Silent Sea

CHAPTER 5

In a basement room located behind a supply office in a building on the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, a man in a worn smoking jacket and scuffed bedroom slippers shuffled across the floor to a desk piled high with charts and papers.

“How’s it going?” he asked the man behind the desk. The man looked up at him, rubbed his eyes, and yawned, lines of utter weariness etched in his face.

“It doesn’t go,” he said.

“You’ll get it,” the man in the smoking jacket said. He shuffled over to a table standing against one wall of the room, and rummaged in a cardboard box and found a sandwich. He unwrapped the food and ate it, staring reflectively at the men who were working at desks in the crowded room.

The men he commanded were an odd group. Some were officers who the Navy had decided were good enough to be kept on but not good enough, for various and obscure professional reasons, to be promoted to higher rank.

Others were enlisted men, among them the ship’s band of the U.S.S. California. When that battleship had been holed by Japanese aerial torpedoes and had settled to the bottom in the harbor on December 7, 1941, the ship’s band had, fortunately, escaped injury. But their instruments went down with the ship. Literally unemployable, in the eyes of the Navy, the ship’s band members had been assigned to the basement room to work in what was called the “Combat Intelligence Unit,” a cover name for a top-secret communications group of intelligence experts who were desperately trying to crack the complicated Japanese military codes.

The members of the California’s band had shrugged and gone to work, guided and instructed by the half-dozen professional code breakers in the basement room. The musicians proved to be adept at cryptanalysis, and some experts were led to believe that there was a subtle connection between the mysteries of cryptology and music.

The immensity of the task of breaking the Japanese military code was almost beyond human comprehension. The five-digit code was not extraordinarily difficult in itself, it was the refinements the Japanese had introduced that drove cryptanalysts almost to tears.

Once a message had been encoded in five-digit code groups, that numerical code was then further enciphered. To do this the Japanese had prepared a list of 100,000 five-digit number groups. The Japanese encoder took the encoded message to that list of 100,000 five-digit code groups and picked a place at random on the list. Starting at that place the five-digit numbers in the encoded message were subtracted, group by group, from the numbers on the master list.

To decode the message the recipient had to know where in the 100,000 group list the encoder had started his subtraction and then perform the reverse mathematics. Without knowledge of the actual list of five-digit number groups in the 100,000-group list a cryptanalyst was faced with a task that might take years to solve — if it could be solved at all.

However, the use of such a massive list of master code groups raised the possibility of garbles and mistakes. The Japanese recognized this and decided to use only number groups from the master code list that were divisible by three. This reduced mistakes, but it soon gave the American cryptanalysts in the small basement room a surprise tool — which they used to good effect.

A further complication for the cryptanalysts arose immediately. Japanese is written, mainly, in Chinese characters called kanji, but Japanese can also be written in a phonetic form called kana. One form of kana used Roman letters, but another form had its own code to represent the more than fifty symbols of the phonetic system.

The cadre of men in the secret basement room had started their work prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were hampered in that work by a distaste for all forms of intelligence operations that was shared by most ranking U.S. military leaders.

That attitude had a precedent: In 1929 the then-Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, had refused to fund the State Department’s code-breaking intelligence operation with the remark, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.”

The work that had been done by the State Department’s “Black Chamber” was divided between the Army and the Navy. By 1941 the two military services, in a rare display of cooperation, had joined their code-breaking resources and had become efficient enough to be able to intercept and decode Japanese diplomatic messages and deliver them to the State Department and the White House before the Japanese diplomats in Washington received those same decoded messages. Too often the remarkable successes in breaking Japanese diplomatic codes were ignored, too often such messages were delayed in reaching people who had authority to initiate action. Morale among the code breakers went down.

