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

CHAPTER I This is the Seawolf

LET’S TAKE the Wolf the first time I saw her. She wasn’t any beauty then. They were just completing her at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She was covered with black scaffolding, workmen were climbing over her sides, and I felt low. You see, they were building the Wolf at Flatiron Pier on the Piscataqua River; and in the drydock, less than three hundred yards away, they’d brought in the ill-fated Squalus. For ten bad minutes before I set eyes on the Wolf, I watched them take the dead from the Squalus. I saw them carrying off the bodies of men I knew, lifeless bodies hidden under gray tarpaulins, carrying them over the gangplank on stretchers; and at the same time I heard the pneumatic hammers working on the hull of the Wolf, just out of sight around the river’s bend. I don’t get shaky easy, but, standing there, you couldn’t help think a little about life and death.

The Squalus, which hadn’t come up from a test dive, a floating tomb for so many men; and the Seawolf, all fresh and new and ready to go out and make a name for herself, as the Squalus had hoped to do…

When I finally got away from there and stood in front of the Wolf, I did my best to keep the Squalus out of my mind. Yard workmen were laying the Wolf’s teakwood decking, riveters were assembling her periscope shears, painters were daubing a thick black coat of paint on her sides, which swelled outward so gracefully at the waterline. Her heavy bronze bell was being rigged. Under the scaffolding I could make out her clean, trim lines. She was pretty.

Watching, thinking about it all, I couldn’t know then what lay before us—Cavite and the stench of Jap dead in the harbor of Manila; the looting of the Philippines; terror and split-second escapes from death in the shallow waters of the Lombok Straits; day and night raids on Jap shipping from Christmas Island to Corregidor; depth charges and depth charges and depth charges—many missions and 40,000 miles under the Pacific, and weeks on end without seeing the sun—well, nobody could have dreamed of anything like that, then. It was August 1939, and the newspapers that day were full of the threat of war.

I’d come to Portsmouth that morning from San Diego, where I’d been advanced in rank to radioman, first class, and transferred from the U.S.S. Plunger. Months earlier, in Pearl Harbor, I’d put in for the Seawolf when I learned she was being built, and they had told me that if I was selected, I’d sail under Lieutenant Commander Frederick Warder, of Grafton, West Virginia. He’d been in charge of outfitting the Wolf from the beginning. I learned now that he was laid up with a bad knee. Less than an hour after I’d seen the Wolf, I knocked at his door on the second floor of the hospital in the Navy Yard.

A soft voice with just the trace of a drawl said, “Come in,” and I walked in. He was in bed. I introduced myself. He looked up at me with the steadiest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. “Eckberg, eh?” he said. “Radioman?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I got in today. They told me you had a bad knee. I’ve just been transferred from the Plunger.”

“Good!” said Captain Warder heartily. “I’m glad to see you.”

I was to learn that “Good!” was his favorite expression. Had we sunk a Jap man-of-war? Good! Were we winning or losing? Good! If the first, we’ll do better still; if the second, we’ll come back twice as hard.

He struggled to sit up. I helped him. He was a small, trim man, almost schoolteacher-ish in appearance, but with authority in every gesture. He appeared to be four or five years older than I was—say about thirty-five. Firm lips, determined chin, piercing blue eyes under narrowed lids, smooth face. I’d learned about him. Graduate of Annapolis, 1925; graduate, M.S. in engineering, University of California, 1934; submarine engineer; married, father of four children—a competent citizen of the United States Navy.

“This knee of mine,” he began, and with an effort he swung about and sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s been bothering me ever since I slipped on the ice last winter.” He looked me up and down and suddenly began firing questions. “Have you seen the Wolf yet?”

“Just a little while ago, Captain,” I said.

“How do you like her?”

I told him. I liked her lines. She looked clean.

“She’s a damn fine boat!” he said, and that was that.

As for me, why had I been transferred? Had I asked for a new boat? Why? What sort of radio gear did I have on the Plunger? Was I familiar with this type and that? His questions were direct. As head radio and sound man on the Wolf, I’d be her eyes and ears under water. A submarine is blind below periscope depth, and her only contact with the world is by sound. She feels and gropes her way along the bottom of the sea, between shoals, over reefs—all by sound. She recognizes the enemy’s approach by sound and measures the success of her attacks by sound.

I answered his questions.

“Good!” he said finally, and gave me my first order. “Go down to the Seawolf and look around. Dig for information. You’ll have plenty of time. Learn that boat. Go there after the yard workmen knock off, and they won’t bother you. But learn that boat.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” I said. “I sure will.”

“Very well, Eckberg,” he said. He smiled. “I’ll be seeing you.”

In the Navy “Aye, aye” means “I have heard your order and will attend to it,” and “Very well” means “I have heard what you have said and acknowledge it.” We’d hit it off right, Captain Warder and I, at the very beginning.

