Silent Sea

CHAPTER 19

The two weeks of R & R passed swiftly for the Eelfish sailors. Paul Blake left the hotel on the second day, took his seabag to the house where Constance Maybury lived, and spent his leave time with her family. Bob Lee disappeared on the third day from the house where he was quartered with Jerry Gold and Perry Arbuckle. He was seen several times in the company of a tall, lissome brunette who towered over him by several inches. Jerry Gold, curious to know what was going on, sought out Chief Flanagan.

“The word I get,” Flanagan said, “is that Mr. Lee is going with a lady he met two rest periods ago. She’s a widow, husband was killed while serving with the Ninth Division, that’s the famous Aussie fighting division. I heard that her husband was a captain in the Aussie Army. From everything I hear Mr. Lee is pretty serious about her.”

“Know anything about what sort of a lady she is?” Gold asked.

“Solid, from what I’ve been told,” Flanagan said. “She works in some bank in town. No children. You got to be careful with those quiet ones like Mr. Lee is.” He grinned at Lieutenant Gold. “Chief Yeoman on the tender told me that Mr. Lee has put in for a permit to marry the lady. Chief on the tender says he’s made out all the papers and has been talking with the Squadron legal officer.”

“Mr. Lee is a lawyer,” Gold said.

“I know,” the Chief answered. “He’s not the only one. Paul Blake is going through the same routine. Mr. Lee helped him file his papers.”

“Does the skipper know about this?”

“I doubt it,” Flanagan said. “Might be a good idea if he did.”

“He wouldn’t try to stop either man, you know,” Gold said. “The Old Man’s got a real good marriage, and he thinks everyone should be married.”

“I could tell him different,” Flanagan growled. Jerry Gold shrugged.

“Look, Chief,” he said, “I know that the Australian people are about the nicest people in the world, but what’s the big attraction, why do Mr. Lee and Paul Blake want to get married?”

“Mr. Gold, it ain’t only Mr. Lee and Paul Blake. From what I hear half of the single dudes on the tender and in the relief crews, they’re lining up to get marriage forms. Lots of the people on other submarines want to get married.

“You see, if you’ve done duty in Pearl Harbor you’d know that you haven’t got a chance to meet a broad there. There’s about a thousand men for every woman in Pearl. And if you do score and make a date with some broad the odds are that in a half-hour your stomach will be turned because she’s so damned spoiled that you can’t stand it. Hell, some of the worst-lookin’ broads you ever saw act like beauty queens in Pearl, and they get away with it because a woman, any kind of woman, is in damned short supply there.

“In Australia it’s the other way around. How many men you seen on the streets lately who are young, say between twenty and forty, how many civilians you seen who have all their arms and legs?”

“Come to think about it, I can’t say many,” Gold said. “I’ve even seen some Australian soldiers in uniform with an eye patch.”

“That’s right,” Flanagan said. “The Chief Storekeeper who runs the CPO Club in Perth told me the British use the Aussies as shock troops, throw them in with rifles and bayonets against General Rommel and his tanks in Africa, do the same thing up in the Islands. Australia has lost most of its young men in this war.

“So the country is full of women, good-lookin’ women who got to figure they don’t have much chance of ever gettin’ married to an Aussie near their own age. And they look around and there’s all our guys. Young guys. Healthy guys with all their arms and legs. If you’ve been out with any Aussie girls you got to know that they treat you like some kind of a king. Nothing’s too good for you, that right?”

“I’ve noticed that,” Gold said, “but I thought it was just my irresistible charm. Go on, Chief.”

“Not much more to say. I was told Mr. Lee walked into a bank downtown to try and get the name of a reliable guy to appraise some opals he wanted to buy for his mother. Opals are mined here, and they’re cheap if you don’t get cheated.

“The manager of the bank is a tall, good lookin’ woman. That’s the lady he wants to marry. Her husband was killed about a year ago. I heard he was an Aussie Army officer. Anyway, she’s a four-oh lady. She’s maybe four, five inches taller than Mr. Lee, but if she can manage a bank then she’s got to have a lot of smarts. And if she is around Mr. Lee for an hour or two she’s got to know that he’s got all the smarts there is. Besides, he’s a hell of a nice dude. He ain’t your big sturdy type, but he’s wiry and he’s got all his arms and legs and eyes. So I guess the lady liked what she saw and sure as hell Mr. Lee likes what he saw and that’s it.”