Most of the men in the basement room in the Pearl Harbor Naval Base worked a minimum 84-hour week. Some, notably the handful of professional cryptanalysts who formed the backbone of the Combat Intelligence Unit, worked even longer hours. The boundaries of rank and rate were ignored once the men were in the room. The weary man in the red smoking jacket and bedroom slippers commanded the group not only by virtue of his commission as a full Commander of the United States Navy but also because of his intelligence, his knowledge of the Japanese language, and his vast knowledge of Japanese ship movements. Everyone in the group shared one consuming interest: to crack the Japanese military codes, to get one part of the codes broken so that they could go on to reading more and more of the codes. They literally lived in the basement room, eating sandwiches and soup brought in from the Navy galley on the base. More often than not they slept on cots in the basement room, unwilling to leave the room, unable to physically leave the nagging probabilities of this group of numbers or that group.

As time went on some success in reading portions of the Japanese military code was achieved. But with this success came a danger: If information about Japanese ship movements gleaned from the code breaking were to be widely disseminated it was certain the Japanese would realize their codes had been broken and would change them. That possibility brought a paralysis of fear to the code breakers.

They moved cautiously to prevent the Japanese from learning that their codes had been broken. Information of vital interest to the planners of the Pacific war was given out guardedly, in many cases, “sanitized” so its origin could never be revealed. The burden of these decisions weighed heavily on the cryptanalysts. In the end it was the endless work of this group, their utter devotion to their jobs, that was the linchpin on which the success of the Pacific war turned.

In Fremantle Mike Brannon sat in a wicker chair facing Admiral Christie and his staff. The chair creaked under his solid weight as he shifted position. The Admiral looked up from a folder on the table in front of him.

“Mike,” he said slowly, “it’s time we took you and the other submarine Captains into confidence, the deepest, the most secret confidence we can emphasize.

“From time to time we have been getting reports from our intelligence people in Pearl Harbor about Japanese ship movements. These reports have turned out to be amazingly accurate. These intelligence reports are called Ultra Codes, and they are so damned secret that not very many people have even seen them.

“You and other submarine Captains will be getting Ultra intelligence when you’re on war patrol. But we’ve got to be awfully careful that we don’t give away what our people in Pearl have accomplished. So Washington intelligence people have suggested a system, a code within a code.

“For example: You might get a message telling you to leave one end of your patrol area and go to the other end and cruise on such and such a course on such and such a day. That part of the message will contain a separate code within a code, and when you decipher it — you’ll be given the code books before you go to sea — you’ll learn that you will proceed to a different part of the area on a different day and patrol on a different course. The information about what targets you can expect will be in yet another code, which we’re sure the Japs haven’t begun to crack. But if they crack the standard code we use to direct submarines and learn that you’re supposed to go to, let’s say, the east end of your patrol area — when you’re really going to the west end as per the code within a code — then if you sink the targets the Ultra people sent you the Japs will think that their ships got nailed by some submarine that just happened to be passing through that area.

“In short, we can’t take a chance of letting the Jap know we can read his codes. We have to assume that the Jap can read some of our codes, but we’re awfully damned sure he can’t read out top-secret codes. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Brannon said. “It’s an operation of, well, misdirection as far as the Japanese are concerned, sir.”

“Exactly,” the Admiral said. “And that leads me to point number two. In order for this thing to work your navigator has to know where your ship is every hour of the day and night. I’m not saying this applies to you, Mike, but there’s too much slack, too much sloppiness out there on war patrol. Sun sights aren’t taken by periscope every day at noon. Star sights are taken every three or four nights, not every night. That sort of thing has to stop. You have to know where you are every moment, we have to know. If a valuable target is coming we have to know which submarine is in the best position to intercept. When Captain Mealey was sent to intercept the battleship en route to Truk — that was an Ultra operation by the way — we knew exactly where the Mako was because Captain Mealey runs a damned taut ship.” The Admiral stood up.

“I don’t want to keep you from your R and R, Mike. My aides will be in touch with you when you go back to your ship. Our intelligence people will brief you fully on the new codes we’ll be using.”

Brannon left the Bend of the Road compound in the car the Admiral’s aide had provided for him. He grinned to himself as he settled back in the car seat. If the code breakers in Pearl could send him targets he’d be happy. Maybe with this new system there would be less aimless cruising in the hope that an enemy ship would come by.

