U.S.S. Seawolf: Submarine Raider of the Pacific

CHAPTER X Tons of Jap Shipping

WE LEFT port soon afterward at 6 p.m. It felt good to shed that shoreside feeling. I’d had enough of land, streets, and people. My throat felt perfect. I wanted to get back into action. We all wanted action. And on this mission we were prepared to prove anything we claimed, too. Lieutenant Mercer had been experimenting taking photographs through the periscope with a 35-mm. camera and fixed it so that he could clip it to the eyepiece and in the conning tower snap a shot of anything we hit.

The first day out we found a notice posted on the bulletin board:

Well, that was clear enough.

We spent three or four days going up the Australian west coast. We made training dives, fired a few practice rounds of service ammunition, checked our gear, and readied the ship for action. Finally we reached our advance base and fueled to capacity. Then we headed north, entered our old picnic grounds, and headed right up for our first stopping point.

Our first days were uneventful, but the crew was on constant alert. These were some of the most dangerous waters in the Pacific. The sea bottom was treacherous, a crazy quilt of boulders, shoals, and menacing coral reefs. Some of it had never been charted. The fear of striking a reef was on my mind day and night. Maley and I stood an intense sound watch, each of us doing with less than six hours’ sleep out of the twenty-four.

On the third day, as we were patrolling, Lieutenant Syverson, conning officer at the time, picked up a target. The call went down for Captain Warder, and the Skipper took over.

The intercom chattered: “She has a two-stick mast… high bridge… single-stacker… Range, about 8,000. Looks like a converted passenger liner… She’s certainly traveling… Probably headed for Balikpapan.”

This made her a doubly valuable target. We knew from information given us that the Dutch had virtually destroyed Balikpapan, on the southwest coast of Borneo, fabulous for the rich-ness and quantity of its oil. But we knew, too, that the Japs were trying desperately to put the wells back into condition. It was up to us to stop this Jap from getting to Borneo.

I picked up the target. Her course was normal. The order came to fire. We fired.

Seconds ticked by… a minute now. No explosion yet.

“I can see both of them,” said Captain Warder’s voice. “They’re missing ahead. Now she’s seen them… Here she is, boys… coming right for us… Looks scared as hell, too… Take ’er down… Rig for depth charge.”

While I kept singing bearings out to him, I was wondering what in the hell had happened. Just what was wrong? We waited, silent. But the ship never dropped a charge.

“She’s running away,” I called out.

The Skipper upped the periscope. “Damn!” he said. “There the bastard goes, heading right back to the barn. He knows damn well I can’t follow him. Secure battle stations. Secure depth-charge stations.”

Now things were quiet. Had we picked up a new jinx? There was nothing to do but lump it. I wandered into Kelly’s Pool Hall and found Eddie Sousa. He felt like cribbage. We sat down and started to play and we hadn’t been playing more than ten minutes when we heard the distant, muffled thump of a depth charge. I started to get up, but Sousa said, “Oh, hell. They’re a long way off. Let’s finish the game.”

We finished it and started a second. When a second charge went off Sousa fanned out his cards and said, “Probably sent out a plane to heckle us.”

I said: “Could be, Eddie, but I better get back up with Paul.”

Sousa began shouting: “Damn you, Eckberg, you know I’m ready to skunk you.” He looked so hurt and indignant I couldn’t help laughing at him.

He chased me out of the room, yelling: “Come on back here, you yellow dog, and finish this game and get skunked!”

Paul, who’d heard some of it, grinned when I came in. “Someday Sousa will handcuff you to a chair and make you finish that game,” he said.

After hearing the charges hit the water, I decided Sousa was right. An airplane had spotted us, dropped a few aerial bombs, and disappeared.

Sousa came in the sound shack and began to complain bitterly to Maley how I walked out on his winning game. Every time he would begin, I would raise my hand and say: “Shhhhhhh, I hear something.” This drove Eddie into a frenzy. He wrung his hands and called me every name under the sun. For days afterward he alternately threatened and cajoled me to finish that game. We still have to finish it.

Sometime during the night we heard over the radio the Nazis had been stopped cold in Russia, and that the Marines were pushing the Japs back on Guadalcanal. Over the radio came word that several of our submarines were working out there in the Solomon Islands invasion.

Maley commented on this. “I’m glad we’re not Marines,” he said. “Think of crawling on your belly in the jungle waiting for a Jap to take a shot at you. What a life!”

As we were about to surface that night, Captain Warder spotted a large sampan. He told Lieutenant Deragon: “I think I’ll look this fellow over. He may be a Nip with a radio transmitter and receiver. If he is, we’ll shoot him up.”

We surfaced silently and crept up on him. We had not been on the surface over five minutes before Gunner Bennett was down in the control room opening the gun locker and breaking out small arms and some machine guns. We were not going in close without being set for a surprise. Everybody wanted to get a chance to shoot some Japs, but the men who were to do that shooting, if it came to that, were already at their stations.

The Captain maneuvered carefully. No talking was permitted on the bridge. We used our motors. There wasn’t a sound of any kind. The Captain kept his glasses on the sampan constantly. We were taking no chances, and the ship was in a crash-dive condition.

I don’t believe the sampan knew we were about until we were less than thirty yards from her. The Captain looked the sampan over, bow to stern and back, looking for telltale antennae, any signs of gun mounts—there was nothing. After a few minutes, he said: “It’s harmless. The only ones on board are a man, his wife, and two small children.”