“You disapprove, Chief?”

“Hell, no, Mr. Gold. Mr. Lee’s a grown man. He’s got a good head on him. No disrespect, sir, but a guy who ain’t as tall as some has got to feel pretty chesty with someone as good lookin’ as his girl hanging on his arm. Make a lot of tall dudes a little jealous, I’d think.” He rubbed his chin with his hand.

“Way I figure it, Mr. Gold, it doesn’t make one whole lot of difference where you find a wife or what she looks like or even what color she is as long as you hit it off and she treats you right and you can read the signs that she’ll keep on treating you right.”

“How about young Paul Blake?” Gold said.

“Ah! That’s young love, sir,” Flanagan said with a grin. “He met her when she came to the hotel with some Red Cross people, and she took him home to meet her family. She’s a hell of a nice young girl and her folks are good people, very solid. If they think they love each other, the hell with it, it’s their business, not mine. All’s I hope for is that the damned red tape and all the paperwork they got to do takes a long time. If either of them gets married and wants off the ship to work in the relief crew they’d get an okay on their request because they’ve made enough war patrols to rate tender duty.

“Truth is, sir, I’m selfish. Mr. Lee is a hell of a good Torpedo Officer and Blake is the best damned sonarman I ever saw. I don’t want to lose either one of them.”

“I’m obliged to you, Chief,” Gold said. “I hope you don’t think I was being nosy?”

“No, sir,” Flanagan said. He grinned. “I figured the Old Man would send someone around to find out the score. Figured it would be you. So I nosed around and found out what I had to find out.” His grin broadened into a smile.

“That lady you were with a couple of nights ago, the blonde? I hear she’s got some good contacts in the black market, that she’s got twelve cases of Nescafé in her house. Chief I know in the CPO Club told me that. Don’t know if it’s true, though.”

“Ten cases,” Jerry Gold said. “See you around, Chief.”

The day before Eelfish was to leave on its fourth war patrol a working party brought a large, tightly rolled burden to the submarine’s foredeck. Flanagan looked at it and then at the Petty Officer in charge of the working party.

“What the hell is that, rubber boat?”

“Six-man boat, Chief. Sign these papers here to show you got the boat and this gear that goes with it, two sets of paddles, CO-two bottles to inflate it, two of those, and a compass with a battery-powered light.”

“You sure this is for us?” Flanagan asked.

“Look right there, says ‘U.S.S. Eelfish.’ We rolled the son of a bitch tight enough to go down your torpedo-room hatch.” Flanagan nodded and signed the papers, and told two seamen to take the boat below to the Forward Torpedo Room.

Eelfish cleared the port early the next morning and settled down for the long run to its patrol area. Captain Brannon went to the Wardroom after the sea watch had been set, sat down with John Olsen, and opened the patrol orders.

“We’re in General MacArthur’s submarine navy,” Brannon said dryly. “Before we go on patrol we have to carry out a special mission. That’s why they sent aboard that six-man rubber boat that Flanagan has been grousing about.” He reached for the telephone hanging on the bulkhead and punched the button that would enable him to talk to everyone below decks over the 1-MC loudspeaker system.

“Now hear this,” he said. “This is Captain Brannon. We have our patrol orders. A good area just at the end of Davao Gulf, south of Mindanao Island. But before we go there we have to carry out a special mission for General MacArthur. That shouldn’t take more than a day or two.” He hung up the phone and looked at the chart that Olsen had laid on the table.

“Borneo,” Brannon said. “Northeastern tip, that’s it, right there. Hell of a name, Bum-Bum.” He looked again at the patrol orders.

“There’s a big mountain near there?” Olsen nodded at Brannon. “Okay, that’s where these ship watchers have been hiding for the past two years. This paragraph here says that for the past six or seven months the reports from the ship watchers on Japanese shipping have been erroneous and that the assumption is they’re suffering from fatigue and tension.