That night, as we had supper in the dinette of the small furnished house we’d taken in Portsmouth, I told my wife, Marjorie, about it. Marjorie is blonde and slender and good-natured and blessed with common sense. She grew up in Chicago, met me when I was still a third-class radioman, and, in spite of the gloomy warnings of her friends and my own irresponsibility, married me. She liked music and she liked the sea. She was proud to be a Navy wife. In the five years of our marriage she had never complained of the haphazard life we’d led. But I knew the Squalus tragedy had hit her hard. She listened silently as I talked about the Wolf, and told her how impressed I was with the calm sureness and friendliness of my new skipper. She poured the coffee. “Is he married?” she asked.

I grinned. I knew Marjorie. Like all navy wives, she felt better if she knew her husband’s skipper was married and had a family waiting at home for him. They like to think that tends to make a captain keep both feet on the ground and not take needless risks.

“Yes,” I said. “Married and with four children, too.”

Marjorie looked out the window. Through that window, on a clear day, you could see Portsmouth Harbor. You could see the Isle of Shoals; you could see the submarines as they went out to sea and took their first dives. It was off the Isle of Shoals that the Squalus dived.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose that will give me more peace of mind. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the men on the Squalus. I want a husband that’s alive, Mel.”

The crew of the Wolf began to gather now—picked submarine men from all over the world, from San Diego and Mare Island, China and New London, Panama and Seattle—burly men, ham-fisted and barrel-chested; little wiry men who looked as though they’d jump at a noise but turned out to be made of cold-drawn steel; soft-looking men who could bake a cake or strangle a man; psalm-singers and book-lovers; swaggering lady-killers and men with ice-water in their veins; Jew and Gentile, Italian, Swede, Dane, German, Scotch, Irish, Pole—Americans who were to take over the Wolf with me and make her the great searaider she was, one of the greatest of all time. These are submarine men. They know how to keep their hands busy and their mouths shut. They’re tough-muscled and tough-minded. They size each other up quickly. A hearty clasp of the hand, a swift appraisal, a grin. “I was on the S-41.”—“Hell, no! Jesus, you must know my old buddy, Duke Briggs.”—“Know him? Why…” Hand clasps, old stories revived, new friendships made.

Most of us meet in the Submarine Barracks, Building 150, assigned to the Seawolf’s crew. Here, eight hours a day, we study blueprints of the Wolf. A submarine such as the Wolf needs a crew of 65—three complete crews each on an eight-hour shift, and specialists all. Officers, electricians, machinists, radiomen, firemen, signalmen, torpedomen, fire-controlmen, cooks, mess boys. The Wolf has to be our home, a battleship on the surface, a raider under the surface, able to hold her own against anything on the sea, below it or above it.

The men come in, their white canvas seabags over their shoulders, their grips in their hands. They ask, “Is this where the Seawolf bunks?”

We glance up from our blueprints. “This is it,” we say. We look them over carefully. They throw their bags down.

“Well, this is the place, then,” one says. “Any empty bunks? How about a locker?”

We’re the crew of the Seawolf. We learn who our officers will be. Executive and Navigation Officer, second in command, is Lieutenant William Nolin Deragon of Albany, New York, Annapolis ’34, a tall, rangy man with a long face etched with two sharp lines from nose to mouth, and deep-set eyes. He’s just come off the S-42. He’s completely nerveless, calm in the most dangerous situation. He will become “Willie” to Captain Warder. The phrase, “Now, Willie, what I want”—the Skipper’s usual preface to an order, whether it be to attack a Jap destroyer or to find a case of iced beer for the crew in some desolate tropical outpost—is to become a familiar one to us all.

Diving officer is Ensign, later Lieutenant, Richard Holden, of Rutland, Vermont, Annapolis ’37, handsome, black-haired, energetic, with a deep bass voice. He’s only twenty-four, but he already has the respect of his men. Communications Officer is Ensign James Mercer of White Plains, New York, a University of Michigan man, slim, aquiline-nosed, with thick black brows, retiring—everything a Navy officer should be. He’s a model to the crew, absolutely fearless. As Communications Officer he’s the Skipper’s right hand during an attack.

Day by day the rest of the crew gathers. Chief Torpedoman Robert (“Squeaky”) Langford, a thirty-five-year-old lanky Iowan with a high-pitched voice and a complete knowledge of a torpedo’s temperament; Ensign Burr Casler, Assistant Navigation Officer, whose jutting jaw and wiry thatch of hair make him look twice as pugnacious as he is; Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Frank Loaiza, “doctor” of the Wolf, a dark, handsome, nervous Puerto Rican who talks with his hands and will be forever hurrying through the boat to his cabinet in the after-battery, getting medicine for us—saline tablets, aspirins, laxatives. He’s “Pill-roller” and the “Quack” to us, but he takes our kidding good-naturedly.

I meet Chief Yeoman John Edward Sullivan, thirty-two, from New Jersey, a big, blond, ruddy-faced Irishman who is to be the Wolf’s chief clerk, keeping the files, the war diary, and all necessary data. Edward (“Pop”) Mocarsky—forty-three, with a few wisps of gray hair on top of his head, a sober, silent Pole from East Hartford, Connecticut, an old-school electrician whose “Mocarsky circuits” baffle any other electrician. Chief Torpedoman Edward Sousa, chief petty officer of the boat, who could rouse the dead with his booming voice; and Electrician’s Mate Hank Brengelman, a roly-poly German with pale blue eyes and a love for books; and Chief Machinist’s Mate Otis C. Dishman, at thirty-eight a legendary figure in the submarine service, a powerfully built man who looks vaguely like Orson Welles made up for a terrifying part, and whose tattoo designs—flowers, pretty girls, and rushing railroad trains speeding about his body—are equally famous among sub men.