Gunner Bennett collected the guns. We were all disappointed. We wanted a crack at the Japs at close hand.

We charged batteries and dove shortly before dawn and headed for another enemy port. Twelve hours later we reached our patrol point outside the harbor. In seizing this port, the Japs won one of the most valuable prizes of the war.

Before the Dutch moved on, they put the torch to the entire city. Refineries, cracking plants, millions of dollars’ worth of re-search laboratories went up in acrid smoke. Most of the foreign population had fled to Java, or vanished into the jungle. Somewhere in that jungle the Allies had a secret airport of which they made excellent use against Jap shipping in the early part of the war.

Even the workers battled the Japanese invaders. We learned later that employees dumped thousands of barrels of oil into the river to stop the Japs, setting fire to it, but a sudden cloudburst put out the flames.

The Japs were using the harbor for all it was worth, running oil up to the homeland in anything that would float. Three hundred miles up the coast they had seized Tarakan, too, but only after the Dutch had destroyed the oil refineries, which used to produce nearly one million tons a year.

Our first day on patrol was quiet. We cruised in deep water.

But at dawn of the second day the Skipper decided to go inside the harbor. It was a ticklish business, for the Japs had mined it, and we knew the water wasn’t too deep. We couldn’t afford to make a mistake.

We went in. We went deeper and deeper. The water grew dangerously shallow. The Skipper had his eye glued to the periscope, scanning the beach installations.

“Battle stations!” he ordered suddenly. “Make ready the forward tubes.”

The entire boat churned into action. The control party scrambled up the ladder.

“It’s a sub chaser.” Captain Warder’s words were measured.

“I don’t know if he saw us. I won’t attack unless he does. He’s small and making high speed.”

This was plenty bad. We were in shallow water. We had nowhere to hide. If he attacked, he could blast us to bits. If he knew we were there, he would attack. It was as simple as that. I listened to the screws, and the thumping of my heart was so loud and strong it seemed to shake me from head to toe. The Japs’ screws were faint, then louder, then still louder. Maley pressed his phones against his ears. There wasn’t a whisper in the boat. I scarcely recognized my own voice as I gave the bearings: “Three two zero… three two two… three two four.”

All sorts of things flew through my mind. I was convinced the Jap would pass close to us, but the pattern of his bearings indicated that he would pass well forward on our bow unless he changed his course radically. But in the back of my mind I knew a plane might have been working with the subchaser, must have spotted us, and put the subchaser on our tail. I found my fist beating the desk in time with the beating screws. Louder… louder… up the bow—up the bow— and past us, a good 600 yards away, at high speed.

Captain Warder sat back on his stool and looked about. “That was a close one,” he said with a grim smile. “I guess he’s going out to meet someone.”

We began to dive again. We waited and listened, and then went into deeper water. We surfaced at dusk and dove as usual at dawn, to re-enter the harbor. Shallow water or not, mines or no mines, we still had work to do. I heard surf breaking on the beach, the water crashing and clashing over shoals and reefs. But the Skipper brought the Wolf into that harbor as daintily as a ballet dancer.

All through the morning and into the afternoon we inched our way forward, gathering information. Lieutenant Holden was at the periscope and began to describe what he saw.

“I see a lot of houses over there,” he said. “Now I see trees… there’s a big clump. Now what’s this? Looks like a radio antenna.” Pause. “Battle stations!… Call the Captain!… Left rudder, Rudy! All ahead full!”

The Wolf leaped forward. We were in shallow water. This was doubly dangerous. Something was up. Holden’s voice:

“I was busy scanning, Captain, and I took a look behind us; and there, almost on our port beam, is a big tanker and an escort. I think we can get them.”

The Skipper took over the periscope. He whistled.

“She certainly is a big one… Too bad she didn’t come in before… That’s our friend of yesterday coming in with her. O.K.,” he said. “Down periscope. We’ll try and get in.” We plowed at full speed into even shallower water. Then we cut our speed, and Captain Warder upped his periscope. “Damn it, she’s drawing away from us,” he said. “Nothing we can do. Secure battle stations. We’ll trail her in and see if we can get a shot.”

We followed that ship right into the mouth of a fresh-water river. The Captain tried every trick he knew stalking her, but she was too far ahead of us.

Captain Warder would have preferred to wait outside the harbor and catch the tanker, but our schedule called for a change. Reluctantly we gave up the hunt and continued up the coast.

On the way the conning officer picked up a smudge of black smoke. It looked like a fat freighter. We went through several maneuvers, were annoyed by a series of brief rain squalls, and finally, about five hours later, we caught up with our target. It turned out to be a seagoing tug!

We were several days without sighting anything of importance. At times the Skipper, who was getting ship hungry, took the Wolf so close to shore we would have been able to swim in. The night of the fourth day, Lieutenant Deragon, dropping in to chat, told me where we were heading.

“And from there?” I asked. He smiled noncommittally. I knew we would learn soon enough. Next day the word had gotten around to the crew, and all kinds of rumors flew about. First we were going to Brisbane, then Pearl Harbor, then Dutch Harbor, and finally Midway. Something told me we were on our way home. It was now many months since we had left Cavite. We had already been out a long time on this patrol.

Home seemed so far away that night. How would my son greet me? I put my hands behind my head and looked up at their photographs—Marjorie and Spike. Well, they’d waited a long, long time. For months now, in our letters, we had been planning what our first night would be like. We’d settled on dinner in some quiet little restaurant, candles on the table, a full-course meal, topped off by a bottle of expensive wine that had to rest in a bucket of ice. We wouldn’t discuss the war. Marjorie wouldn’t talk to me about the Wolf. No questions about the ships we sunk, or the escapes we had. We would talk about ourselves and about Spike, and about the home we intended to build after the war.

