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

CHAPTER VI Fire One!… Fire Two!

“TAKE IN all lines.” Captain Warder’s voice rang out in the darkness. The great Dutch port of Surabaya lay about us in a half-circle, blacked out against the enemy.

“All back one-third!”

The U.S.S. Seawolf trembled as she backed into the harbor.

We turned around until we were headed due north. Heavy with fuel and food and torpedoes, we began snaking our way through the mine-filled waters on our fifth mission of the war, once again charged with unrestricted submarine warfare—to sink and destroy enemy shipping wherever encountered. It was still early in 1942; the Japanese juggernaut, triumphantly crushing all resistance, was roaring southward with growing fury; and the Seawolf, done at last with assignments as transport and ferry, was on her way to glory. We had aboard a Dutch pilot who knew every inch of these waters, the position of every mine. By his side on the bridge stood Captain Warder, and together they peered through the darkness as we moved forward, gliding past the dark shapes of wharves and jetties with their cranes grotesque against the purple sky. Above the steady purring of the Wolf’s Diesels came the sharp chug! chug! of a motor. The Wolf came to a halt, riding in a mirror-smooth sea; a flurry of conversation on the bridge, and the pilot, with a wave of his hand, climbed over. The Wolf moved on, alone.

Our bow was pointed for Macassar Straits, between Borneo and the Celebes. The Dutch were fighting a desperate delaying action, aided by Flying Fortresses operating from secret bases in Java, against the Japs who had to cross Macassar Straits to get to the rich oil wells of Borneo. At midnight of the second day I received a short coded dispatch which was rushed to the Skipper. A few minutes later the Wolf veered sharply to the right, reversed her course, and, working up to full power, raced back the way she came. The news spread swiftly. We were going to Lombok Straits, a narrow passage between Lombok and the island of Bali, 120 miles southeast of Surabaya. The Japs’ southward push to gain that great semicircular chain of islands, Java, Bali, Lombok, Flores, and Timor, which alone stood between the Japs and Australia, had gained such momentum that they had already overrun the Celebes Sea area, our original destination. Now our job was to get to the Lombok Straits and impede that southward avalanche. At any other time we might have been excited about skirting the coast of romantic Bali, but now the Wolf’s crew was all business. The Japs were cleaning up; no one could stop them. How swiftly they were coming down we learned with shocking suddenness that night when radio frequency told us Singapore had fallen. The Japs had taken it the very day we left Surabaya. There were grim faces aboard the Wolf. Singapore gone? That had been a symbol of might and resistance before any of us had been born. The picture of Japanese strategy—hedgehopping island by island—became clearer, and so did the part we were to play. The Japs wanted Java; their aim was to smash the Dutch defenses protecting Bali which would be one of their stepping-stones to Surabaya. From Sumatra they would cross the Sunda Straits eastward; from Bali they would cross westward, and from Borneo and the Celebes southward; and with an endless supply of men and matériel, they would launch a triumphant blow against Java, heart of the barrier. Once Java was theirs, Surabaya with its invaluable harbor, its magnificent naval installations, its inexhaustible riches, would be in their hands.

Captain Warder sent the Wolf plunging forward with every ounce of power we could muster. Twenty-four hours later found us at the entrance of the Lombok Straits, struggling in some of the most dangerous and unpredictable water currents in the world. We dove at daylight, and through the long hours the Wolf fought to maintain her course submerged. Depth control and navigation were extremely difficult. Every inch was a battle. The waters were shallow, and vicious cross currents made them treacherous. Sometimes we moved for six hours in one direction, only to learn that we had not gained a foot, actually, but had even been forced backward. The crew was tense. No matter how dangerous surface waters may be, there are always guides—sun, stars, shore points—by which you can set your course. But under the sea everything must depend upon the navigator and his estimate of the ship’s position, and upon what sound tells him: how far, how fast, and in what direction the underwater currents may be taking the ship off her course.

As we laboriously maneuvered with Bali on our left and Lombok on our right, we heard more news. None of it was good.

Now the Japs were bringing their offensive to pinpoint focus. They were concentrating a tremendous force on one assault, to take the Bali airfield. They might even attempt a landing on Bali, under our nose. Captain Warder picked the most logical place for the Nips to attempt such a landing, and we kept that under close observation. A British submarine, we learned, was posted at the northern entrance of the straits. One of our older S submarines was assigned to the central area; and we were given the southern entrance. We patrolled carefully, day and night, awaiting the Japs. Then came a message from the High Command: urgent orders must pull the S boat elsewhere and we’d have to take over her area. Now our job was doubled. We lengthened our patrol. During the day the Wolf was alert within the straits, covering every point she could; at dusk she stole out through the southern entrance, surfaced, charged batteries, and ran the patrol back and forth in front of the entrance.

On the seventh night came another urgent message: the Jap force had been sighted. An armada of Jap men-of-war and transports was racing full speed for the Lombok Straits. The Seawolf was ordered to meet it head on. We halted our battery charge and at terrific speed knifed our way on the surface northward for the straits, plunged into them, and did not ease our Diesels until the dull mass of Nusa Besar, a small island in the middle of the channel, came into sight. We waited, watched, waited…

“Something one point on the starboard bow, sir!” It was the bow lookout. The time was 2 a.m.

“Clear the bridge! Stand by to dive!”

Wang! went the klaxon horn signal. Men tumbled down the ladder, the hatch was swiggled tight, we crash dived and leveled off.

Now, on sound, I heard pinging all around. We’d gotten into a hornet’s nest, all right. We didn’t realize it then, but we had penetrated through the outer screen of Japanese destroyers—their first defense, specifically set up to intercept any enemy force—and were in the middle of the Jap task force.

Captain Warder upped his periscope carefully. “It’s pitch black up here,” he said. “I can’t see a damn thing… not a damn thing.”

But in the sound shack, phones pressed against my ears, I heard the chorus of beating screws. Maley, who’d been dozing just before the diving alarm sounded, joined me. His long nose seemed even longer.

“Jesus,” he said soberly, “I hear we’re really in it.”

“You’re not kidding,” I said. “We’ve got a whole nest of them up there.”

He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. “I understand from the talk that we’re heading right in,” he said, staring at the red tip of his cigarette. “The old man’s waiting until it comes light so he can see what he’s doing. He’s not interested in these destroyers, anyway. He wants the troop ships.”

Overhead the Jap screws churned the sea. Their sound came down through the water and penetrated the ship’s hull. Everyone heard it.

Maley inhaled deeply. The subdued light of the radio shack etched the hollows under his cheekbones. “It’s going to be a long day,” he said.

I said, “Yes, it looks like we’re going to have quite a time.”