These are the men of the Seawolf. We consider ourselves a damn fine crew. We know we’re different from other services of the armed forces. We differ from the crew of a Flying Fortress, for example, or a company of Marines, because we have no identity outside our submarines. We were not salesmen, clerks, factory employees, white-collar workers, transformed overnight into fighting men. Most of us have had no private life. Most of us went into the Navy as soon as we were old enough—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. With all due modesty we know we’re picked men, paid 50 percent more in our jobs than men in any other branch of the service, and that few of us will be in it actively after we’re forty—because it’s so tough. Most of us have been in submarine service for at least ten years. Most of us are married, with families. Submarines are our lives and our careers. We’ve never been interviewed by newspaper writers. We’ve never talked about what we’ve done.

We’d never thought there was much to talk about. But, then, we hadn’t been on the Seawolf. We hadn’t become part of a boat that was glory itself.

My first trip through the Wolf was unforgettable. I thought I knew submarines. I’d been on the boats for twelve years, since I was eighteen, when my brother Paul, quartermaster first class on a submarine, felt my biceps, punched me in the shoulder, and said, “Kid, why don’t you come into this outfit? We could use you.”

In twelve years I’d seen a lot of submarines, but the Wolf topped them all. More than 308 feet long, weighing 1,480 tons, built to make over 20 knots surface speed, air-conditioned and equipped with every modern device, she combined the best we knew in submarine construction.

I ducked into her conning tower and let myself down the narrow perpendicular steel ladder leading to the control room directly under it. I turned around—and whistled. I’d never seen so many instruments—dials, valves, gauges, controls—in one control room. The room was white, glistening white, and the instruments shone and gleamed. I almost swelled with pride as I stood there and drank it all in. Here was the glittering “Christmas Tree,” a small panel of green and red lights which gave the legend on every hatch of the Wolf, and whether it was open or closed. Here was the depth gauge, here the two tremendous wheels which operated the bow and stern planes, the fin-like projections on either side of the Wolf controlling her balance underwater; the high-pressure manifolds, which drive thousands of gallons of water out of her tanks to send her to the surface, or suck in a small flood to weight her down and send her deep; the helmsman’s wheel—all the magic-working buttons, wheels and levers of a modern submarine. In one corner was a head, or toilet, in its tiny compartment, one of the four on the ship; and in the opposite corner of the control room, set off in a compartment by itself, was the radio and sound room—my shack.

Here was my station. It was about six by eight feet, just enough room for three men, and dominated by my radio gear—sets of intricate apparatus that looked like the control board of a radio station, with a panel six feet high and four feet wide rising from the back of a glass-topped table. Behind me, as huge and fully as intricate, my sound gear. Above, and to the left, a shelf for reference books. Overhead, the wires and rows of cables and tubing that mark almost every inch of ceiling space in a submarine.

Seated at this table—my desk—I had before and behind me the last word in submarine radio and sound gear, an instrument of electrical echo-ranging and sonic devices so sensitive that when the Wolf was submerged I would be able to detect the beating of a ship’s screws when she was still far away. On the surface I’d switch from sound to radio, and send and receive with antenna strung topside.

I explored further. I squeezed through the oval bulkhead doorway—if you were over six feet tall you had to bend almost double to go through—and found myself in the narrow passageway leading to the forward torpedo room, in the bow. It was hardly wide enough for two men to squeeze by each other. As I went forward, here on the left was the chief petty officer’s stateroom; then the captain’s stateroom, with desk, depth gauge fitted into the wall, gyrocompass repeater, night-bell to call his messboys.

Next, the officers’ wardroom, where they ate, held conferences, played cards, lounged—scarcely as large as the dinette of a small apartment; and then a tiny pantry with a serving shelf opening into the wardroom. There’d always be a messboy here to turn out sandwiches and coffee for the officers, day and night.

On the opposite side of the passageway was the yeoman’s or ship’s office, with typewriter, stainless steel file, and cabinets; this would be Sully’s domain. Then came the engineering officer’s stateroom, to be shared by Holden and Mercer. Like a pullman compartment, it had two settees which could be turned into bunks at night. Then the executive officer’s stateroom—and then another head and a shower room. After this, the forward torpedo room. Directly ahead of me were the round brass doors of the four bow torpedo tubes. This forward torpedo room was a large room, at least fifty feet long by fifteen feet wide. Suspended on heavy chains from the ceiling, at least seven feet from the floor, were six bunks, three on either side. Under them were the torpedo racks, now empty, but later to be filled with the burnished bronze-steel torpedoes, two tons each, lying side by side in tiers.

In the center of the room four “jump” bunks—so called because men could jump out of them, dismantle them, and pull them out of the way in a minute or less. I looked this room over carefully.