That house had been started one quiet night in the sound shack when I was writing a letter to Marjorie. I talked about a house—a dream house. I even included a few sketches. In the next batch of mail, Marjorie included a number of suggestions. She had ideas about the location of the kitchen. Spike’s room should be here. We’d have a sunroom there. Throughout the long months at sea in every letter I wrote I carried the plans a bit further. Finally between us, we had it finished, just as we wanted it. The last time I saw Spike he was twenty-six days old. I wondered about my brother Roy. He owns a bar in ’Frisco. I promised myself a terrific binge there. Angela, his wife, would top off the evening with her specialty—a spaghetti dinner with all the trimmings. Toward dawn I fell asleep, and it seemed only a few minutes before Lamby was shaking me, telling me it was time for my watch.

We arrived at the new patrol area in midafternoon, and things began to pop at once. It began when Lieutenant Mercer, at the periscope, summoned the Captain. He had spotted a ship—a two-mast affair.

“You’re right,” observed Captain Warder. “Here are the masts, now… Battle stations!”

Our approach was perfect. We fired a few moments later, and the whine of the fish heading straight for the Jap was music in my ears. This time there was no miss. I began to report it.

“They’re going…” I wasn’t able to complete the sentence. A terrific explosion rocked the Wolf. It was the concussion from our torpedo; we must have struck a munitions carrier. It was as terrific and deafening as a depth charge. I tore off the earphones and held my splitting head. My ears were ringing. Maley was shouting, but I couldn’t make out his words. He pointed to the intercom system. I leaned over and pressed my ear against it and heard the Captain giving a blow-by-blow description of the sinking ship. His voice sounded as if he were at the end of a bad telephone connection.

“Christ, boys,” he was yelling. “We knocked the lifeboats right off her… There go the smokestacks… Some damn fool is trying to blow the whistle, steam is coming out of there. There go the Nips jumping over like rats. There’s a second explosion. She’s going down already. She’s breaking apart.” He paused and called to Lieutenant Mercer: “Jim, hurry up if you want a picture of this. Only the stern is showing now.”

Ensign Mercer clipped his camera to the eyepiece. “Got her, sir,” he said.

A moment later Captain Warder, back at the periscope, announced, “There she goes… Good-by!”

My ears still rang from the first blast, but I replaced my phones and listened. A few minutes later I heard the underseas roar that meant her boilers had exploded.

Paul took off his headset. He leaned over and yelled in my ear.

“That’s one Jap bastard that won’t do any damage, Eck!”

The Captain, still scanning the surface, kept up a running description. I put my ear against the intercom again.

“Congratulations, forward room and sound,” he was saying. “Good work, everybody. Wait a minute: There are lifeboats up there. Men are swarming over the sides. Damn it, this sinking can be seen from the beach very easily. I can’t take any chances. We’ll have to take prisoners rather than let them hit the beach and spread the alarm.”

His voice dropped. “I don’t understand that… Wait a minute, though… Yes, I do! We blew the oars right out of the boat. I’ve been wondering why they weren’t rowing. There must have been plenty of men on that ship… I’m figuring on going into that Gulf, and I don’t want those men to spread the alarm. We’ll track them until dark. If conditions permit, we’ll take prisoners.” He kept his eye to the periscope. Men were swimming aimlessly about; others were clinging to spars and debris. Every piece of wreckage had a figure clinging to it. “Those lifeboats are crowded to the rims now,” he went on. “There’s a lot of people swimming around up there yet. All right Jim, mark this lifeboat, zero… zero… five… Look out for signs of activity. Let me know at once if anything shows up.”

He turned the periscope over to Ensign Mercer. As he came by the sound shack, he looked in. “Good work, boys,” he said. “Take it easy for a little while. We may be busy later.”

Lieutenant Deragon went over our records to see if we could identify the ship we’d sunk.

A few minutes later Ensign Mercer, after checking tides and currents, told the Captain the Japs were being floated out toward the Celebes. They were on their way to the open sea, without oars or provisions. According to the charts, the nearest land was 600 miles to the south.

Captain Warder was silent for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “we won’t have any prisoners tonight.” He paused again. “They’ll never make it. Those poor bastards swimming around… Well, there’s nothing we can do about them.”

We waited until darkness and then surfaced. Jap lifeboats were still bobbing up and down. They must have been a terrified group when they saw the long black shape of the Seawolf bear down on them. The first two Japanese the Captain saw were youngsters. They looked about sixteen, he said. They were stark naked, clinging to two pieces of wreckage. Their clothes had been blown off by the blast. The Captain leaned over the rail cable. “Savvy English?” he shouted.

One boy turned, screamed what sounded like a panic-stricken warning, then let go of his piece of wreckage and swam off. The Captain shouted after him, but he churned the water like a long-distance swimmer and finally vanished in the darkness. Captain Warder asked the remaining boy if he could “Savvy English.” The other shook his head.

“Sousa,” the Captain called, “go down to the rail and see if you can make out a name on that wreckage.”

Eddie leaned far over and examined several pieces floating about, but he could find no identification.

Sousa threw a line out to the boy, but the Jap chattered and would have nothing to do with it. Sousa shouted in exasperation, “Grab hold the line, grab hold!” but the Jap pushed it away each time it dropped nearby. Captain Warder watched this scene silently.