Maley puffed again, suddenly ground out his cigarette, stood up impatiently, pulled at his ear, and wanted to know if I didn’t want coffee. “I’ll take over for a while,” he said.

I looked at my watch: 5 a.m. I still had three hours to go. I recognized Paul’s symptoms. He wanted to sit down and hear for himself. He wanted to size things up himself.

“Okay,” I said. I gave him the phones and ambled aft into the mess hall. Half a dozen men were there, sipping coffee and complaining about it. The coffee was the first made from a batch of Javanese coffee we’d taken on at Surabaya, and though we knew it was supposed to be the best coffee in the world, we didn’t like it. We thought it reeked.

“What we got up there?” someone asked. “Does it look like we’re going to get it, Eck?”

I shrugged my shoulders. No use kidding ourselves. “The way I get it,” I said, “we’re in a whole damn swarm of ships. We got four or five Nip destroyers rushing around up there.”

I was certain that eight or ten more were patrolling the entrance of the straits. We were in here tight, all right. I took my coffee back into the sound shack.

Maley gave me the phones with a tired smile. “They don’t sound like they’d want to play games up there,” he said. Then he went off to finish sleeping. At dawn the Skipper brought us up to periscope depth. He scanned the sea. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “What do you think of that? Down periscope.” Then, to Ensign Mercer: “Jim, there’s nothing up there now. Nothing at all. Let me see those charts.” It was evident that the destroyers had spread out and were running an entrance patrol, completely unaware that we were already inside. I was right. We were locked in the straits.

Silence for a moment, then Captain Warder’s voice again: “We dove at this point, didn’t we? We’ve been making one-third. That means we should be in here somewhere.”

“That’s right, sir,” came Mercer’s voice.

“Up periscope,” said the Captain. “Dammit… dammit if I don’t think I’m lost. I can’t spot Nusa Besar. I see some land over there, but I don’t know where it is on the chart. Do you suppose this current has thrown us off again?… Hmmmmm… Well, we’re bound to run into them if we continue up the straits. We certainly can’t miss them. There’s too many.”

We moved on slowly, hour after hour. We were moving north in the straits, but we did not know our exact position. The Skipper took frequent periscope observations.

“Aha,” he said, some minutes later. “I see the masts of several big ships. They’re close to the beach. They’re probably where we thought they were, over near that Bali airfield. They look as if they’re at anchor. Now, Jim… if that’s the airfield, mark my bearing.” He estimated the distance. “Range, 16,000 yards.” Then: “Now we ought to get an idea where we are. Don’t sound battle stations yet. I want to get this navigational problem fixed up before I attack. I’ve got to make sure of what I’m getting into here, and I’ve got to find a way out.”

Minutes passed. The Skipper and Mercer were working at the plotting table. This was a damn important operation for the Wolf. If we could stop the Japs from landing on Bali, we could throw them off their timetable and delay their entire East Indies invasion. At this very moment the United Nations were pouring troops and munitions into the vital ports of Moresby and Darwin, building them up as supply bases. Every hour counted.

“All right!” Captain Warder sounded satisfied. “We’ll get on the course to close with them. Tell the crew to stand easy. It’ll be quite a while yet before we get in to where I’m going to fire.”

We maneuvered slowly. We knew we were in treacherous waters and going into still more dangerous ones. Over my phones I heard the roar of shallow water eddying and swirling around the high coral shoals. The Wolf was weaving her way with infinite care through a subterranean maze of jagged, razor-sharp reefs, any one of which could rip her hull from stern to stern. The slightest error in navigation would be fatal for all of us. My watch showed a few minutes after 7 a.m. Gus Wright, battle telephones on his ears, was in the after-battery compartment, ready to pass on all orders from the conning tower. We were ready to leap into action. We glided forward smoothly. Suddenly the Wolf lurched. The lights flickered. I was thrown off my stool. There was a grinding, grating noise.

“We’re aground!” someone shouted.

It echoed thinly through the ship.

Captain Warder’s voice said: “All back emergency!”

The Wolf shuddered. We heard the grating noise again forward on the keel. Suddenly we were free. Down below we began breathing again.

“Well, Jim,” said Captain Warder conversationally, “I guess we just won’t go in that way. We’ll have to find some other way in here.”

We reversed our course. We inched backward. Suddenly, another lurch, a jar, and the Wolf was stuck again, this time at periscope depth. Ten full minutes the Skipper made use of all the tactics he knew for such an emergency. No one did much talking. We were in a hell of a spot. We were trapped, we were lost, and above us prowled Jap warships loaded with depth charges.

Captain Warder, at the control-room periscope, scanned the sea. The sun was shining, the day was bright. He could see the ships he wanted to attack, and he couldn’t get at them. “I can’t keep this up,” he said. “I’ll hurt her. She’s going to get damaged. There are ships in there, and I’ve got to get them.” He stepped back from the periscope. “Surface!” he snapped, and shinnied up the control-room ladder like a monkey.

Sitting in the sound shack, I felt my stomach turn over. I went ice cold. For the first time in my life I think I knew absolute, craven fear. Here it was bright daylight, and Captain Warder was bringing us up in the middle of a Jap task force that could blow us to bits with a single salvo.

The Wolf broke water. The hatch sprang open. The Captain raced to the bridge. I waited instinctively for the first shells to scream over.

Captain Warder’s voice came down evenly: “Put two main engines on propulsion. Put two on quick battery charge.” Then: “Send raincoats to the bridge.”

Nothing made sense any more, and then all at once it did. As we surfaced, a tropical squall had struck us, as though in the Wolf’s extremity someone had cast a huge gray blanket over us, shielding us from the Japs. “An act of God,” Captain Warder called it later. Dangerous as the surfacing appeared to us below, the Skipper was correct in his analysis of what had to be done. If we continued underwater, we might be caught on the coral reefs. Far better to risk getting out of these dangerous waters, with the chance of fighting it out on the surface, than to be set up like a sitting duck on a rock for the Japs.

We ran toward deeper water on the two engines, full speed, for about half an hour, and then we dove. It was our eleventh night out of Surabaya. As soon as we leveled off, I began searching for ships. Something was wrong. The familiar background of water noises was missing. The number two projector was dead. It must have snapped off the end of the second sound shaft when we ran aground. Now the Wolf was crippled in sound, badly crippled. There was nothing we could do to fix it. Now sound had only one projector with which to search and find the enemy, look out for other ships, and trace the trail of our torpedoes. I reported it to the Captain.

“Carry on the best you can, Eckberg,” he said.