A face bowl and a towel rack came out of the wall. Here were blowers, ventilators leading from our air-conditioning plant. Large, too. If the size of the blower pipes meant anything, there’d be a lot of air in this room. Well, I thought, I’ll try to get me a bunk here.

I retraced my steps. I ducked back down the passageway, through the control room again, and found myself in the afterpart of the Wolf. First, the after-battery compartment. Here most of the crew would live. The metal clothing lockers were already installed. I pushed on, through a doorway, and was in the mess hall.

Three tables were set, across the width of the boat, each with a rim to keep dishes from sliding off when the Wolf pitched. A bulletin board was already in place on one wall. I opened a door on my left. This was a small provisions room. I passed the refrigerator.

The next doorway I found on one side turned out to be the door to the galley. Four-coil electric stove, with two ovens; a huge coffee urn; a sink; a Mixmaster for pastries; pots and pans neatly packed into shelves; bins for coffee, flour, sugar—the whole thing no larger than a kitchenette, compact and efficient enough! I’d never know how sixty-five men could be served three meals a day, sandwiches and snacks and hot coffee and hot soup day and night—all from this little room.

Next to the galley was the scullery, where the mess cooks would grumble about their low station while doing dishes by the carload. Opposite the scullery, a wash and shower room—two showers, four face bowls, mirrors, lockers for soap and toothpaste. So far, so good. I ducked back further. Now I was in the forward engine room, then the aft engine room, both with their powerful Diesels, like some endless-cylindered motor of some thirtieth-century racing machine; then the after-torpedo room in the stern, a replica of the forward torpedo room. Toilet on the port side of the after engine room, shower on the starboard side. Compactness, utility, efficiency—that was the Seawolf.

For weeks we grew with the Wolf. Captain Warder, his knee better, joined us in Building 150 as we pored over blueprints. With the crew and workmen he crawled all over the Wolf as well. We were proud of our skipper; not every submarine crew could boast that their captain was also a submarine engineer who knew his boat from the keel up. Sometimes, at the end of the day, he came into Building 150 looking like a grease-pit mechanic, but there’d be the light of discovery in his eyes. He’d ask for a cup of coffee. There’d be a silence. He’d stir his coffee slowly. “Well,” he’d say, “I found out something new today.”

“What was that, Captain?” someone would ask.

“You know that fuel line running along the port side of the forward engine room?” he’d say. “It has a flange right at Number 105 bulkhead. I didn’t know that.” He’d sip his coffee thoughtfully. “That might come in useful someday.”

We thrashed over every pipe and line, every induction coil and bulkhead. Afternoons we spent studying the Wolf herself. We went into the ship, and we underwent “dry dives.” The lights would suddenly go out, leaving us in complete blackness; the command would ring out for each of us to take a new station. I might find myself at the Christmas Tree, in the radio shack, at a torpedo tube—anywhere. Each of us had to know as much as possible about every other man’s job. Every submarine man is a specialist, but he must be prepared to take over any other post at a moment’s notice, whether it be frying eggs or firing torpedoes.

We learned to take apart and put together practically everything but the hull of the Wolf. We had to draw thirty-four blueprints of her principal systems. By the time we completed our schoolwork we knew the anatomy of the Wolf as a surgeon knows the muscles and their insertions, the bones and their functions, the arteries and their positions.

We began to move into the submarine. The first thing I did was to paste a photograph of Marjorie on the panel of my sound gear, and fix another above my bunk, which turned out to be No.1 bunk, in the forward torpedo room—just where I wanted it. My locker was built into the bulkhead next to my bunk, and I packed away my clothing: four suits of blue dungarees; four changes of underwear, one set of gray wool, one heavy all-wool with double back and chest; a dozen pair of socks, six wool, six cotton; two pairs of black shoes; dress and undress blues; sandals; six hats (blue and white, and one warm blue knitted watch cap for cold nights on deck).

Throughout the ship my shipmates began to move in, too. Squeaky Langford came aboard with a miniature Chinese carved teakwood chest he’d picked up in Sing Tow. It was a good-luck charm, and in it he had his good conduct medal, a couple of old rings minus stones, and a broken watch. Men came aboard with their St. Christopher’s medals and crucifixes. There was a Bible or two. They came with their pipes and tobacco, their favorite magazines, batches of letters they wanted to show off, photographs, acey-deucy sets, dice, decks of cards. We married men pasted up snapshots of our families inside our locker doors. Neat green curtains were hung in the doorways of the officers’ staterooms. Life jackets and Momsen lungs were stowed into place in the bulkheads. Dishman showed up with a portable phonograph which he gave a place of honor on a workbench in the engine room. Books—Jack London’s sea stories, biographies, Zane Grey’s stories—began to fill the double bookshelf in the mess hall, which for no reason at all suddenly became “Kelly’s Pool Room.” Henry (“Short Pants”) Hershey—“Short Pants” because he was five feet four—a machinist’s mate and a wizard softball player, came in lugging a sackful of bats, balls, and mitts. We were making the Wolf our home.