“All right, Sousa, you can’t do anything with him,” he said finally. “Pass the word below to bring up a life jacket and a bottle of whisky.” They were handed up and tossed to the Jap. He caught them and held them. Captain Warder commented dryly:

“If he puts on that jacket and drinks the whisky, he’ll never know what hit him.”

The current was strong. In a few minutes the Jap who wouldn’t be rescued was out of sight and on his way to the open sea.

At that he was given more than the men on the Perch, and the Sea Lion, and the Shark. They didn’t even get a life jacket or a bottle of whisky.

We were on the double alert all night. When you sink a ship and then return to the same area, you’re inviting trouble. The Skipper decided to patrol outside the harbor for a period of watchful waiting. We were on the alert, too, for mine fields. We saw hostile aircraft and ignored them. After surfacing that night the Captain decided to go into the Gulf again. We sneaked into the Gulf before diving, and at this point we were less than twenty miles from a beehive of Jap activity. We pushed on silently, nearer and nearer to the Jap center. We upped a cautious periscope.

“I can see a church steeple, some houses,” the Skipper reported. “Looks like a lot of shipping in there. I see several masts… Can’t go in there, boys, that’s mined. Let’s take a look over here…. Hmmmm, could be at that… What a wonderful camouflage job… Left full rudder, Rudy… I think there’s a ship over there, but I’m not sure. If it is, it’s a big one. Battle stations! Sure that’s a ship… She’s a beauty… Motor ship, with a cruiser stern… Heavy guns aft… looks brand new to me… What a camouflage job!… I can see them loading her, probably hemp. This ship is tied up to a wharf or anchored right off one. She’s a beauty. This should be an easy attack if we can avoid detection. Down periscope.”

Silence. Then: “What course are we steering, Jim? Where are we? Let me have a look here. This is a ticklish spot to get out of in case they send somebody out here looking for us, as I expect them to… So that’s where we are… Well, I want to work up to this point and take a zero angle shot. How about the tides and the current drift?”

Captain Warder was thorough as usual. We worked our way slowly in. The water was shallow, but the possibility of mines kept us even more tense. This place surely must have a mine field.

I could almost sense Maley’s thoughts. Again, up periscope.

“Just as I thought,” observed the Skipper. “Down periscope. Make ready the bow tubes. Sound, I won’t need you on this attack, but I want you to track these fish. I want to know especially if any of them run erratic… Bow tubes ready? O.K., open the outer doors. Rudy, this is going to be ticklish, and I’m going to have to coach you on. Up periscope. We will fire this time if everything is the same up here.”

The periscope hit its upper level, and the Captain was on it like a leech.

“Okay, they haven’t seen us. They’re loading hemp, all right. Boy, she’s a beauty! Henry, I’m going to fire. Are you ready?… Rudy, come left more, come left a hair, steady, hold her steady… Fire!… Eckberg, are they running?”

“They’re running, Captain—hot and straight.”

“Yes, I see ’em now, number two is going to miss, number three is going to hit.”

Boom! I heard her go. What an explosion!

The whole ship seethed with excitement.

Captain Warder watched intently. “She’s listing heavily to port. Seems to be settling heavily. The guns are manned and firing wildly—in all directions. They don’t know what hit them. We must have caught them flat-footed… Now, what is this?… Boy, what damage control they must have! They have righted the ship and taken off the list… Oh, no, my friends!… Not that easy!… Make ready the aftertubes… Rudy, swing her around!”

The Wolf swung completely around, attacked again—from the stern. More of our torpedoes crashed into her. Captain Warder waited impatiently until the smoke cleared away.

“We blew their aft guns to bits. The forward gun is manned, but the crew is standing there. They’re probably dazed. Wait, there’s a fire breaking out in the bow. They’re abandoning ship… There she goes settling in the water. Wait a minute! What have we here? Here come some Zeros! They’re peppering my periscope.”

We heard the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns. But Captain Warder was determined to see this large Jap vessel sink, Zeros or no Zeros.

“Dammit,” he exploded, “that ship must be honeycombed with watertight compartments. It won’t do any good to put any more fish into her now, unless I can place it… Hmmmm. Damn those planes! Damn them! Well, I’m going to throw one more at her and see what happens. Up periscope. Rudy, come right, now. Steady. Are you ready, Hank? Okay—Fire!” Pause. “Well, there she goes, boys. She’s going up in smoke. Fires are breaking out all over her. I believe she’s sitting on the bottom in very shallow water. Come on, I’m satisfied. Take a couple of snaps, Jim, and then let’s get the hell out of here.”

I heard the sound of many screws. The anti-sub boats were still hunting for us. I gave the Captain their bearings.

“We’ll have to get out of here,” he said.

The Japs were coming closer, throwing depth charges right and left. They were missing completely. The Wolf headed out for the mouth of the Gulf. We had to get out of here fast. We knew the Japs would immediately take protective measures. It would be suicide to stay.

It was now late afternoon. We raced under a flat sea, with a bright sun in the sky. It was risky periscope weather. Seventy miles should take us—Just then the Captain’s voice broke in. “Oh, here’s another one. Looks like—yes, it is a big Maru… We’ll take her. Sound, this will have to be your approach.”

I heard the freighter zigzagging, seeking frantically to escape. She knew we were stalking her. This Maru was doing about 120 degrees zigs. I told the Captain, and he called back:

“Eckberg, I’m getting ready to fire. She should be on the port bow now. Got her?”