We moved in toward the beach. It was now 11 a.m. Captain Warder upped periscope. He saw three big transports jammed with Jap troops. He kept up a running report: “A destroyer over there… That bastard is firing… He’s firing his main batteries. There they go—I can see the burst and flame and smoke…. Is he firing at me? He’s firing in this direction, all right…. Hell, he can’t see this periscope!… Ohhhh. They’re firing their anti-aircraft! There’s something up there…. Well, that’s fine!” He chuckled. “That takes the pressure right off us. Now we can really sneak in.” Pause. “There’s some Jap Zeros there, too, dammit.”

We closed with the transports. We reached a point where the water was so shallow we could go no farther at periscope depth. Captain Warder ordered the Wolf swung about so that he could fire from the stern tubes and be headed out at the same time for a swift escape.

“Stand by!” came from the conning tower. Captain Warder coached Rudy at the helm. “Right a little… Left a little… Steady… steady… steady… steady…” This was a long-range shot. It had to be right. “Fire six!” A pause. “Fire seven!” A pause. “Fire eight!”

I picked up the torpedoes as they went.

“They’re running hot, Captain,” I reported. “I can hear them—”

“Yes, they’re running straight, too, Eckberg,” came Captain Warder’s soft voice. “I’m watching them.”

A minute later: “Oh, hell! Down periscope. Rig for depth-charge attack!”

This was the first time the Skipper had uttered those words.

My first reaction was simple curiosity. My pulses were beating at my temples, but through my mind ran the thought, Here they come. I’m really going to get it this time. I wonder how I’m going to act. Am I going to be the screaming, raving type? Or am I going to be just another guy getting depth-charged? Was I—

Captain Warder, slow and deliberate, broke in: “Now, Eckberg, here comes a destroyer. We are going to get hell. I want you to pick up those propellers, and I want you to give me bearings. Give me all the information you can in regard to this ship.”

Under his words I heard three distant muffled explosions. Our fish had hit home. I answered him, surprised at my calm voice: “I sure will, Captain. I’ve got him now. I’ve got his screws. They’re bearing one six zero, they’re fast, and they’re getting louder.” The whish-sh… whish-sh… whish-sh of the destroyers’ screws was clear in my phones.

“Good!” said the Captain.

“He’s coming portside, Captain, he’s coming fast.”

“Very well, Eckberg. Keep talking.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Now every moving thing in the Wolf—every bit of machinery, every source of sound—was turned off. The air-conditioning machinery was switched off, lest its sound betray us. The whir of the fans ceased. The blowers stopped. The hydraulic pump jarred to a halt. The whine of the electric generators died away. The men took off their sandals lest a footfall betray us. In the galley the mess cooks silently shifted pots and pans from the stove to the floor, lest an accidental push send them clattering down.

Throughout the ship the buzz of conversation stopped. We waited. The heat began to increase. The Wolf was as silent as a tomb save for the low grind of my sound controls as I spun dials, worked my wheels frantically to keep the Jap clear in my phones. Now he was 5,000 yards away. I must know where he was every second and where he would be. The perspiration began to roll off me. It seemed as though someone was pouring water down my back. Four thousand yards… three thousand… two thousand… one thousand… The temperature within the Wolf was at least 110 degrees… five hundred yards… I began to say, “Bearing two five five,” but I never pronounced the second five. The first depth charge exploded. Everything suddenly turned upside down. It was the loudest sound I had yet heard. It was as solid as a blow on the skull, it was like a thunderclap between my ears. I found myself on the floor, my stool upturned. Maley was on the floor beside me, scrambling to his feet. We were in a snowstorm—paint chippings and cork from the bulkheads filled the air. The photographs of Marjorie and Spike tumbled down on me. The books on the shelf fell to the floor. Paint flew off corners. Overhead, electric bulbs shattered in their sockets. The lights flickered off, then on again. The wall opposite me billowed in toward me; the force of the concussion was so great it had contracted the Wolf’s hull like a rubber ball. It was as though a gigantic hand had reached under the sea, grabbed the Wolf about the middle, and shaken her.

I was sitting in a puddle of my own perspiration, one hand flung back to break my fall. I tried to get up. I reached forward to grab my bearing-control lever, and an electric shock jarred me from head to toe. I was grounded in my own sweat. I tingled to my fingertips. And all the time from that terrific explosion it seemed that somewhere, deep in my skull, behind my eyes, my brain pan jangled like a struck bell.

All this could have taken only a few seconds. As from a great distance I heard Captain Warder’s voice, asking insistently, “Where is he now, Eckberg? Where is he now?”

I put my hands to my phones to adjust them and found them over my temples. I pushed the left phone over my ear—and another charge exploded. This was even closer than the first, right off the beam of the ship. I can hear today only because the phones were not on my ears. The Wolf lurched sharply. There was no screaming, no panic. I listened hard, balanced on the edge of the stool, and I caught the Jap screws again. He had passed our beam. He was going up our port side. He was driving up on the bow. I managed to call out his bearing.

“Good work, Eckberg,” said the intercom. “Keep it up. Good work.”

A moment later Captain Warder’s voice came to me again, surprisingly clear. He had abandoned the conning tower and taken a stool in the control room just outside my shack. The conning tower had been sealed off. Now we could see each other if he leaned to the left and I to the right. Here he could talk directly to me, and from here he could control the Wolf’s activities.

A third depth charge landed. It wasn’t as close. I could hear the Jap’s propellers through it. Now more charges, each a little farther away. I was shouting bearings, and Captain Warder was snapping orders.

Our depth gauge had to tell us much. If a charge exploded above us, it drove us down. If the gauge showed eighty feet and a moment later one hundred feet, the charge had exploded above us. If we bounced up, it had exploded under us. The Jap was trying to land them so close that the concussion would rip open the Wolf’s seams. If he managed to explode one directly under us, we’d ride the bubble of air right to the surface, where he could finish us off with his deck guns.

“She’s gone away, Captain,” I finally announced.

The Skipper passed a hand over his forehead. He clenched and unclenched his left hand. “Dick,” he said, “pass the word. Have the mess cooks run coffee through the ship for all hands.”

Lieutenant Holden gave the word, and Gus Wright, undisturbed as always, came through with, “Who wants a cup of mud? Come and get it!”

We gulped down our coffee. And then the entire crew began digging into corners looking for leaks. Zerk and Dishman and Snyder were crawling about in grease and slime, and Zerk came crawling out of a corner with a grin to announce, “Well, she held together down here, anyway.”

Dishman, who had No. 1 engine, would take no one’s word that she was all right. He swarmed around her like a mother hen looking out for her brood, inspecting every nut and bolt, feeling, listening, watching.