On a cold February 15, with a chill wind blowing the waters of the bay white and black, Marjorie drove me into the yard and down to the dock. The Wolf was to go out on her first sea dive. Marjorie was to drive me down, then return. From our window she would look out on the entrance channel and lower harbor, and watch the Wolf go out, and go down. We rounded a turn, and the submarine came into sight. Black, shining black, in the cold morning sun, long, sleek, and black—a magnificent engine of destruction. She rode heavy in the water alongside the slate-colored drydock. There was tremendous activity topside, and a crowd of navy yard workmen and navy wives waiting to see us off. The deck force was scampering about, chopping the ice clear from our lines, and even in the distance the orders echoed crisp and clear. I made out Lieutenant Holden at once. He was standing well up on the bow, the wind whipping his heavy submarine coat. The flag was blowing at the stern. I got out of the car.

“Well, here goes, honey,” I said.

“Oh, Mel,” she said. I leaned down and kissed her. She turned the wheel sharply and drove off. I came aboard the Wolf as a voice boomed through a megaphone from the bridge: “Preparations for getting under way!”

There was a terrific roar from deep within the Wolf; then a series of sharp, ear-splitting reports, like a 20-mm. gun firing. Her powerful Diesels were turning over.

From the bridge, the same booming voice: “Stations for getting under way!”

The gangway was hauled in; the crew sprang to action.

“Take in No. 4!” came from the bridge. “Take in No. 4!” another voice echoed. The heavy two-inch lines were hauled in swiftly. They were brittle with ice, and they snapped and bit at the air as they were pulled in and fed hand over hand through a hatch into the after-torpedo room.

“Take in No. 3!” came the order, and “Take in No. 3!” came the echo.

The crew worked as one man; the Captain took his place on the bridge. As Line No. 1 was loosened and pulled in, the stationary colors were brought down, the running colors climbed up the mast. The Wolf was free of everything that held her to the land.

Her engines purred. Thick black smoke poured from the exhausts along the waterline.

The familiar odor of burned fuel oil came to me, and the old excitement swept over me. I hurried into the radio shack; I put on my earphones; the intercommunication system was switched on, and all through the Wolf’s compartments little grilled loud-speakers awoke and chattered. When the Captain went into the conning tower, not a whisper of his but echoed through the ship. We were all one family, all wrapped together in that extraordinary intimacy of men who go down to the sea in the sealed steel chambers of a submarine.

The good-byes rang out in the crisp air. The Wolf’s engines raced into a deafening roar. Slowly, stern first, streams of white water pouring from her sides and into the darker waters of the bay, she slid away from the dock and into the channel.

Engines thundering now, we cleared the outer harbor. We neared the Isle of Shoals, where the Squalus met her doom.

“Rig for dive.” Captain Warder’s order was almost casual.

“Rig for dive” ran tinnily through the boat. From stern to bow men leaped to their stations, spinning wheels, pulling controls, bracing themselves against valves. For a full ten minutes men investigated, inspected, tested, readying the Wolf for her dive.

Lieutenant Holden’s deep bass voice echoed through the intercommunications. “Main induction has been tested, bow and stern planes tested, safety flooded, sir.”

“Very well,” came Captain Warder’s voice. “Stand by to dive.”

“Stand by to dive,” echoed back.

Two sharp blasts of the diving alarm. Slowly, like some prehistoric aquatic monster, the Seawolf buried her nose in the water, and, moving ever forward, nudged her way deeper, deeper, until the waters closed over her and she vanished from sight.

We wasted no time putting the Wolf through her paces. Drill followed drill, dive followed dive. We had to anticipate every emergency. We assumed the Wolf was in a collision; that she had caught on fire; that she was being shelled; that her hull had been stove in; that she was being depth charged. In a practice dive off the Isle of Shoals, the drill order came: “Power gone on the bow and stern planes. Shift to hand.” We were assuming that our electrical power had suddenly gone, and that the boat had to be taken down by manual power alone. The bow- and stern-planes men instantly shifted to hand operation, maneuvering the planes by means of the huge wheels, each as wide as two men abreast. But within thirty seconds Dishman, on the bowplanes, shouted, “I can’t hold her!” Strongest man on the boat, his tremendous back muscles stood out and perspiration poured down his sides as he struggled with the wheel. The Wolf was knifing her way downward so swiftly that the water pressure made it impossible for him to shift the planes back. Two men leaped to his assistance. They couldn’t budge it. We were taking a terrific angle on the bow; the bowplanes were jammed at “hard dive,” and my chair began sliding forward. I clung to my desk. Captain Warder rushed down the control-room ladder.

“Blow No.1!” he ordered. The high-pressure air screamed into the tank, emptying it of water. Our eyes were glued to the depth gauge—90… 100… 150… 170 feet… We braced ourselves. We had only 230 feet of water here. The Squalus flashed through my mind. If we were to strike a rock ledge on the bottom…

Captain Warder, his eyes darting from the gauge to the men straining frantically at the wheel and back again, snapped: “Blow everything!”

We were emptying every tank we had!

Still the Wolf went down. 180 feet… 200 feet…

“All back, emergency!”

It was the order to reverse propellers—the last resort of a submarine captain. “All back, emergency!” echoed over the phones from the maneuvering space.