The Captain upped the periscope and took a look. He said, “Oh, Christ! Down periscope! Take ’er deep!”

We went down fast. I heard the screws of this Maru coming at us. Then she was over us. It was like standing under a trestle while a freight train rumbled overhead. She was still zigzagging and had no idea where we were.

The Captain again put the Seawolf on the course to the Gulf’s mouth. He left the conning tower and went to his room. For the next four hours I listened intently for the freighter, but she was gone. The Wolf was moving south at a rapid pace. My eyes were tired. I took off the earphones. Maley was absent-mindedly doodling on a scratch pad.

“I’m going to hit the sack,” I told him.

He nodded. “O.K., Eck.”

Lamberson was asleep in his bunk next to mine. He woke up as I got in. “Where the hell are we, Eck?” he asked drowsily.

“On the way out of this damn gulf,” I told him.

He yawned loudly and turned on his other side. “I don’t want to be on the next sub that pokes her nose into this gulf,” he said. Then, after a minute, he sat up restlessly and began rubbing his eyes. “Guess I’ll play a little solitaire.”

He climbed down, got a deck of cards, and sat on an overturned water bucket. He used a chair for a table.

“Hope we go east, Eck,” he said. “That means home, and will I be glad to see it!”

I had closed my eyes, trying to force myself to sleep. My nerves were still tingling from the long stretch I had just completed.

I fell into uneasy sleep. It seemed as if I had closed my eyes for only a few minutes when the alarm went. When I hit the deck seven feet below my bunk, it jarred me awake. I raced up the three steps through the watertight hatch to the officers’ quarters, squirmed down the narrow passageway. It was like a subway rush. Crew members were pushing each other along. I had to buck this human tide. Finally I reached the after end of the forward battery, then the control room. There wasn’t any talking. Each man had a job to do and we didn’t waste time in talking. I took over sound.

The Captain’s voice broke the silence. “This ship has something on the forward deck that I can’t make out. He apparently doesn’t see us, he’s not zigging at all. This will be a big day if we can get him. Sound, can we pick him up yet?”

I said: “Yes, Captain, I have him now.”

“Very well!” said the Captain. “This is a 5,000- to 7,000-ton freighter, two goal posts, stack amidships, looks like coal-burner, estimated speed nine knots, course, three five zero. The decks are loaded with what looks like invasion barges… The crew is in white uniforms, well disciplined. This is probably a Jap naval reserve ship. We’ll plunk him.”

I gave sound bearings, and in a few minutes the approach party gave him the bearings for firing. “All right, Willie,” he said, “stand by to fire. Ready, Henry?” Bringelman was at the Captain’s right shoulder with his hands on the solenoid controls ready to push the firing buttons.

Henry answered: “All set, Captain.”

Then the order came, “Fire!”

I caught the fish as they left the Wolf, The Captain said, “I can see them. One’s going to hit…!”

I heard the terrific blast.

“There’s no running around,” the Skipper said. “They don’t seem to be panicky. Everybody seems to have a destination. She’s listing to starboard. There’s a group of them forward, trying to clear the invasion barges, trying to save them. They won’t have time. They are going to go too fast. Yes, they have abandoned the idea. These people are cool, calm, and collected. Right now they are throwing everything that will float over the side. There’s no time to launch any lifeboats.”

I interrupted. “Ship coming up the starboard quarter, sir.” Her laboring screws sounded like a minesweeper.

“O.K., Eck, we’ll have a look,” the Captain said. “Hell, it’s those anti-sub vessels again. Converted minesweepers.” He paused. “Is that all they can get out here?” he asked. “That’s an insult to my ship and crew.”

There was a distant boom: the Jap was clumsily dropping depth charges.

We went deep. I could hear the ship breaking up, and finally her boilers exploded.

We stayed down the rest of that day. Everybody was exhausted. The torpedomen, who had been reloading and reloading, were asleep on their feet. Gus Wright had made sandwiches all day long. He was carrying coffee to me every half-hour or so.

We surfaced that night with normal routine. We were still in the Gulf. Again I slept badly. The day’s excitement was too much. I woke about 3 a.m. Swede was on watch in the control room.

“What are you doing up, Eck?” he asked.

“Not sleepy, I guess,” I said, and downed some of his coffee.

“Sleepy, hell,” he said. “What’s worrying you is worrying me and everybody on this boat. We are inside the Gulf, that’s all, and we’ll feel better when we get way outside.” He was right.

It could not have been three minutes later that Franz yelled from the conning tower: “Stand by to dive!”

Swede jumped to his controls. For a huge man, he was as quick as a cat. I took off for the sound room. I couldn’t find a thing.

Ensign Casler was the officer of the deck, and had picked up a smell of smoke. He couldn’t see anything, but didn’t take a chance and ordered a crash dive. Diving and cruising submerged upset our schedule, since we couldn’t make the speed submerged that we could on the surface. We’d hoped to reach the entrance by dawn, then submerge. But it was only an hour until daylight now, and so we continued submerged. About an hour after my morning watch was over, I was back in the engine room, playing my favorite Froggy Bottom record.

Suddenly there was the cry of “Battle Stations.” I grabbed at the machine to stop it and shattered the record. I ran to the sound room ready to kill every Jap in Japan. My favorite record lying in a thousand pieces! I got in the sound shack.

“Another target,” Paul said. “Too damn far away to tell what it is.”

Captain Warder had his periscope up. “Well, boy,” he said, “I rather wish we weren’t on a time schedule. This is like a picnic. I can’t tell yet, but this looks like an old freighter. Might not be worth a fish.”