Still submerged, we ran for the southern exit of the straits. We thought we had sunk two ships. We knew the Wolf had been hurt by the depth charges—probably not badly, but a few air and water lines had sprung small leaks, according to the report from the men crawling about. We wanted to reach the open sea to surface and recharge batteries, to examine the Wolf’s injuries, and to send a report to the High Command of what we had done.

We dared not use our transmitter in the straits because the Japs could put direction finders on us. Out at sea, by the time they determined where we were sending from, we’d be away from there with all the ocean to hide in. We remained down until well after dark. Jap planes were still in the area and probably working frantically to spot us. I maintained a continuous watch and heard no propellers over a two-hour period. Captain Warder took frequent periscope observations and reported nothing in sight. But we took no chances. These waters were phosphorescent. A submarine left a white wake easily seen from the air. Not until 9 p.m. did we rise slowly to the surface.

Now we worked hard. Our auxiliary gang under Zerk toiled all night repairing the leaks. I sent off my dispatch reporting our action and the damage incurred. We recharged batteries. Then we turned in our tracks and headed back full speed for Lombok Straits. We weren’t finished with the Japs by a long shot. This time the Skipper chose a new route, to protect himself against a possible ambush. Instead of proceeding around the left side of Nusa Besar, as before, he came around the right, and then the Wolf dove directly in front of the island. We spent from dawn until noon fighting the currents to get into a position to attack the Japs if they were still where we’d seen them the day before.

Captain Warder peered through the periscope. Nothing. No ships in sight. We scanned the sea endlessly all that day and found no trace of the Japs. Later we learned that they failed to make that landing on Bali that day and the Wolf was credited with having repelled it. We patrolled for two days in and out of the straits. We heard the Japanese version of what we’d done off Bali the second night when we tuned in Radio Tokyo. The English voice was contemptuous:

“Our fleet has again shown its superiority over the Allied submarines.” (Snickers from us.) “In a recent landing on the Island of Bali”—(More snickers)—“our forces ran into a nest of Allied submarines. The advantages went to our fleet forces. We destroyed—”

“By Christ,” exclaimed Sousa, “we’re a whole nest of them, you know that?”

“—several of the enemy and not one of his submarines was able to accomplish a successful attack. This type of warfare is becoming more and more successful. It will not be long until we have eliminated the last Allied submarine from Pacific waters.”

Zerk commented, “Well, probably they have sunk a lot of our boats we don’t know about.”

Sousa glared at him. Lieutenant Deragon said, “You see the kind of fairy tales they’re putting out? How are they going to win the war by putting out stuff like that for home consumption?”

John Street, with his score card, just grinned.

After that depth charging, the crew of the Wolf seemed more closely knit together than before. Maley and I particularly seemed to hit it off well. Even though one of the sound shafts was out of commission, neither of us felt at ease in action after that unless we both were in the shack.

Now we patrolled constantly. We had several uneventful days. We remained submerged during the daylight hours, surfaced at night, recharged batteries, then waited for dawn, hoping each day would bring us a target. One night a message came for us to keep out of the straits from dusk until dawn. A Dutch raiding party of cruisers and destroyers was coming through. The following night, lying off the straits in the position assigned to us, we had a box seat for the show. Frank Franz, bridge lookout at the time, told me later that he saw flashes of gunfire and the flare of bursting shells. Apparently our Dutch friends met a Jap raiding party in the middle of the night and sank four or five Jap ships.

A little later another urgent dispatch: a Jap convoy had been sighted, was on such and such a course.

When the convoy struck the center of the straits we were there, waiting. Captain Warder again determined the point where he thought the Japs would attempt to land. We waited for the false dawn, when a submarine commander has good visibility, but it is difficult to detect his periscope a few inches above the water.

The Wolf dove at 4:30 a.m. We hadn’t sighted the convoy yet. It was a moonless night. As soon as we got down and leveled off, however, I heard the familiar ping!… ping!… ping! There they were! On the alert.

Now Captain Warder exhibited the most skillful maneuvering I’ve ever seen. By sound we were able to determine that eight ships were coming toward us, four in single file and two each on either side as escorts. Obviously, the four in single file were troop transports; their screws labored through the water. The other four were destroyers. Their screws beat with a cleaner, quicker beat. By sound alone Captain Warder maneuvered the Wolf to a point he sought between the two leading transports. In that position he could fire all of our torpedoes in rapid succession and with maximum damage to the enemy. It was as clear-cut as a problem in geometry.

“Yes, here they are!” Captain Warder announced at the periscope. “This is a real landing force. They’ve probably got them packed in there like sardines… Are the tubes ready?”

The word came back: “All tubes ready, sir.”

The Wolf waited.

“Stand by… Fire!”

Now, in order, the Wolf sent torpedoes crashing into the two leading transports. Without waiting for the result, the Skipper swung his periscope around, got the first destroyer in the cross-hairs of the object glass, and barked: “Fire!”

A series of explosions shook the Wolf as our fish crashed into the three ships. I heard screws.

“We hit all three,” came Captain Warder’s jubilant voice.

“Here come the others. Those other three destroyers are making a beeline for us. Down periscope. Take her down! Rig for depth-charge attack!… Dammit ..” His voice trailed away. “I’d have liked to see those three babies sink!”

We went down. We wondered how bad this would be. Then the screws began pounding in my ears. Here was one set of high-speed screws, and then another, and then a third. Now I had too many to keep track of: they were coming and going in all directions. Although we were shaken up by their depth charges, no great harm was done. But they were persistent. We were depth charged intermittently, and not until noon did we hear the last of them. We waited. The heat began to increase again. When we’d been submerged for hours, the Skipper upped periscope for a swift glance about.

The nearest ship was 8,000 yards away. Captain Warder raised approximately six inches of periscope above the water—and damned if the Jap didn’t see it, from that distance of more than four miles!

“Down periscope! He’s started to head this way,” exclaimed the Skipper. “I don’t know if he saw us or not. I don’t see how he could have from that range. I’ll take another look to be sure.”

The periscope slid up again. Captain Warder had it above surface less than five seconds.

“Down periscope! He has seen us!”

The Skipper turned around. His voice was louder. “Do you know,” he said, “I saw men all over that ship. They were hanging on the masts and on every piece of superstructure, and every man had a pair of binoculars!” He added, “I’m taking no more chances with the periscope. Sound, what’s he doing?”

I could hear the Jap clearly. “I have a bearing, Captain. He’s bearing one nine zero, steady bearing.”

“Good! Keep track of him. Let me know everything.”

The Jap screws grew louder. They were drawing dead astern. My heart was in my mouth.