The bus loaded with Eelfish volunteers for a day’s hunting and barbecue pulled up at a rambling group of buildings in the flat desert country that Australians call the Outback, ninety miles east of Perth. A burly Australian rancher held a gate open, and the bus rolled through and stopped. Chief Flanagan got out of the bus and walked up to the rancher, who was closing the gate.

“I’m Chief Flanagan of the Eelfish, sir,” he said.

“Jim Biggs, here,” the Aussie said. He stuck out a work-hardened hand. “Welcome to you and your people.”

“I’ll line up my people,” Flanagan said. “Then you can talk to all of them at once, Mr. Biggs.” He turned and growled out orders and the twenty men who had volunteered for the day’s outing shuffled into two ragged lines.

“This is our host, Mr. Biggs,” Flanagan said. He turned to the Aussie. “All yours, sir.”

“Too right,” the Australian said. “Well now, chaps. Not to stand on ceremony or things like that. But a few words of warning.

“This is what we call the Outback. Mainly desert. Very little water, very damned little. Most places there’s no water at all. Nearest water from here is about eighteen miles. So you don’t leave the ranch without two water bottles hanging from the saddle.

“You’ll hunt in parties of five men, two parties out at one time. Each party will be under one of my trackers.” He turned and indicated two small, very black men who were standing to one side.

“Joe and Pete are abos,” Biggs said. “Abo is our way of saying aborigine for short. Some people call them Stone Age men, and I guess the tribes that live far out in the Outback are Stone Age people.

“Joe and Pete are men of great dignity. Great ability. They can see farther with their naked eye than you can with a pair of bloody binoculars. They can smell water two feet under the sand where you can see nothing but dry sand. They can live all their lives on raw lizards, ants and bugs, and grubs that would turn your bloody stomachs. And mine.

“The point I make, chaps, is that these are good men. Far better men than I am in their own way. If either of them is mistreated or made fun of you’ll have to answer to me and, I’d guess, your cobber here, the Chief. Now, one other thing, you’ll be on horseback. Any of you ever rode before?”

Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Wharton stepped out of the line. “Some of us have ridden before, Mr. Biggs. But we have a real Apache Indian with us and he said he’d show us how it’s done.” Wharton smiled.

“An American Indian?” Biggs said. “Never seen one of those gentlemen. Will you step out, sir, and introduce yourself?

“Charlie Two Blankets,” the Apache said, stepping out of the line. “I think some of our tribal trackers could go up against your people. Any time.”

“In your country, yes,” Biggs said. “Out here, no. It’s different, y’see, like our cricket and your baseball.”

“Charlie Two Blankets is the greatest bronco-busting rider in the Navy, Mr. Biggs,” Chief Wharton said. He was smiling at the Australian. “If you’ve got any horses that need breaking ol’ Charlie is the man to break them for you. At least that’s what he tells us.”

The Australian looked at him, the sun lines around his eyes crinkling as he smiled.

“Well, yes, chaps. I do have a horse that none of my Abo people can handle. Bucks like a mad thing if you get near the beast. Maybe Mr. Two Blankets would have a go at breaking him.” He turned to Flanagan. “If you’d allow it, sir?”

“It’s up to Charlie, I guess,” Flanagan said.

“Go on, Indian,” Wharton jeered. “Let’s see you do your stuff on the man’s wild horse.” Charlie Two Blankets shrugged.

“Show me the animal,” he said.

Biggs led the way toward a large corral. Walking beside Flanagan he dropped his voice to just above a whisper.

“Served my time in our Army, First World War,” he said. “I know what that handsome chap’s up to, egging on the Indian man. Hope the Indian can ride. Do you know?”

Flanagan shook his head.

The horse in the corral looked wild. It threw its head back and snorted loudly, its eyes rolling, as the group of men neared the corral. Charlie Two Blankets eyed the animal for a moment and then stooped down and undid the laces of his shoes and kicked them off. He took off his socks and placed a sock carefully in each shoe. Then he stripped off his dungaree shirt and trousers and walked up to the corral bars in his shorts. He vaulted over the top rail, dropped down in the dust of the corral, and walked toward the horse.