Then I caught her screws. She was a coal-burning freighter, making slow speed.

A few minutes later Captain Warder caught sight of her. “She’s not so small, at that. About four thousand tons. Loaded to the gunwales. We’ll plunk this baby, too.”

We went in for the kill. I caught the screws of anti-sub vessels again. They were about three to five miles away. We came to the firing point. “Fire!” I heard the dull thud of the first explosion.

“We really cracked her this time, men. I can’t see anything for smoke,” came the Captain’s voice.

We headed out toward the open sea. We moved out of the Gulf and could relax at last.

I grabbed a nap that afternoon. Then I went back in the sound shack working on “Begin the Beguine.” I must have been loud.

Zerk stuck his head out of the after-battery hatch.

“For Christ sake, knock off the goddamn noise, damn it!” he yelled.

I yelled back: “Go on back in your hole, you ant-faced baboon!”

Before I knew it the whole battery was shouting, “Shut up, can it, keep it quiet.” They accused Zerk of making noise. I kept quiet. Zerk explained hotly that he was only telling me to keep quiet. “I wasn’t making the noise, it was Eckberg!” He came out into the passageway. They shouted him down. “Shut up, damn it, Zerk.” He went back mumbling.

I started copying code, and after about half an hour I realized we were headed in an easterly course. It suddenly dawned on me: home was in that direction. I got so excited I left my station for the first time in my navy career and rushed out into the control room. The first man I saw was Lieutenant Deragon.

“Where are we going, Mr. Deragon?” I asked him.

“You’re overdue, Eck,” he said with a grin. “I knew as soon as we changed course you’d be out here. We expect to go home. How’s that?”

That was all right with me. At last we were headed home. We still had Palau to go by, and that was tough, but we were headed home.

The next three days were uneventful. We spotted nothing.

Near dusk of the fourth day, the periscope officer picked up an island. We closed in to run a patrol in front of it. Conditions were in our favor. We had a nice chop, it was a cloudy day, and just enough rain was falling to make our periscope almost invisible to the enemy and yet permit us to look around.

We moved in carefully and spotted a patrol boat. He was too far away to be dangerous. Captain Warder, scanning with the utmost care, picked up the masts of a ship coming in our general direction. The Jap—it turned out to be a destroyer—was making tremendous speed. The Skipper sounded battle stations. But as we maneuvered, we realized that from her speed and the angle on our bow it would be impossible to launch an attack. The weather conditions had turned bad. The rain, which had aided us at first, now poured down in sheets, making our visibility almost nil. We were in the midst of a typical tropical squall. The Captain peered through and saw two more destroyers come charging by.

“Well, we have to let that first baby go by,” he said… “But these two— What in the hell is their hurry? Maybe they are heading for the Gulf, to clean us out of there. I think I’m going to tackle this one.” He studied the sea. “This will be a terrific shot if I can make it,” he said, almost under his breath. “He’s really making speed.” He ordered: “All ahead, full right rudder. We have to go like hell to get this fellow.”

The Wolf quivered with the speed. We veered to our left to get into position. We were on this course for about five minutes, the Skipper taking sweeps with his periscope, when he exclaimed:

“Well, I’ll be goddamned! At my age, too! To think I would fall for a trick like that! Here is an aircraft carrier, and I’m out of position! I’ve been sucked in by this goddamned destroyer, and now it’s impossible to make the attack. Look at that big beautiful bastard! She’s really spinning! Looks new to me. The length of that flight deck looks to be about six hundred feet.” I think he could have bawled.

None of us believe that the Captain was at fault. We had been closing to run our patrol, and it wasn’t his fault if the Jap ships chose this time to make their appearance. We were not out of position because we had not left our original course long enough to make any difference. Had we stayed on a course that would have brought us up to the patrol point, we still would have missed the carrier because she was traveling at such high speed. Captain Warder was too cagey to be sucked in by anyone.

We surfaced. It was near dusk. By this time the carrier was out of sight. It seemed apparent that the destroyers and the carrier were rushing to a rendezvous. Captain Warder wanted to find that rendezvous.

The Japs were probably meeting there preparing for an attack on the Solomons. We could be of damn good use if we walked in on them.

The Wolf was put on 100 percent power—to go as fast as she could. The speed indicator in the control room spun around like mad. It vibrated all the way up to a point that we hadn’t seen in eight months. We swept that surrounding ocean like a broom.

Suddenly, as I sat in sound, I realized something had changed.

Something was missing. Then I had it. The high-pitched endless whine of our electric motors was gone. I peered into the control room. There were Captain Warder and Lieutenant Deragon, looking glumly at a chart.

“Hell,” said the Skipper, disgusted, and vanished in the direction of his stateroom, Deragon with him.

I hurried out and looked at the chart. The Wolf had a new course laid out, taking her to Pearl Harbor. I went back to my shack, wondering what this all meant, and a moment later Captain Warder came in. His face was expressionless. He had a message to send. I turned the transmitter up and contacted an Allied Command.

Our message was brief. We had sighted the carrier. This was her course and her apparent destination. And something I had not known—the Seawolf was having serious electrical trouble. That’s why we were going to Pearl Harbor. It was the main motor generator cables which had gone bad. They grew so hot we feared a fire. A bad fire in the batteries would cripple us. We’d be unable to dive. And in these Jap-infested waters, it would mean the finish for all of us.