“Captain!” I yelled. “He’s coming and he’s coming fast, and he’s going to come right over us!”

The Wolf was as still as a grave. Now every man in the ship, standing at his post, his heart beating fast, listening with all his might, heard the propellers of the destroyer reach a roar, fill all space with sound, pass over—and then go on.

There was not much water between the stool upon which I sat tense and the keel of the Japanese destroyer. And not a depth charge was dropped. Later Captain Warder analyzed what must have happened. A Jap lookout sighted our periscope, but reported it simply as an “object”—not a periscope. The destroyer sped over to investigate. His course was so true that he passed directly over us.

The heat was beginning to tell now. In the maneuvering space it had reached 140 degrees. The air was foul with the odor of human bodies. We dripped with perspiration. Captain Warder ordered saline tablets distributed, and Doc Loaiza, whose beard now made him look more like a Turk than a Puerto Rican, for it framed his mouth in a perfect black oval, passed them out.

When he came by, his feet squelched in perspiration, almost half an inch thick on the deck. A messboy brought in a gallon jug of water. I lifted the jug to my lips, drank, and spit it out. It had become brackish. It had a coppery taste from the lining of the water tank. Repeated tossing about had stirred up the sediment. It wasn’t fit to drink. Maley sat beside me, naked to the waist, mopping his body with a soaked undershirt. The pressure in the boat was high from the compressed air we’d sucked back each time we fired a fish. The air-conditioning had been off so long the heat had reached a terrific point.

Captain Warder, sitting in his chair, perspiration pouring off him, asked repeatedly, “Anything on sound now, Eck?”

Each time I reported, “I can still hear them, sir, but nothing very close.”

My watch over, I lurched across the control room, through the passageway, bumping against the bulkheads, and climbed heavily into my bunk. It grew hotter. I lay there, trying to breathe, as gently and as little as possible.

At last Captain Warder dared to take another periscope observation. He saw nothing. And finally the Wolf rose to the surface.

The Wolf had been submerged for long hours, and for most of that time with her air-conditioning off and under the cumulative air pressure of the compressed air sucked back in the firing of eight torpedoes.

The hatch was opened. As if produced by magic, a small gale roared through the ship. Papers flew about. The clothes of the men standing in the passageway billowed outward; their hair stood on end as though they had touched an electrically charged rod. The foul air imprisoned under pressure in the Wolf was rushing out the hatch, and they were in its path. The Diesels started up: the gale was reversed; fresh air poured in.

The men breathed deep draughts. They began to talk again. “Doesn’t that stuff smell good!” and “Oh, God, it does!” Then, laughter. “Well, goddammit, we gave them hell and we got away with it, didn’t we?” And, “I’ll bet we can hear those slant-eyed bastards hissing all the way over here!”

Captain Warder wasted no time. The Wolf headed directly out to sea. Once more we inspected our damage and sent a report of our action. This time damage was practically nil. We all managed to get a good night’s sleep.

Next morning, refreshed, we headed into the straits again. We had got three Jap ships, and we wanted more. But we could find nothing. Apparently we’d frightened them off again.

On the fourth night my radio spluttered with an order from the High Command to leave the area and start a new patrol.

We had been out for some time now, and our new patrol was an area off Tjilatjap, a Javanese seaport on the south coast used by the Allied powers to evacuate personnel from the East Indies to Australia. Hours before we reached our position we saw the city aflame. The flames lit up the sky for miles around. Bridge lookouts told us the shoreline looked like a carnival of light and fire. Only the pillars of black smoke twisting furiously upward told the story. The Dutch, following the scorched-earth policy, were putting the torch to everything before the Japs arrived.

For several days we made routine patrols, watching the burning city, and waiting for the Japs to show up and pluck off their prize. Then a new dispatch ordered us into the southern entrance of Sunda Straits, a 60-mile-wide stretch of sea between Sumatra and Java. If the Japs hoped to reach the southern coast of Java in their southward push, they must use the Sunda Straits. Our job was to sink anything they’d try to send through. We had perfect conditions in these waters, which were deep and maneuverable, and Captain Warder and Lieutenant Deragon spent hours poring over their chart tables, plotting out the probable shipping lanes the Japs would use.

“I think we can ignore the Sumatra side,” Captain Warder’s voice said. “I don’t see anything there. But the Java side does have a beautiful harbor. They might try to put some ships in there.” He added, “But we can’t get up there because of the water depth.” And finally: “Very well, Willie, this is the way we’ll do it: We’ll run back and forth on a coastal patrol for several days. If we haven’t made any contacts by that time, we’ll set a patrol to take us into the center of the straits.”

We spent quite a few days there, and saw nothing but the wreck of a Jap bombing plane. It was a long patrol, made under the constant strain of expectation, and for the first time an attack of nerves broke out. Half a dozen men weren’t talking to one another. By this time we had been out on the longest sustained run we had made so far—and most of the crew had not seen the sun or been topside all during the patrol. It didn’t help any that we were all running short of cigarettes. There were less than half a dozen packs left on the boat. Some of the men had a few cigars, and they nursed these along. Those who smoked pipes weren’t in any better fix. Their tobacco was all gone. There were some pretty stretched tempers on the Wolf.

Then came a dispatch from the High Command ordering us to patrol the Christmas Island area and then proceed to a southern port.

Heading for port! That meant a new lease on excitement for all of us. We hopped to it. Christmas Island was a little piece of British land south and west of Java, valuable for its phosphate. It was John Street, with his gift for looking up things, who checked on the place and discovered it was an old pirate hangout. O.K., we thought. We’d do a little pirating ourselves.

We started immediately, diving by day and surfacing by night. At dawn of the third morning we were in a perfect position to dive off the island. Captain Warder took pains. The Allies were reported still in possession of the island and to have established batteries on shore. These batteries had spotted a couple of reconnoitering Jap subs and were presumed to have sunk them. We had to be careful: from a distance all submarines look alike.

The Skipper could find no sign of life. Our charts indicated that the only dock facilities on the island were in a small inlet called Flying Fish Cove. The Skipper found the cove and kept a wary eye on it.

“I ought to go in there tonight and blow that dock up,” I heard him say. “The Japs probably will have it, anyway.”

“Might be a good idea,” came Ensign Mercer’s voice.

Captain Warder hesitated. “But there are probably some natives on the island. They may be killed on the docks.”

Nothing was done. That night we received a coded dispatch:

“Air reconnaissance shows transports, destroyers, and cruisers en route to Lombok Straits.” Apparently the convoy was bound for Christmas Island.

Well, my thoughts ran, if anyone can keep us out of harm, this man will do it. He’s an artist with a submarine.