“Be careful, cobber!” the Australian called out. “That beast is dangerous!”

The Apache trotted toward the horse, making a sound deep in his throat. The horse laid back its ears and charged across the corral at the man. The Apache feinted to his left, and as the horse veered the Indian pivoted and took two running steps, and his hands shot out and grabbed the horse’s mane. In one smooth, sinuous movement, aided by the horse’s quick burst of speed, the Apache was on the horse’s back. He raised his voice in a high, wailing cry, and the horse bucked violently, rearing high on its hind legs, shaking itself from side to side to dislodge the man on its back. The horse neighed in a high scream, and the Apache answered with his own scream. The horse bucked, gyrating wildly, coming down with all four hooves hitting the ground, twisting and bucking across the corral in high jumps. The Apache clung to the horse’s back, his hands clenched in the mane, his powerful legs locked against the horse’s barrel.

“God, he’s a burr, that one!” Biggs said. The horse went upward, twisting. When the horse came down the Apache reached forward with his right hand, bending low over the horse’s neck, and grabbed the horse’s right ear. He pulled the head back savagely, and then with his bare heel he kicked the horse again and again in the side of its head. Then he leaned forward and bit the horse’s ear. The horse screamed, ran a few steps forward, and then stood, its sides heaving. The Indian sat very still on the animal, and then he leaned forward and began crooning in a low hum into the horse’s ear. He rapped the sides of the horse with his bare heels, and the animal trotted a few steps and then stopped. The Apache leaned forward over the horse’s neck and crooned again, softly. He tapped the sides of the horse gently with his feet and the animal raised its head and then trotted docilely around the perimeter of the corral. Charlie Two Blankets slid off the animal’s back and walked around to its head and stroked the long smooth muzzle, crooning gently as he did so.

The Apache led the horse over to the side of the corral, his right hand entwined in the mane.

“Here’s your horse, Mr. Biggs,” the Indian said. “He knows a man can hurt him and he knows a man can be gentle with him. Treat him kindly and you’ve got a good animal. Now I got to get dressed before this sun gives me a bad burn.” He vaulted over the top rail of the corral and pulled his shirt over his bronzed shoulders. Flanagan walked over to him as he finished dressing.

“I’m damned glad you didn’t get yourself killed, Charlie. I’m damned glad you hadn’t bullshitted people about the way you can ride.”

“Indians don’t speak with forked tongue, Chief. Only white man has a forked tongue. Didn’t you ever see any cowboy and Indian movies when you were a kid? Now I want to see some of these wiseass submarine sailors ride.”

The Australian walked over to Charlie. “I’ve been talking with my two chaps, sir. They want to know what kind of a tribe you come from. Can’t very well tell them about America, the Outback is all the world they know. They think they may be related to you by tribe, and I’ll thank you not to laugh, sir. To be related to an Abo is the highest honor they can think of. They’d like to touch you so their medicine and yours can mix.”

“I understand,” Charlie Two Blankets said. He faced the two aborigines and drew himself to his full six feet of height. He bowed his head slightly toward the two smaller men and stretched his arms out, his palms facing the sky. His voice rolled out in a sonorous chant, the liquid vowels and clipped consonants of the Apache language hanging in the still Australian air. The two aborigines stood quietly, watching him. When he had finished they stepped forward, their arms outstretched, palms upward. Gravely, they turned their hands and touched the Apache’s hands, palm to palm. The older of the two aborigines turned his head and spoke briefly in his own tongue to Biggs.

“He says he doesn’t understand your language, breaker of horses, but he would like to know what you said. He is sure you made a prayer to the Rain God. That’s the most powerful god these people have because water is so scarce.”

“I made a prayer to the gods,” the Apache said. “I asked my gods to protect them and give them many children.”

Biggs turned and spoke to the two aborigines, his deep voice chopping at the guttural speech. The two men smiled.

“Right thing to say, cobber,” Biggs said. “Children and water are the only resources these poor devils have when they’re on their own. Tonight they will pray to their gods and ask that their strength enter you while you sleep.”