“So we pick them up and Sea Chub will drop off four more ship watchers. Shouldn’t be too tough a thing to do.”

“All four of those dudes might be out of their minds by now, might not be such good passengers to have aboard for a whole patrol run,” Olsen said. “Hiding in those mountains and watching ships go by and reporting the ship movements and hoping the Jap doesn’t zero in on you with radio direction finders, that must be a scary business to be in.”

“We’ll have to send in at least three people,” Mike Brannon said. “One man can’t handle a six-man rubber boat, or can he?” He nodded at Pete Mahaffey and sent him in search of the Chief of the Boat.

Flanagan listened as Brannon outlined the mission. “One man can’t handle one of those things, Captain. Takes at least three men. One to steer, two to paddle. Six-man boat will carry ten people, you know. They’re heavy.”

“Any suggestions as to who would want to volunteer?” Olsen asked.

“I’ll take the thing in,” Flanagan said. “If I could have Booth and Charlie Two Blankets, they’re good men, it should be easy.”

“Would they volunteer?” Brannon asked. Flanagan nodded his head. “They’ll volunteer. No sweat, sir.”

Eelfish arrived off the point that was identified on the charts as Bum-Bum and patrolled up and down the ten-fathom curve, barely ten miles from the headland for two days and nights, watching.

“We’ll go in tonight,” Brannon said to the officers gathered in the Wardroom, as Eelfish cruised at 110 feet a dozen miles from the land. “We told them it would either be last night or tonight when we arrived on station. We leave the hundred-fathom curve about eight miles before we get in to the land area, and the chart shows deep water all the way in to near the beach. We can launch the boat a thousand yards from the beach. They told us to make the pickup at a sandy beach on the headland.” He looked at his wrist watch.

“It’s fourteen hundred. We’ll surface at nineteen hundred hours, full dark, make a radar search and move in if we’re sure we’re alone. We should be able to launch by twenty hundred and have the boat back in an hour or two.”

Booth and Charlie Two Blankets paddled the six-man boat toward the dark bulk of the shore while Flanagan steered the clumsy craft with a paddle.

“I can see that sandy beach,” the Apache said. He shifted the three rifles that lay against the seat between himself and Booth and stood up in the boat.

“Damned moon is sure bright. Yeah, that’s the beach. Looks like there’s a big tree or something laying in the water near the beach, Chief.”

“I can see it,” Flanagan said. “Probably a big palm tree. There was a big storm here a week or so ago according to Mr. Michaels.” He steered the boat toward the tree lying in the water. Booth scrambled to the forward part of the boat and grabbed the tree roots. The boat swung in behind the massive bole of the tree.

“Take a turn with the bow line around some of those roots,” Flanagan ordered. He reached over the side of the boat and probed for the bottom with his paddle.

“Water’s only about two feet deep,” he said. “I think this is as far as I want to go with the boat. Which one of you two dudes wants to go in and make the contact?”

“I’ll go,” John Wilkes Booth said. He dropped over the side of the boat and began to wade toward the beach. Flanagan and the Apache watched the yeoman as he waded up out of the water, shaking first one leg and then the other. A man left the tree line behind the beach, followed by three other men. The man in the lead suddenly turned on a flashlight. “Turn off the fucking light!” Booth’s order carried across the water to the rubber boat.

“Too right, mate,” the figure said. The light was turned off and Flanagan and Charlie Two Blankets saw the man holding the flashlight spring forward and swing the flashlight at Booth’s head.

The rifle shot caught Flanagan by surprise, hammering in his ears. He saw the second man coming down the beach from the tree line fold at the waist and fall. Charlie Two Blankets, his rifle resting on the top of the tree trunk, squeezed off another shot and the third man coming down the beach spun around and went down, his legs kicking. The fourth man turned and ran for the tree line.

“Turn that son of a bitch!” the Apache yelled at the two men struggling together in the sand. “Turn that son of a bitch, Booth, so I can see who’s who!” He was kneeling on the seat of the rubber boat, his rifle across the tree bole.