“What I want to do,” the Skipper was saying, “is to put your direction finder on this frequency and keep searching. Be sure you cover it thoroughly. I want you to sweep over your entire range of frequency constantly.”

With action in sight, petty quarrels vanished. Men spoke to each other again. Stations were checked and then double checked. It was as though an electric shock had gone through the crew. We patrolled all day. We saw nothing. I searched and searched and searched.

“They’re probably coming in under cover of darkness,” said the Skipper.

At night we surfaced. At dawn we dove in front of Flying Fish Cove. The Japs had the same charts as we, and undoubtedly they’d set their course for the cove. With their heavier armaments they might bombard the island before attempting a landing, trying to knock out the shore batteries.

Captain Warder tirelessly studied his charts. He analyzed the Jap strategy: “The cruisers will bombard the island, with the transports undoubtedly standing off, waiting for the bombardment to cease. In that case the destroyers will be used to guard against submarines. That means our most valuable targets are the cruisers. Very well, we’ll ignore the destroyers. We’ll attack the transports if conditions are favorable, and we’ll really make a try for the cruisers.”

When we surfaced that night we found a brilliant moon flooding the sea. We dared not be silhouetted against it. We went out to sea and recharged batteries. Beginning at dawn, Captain Warder made periscope observations. Our intercom system was open. We waited tensely. At the 7:30 a.m. observation came Captain Warder’s voice saying sharply:

“Here they are! Ummmm. Four cruisers in a line. Bombarding formation. I believe they’re going to shell the island. Stand by to mark these bearings down, Casler. First cruiser, mark…”

Rudy Gervais, at the helm, spoke up: “One seven two, sir,” he said, giving the Wolf’s course, reading clockwise from true north.

Captain Warder: “Three four two,” giving the course of the first cruiser.

Ensign Casler, thus having the cruiser’s course and the Wolf’s course, could determine the angle between and use this to compute our approach.

“Second cruiser, mark,” came Captain Warder’s voice. “Three three nine… Third cruiser, mark… three four seven… Fourth cruiser, mark… three five two.”

Casler meanwhile had been taking down not only the figures but the time each mark had been made. The Wolf now knew the courses of the four Jap cruisers in relation to our own course.

“Well, now,” said Captain Warder, still at the periscope, “put this down. These are light cruisers, probably with six-inch guns. They carry planes. Two turrets forward. Turret aft. Catapults. I believe torpedo tubes. Typical Jap bow. Raked stern. Fire control tower is typical Japanese. Pagoda style. Got all that, Casler?”

“I have it all down, sir.”

“All right…. Lovely day for our side…. I’ve got a good chop up here…. Beautiful for periscope work. Here’s an approximate range: 12,000 yards. Angle on the bow, I’d say about eighty starboard. Speed, about thirteen knots. Casler, let’s see what we can do with that. Down periscope.”

A moment later: “I think I’ll have another look at those babies. Up periscope.” A pause of perhaps forty seconds. “Well, the transports are heading for Flying Fish Cove. Apparently the island has been abandoned. At least, they’re not firing. I’d certainly like to get in an attack on those transports, but we’re too far out. But these destroyers aren’t too far off. Here’s a bearing on that nearest one. Mark.”

Rudy’s voice: “One seven two, sir.”

Captain: “Two eight four.” This cruiser was just off our port beam. “Down periscope. Sound, do you have any of those propellers down there?”

I was on the alert. “I have that last cruiser you mentioned, Captain.”

The Skipper set the Wolf’s course to intercept the four cruisers. During the next hour he took frequent bearings on the Jap men-of-war. Finally, “Up periscope.” Then, “Mark!” His voice was several notes higher. He sounded like a hound near the rabbit. “Cruiser Natori class. Angle on the bow, five starboard. Range, 3,000. Seems to be making medium speed. Down periscope.”

“Zero zero three, Captain,” announced Casler. The cruiser was coming toward us almost head-on—only three degrees away from a collision course.

Suddenly, “Battle stations!” the aaaap!… aaaap! blared through the boat. The crew moved swiftly and silently into place.

“Battle stations are manned, sir,” reported Lieutenant Holden, diving officer.

“Good!” said Captain Warder. “Up periscope… This ship is patrolling. His planes are still on the deck. Down periscope. Range, 2,300. Left full rudder. Ahead two-thirds. Come to course three four zero.”

We were all tense now. I gave the Skipper bearings every few minutes. We were using every device we had to get into position for the kill. “Up periscope,” came the Captain’s voice. “Ah!” he said. “I see a command pennant. The admiral of this little organization is aboard this baby. Down periscope.” He added, “Tell the forward room to make ready the tubes.”

“Forward room. Make ready the tubes,” came from the Captain’s talker. Then: “Captain, forward room has the word, sir.”

“Very well.” Captain Warder turned to Mercer. “This fellow doesn’t know we’re here,” he said. “He’s not zigging. If he keeps coming… Sound, have you got him?”

I had him. “Bearing three five two, Captain.”

“Yes, that’s about where he should be,” commented the Skipper. “Stay on him, Eckberg… Now, let’s take another look. Wait a minute… Willie, are you all set down there? How does it look?”

Lieutenant Deragon replied: “Everything checking so far, Captain.”

“Very well. Open the outer doors.”

Moments passed. The word came echoing back: “Outer doors open, sir.”

“Up periscope,” ordered Captain Warder. “Now, the usual method of firing, Willie. All set?”

“All set, Captain.” Lieutenant Deragon’s voice was steady.

“All set, Henry?”

“All set, Captain.” Henry Bringelman, at the firing controls, spoke as calmly as though he were giving the weather report.

“Okay,” said the Captain. He put his eye to the periscope. “Here he is. Stand by… stand by… Fire one!”

I caught the sound of the fish as she went. My ears clicked with the sudden increase in air pressure.

“One fired, sir!”—this from Bringelman, below.

“Stand by, two… stand by… Fire two!”

And almost like an echo, Bringelman’s deep voice: “Torpedoes fired, sir.”

I heard the high-pitched whines. “The fish are running, Captain,” I sang out.

“That’s fine, Eckberg. They’re hot, eh?”

“Yes, sir. Straight and hot.”

A second’s pause. “Number three hit,” came the Skipper’s voice. “She’s slowing down. Her propellers are still turning over. There go the steam jets!… There’s panic on her! Men running all over the ship! Dammit, I’d sure like to see one of those babies sink just once! Oh, oh, here they come. Take her down!” His voice faded. “Let’s get out of the conning tower,” he said. “Eckberg, you’re going to have four sets of screws coming at you. They’re coming here like a bat out of hell.” He raced down the ladder into the control room to take his place on the chair outside my shack. The conning tower was sealed off. We had only a few minutes to wait. I picked up the screws. They were coming up the starboard side very fast.