The Seawolf shuddered. Slowly she checked her descent. Slowly, as her propellers bit into the water and pulled the stern down, she came to an even keel. My chair began sliding back. But now the Wolf began to rise, faster and faster, until with terrific speed she popped out on the surface of the sea like a cork in a dishpan. Our eardrums clicked. Fog set in through the ship as the water in the air expanded in the lowered pressure. We peered hazily at each other.

“Open the hatch!”

The fresh air rushed in.

Someone said, “Christ, I was wondering if I was ever going to smell that filthy stuff again!”

We breathed deeply. We had been down far, and now we were up; and the Wolf was still as good as new.

The Wolf’s shakedown cruise—to shake down or shake out the bugs in her system—began April 12, 1940. From Portsmouth to Galveston, to Tampa, to Corpus Christi, to Cristobal, Canal Zone, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, to Annapolis, and back to Portsmouth again—a two-months trip to test her under every possible condition.

At the same time the crew was put to the test. We grew to know each other better, to learn each other’s habits of work.

Teamwork is the essence of a submarine, and only by endless and incessant practice through one maneuver to another can a crew acquire perfection, so that they can tumble out of their bunks and click into split-second precision almost the instant an alarm sounds. Each of us became letter-perfect in our stations. Before, in our training periods, we had learned to know the Wolf—every cubbyhole, every cable. Now we learned to mesh together.

Our stations, our duties, were as clear-cut as the assignments given a crack football team in a championship game. Life was the title we were fighting for, and death always lurked as the penalty for a man who wasn’t where he should be, for a man offside. We couldn’t afford to make mistakes, and officers and men moved, transferred, replaced each other, with clockwork regularity.

Lieutenant Holden, engineering officer, dove the boat and was in charge of all machinery. Ensign Mercer, communications officer, decoded messages, handled confidential publications, was ordered to guard with his life the Wolf’s secret U.S. Navy codebook.

Sousa, chief petty officer, was liaison man between officers and enlisted men. We learned that Ensign Casler was a poor cribbage player, but an expert navigation officer; that Dishman rarely failed in an emergency; that Sully had a knack for baking cakes; that Loaiza was always complaining that he was afraid and always proving the opposite. We grew to know Captain Warder, to learn how precise and accurate a technician he was, and how human.

One afternoon some of us were on the Cigarette Deck, the afterpart of the bridge, listening to a portable radio. We were sitting on wooden benches and lounging about, absorbing the sun.

Captain Warder climbed up from below. He was wearing shorts and undershirt and sandals.

“Hello, boys,” he said affably. And without further ado he began setting up exercises to the music. He stood there in the sun, unconcerned, arms up, arms down, bend, rise, one, two, three; one, two, three, in time to the music, giving himself the commands a little more breathlessly each time, until he was out of breath. We couldn’t help chuckling.

“Go ahead and laugh,” he said. “You’ll never see me with a bay window.”

After that, he went up on deck each afternoon when he could, and exercised. He knew how cruelly confinement can work on your body, making your legs weak, your feet swollen, your back aching, until a mile’s walk on land becomes torture.

Back in Portsmouth the Wolf received her post-shakedown overhauling. Errors in construction, defects in gears, leakages, were corrected. She was trimmed, tightened, tuned. In September we left for Newport, Rhode Island. There, for six weeks, day after day, we had extensive torpedo practice. The torpedo crews sent practice fish crashing into fictional destroyers. Nothing was overlooked. Then to New London, Connecticut, where we spent hours practicing escapes with Momsen lungs. The Wolf had proved herself; we had to prove ourselves. In peacetime, submarine crews are like boxers between bouts. They are forever in training. The fight may never come, but they train as if it were to come any moment. There are competitions and contests to keep them on their toes. Each submarine competes for records in engineering, gunnery, torpedo marksmanship, communications—every phase of submarine activity.

Marjorie had been expecting our first baby; and in April, shortly after I left with the Wolf on her shakedown cruise, Marjorie went to San Diego to rent a house, furnish it as our permanent home, and await the baby’s arrival. In New London I waited expectantly for word from San Diego. It came in October. I had no inkling of what it was when I took it, myself, in the radio shack. In Morse code a message came in. It was the Submarine Base, New London, calling the Seawolf. I answered, “Go ahead.”

Again the formal letters. And then, as I took down the words on my typewriter, the message spelled itself out:

I ripped the sheet out of my typewriter and bellowed, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!”

Heads popped. Somebody started hammering on a bulkhead.

“Where are the cigars?” a voice growled.

The hand of war reached out to touch us first on Friday, November 15, 1940. We were in San Diego, Marjorie, Spike—our five-weeks-old youngster, christened David—and the Seawolf.

The Wolf had come in on Wednesday from New London. We had all been granted a five-day leave, and for the first time in months Marjorie and I were enjoying a normal family life, now made more wonderful by Spike’s presence. About 10 a.m. on Friday the doorbell rang. It was Sully. He had his hat in his hand, and he looked uncomfortable.

“Eck,” he said, “you got to get back to the boat.”

“What!” I demanded. “We just got here!”