On the bus that evening Chief Wharton walked down the aisle and perched on the arm of the seat where Charlie Two Blankets was sitting.

“I take back everything I ever said when I kidded you on the ship. You are just one hell of a horse rider. And some kind of rifle shot, too. You must have hit that one kangaroo at about two hundred yards and that damned thing was running and jumping.”

“I don’t like to kill a pretty animal like that,” the Indian said. “You should never kill animals unless you can eat them and that Australian fella said the only part of a kangaroo you can eat is the tail. He said they were pests, that they eat his crops. I don’t think I’d want to eat that thing’s tail.”

“Might be better than roast sheep,” Wharton said. “I’ll be tasting that mutton for a week.”

The next morning Flanagan went looking for Paul Blake. He found him in the hotel dining room eating his breakfast.

“Mind if I sit down?” Flanagan asked.

“No, I mean, yes, sit down, Chief.”

“What have you been doing with yourself?” Flanagan asked. “I thought you’d sign up to go out on that thing we went on yesterday. Hell of a good time. You hear about the Indian?”

“Yes, sir,” Blake said. “Everyone who didn’t go has heard about that. Must have been something to see. The reason I didn’t go …” He blushed suddenly, and Flanagan felt awkward.

“Reason I didn’t go, Chief, I met a girl. I mean, it’s not, I’m not living at her house or anything like that. She took me home to meet her parents, she lives with them. They’re real nice folks, just like my own folks. Her father is in charge of the Port Customs or something like that.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“Day before yesterday some Red Cross people came to the hotel to see if they could do anything for us, for the crew, like sew on buttons or even write letters home. Most of the fellows were out somewhere. I was the only one here. I was sitting in the lobby and I was trying to write a letter to Ginny, that was my girl back home until she decided I was too far away.” Flanagan saw the younger man’s eyes blink a little bit.

“Well, anyway, I had tried and tried to write a letter to Ginny and I couldn’t say what I wanted to say and there were some crumpled up pages on the deck around my feet and she asked me if I’d like her to write the letter. So I gave her the letter from Ginny.”

“The Dear John letter?” Flanagan asked softly. Blake nodded.

“And she wrote Ginny a real nice letter. She just seemed to know what to say. So I asked her if I could buy her lunch and she said yes and then we went to the zoo and walked around and she took me home to meet her father and her mother. Real nice people, Chief. Her father walked me back to the streetcar, they call them trams here, and invited me to go back there for supper tonight. You could go with me if you want.”

“Thanks, but no,” Flanagan said. “You go ahead, but don’t foul things up by making a run on the girl or something like that.”

Blake’s face flushed. “I wouldn’t do anything like that! She’s a nice girl. Her mother and father treated me like I was their son. They’re going to take my picture today and send it to my folks.”

Flanagan stood up. “Okay, son. Take things easy.” He walked away, glad that the boy’s disappointment over the Dear John letter had evaporated quickly. He saw Lieutenant Lee coming across the hotel lobby, motioning at him. He stopped and waited until the officer came up to him.

“You mind if I ask you to come out to the ship, Chief?” Lee said. “They’ve got some sort of a problem with some torpedoes. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I’ve got to go out there, and I’d like you to come along if you don’t mind. It shouldn’t take long.”

“I don’t mind,” Flanagan said. Lee led the way outside to a jeep, where a sailor sat behind the wheel.

The Eelfish was now moored inboard, next to the bulk of the submarine tender. Flanagan walked down the steep gangway and saw that some relief crew sailors were closing the torpedo-loading hatch to the After Torpedo Room. Up forward Steve Petreshock was supervising a relief-crew gang as a torpedo was being lowered to rest in the loading skid.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Flanagan said to Petreshock. “You’re supposed to be in the hotel and what in the hell is going on, taking fish aboard? We’re not supposed to get new fish until after we get back from the hotel.” He turned to Lee.

“We’re not going to have our usual week to ten days in port after the R and R,” Lee said. “They want us back at sea as quickly as we can get there. So they load the fish today.”

