“I recall your rather strenuous objections to that tactic when I mentioned it in Fremantle, sir. I trust you have changed your mind?”

“In all truth, sir, I have not,” Marble said. His heavy face was flushed, his mouth set in stubborn lines.

“We’ve lost too many submarines in this war, far too many. It is my judgment we lose submarines because we take unnecessary chances, reckless chances. Mako, as Captain Brannon here knows very well, the Mako was lost because it attacked a convoy on the surface at night. If I remember Captain Brannon’s patrol report, Mako was raked by heavy gunfire, went down, and was lost. And I point out, sir, with all due respect, that Captain Brannon’s brilliant attack on the two Japanese destroyers that killed Mako was conducted while Eelfish was submerged. At night.”

Captain Shelton saw the gathering storm in Captain Mealey’s face and cleared his throat.

“We will, of course, sir, follow your orders as you give them. To the very best of our ability. Where you lead, sir, we will follow. Never doubt that.”

Captain Mealey looked at the officers around the Wardroom table.

“Let me say this, gentlemen. When Captain John Paul Jones was put in charge of a small battle fleet in our Revolutionary War, he said, if I can recall, quote: I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.

“I cannot ask for ships that sail fast because we must conserve our fuel, but, by God, we will go in harm’s way!”

Sitting in the Wardroom after the other Captains and their Executive Officers had left, Captain Mealey turned to Mike Brannon

“We have our work cut out for us, sir. I am going to break one of my own rules. I am going to take you into my confidence. If I had been able to overcome the politics we would have other ships, other Captains with us for this first wolf-pack operation. But I could not.”

“Politics?” Brannon said.

“Politics,” Mealey answered. He drew a small circle on the green-baize table covering with the stem of his pipe.

“Both the Commanding Officers of the other submarines are very close to being promoted to four stripes. Neither has a good war-patrol record. Both have very powerful friends in Washington. That’s the background.

“When word got out some weeks ago that we were going to mount a wolf pack, both of them were told about it by their friends. The pressures from Washington to put one of those two in charge of the wolf pack were very strong. I cannot tell you how strong.” He turned his bleak face to Brannon.

“That’s why I am here, why my flag is in Eelfish. This wolf-pack operation must be successful. My boss in Pearl Harbor, Captain Rudd, and I share the opinion that if either Marble or Shelton led the wolf-pack operation it would not be successful.

“I may be pretty dumb,” Brannon said slowly. “But I don’t make the connection at all.”

“I’ll try to explain,” Mealey said. “If either one of them led the wolf pack and if they ran true to form, which is to say that the wolf pack operation would fail, the black eye for that failure would be painted on Captain Bob Rudd. This is his idea. He’s fought for it for months and months. He’s made a lot of very powerful people in Washington very unhappy.

“Captain Rudd became controversial when he began backing submarine captains in their complaints about the Mark Six exploder. He did a lot of research on that exploder.

“One of the things he found out was that the Mark Six exploder was developed by the United States in the mid-nineteen twenties. The British and the Germans developed an almost identical version shortly afterward. The British and the Germans began using their magnetic exploders as soon as their sea war started. They found them to be extremely unreliable, just as our submarine Captains found. They stopped using them and went back to contact exploders.

“We knew this. Bob Rudd also found out that our Mark Six exploder had never once been fired from a submarine at a target. Never once tested! Not from a submarine.”

“I didn’t know that,” Brannon said.

“Few people do,” Mealey said. “What’s more, you won’t find a single piece of literature on that exploder which tells you how to maintain it, test it, or use it. That literature was drawn up, but the Gun Club Admirals who developed the exploder decided that the literature was too secret to be disseminated, so they locked the original copy up in a safe.

“It took Captain Rudd a solid year of work and, I have to say this, of politics to break that logjam and modify the exploder so that it will work on contact. That was one major political battle that was won. Now Captain Rudd is in the middle of another political battle, the wolf-pack.

“He’s won the first round. We will try a wolf-pack operation. Just one. If it’s successful Captain Rudd will be riding high. If it fails he’ll probably lose his job, will probably be relieved and sent to a desk somewhere where he’ll rot away. That would be one hell of a loss, in my own opinion. He’s made a lot of very powerful Admirals angry with his work in exposing that Mark Six exploder. He rammed it right down some very sensitive throats, and if this wolf-pack fails they’ll nail his hide to the door.”

“You’ll just have to forgive me, sir,” Brannon said. “I don’t get the connection between Captain Rudd’s unpopularity with some Admirals and the assignment of Captains Marble and Shelton to this wolf pack.”

Mealey bared his teeth in what was more of a grimace than a smile.