“Don’t shoot, for Christ’s sake!” Flanagan yelled. He grabbed one of the rifles in the boat, jumped over the side, and started to splash around the end of the tree roots. He heard the Apache say “Ahhh!” and heard his rifle crack. One of the two figures struggling on the beach dropped, and the other one turned and sprinted for the water. He floundered through the shallow water, and Flanagan saw the flashes of rifle fire in the dark tree line. Gouts of water began to rise on either side of Booth as he labored toward the safety of the tree. Flanagan raised his rifle and got off five shots into the tree line as fast as he could work the rifle bolt. The Apache was firing steadily from the boat.

“Zigzag, you dumb bastard!” Charlie Two Blankets yelled, and Booth began veering from one side to the other. He dove forward and began to swim frantically.

“Smart,” the Apache said. “The Chief Yeoman has got the smarts. They won’t hit him now.” He ripped two shots into the tree line, reached for a canvas bandoleer in the bottom of the boat, and jammed another clip in his rifle. Flanagan, crouching low in the water, moved out from the shelter of the massive ball of tree roots, grabbed Booth, and dragged him behind the tree and into the boat. A machine gun in the tree line began to chatter, its bullets ripping into the trunk of the tree.

“That fucker’s gonna need all the machine guns on the island to make chips outa this big tree,” the Apache said. He climbed out of the boat and eased up behind the tangled mass of roots, his eyes studying the tree line. Very cautiously he edged the rifle between the roots and sighted. He fired once, then again, and climbed back into the boat.

“They need a new gunner,” he said. He looked at Booth. “What kind of a dance was you doin’ with that dude on the beach?”

“Fucker was a Jap. Hit me so fucking hard on the shoulder I thought he’d broke it. Bastard was trying to bear hug me to death. Woulda done it, too, if you hadn’t shot his ass off, old Indian.”

“We’re all gonna get our ass shot off if we try to leave this damned tree to go back to the ship. Listen to the fire those cocksuckers are layin’ down. Must be a hellish lot of them up in those trees.” He pawed over the bandoleers in the bottom of the boat. “We got maybe a hundred, hundred and twenty rounds between us. Not enough if they decide to come after us.” He dove into the bottom of the boat as an express train screamed by close overhead. The express train exploded with a burst of fire and a roar against the tree line. Another express train left a banshee wail behind it as it roared by only a few feet above the heads of the men in the boat. A huge gout of sand burst upward with an orange burst of fire at the edge of the tree line. The boom of the two 5.25-inch deck guns of the Eelfish echoed across the water, followed by the stammering roar of the 1.1 pom-pom and the steady stutter of the twin 20 mm guns.

“Old Man’s laying down covering fire. Contact fuses so they burst as soon as they hit something up there in the trees,” Flanagan yelled. “Let him get off a few more rounds and then we’ll haul ass outa here.” Booth crawled forward in the boat, untied the bow line, and held on to the tree roots, keeping the boat snugged in next to the palm tree, ducking as two more shells screamed by overhead.

“Keep your heads down,” Flanagan ordered. “Shove off, Booth, let’s get the hell out of here.” Booth and Charlie Two Blankets, crouching on their knees in the rubber boat, paddled steadily away from the safety of the downed palm tree and toward the open sea as the fire from the Eelfish roared overhead toward the tree line on the beach.

Steve Petreshock was down on the pressure hull with a safety line around his waist as the rubber boat bumped alongside. He grabbed Booth and then the Apache and helped them up on the deck, and then took the three rifles and bandoleers from Flanagan.

“Scuttle the boat, Chief,” Mike Brannon called from the bridge. Flanagan pulled out his sheath knife and punctured the rubberized fabric in a half-dozen places, then scrambled onto the pressure hull where Petreshock grabbed him.

“Belay firing, secure the deck party, secure all guns,” Brannon barked. “Right ten degrees rudder. Make turns for full speed. Deck party below. Lookouts keep a sharp watch. Control, give me a radar sweep.” He stood to one side as the deck gunners scrambled down the hatch.

“Radar reports no contacts, Bridge,” the speaker on the bridge echoed.