“I know,” he said. “But those are the orders. I’ve got instructions to round up everybody.”

I led the way into the living room. Marjorie was bathing Spike in the kitchen, and I could hear them cooing and laughing together. I left Sully sitting on the edge of the sofa, and I went into the kitchen, trying to think what to say. When I saw Marjorie and Spike together, so happy, I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

I said, “It’s Sully. It’s pay day, and I told them to let it ride; but I guess they want me back to pay me.”

She looked up, and I think she knew I wasn’t telling the truth.

She knew Sully wouldn’t have come all the way out to see me for that.

“All right,” she said. “Get back as soon as you can.”

Sully came into the kitchen, and, fast-thinking Irishman that he was, he knew what to do and say. He strode over to the bathenet and put his arm around Marjorie, and then tickled Spike under the chin.

“What are you trying to do?” he demanded, turning to me.

“You’re always telling me he has red hair. Why, it’s almost white.”

I left them talking together and went upstairs to put on my blues. I didn’t take my seabag along, so that I’d have reason to return and say good-by.

A few minutes after Sully and I reached the Wolf we were called to quarters. Lieutenant Deragon stepped up. He was a family man himself, with one child, and he knew what effect the news he was about to tell would have on us. He cleared his throat and said, “We’re leaving tomorrow. Destination unknown. I can’t tell you the hour. Now go ashore, conclude your business, and be aboard at 6:30 a.m.”

Marjorie and I did little that last night but sit around and ogle Spike. We couldn’t get our fill of him. We put him on the carpet, and he lay on his back gurgling. We watched him until he fell asleep out of sheer weariness. Then we put him to bed and began to pack. It was just as well that we kept him up so late. The next time I saw my son he was two and a half years old.

While we packed I began to feel homesick—the first time in my life that I was homesick before going off. The last thing I placed in my bag was Spike’s photograph. That would have a place of honor next to Marjorie’s on my radio gear.

We were up at 5 a.m. the next morning. It was raining. Marjorie insisted upon walking down to the streetcar stop with me.

Then I had a feeling, a powerful hunch that it would be a long, long time before I’d see her again. I had a sinking feeling that I would never see her again. I fought to shake it out of my mind.

“Keep your chin up,” I said. “I’ll write every chance I get. Watch out for Spike. Don’t let him know you’re worried.”

She managed a smile. “I’m not worried,” she said, lying to my face. “I’m not worried a bit. You can take care of yourself.”

I told her, “Why, you’ll probably be riding a transport out to Pearl in a few weeks, and I’ll see you there before you know it.”

For some reason, we assumed we were going to Pearl Harbor.

And, waiting there in the rain, we both lied to each other. We talked about what I would do as soon as I got to Pearl. I’d look for a nice house. Five rooms would do. We talked about how much rent we could afford to pay—we settled on $35 a month, furnished.

The streetcar came. I said, “Well, I’ll be seeing you, honey.”

Her last words were, “I’ve got my fingers crossed, darling.”

Then she began to cry. “Now, now,” I said, awkwardly, and got into the car. I had a small handbag. The streetcar was empty except for one old man, probably a night watchman on his dreary way home, and I sat in the rumbling car, saying to myself, “I wonder when I’ll be riding a San Diego streetcar again. I think I’m headed for places I’ve never seen before.”

We shoved off that Saturday morning, November 16. Five days later we arrived at Pearl Harbor. There was nothing there then, a year before the Japanese attack, to indicate that this bustling U.S. naval base, more than 2,000 miles from San Francisco, would be marked for the first blow in the greatest war in history.

We were there only briefly, and we picked up two new members of the crew. I was in the control room when a thin, hollow-cheeked, dark-faced fellow, with dark eyes and a sardonic grin on his lips, climbed down. He was wearing dungarees and smoking one of the largest and smelliest corncob pipes I’d ever seen or suffered with.

“You on here?” I asked.

He nodded. “Just came aboard,” he said. He looked around critically. “Damn nice boat,” he said.

“You know, we’re only here for a little while,” I said. “We’re due out fast.”

He grinned a crooked grin I was to know and like after a while.

“I think I know where we’re going,” he said, “and that’s where I want to go. I’m too close to the States now. My name’s Zirkle.”

I introduced myself. “Well, where are we headed?”

“West, buddy, west—Asiatic stations,” he said mysteriously, and ducked aft to the mess room. That was my first introduction to the official pessimist of the Wolf and the loneliest man aboard. Zirk never talked about it, but the story was that he had a Chinese wife and children trapped somewhere in occupied China.

Later in the day, as I was bent over my radio reports, a dapper young fellow stuck his head in. “Eckberg here?” he asked.

“That’s me,” I said.

He stuck out his hand. “I’m your new radioman,” he said. “My name’s Paul Maley.”

He was replacing a man who had been advanced in rank and transferred to another ship. He was small and dark, with a determined chin, a wide mouth, a long thin nose, and, for a man, the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen.

“O.K.,” I said. “Do you know anything about this gear?”

He looked it over. “I’m not so hot,” he admitted. He was about twenty-three, and I liked him at once. “But I can learn,” he added.