“Captain Rudd checkmated the effort to put Marble or Shelton in charge, knowing they would fail. He managed to get me assigned to run the first wolf-pack operation. The opposition countered, sir, countered very well. They’ve given me two weak sisters, Mister! All I’ve got, all Captain Rudd and I can depend on, is the Eelfish and the two of us. Let’s pray to God that the Eelfish, you and I, will be enough. Because I mean to be successful! Each night before I go to sleep I pray, Captain Brannon, I pray that if I do not measure up to what is expected of me that the Lord will take me before I get back to port and have to face people I respect, have to face myself for the rest of my life!”

Brannon sat quietly, his hands slowly turning a pencil around and around on the table top. He was stunned by the intensity of the older man. I’d better start praying myself, he thought, praying that you do everything you expect you should do, because if you don’t and your prayer is answered that you die, then Eelfish dies with you.

The three submarines, following the courses advised by the Ultra code breakers, eased through the Sibutu Passage and timed their arrival at Balabac Strait so that that dangerous area could be run through during the night. They twisted and turned their way through the maze of small islands and turned north to begin the run up the west side of Palawan Island, through the justly feared Palawan Passage.

The water along the 300-mile length on the west side of Palawan Island is called “foul ground” by sailors. It is shallow and treacherous. Barely twenty miles to the west of Palawan’s foul ground there is a vast area that is marked on the charts with the name “Dangerous Ground.” Ships going north and south to the west of Palawan used a narrow alley of deep water between the foul ground and the Dangerous Ground. But even that narrow alley of water is not safe. Dangerous reefs bearing the names of sailing ships that foundered on them many years ago thrust skeletal fingers out into the deep-water alley.

Mike Brannon, who had permitted himself no more than cat naps during the time the Eelfish was making its twisting run through Balabac Strait and up the Palawan Passage, relaxed when John Olsen brought cups of hot coffee to the cigaret deck where Mealey and Brannon kept the night watch and announced that the Eelfish had cleared the Passage.

“So far, so good, sir,” Brannon said to Mealey. “From here on it’s a clear run to our patrol area.” He turned as he heard the rasp of the bridge speaker.

“Bridge,” the voice over the speaker said. “Notify the Captain that we have an Ultra message coming in.”

“Bridge, aye,” Lieutenant Lee said. He turned as Mike Brannon slid between the periscope shears and the cigaret deck railing and came into the tiny bridge space.

“I have it,” Brannon said. He turned and spoke to Captain Mealey. “Would you like to decode with me, sir? We’re going to dive in an hour or so. The baker should have some fresh pastry about now.” Mealey came forward into the bridge, and the two men went below.

Brannon read the decoded message and shoved it across to Captain Mealey, his eyes glistening. Mealey read the message and smiled, his right forefinger creeping up to touch his white mustache.

“Alert Hatchet Fish and Sea Chub to form up on us after surfacing this evening,” he said. Brannon nodded and went to the radio shack. He came back and sat down at the table and reread the message.

“My God!” Brannon said. “Troop transports, two oil tankers, freighters, a heavy cruiser, destroyers, and a small aircraft carrier! That’s a regular task force, Captain! What in the hell is the Jap doing sending that kind of a force out of Manila to Mindanao?”

“How much of a briefing did they give you about the Navy-Army move northward from New Guinea?” Mealey asked.

“Not very much at all. They told me the Army was going to move north, but that’s about all. They seldom tell us much.”

“General MacArthur is going to make good his promise to return to the Philippines and free them,” Captain Mealey said. “With the Navy’s help, of course. He’ll make good his promise to return before the end of this year, probably late in October. The first major step toward an invasion of the Philippines was taken last week. If I can recall my briefings in Pearl Harbor, the plan was to invade a small group of islands to the north and east of New Guinea called the Admiralty Islands.

“That group of islands will make an ideal cornerstone for air control all the way to Saigon and Truk and to the Philippines. From what I know of the Japanese defense in the Admiralty Islands, we’ll have a tough job with the invasion, but they’re committing the men to do the job.

“Once that invasion operation is over we’ll have an excellent airfield and several good deep-water harbors. What’s more important is that this move and the ones to follow will leave about one hundred thousand Japanese troops massed in Rabaul rotting on the vine. They’ll be bypassed. After we secure the Admiralty Islands, the next move, if you look at a chart, is a series of steps north and west to Morotai, Peleliu, Yap, Ulithi — and then the Philippines.”

“Where will MacArthur hit the Philippines, sir?”

“I don’t know,” Mealey said. “I would think he might land at Mindanao Island. Apparently the Japanese think it will be Mindanao. The Ultra message says that Mindanao is the destination of this task force.” The frosty smile came and went under the white mustache.

“When they get out of Manila Harbor they’ll find that we stand between them and their destination, and by God, we’ll draw blood!”