“Very well,” Brannon said. He turned to Lieutenant Gold. “Take the deck, Jerry. Maintain this speed for fifteen minutes and then make turns for two thirds. Keep the lookouts sharp. Radar sweep every five minutes for the next fifteen minutes.”

John Olsen had led the boat party into the Wardroom by the time Mike Brannon got below. Pete Mahaffey was serving coffee.

“Begin at the beginning, when you left the ship,” Brannon said. Flanagan nodded and recounted the operation from the time the six-man rubber boat pushed away from the side of the Eelfish until he had ordered it tied up to the roots of a downed palm tree in the water. He turned to Booth.

“I volunteered to go ashore and lead the ship watchers out to the boat,” Booth said. “The guy who came down the beach, there were four of them, the right number, the guy in the lead had a flashlight lit and I told him to shut it off. He tried to hit me in the head with it. Damned near broke my shoulder. I grabbed him and he got me in a bear hug. I heard a rifle firing but I didn’t know what was happening, that guy was squeezing me so tight and he was, kind of, grunting and slobbering on me. Then all of a sudden he made a funny sound and he just dropped. I ran like hell for the water and the boat.

“I heard Charlie yelling at me to zigzag and I tried to do that and then I dove in and sort of grabbed at the bottom and pulled myself along. Chief Flanagan came out from the tree, into the open, and got me and hauled me back into the boat.”

“Charlie figured out what was going on before I did,” Flanagan took up the story. “He opened fire as soon as the guy grabbed Chief Booth. I saw the second guy coming down the beach go down and then the third guy went down and the other guy, the fourth one, he ran back into the trees.

“Charlie was yelling at Chief Booth to turn the guy he was fighting with around so he could get a shot in and I yelled at him not to shoot and got out of the boat to go help Booth, and then all of a- sudden Charlie loosed off one round and the guy Booth was fighting with dropped.”

Mike Brannon looked at the Apache Indian. “That’s sort of miraculous shooting, Charlie. To hit the right man at night when the two of them were struggling together.”

“The Jap had on white shorts and a white shirt, sir,” the Apache said. “Chief Booth had on dungarees. Moon was awful bright. Range was only thirty, thirty-five yards. When Booth swung the guy around so they were sideways to me I got a good sight on that white shirt and popped him with one under his left armpit. Man don’t live with a thirty-ought-six slug hitting him there, sir.”

“You’re sure he was a Japanese?” Brannon looked at Booth.

“Yes, sir. Big fellow. Bigger than I am and I’m six feet and two hundred, sir. When he spoke to me, when I told him to put out the flashlight he had an Aussie accent. But he was a Jap, no doubt. A strong son of a bitch, too.”

“When Booth was back in the boat they opened up with a machine gun, sir,” Flanagan said. “If you hadn’t come in with the deck; guns I don’t think we could have made it back.”

“Lieutenant Gold heard the rifle fire,” Mike Brannon said. “We were cruising in a circle from where we dropped you off.”

“Captain was going to flood down forward and run the ship up on the beach and lead a boarding party to come and get you,” Olsen said with a grin. Brannon shook his head. “I was afraid we were going to lose all three of you. Chief Booth, would you write up this operation? Do it in the first person with Chief Flanagan as the narrator. He’ll sign it. Go to direct quotes from you and Charlie where needed.” He looked at the three men.

“I’m just damned glad we got you back and I’m damned sorry that we had to do the operation. We’re a submarine, not the Marine Corps.”

Sipping at a coffee cup after the three men had left, John Olsen looked at his Captain.

“I wonder what happened to the Australians who were supposed to be manning that ship-watching station?”

“They’re probably long dead,” Brannon said. “Hey, maybe that’s why their reports were so wrong. The Japs had probably killed the ship watchers and were sending phony reports to Fremantle about ship movements. Sea Chub is coming in here in about a week with a new crew of ship watchers and some new radio gear. Get Michaels and make a coded message direct to Admiral Christie. Tell him what happened and tell him to keep Sea Chub away from here.”