Now the depth charges came. They were coming viciously, one every ten or fifteen seconds, beautifully spaced. They came nearer and nearer our starboard side, and it seemed impossible that one wouldn’t get us. I thought we were lost. The ship shuddered and rocked. The radio shack was again filled with a blizzard of flying paint and cork. Locker doors swung open and clanged shut again. I managed to hold to my stool this time, and turned just in time to see the cans of dynamite tumbling across the deck. I stuck out my foot and held them under it. The breath was almost knocked out of me, but I gave the Skipper every bearing I could. I shouted at the top of my voice. Captain Warder wasn’t seated now, he was standing, clinging and swinging with the heaving of the Wolf. Every time I shouted bearings, he shouted back, “Good! Good! Good! That’s fine! Keep it up!”

His eyes were glued to the depth gauge. We were bouncing up and down like a rubber ball. The first screws died out of my phones; another set came in. Oh, God, I thought, now it begins all over again! One destroyer had completed his run of depth charges, and a second was coming up the portside to repeat the depth charging on that side. They were out to get us. I stole a swift glance at Paul. He was holding on for dear life, but he had a pencil in his hand and a pad before him, and he was a tally sheet on the charges. Four vertical lines, and then one through, for every five… Intermittently, all through that day, the Wolf was depth charged. The explosions churned the sea about us. Every man was alert at his station. There was no sleep. And somehow we escaped unhurt.

Late that night we surfaced, and then all night we dodged the same brilliant moon that harassed us the night before. We had to remain approximately fifteen miles off shore. The crew was in fine fettle. We were doing all right. We actually skipped sleep to take turns crowding about the conning tower ladder to breathe the fresh air and gloat over the damage we’d done. In Kelly’s Pool Room the men were tired but jubilant. Gus Wright was sitting at a table, a cup at his side, his brows knit, and I would have sworn he was rolling a cigarette. Where did he get the tobacco and paper? I looked closer. The paper was toilet tissue. The tobacco…

“Coffee grounds,” said Gus seriously. “I’ve been drying them in the oven.” He held the paper in his left hand, sprinkled the black grounds into it from the cup, smoothed them out with a practiced hand, rolled it, flicked it across his tongue—and he had a cigarette. He lit it up and began to smoke. “Had to do this once when I ran a sheep drive up to Oregon,” he said, and winked.

I like my cigarettes, but not that bad. I’d got my fresh air. I went forward and hit the sack for a fifteen-minute nap.

When the moon went down that morning, the Wolf turned toward the island again. It was about 2 a.m. We were making slow speed. Slowly we drove toward the enemy. It would take us until dawn to get to the point at which the Captain wanted to be. At 4 a.m. we had reached a spot eleven miles from shore, when suddenly:

“Clear the bridge! Stand by to dive!” It was Lieutenant Syverson on the bridge.

Captain Warder, in his pajamas, raced into the control room. The diving alarm sounded. We were under in a matter of seconds. By the time we leveled off, I knew we had spotted a ship on the port quarter. We didn’t think he’d seen us. I took over sound and located him in one minute. Through the intercom Captain Warder said, “They’re really looking for us if they’re this far out. What do you hear, sound?”

“I’ve got him. Captain,” I said. “He’s over on the port beam now. Not making much speed.”

Captain Warder upped periscope. It was dawn. “I see him,” he said a moment later. The Jap couldn’t see our periscope. We were very careful now. We were running out of torpedoes. We had only a couple of attacks left in us. “I’ll be damned!” came the Skipper’s voice at the periscope. “This cruiser is similar to the one we hit yesterday.” He peered again. “And damned if they haven’t a command pennant flying.” He chuckled. “Boys, did we shift that Admiral around, or are they trying to trick us?”

Finally, we attacked. We fired at 5:13 a.m.

“Can you hear them run, Eckberg?” came the familiar question.

Their whine was clear under the steady beating of the Jap’s screws. What I wanted to hear was that explosion, and the sudden silencing of those screws.

“Yes, sir, I hear them. I hear them, all right.”

“I believe they’re heading straight for the target,” the Skipper said.

Suddenly the Wolf jarred.

“We smacked her!” exclaimed the Skipper. “Let’s go.”

I heard the death rattle of the Jap ship in my phones. It is an unmistakable symphony of death you hear as a torpedoed ship slowly sinks at sea. First, a series of sharp reports, like a string of firecrackers set off—her ammunition exploding. Then two muffled explosions, almost simultaneously—the cold water has reached her steam boilers, and they have blown up. With that, the sudden halting of the steady whish—sh… whish—sh… whish—sh of the screws, broken off sharply, like a voice suddenly choked off. Now fugitive crackling, splintering little explosions—the ship’s pipes breaking up, her plates buckling and twisting off, and all this time, a slow, hollow gurgling like a man dying… A few seconds of complete silence. Then the final Whoomph!—the ship’s hull caving in like an eggshell between pile drivers as she reaches a depth where the water pressure is overwhelming. In that final Whoomph! everything gives way at once.

“She’s gone, Captain,” I said.

“Good!” said the Skipper. He trained his periscope on the sea where the ship had been. “I don’t see a damn thing,” he said. “No debris. Nothing at all. Are you sure you heard the screws stop, Eckberg?”

“Yes, sir. I heard her blow up, Captain.”

“You’re probably right,” he said. “I can’t see a trace of her up here. I think we really smacked her in the right place. I don’t think there are any survivors from this one.”

I glanced at my watch: 5:17 a.m.

The ship with all hands had gone down in little more than three minutes flat.

Captain Warder spoke directly to the torpedo room. “Thank you, boys. Nice work, after torpedo room. Nice work on those bearings, sound.”

Five minutes later I picked up a set of high-speed screws. I reported it.

“Oh, yes,” said the Captain. “Sure, they’ll be along to see what happened to their buddies. They’re going to be awfully baffled. Let’s see…” He looked through the periscope again. “Yes, here they are. I can see them using their searchlights. They won’t find anything. Down periscope. I don’t want those big searchlights to swing around and spot us.”

The Jap destroyers paid their respects with two mild depth charges. We scarcely noticed them. We secured battle stations and returned to Flying Fish Cove.

As the morning went on, we spotted a few ships. The crew was still on the alert. Nothing happened. Toward noon, the Skipper took another periscope observation near the cove entrance.