By morning the electricians had fixed things well enough for us to resume our patrol. Captain Warder now set our course for another island. This was next on our schedule, and the Skipper felt the Wolf was in good enough shape to make it before going into Pearl Harbor for complete repairs. It was a small island boasting an airfield, bristling with gun emplacements. We reached it before dawn.

Captain Warder studied the island through the periscope. “Nice beach here. Wouldn’t mind going in for a swim,” he commented. “This is a pretty little place. I see barracks, lots of them, on top of hills. I can see what looks like gun emplacements. I can see radio-antenna towers. There is a ship in the harbor. She’s only a sailing vessel, though. This is a typical South Pacific island.”

We spent several days hunting for trouble. No luck. Then, finally, we set an easterly course for Pearl Harbor. On the way Captain Warder spotted ships. The Wolf prepared to attack—an attack that was to prove one of the most dangerous she ever tried.

“Seems to be a whole mess of ships,” the Skipper said. “This one Maru looks big enough. We’ll plunk him… Wait a minute. Of all things to blunder into! Look what we got this time!”

We had a pretty good idea down in sound. Maley and I had a number of sets of screws going in our ears.

“We’ve got screws all over this damn place,” I called to the Skipper.

“I’m not surprised, Eck,” he said, a little ruefully. “We’re barged into a floating cannery and her brood of fishing boats.”

Fishing boats! And thick as flies! That was bad. Fishing boats meant deep, heavy nets hanging down; and if our propellers struck a net, we’d have to surface—in the face of gun batteries that could blast us out of the water.

“Well, see if you can get me a range.” Captain Warder’s words were easy.

I tried. There were too many ships.

“Make ready the bow tubes,” came a moment later. “This will be a difficult attack.…” A few minutes went by… “Fire one! Damn it, we missed!… Damn that bastard!”

We dove deep. On sound I heard the ship and her brood scuttling away. She dropped two depth charges as a parting salute, but they were mild.

The next day we sighted two more ships, one heading south, one north. They were not alone. Jap bombers roared overhead, and patrol vessels played sentry on either side. The Wolf tried for the ships anyway. They were racing along at twenty-five knots or better. We could not close the range sufficiently to launch an attack. We gave it up, finally, knowing we had not been detected, and pushed on for Pearl.

We were less than five days out of Pearl when the shout came, “Plane above the port bow!”

We stood by to dive.

“We don’t have to dive for that baby,” came a moment later. “It’s a PBY.”

We felt like cheering below. We were in home waters now. We wanted to be topside, and we wanted to be up there badly.

For many weeks I hadn’t seen sunlight or tasted fresh air. I must have looked the way I felt. “Like a dirty turkish towel,” was how Maley put it. I knew I had lost weight. My pants hung so loosely. I had to use new holes in my belt to keep them up. But we tried to forget about topside and set to work cleaning up the Wolf. Our cruise had been a real success. Pearl was the nearest to home we had been in two years. We worked and thought of home again. Family photographs suddenly came to light once more. We reread old letters.

In the mess hall one night I was talking to Rudy Gervais. He was in love with a girl in Connecticut. He had a curious sensation of being far too old for her—suddenly. She was young; he felt old as the hills.

“The last time I saw her I was just a kid,” he complained. “Now I’m not a kid any more. She still is. How are we going to hit it off?”

“Aw, you’re still a kid,” I told him. “Don’t worry, she’ll be more than glad to have you.”

“I don’t know,” he said. I looked at him. Shave off that beard, and he still would be taken for eighteen.

The eve of hitting Pearl, some of us below went up on the bridge. A handful of us went up at a time. When I came up, there were three figures standing by the rail. One was Lieutenant Syverson.

“Good evening, Eck,” he said. “Come on up.”

Then we stood there silently. No one spoke. We couldn’t see the land. Moonlight shimmered on the water. It was a perfect night. The Wolf left a sparkling phosphorescent trail. It was a damn pretty thing to see. We all breathed deeply, and then, one by one, went below.

It was November, almost a year since the Jap attack. We had been out at sea nearly twelve months.

We sat around in a circle in Kelly’s Pool Room that night, and we talked about Pearl. It was just 2,200 miles from home. I looked around at the men. We weren’t the same men who had left Cavite a year ago. Sully had flicks of gray in his beard. Deep lines were etched in Maley’s face. I had lost a lot of weight. Hank Brengelman’s Santa Claus face wasn’t roly-poly any more. Only Pop Rosario looked the same. He might have been thirty and he might have been fifty.

We talked about Pearl Harbor. How would she look? I remembered when I first saw it in 1929. There were only nine buildings and a couple of piers.

Sully exclaimed: “Damn it, Eck, there couldn’t have been.”

That started an argument that lasted for hours. Finally, about 2 A.M., I went to bed.

We had early reveille and were met by a destroyer escort to take us in. The order from the bridge was one we hadn’t heard for a long time: “Station the channel watch.” We were in Pearl.

Every few minutes somebody would yell: “Christ Almighty, look at that!” or “Look at those guns!”

The word finally came, “Secure the radio watch.” Then: “If you are in the uniform of the day, come on deck.”

This meant clean dungarees, shorts, shirts, and white hat. I had been prepared for this hours ago. I climbed topside, emerged from the conning tower, and stood transfixed. I was stunned by the sight and sound.