The throat of the Gulf of Davao from its easternmost point at Cape San Agustin to the main part of the Island of Mindanao, at a small fishing village called Lais, is 30 miles wide. The port of Davao lies 65 miles to the north, up the Gulf on the east side of Mindanao. Early in the war the Japanese had occupied Davao and used it as a major naval base and a staging area for their conquest of Celebes and Borneo. Now, in mid-1944, Davao was once again a major naval stronghold for the Japanese. The elements of the Japanese fleet that had been driven out of strongholds in the Pacific islands by the relentless stepping-stone tactics of the American Naval and Army forces had concentrated in Davao, at Tawi Tawi just north of Borneo, at Surabaya and at Singapore.

Mike Brannon had been prepared for a nonproductive patrol area. Captain Mealey had made an appearance in the Officers’ Club the evening before he was flown back to Pearl Harbor, and when asked about his patrol Captain Mealey had praised Mike Brannon and Eelfish and let it be known, in caustic words, what he thought of senior submarine commanders who lacked aggressiveness. After Mealey had been flown out of Fremantle Mike Brannon had noticed a chill in the air when he went to the O-Club to eat.

“I’m proud to have served with Captain Mealey,” he said to John Olsen as the rest period neared an end. “But I wish that he hadn’t been as tough on some of those senior skippers out here. They’ll take out their dislike of Mealey on us, you’ll see. We’ll get a patrol area where there won’t be any ships.”

Eelfish was assigned to patrol the eastern third of the opening to the Gulf of Davao. Two weeks after the Eelfish reached station John Olsen came on the bridge one morning to get star sights before the Eelfish submerged for the day.

“Sea Chub reported seeing two enemy cruisers and a destroyer. They’re giving chase but they’re too far away, I think, to catch up,” Olsen said.

“Where?” Brannon said.

“Over on the west side of the Gulf,” Olsen replied.

“Son of a bitch,” Brannon said. “The ships that come out of this damned Gulf aren’t going to turn east, where we are. They’re going west, to Tawi Tawi or to Borneo. Nothing comes this way. We’ve been here a little over two weeks and we haven’t seen one damned ship. The Irish have no luck, John, no luck at all.”

“Neither do we Swedes, sir,” Olsen said.

Four days later, patrolling at the western limit of his area, Mike Brannon relieved Bob Lee at the periscope for the usual hourly periscope sweep and saw the smoke of a small freighter to the west. He watched as the smoke came closer and when the small freighter crossed his bow he fired two torpedoes at a range of 800 yards. The small inter-island freighter — Brannon estimated it to be no more than 2,000 tons — rolled over and sank. Three days later Perry Arbuckle saw an inter-island freighter with a heavy deck load and Brannon attacked. He fired one torpedo and the freighter broke in two and sank. Two days later Eelfish was ordered home with twenty-one torpedoes aboard.

Admiral Christie’s booming assurances that the Eelfish had indeed had a successful patrol did little to mollify Brannon’s barely concealed anger over the unproductive patrol area he had been assigned. The crew of the Eelfish, not unaware of the political infighting that went on constantly among the senior submarine captains to get productive patrol areas, got ready to go to the hotel for their two weeks of R & R.

Paul Blake approached Lieutenant Bob Lee on the afterdeck before the bus arrived to take the crew to the hotel.

“Do you think all the paper work is done yet, sir?”

“I don’t know,” Lee answered. “I did all I could before we left on patrol. Now it’s up to the people on the Base and the tender. They have to make an investigation of the family and the woman, you know. The chaplain has to talk to the ladies we want to marry. I believe that Captain Brannon has to interview them also. Then, after all that’s been done and everything is four-oh, the whole business goes to the Admiral for his approval.”

“That’s an awful lot of stuff to go through for someone to marry a nice girl,” Blake said. “It isn’t that Constance is a bar girl or anything like that. Her folks are just as nice as my folks.”

“I know,” Lee said. “You know what General Sherman said: ‘War is hell.’ I’ll check with the legal officer on the tender tomorrow. We went to the same law school but he was about three years ahead of me. I’ll be in touch with you as soon as I find out anything. You going to spend your rest period at her folks’ house?” Blake nodded. “I’ll get in touch with you there. Don’t sweat it. Everything will come out all right.”