“It certainly is a clean and snug-looking shack you have here.”

I thought it was, too. It had been painted and decorated since the first time I’d walked through the Wolf. The antenna systems, the direction-finder apparatus, the entire interior, ceiling and bulkheads, were painted white. But there was color, too. Beside my chair we had a small stool, part wastepaper basket, about a foot high, with a bright green leather cushion. I had a black typewriter resting in the well of my glass-covered desk. To set off the desk, I’d put some bright blue blotting paper under the glass.

Green linoleum had been laid on the deck. All in all, with Marjorie’s and Spike’s photographs high on the panel, and the radio and technical books on the bookshelf, it was a cozy little room.

“This is a good ship,” I said. “She’s not thoroughly clean yet, but that’s not the crew’s fault. We’re all working to make her pretty and pretty she’ll be. She’s going to be a real showboat. Come on, I’ll show you where your bunk is.” I took him into the forward torpedo room and showed him his bunk facing mine.

“O.K., Eck,” he said, and that was the way it has always been between us—calm, easy, friendly, like two brothers. Maley and I worked side by side. During attacks it would be Paul’s duty to keep a lookout for enemy ships while I concentrated on the target.

The crew of the Wolf had a special job in Pearl Harbor. We washed our clothes when we found the time and pressed our dress uniforms—whites and blues—on the mess hall tables with a small electric iron which we’d all chipped in to buy. The problem of what to do with soiled clothes, with long trips ahead of us, had to be solved. Sully had an inspiration.

“What we need is a washing machine, an electric one like I’ve got home.”

We appointed a committee which called on the skipper. He said, “That’s a damn fine idea. Go ahead.”

We had a bank aboard the Wolf, called the Seawolf’s Slush Fund. If you were short of money and were going on liberty, you borrowed from the bank against your next pay day. You repaid with interest. Ten dollars cost you eleven dollars. Miss one payment, and you were taxed an additional dollar. This, with accumulated interest, was more than enough to pay for the washing machine.

Sully, as the moving spirit, and Mr. Deragon, representing the officers, went out to buy it. They walked into the biggest department store and, once inside, got into an argument as to which was married longer. The oldest husband in point of service should have the privilege of selecting the machine. As usual, Sully, who’d married at twenty-two, won the argument. He picked the machine—a gleaming white enameled beauty, big and round and perfect. It was delivered by ship’s boat. Getting it down the hatch was a work of art. The entire ship’s crew acted as sidewalk superintendents. When we finally squeezed it in, we didn’t know where to place it. A submarine is built for efficiency, and there isn’t any waste space. It could go into the washroom, but then there wouldn’t be any room for anyone to get in and wash.

Sully said, “The hell with that. We’ll change the washroom.”

With that he set to work tearing down the hand-and-face bowls in the washroom in the mess hall, as well as mirrors, soap dishes, and towel racks. The auxiliary gang worked on this special assignment of love for three days, moving them all to the forward bulkhead of the washroom. Everyone, including the officers, took a hand helping them. One shower room was not much use anyway, since it was loaded up with soap powder and salt-water soap for Gus Wright and the mess cooks, and nobody used it because it was too much trouble to move out the stuff and then put it back again. We placed the washing machine in front of the shower, and there it stayed.

We christened it Baby, and she was one of the real heroes of the Wolf—actually, the only heroine aboard. She took all kinds of punishment without grumbling. She was coddled, she was cussed, she was depth charged, she was damned—and she was loved. She was not always innocent. Sometimes she developed a temper, sometimes she was impatient, and sometimes she was as unpredictable as a woman. There was the afternoon I spent a good part of an hour sewing three buttons on a pair of shorts. Baby made short shrift of my work—probably sheer feminine jealousy. When I took them out, they were minus the buttons. I must have stood there and cussed her for five minutes. But from then on Baby was our sewing critic. If she didn’t rip off the buttons, you’d done a good job.

Before long the fore and aft part of the ship—the mechanics, or “Winton Wizards,” and the deck force, or “Deck Apes,” who were always competing against each other in baseball and liberty parties, were feuding about who could use Baby, and when, and why a clean machine like her had to take grease-stained dungarees in the first place.

Our second day at Pearl Harbor, Maley and I returned from town to find electricians spiking the Wolf’s batteries. I’d heard of this, but I’d never seen it before. It’s an emergency measure to increase the speed and power of the boat, but at the expense of the battery’s length of life. Since a submarine moves on battery power when it’s submerged, only an emergency would compel the skipper to shorten the life of his batteries.

“This doesn’t look so good,” I said to Paul. “We’re heading for trouble, sure.”

The third day we took torpedoes aboard—not exercise torpedoes, but warheads. They went into place under my bunk.

There could be only one reason why we were getting war shots ready. That was to sink somebody. On the fifth night we pulled away from Pearl Harbor.

Now, for all practical purposes, we were on war service. The official declaration of war was still a year away, but our High Command was on the alert. We traveled with darkened ship; night lookouts were posted, four at a time, each to sweep one-fourth of the sea with powerful night glasses. We trained constantly; we were ready. The blow would come soon, no one knew when—but the Seawolf was ready.