“And you?” Flanagan said to Petreshock.

“Well, we got the word yesterday morning that they were going to load fish, so me and Nelson decided to come down today and make sure they did it right,” Petreshock said. “Nelson’s in the After Room, and he’s got some kind of problem. Don’t know what it is. I been busy up here.”

Flanagan nodded and went to the Crew’s Mess hatch and went down the ladder, followed by Bob Lee. Fred Nelson was in the After Room with a crew of torpedomen from the submarine tender.

“What’s the problem, Fred?” Flanagan asked.

“These people are giving us destroyer fish, Mark Fifteens, for the tubes back here,” Nelson said. “Mark Fourteens for the reloads.”

“What difference does that make?” Lee asked.

“Mark Fifteen fish are longer than our regular Mark Fourteen torpedoes,” Flanagan said. “I’ve heard you could use Fifteens in the After Room because the tubes back here are a lot longer than those up front so’s the fish will clear the screws and the stern planes. But I never heard of any boat firing Fifteens.”

“It’s a real fuck-up!” Fred Nelson said. He stared at the tender torpedomen balefully, glaring at them from his six feet four of brawn, his eyes hot.

“Way it is with these damned fish,” Nelson said. “Way it is is that the fish are just that much too long so when the fish is lined up with the tube you can’t open the inner door because the warhead sticks out too far.

“That makes it that when you want to load a fish you got to open the inner door first and then jockey the damned fish back and forth until you get it lined up. That ain’t too bad sittin’ in port. But when we have to pull these bastards to routine them at sea it means we do the routining with the inner door open and the Old Man wants them inner doors closed when a fish is outa the tube.

“And that ain’t the only thing. They had to put a modified guide stud on these here Fifteens because the regular guide stud don’t line up with the stop bolt in the tube. Means that when you load you got to bleed down the impulse air and dry-fire the tube and hold down the firing key. Then you got to ease the fish in the tube inch by inch until you can feel the stop bolt touch the guide stud and then you ease it in a little bit more until you can feel the stop bolt drop down into the slot on the guide stud.”

Flanagan stood quietly, his mind sifting through the problem. He looked at Nelson.

“That would mean that when you want to pull the fish to routine it you have to bleed down the impulse air and dry-fire the tube and hold the firing key down while you pull out the fish. Hell, you can’t do that unless you bypass all the safety interlocks!”

“You got the picture,” Nelson said sourly. “With them safety interlocks disconnected any clown goes between the tubes and touches a firing key and we’ve got a fish fired in the tube with the outer door closed.”

“There’s another thing.” One of the relief crew torpedo-men spoke up. “When you pull a fish for routining you got to be awful sure you dry-fire the tube and hold that firing key down because if you try to pull the fish without doing that the modified guide stud will bend up and the only way you’ll get that fish out of the tube is to go topside, open the After Trim tank manhole, go down in the tank and take off the stop bolt housing, and then remove the guide stud. That ain’t anything I’d want to do out in a patrol area.”

“How come you give us these fish?” Flanagan asked.

“We’re short of torpedoes,” the relief crew man said. “We’re putting four fish, Mark Fifteens, in the after tubes of every submarine until further orders.”

“Big pain in the ass,” Nelson said.

Riding back to the hotel in the jeep Lieutenant Lee turned to Flanagan.

“What do you think, Chief?”

“I guess it will work out,” Flanagan said slowly. “I don’t like the idea, but if they’re short of fish they’re short of fish. Nothing we can do about it. Thing that bothers me is that we’ve got to change routines back there in the After Room. With the safety interlocks on the tubes disconnected, having to dry-fire the tube to pull a fish for routining, you have a chance of a casualty. We’re going to have to work out some new routines, do a lot of drilling back there.” He sat back on the uncomfortable seat.

“What’s important, sir, is that we’ve got some damned good people in charge of those two torpedo rooms. Nelson and Petreshock gave up one of their rest days to come back to the ship to supervise loading the torpedoes. That’s a hell of a thing to do, you know.”

“I know,” Lee said.