The Seawolf was slowly gliding into Pearl Harbor. But what a different spectacle than when we had last been here two years ago! It was unbelievable. The sky above us was darkened by huge, sausage-like barrage balloons. The harbor on both sides of us was a staggering scene of destruction, as though a tornado had twisted across it, overturning ships, snapping crane booms like matchsticks, splitting buildings in half. We passed piled-up fragments of planes, their wings jutting out grotesquely; ships splotched with huge holes, keels and hulls of nameless vessels. There was the screeching of moving derricks, the scream of air hammers, a bedlam of engines roaring, machines pounding, men at work.

The Seawolf moved slowly past a gigantic overturned hulk. Against its immensity, the men swarming over it appeared no larger than ants. Somebody on deck murmured in an awed voice: “The Oklahoma!” and I stared at it. To our right as we moved into dock lay a light cruiser with a damaged superstructure; on the left, we were passing Ford Island. It looked as though a hurricane had wrecked it. Trees were splintered, structures leveled to the ground. Directly ahead of us now was the submarine base. I had never seen so many submarines tied up before. Anti-aircraft guns bristled from every roof overlooking the harbor; sandbags were piled high in front of every building.

You could be sure of this: history would never record a second surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Quite a crowd waited on the dock to welcome us. I saw faces I hadn’t seen for months. There were shouts of, “Hello, Skipper, how was the trip?” and “Good hunting, Captain?”

We tied up. Lieutenant Deragon made an announcement to the crew. “We are now in Pearl Harbor,” he said formally. “The Captain expects to fuel up, take on supplies, and leave here the first possible moment. There will be free beer for the entire crew with the exception of the duty section.”

We cheered that.

Lieutenant Deragon went on: “The beer is at the swimming pool. You men know where that is. You owe a vote of thanks for it to Commander Stephens, executive officer of the submarine base.”

Captain Warder, smartly dressed in a new khaki uniform, as trim a naval officer as ever stepped on a deck, appeared from below.

Deragon concluded: “Now what we have done on this last patrol and where we have been is no one’s business but our own. You men are free now. Go ashore and enjoy yourself. But be ready to leave at half an hour’s notice. Now, I think Captain Warder has a few things he’d like to say.”

Captain Warder stepped forward. He was all smiles. “Boys,” he said, “this might sound repetitious. The only excuse I make for it is that I am sincere. I am proud of you all. We have made a fine record. We have a wonderful ship. To my way of thinking, we have the best submarine crew in the United States Navy. My thanks goes out to every one of you.”

We stood there listening, and we liked it.

“I am now on my way to Admiral Nimitz’s headquarters,” he said. “If we can possibly do it, we will leave tomorrow. I know you are eager to get home, and so am I. Now, have a good time. I’ll see you all up at the swimming pool.”

We found ice-cold beer at the pool. The crew of the Seawolf relaxed. We lolled about, lying on the grass, taking it easy on the deck chairs, and letting the sun and air get at us. Captain Warder appeared an hour later, sank into a deck chair, and paid his acknowledgments to a glass of cold beer. A few minutes later Commander Stephens joined him.

Old Pop Mocarsky, who hadn’t smiled in a year, marched up and stood in front of the Captain. He turned to the crew.

“How’s the beer, boys?” Old Pop shouted. “O.K.?”

“O.K.! Pop,” we shouted back. Captain Warder rose to his feet, put a hand on Pop’s shoulder, and looked at all of us.

“Pop,” he said, “the beer is fine. I’m fine, and you look fine. Today the whole world’s fine.”

After the party a group of us looked in at the ship’s service store. There we saw the first American girl we’d seen in nearly two years. She was standing behind the counter, sorting handkerchiefs, and she was small and blonde, and pretty. She came up to wait on us. We stared at her. A red flush crept into her cheeks.

“What are you men looking at?” she said finally, trying to fight off a smile. “Do you want to buy something or not?”

We realized then that we must have looked pretty odd, with our beards, our cut-off dungarees, wearing no socks, and staring at her like high-school kids.

Sousa said, “Now, honey, you ought to feel honored. Got any socks?”

She had some, and we all solemnly bought ourselves one pair each.

We were like housewives on a shopping tour, going from counter to counter, looking at things, feeling them, smelling them.

Yet the ship was on our minds. We felt a little lost away from her. And all at once we got stage fright. We felt conspicuous. We wanted to get away from the lights and people’s eyes, and down inside the Wolf again where lights were low and the faces around us, before and behind us, were the faces we knew. We hurried back. On the way we passed an officer. We had taken about four steps when he called out:

“Just a minute, sailors!”

We turned and stared at him.

“You failed to salute,” he said.

For the first time in months we realized we were back in the Navy. We hadn’t saluted an officer for a long, long time. Someone mumbled, “Sorry, sir,” and we saluted and hurried on.

The Wolf was fueling up at the dock. Supplies were coming aboard. The entire crew was there. We had liberty, no one had called us back, and yet none of us felt comfortable more than a hundred yards away from the Wolf. We were going home. We weren’t taking any chances.

Most of us sat up on deck that night and talked about home. I hit the sack early in the morning. Some of the others stayed topside and talked all through the night. I didn’t sleep well. I was so accustomed to pitching and rolling that the lack of motion disturbed me.

At 4 p.m. the next afternoon the cry echoed: “All hands to quarters.”

Sousa mustered the crew in three minutes flat. Not a man was missing.

“Stations for getting under way!” the order came.

I turned for a last look at Pearl Harbor, then I climbed down into the ship. The lines were pulled in; the sharp rat-tat-tat of our engines echoed across the harbor; we were escorted out by a destroyer; and after darkness fell, we set a straight course for San Francisco. We were heading home.