“Ah,” he said. “They’re getting ready to leave. Yes, the Nips are engaged in some very intense anti-submarine patrols. Here are destroyers patrolling…” His voice rose. “Here is a cruiser launching a plane. Boy, they really are looking for us. Down periscope. Dammit, I’d like to get in that water right at the cove mouth, but it’s as flat as a pancake, and they’d pick me up. There’s no doubt they’re getting ready to leave. I can see the transports moving around inside the cove. What they’re probably doing is sweeping for us right now. Do you hear them pinging, Eckberg?”

“Yes, sir,” I sang out. “Three or four pingers, sir, all over the place.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “They’re worried and want to get out. They’re a bit scared about leading those transports out. That means the cruisers and cans will sweep this place thoroughly before any mass movement begins. I did see one cruiser angling over this way, though.… If he would keep coming we might get in this last attack.” His voice suddenly changed. “Thompson, have them make ready that last torpedo and let me know when that’s done.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” came Thompson’s voice.

“Sound, do you hear anything new?”

“About the same, Captain,” I reported. “That cruiser you spotted is still coming this way. Pretty steady bearing, too.”

“Is that so?” commented the Skipper. “Well, let’s take a look. Thompson, as soon as that fish is ready, have them open the outer doors.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” came Thompson’s voice promptly.

“Up periscope,” said the Captain. “Ummmmm. Yes, here he is. We can’t close with him, though. If he’d zig this way a little… No, he’s going to get by us, dammit! I certainly would like to take a crack at him. Wait a minute… He is zigging—and this way, too! Put this down… Bearing, mark!”

“Two six five,” came Rudy’s voice.

Captain Warder looked at his azimuth. “Three two zero,” he said. “Estimated range, 3,000. Angle on the bow, ninety starboard. Give me a normal approach in a hurry. Is that fish ready, Thompson?”

“Fish is ready and outer doors are open, Captain,” responded Thompson.

“Right full rudder,” ordered the skipper. “What’s that approach course, Casler?”

“Three zero zero, Captain,” said Casler, who’d been working it out on the plotting table.

“That’s fine,” said the skipper, his eyes still at the periscope. “Rudy, come to three zero zero… He’s still coming this way. Down periscope.” In a satisfied voice, “We’ll fire on the next observation. Sound, have you got him?”

“I got him, Captain.”

“Good! Let me know if he changes course or speeds up. This baby has a pennant, too. Well. If we sink him, that Admiral will have to get on one of those destroyers.”

There was snickering audible all through the boat.

“All right,” said Captain Warder briskly. “Let’s have a look. Up periscope.” Pause. “My… what a target! I can’t wait. Stand by… ready, Hank?”

“Ready, sir,” came Hank’s deep voice.

“Fire!” Captain Warder’s order was sharp.

Our last torpedo shot from the Wolf’s bow. I followed it right to the target. It was a perfect hit, but I knew we dare not stick around to see her sink.

“Now,” said Captain Warder dryly, “if we had a few more fish we could have this Admiral riding a canoe. He doesn’t have many more cruisers left here. All right, now. Abandon conning tower. Rig for depth charges. They’ll be coming around again.”

It was 4 p.m. We knew this was going to be a tough one. The Japs—partly in panic, partly in rage—would make us remember this. We were not wrong. Most of us had not had any sleep for nearly thirty-six hours. We had now been under for a long time, and the moment the air-conditioning was turned off we began to feel the heat and closeness. The humidity was very high. We waited for the worst, Captain Warder, wearing only shorts like the rest of us, sitting in his chair outside the sound shack.

The next hours were hell. At the beginning I heard the Jap’s screws coming toward us. I picked the loudest and ignored the others. I stuck to him. After the second hour, the heat, the closeness, the strain, the lack of sleep began to tell. We found it difficult to carry out routine orders. I found myself repeating Captain Warder’s words to myself for fear I would forget the first words by the time I heard the last. It was difficult to concentrate. Our minds worked sluggishly. After the fourth hour, a fog of moisture and humidity settled in the compartments throughout the Wolf. We squinted at each other. Some of the men lay sprawled on their bunks, seeking to conserve their strength. Others slumped on stools, their shirts tied about their waists to keep perspiration from running down their naked bodies.

I was leaning on my elbow on the plate glass of my desk, and once, glancing down, saw that my perspiration had run down the glass and into the blue blotter I had placed under it, soaking the blotter and dripping from it, as from a soggy cloth, onto the linoleum deck, already swimming in perspiration. The sweat was rolling down my elbows in streams. The skin of my hands was pinched and white. I found myself nervously rubbing my palms against my knees, kneading the dirt out.

The stench in the Wolf grew unbearable. It was salty, and acrid, and nauseating, made up of perspiration, oil, staleness, and oven-like heat. Few of us had to answer any call of nature. Fear seemed to constrict our bowels, turn our stomachs into hard knots. Our bodies threw off such quantities of liquid that there was little for our kidneys to do. It was just as well. Our toilet tanks could not be emptied lest the air bubbles give us away on the surface. By 7 p.m. some of the men lay in their bunks near exhaustion. They tried to read, but the words swam before their eyes. The refrigerator had been switched off. Our drinking water was warm. Some of the men drank anyway and became nauseated. Doc Loaiza stumbled through the passageway, groping his way along the bulkheads, passing out saline tablets. They gagged us.

Once, during this time, Captain Warder stuck his head through the door of the sound shack. He whispered. I didn’t get his words. I wondered why he was whispering. He repeated them. Then I understood. How was I doing? I wanted to show him I was at ease.

“I’m fine, Captain,” I said, loudly—but my voice was a whisper, too. The pressure had become so great that your words literally stopped moving the moment they left your lips. They hung in the thick air. When orders came, they had to be squeaked from one man to the next.

Finally Captain Warder ordered the Wolf taken to periscope depth. We had to surface soon. The men needed air. The lights were dim; the batteries had to be recharged, for when they went down completely, we’d have to surface—or die.

“I see a destroyer over there,” came the Skipper’s hoarse voice at the periscope. And after what seemed an age: “He’s waiting, all right. He’s listening for us. Let’s go back down.”

Slowly the Wolf descended. Maley’s face was gaunt as he slumped at my side. His cheeks were beaded with perspiration.

His eyes were red-rimmed. My beard was wet and sodden. It itched horribly. An inch of sweat swirled on the deck under my feet. I sat there, in a half stupor, when suddenly I felt myself tilting back on my stool. An empty can of Maley’s pipe tobacco skidded off its shelf. Hell, we were taking a terrific up-angle… Something was wrong. I jumped up and out into the control room. Everyone there was frozen at his place, eyes glued to the depth gauge. The needle was climbing down… We were going up!

“Jesus, we’re broaching!”

I was numb. After the punishment we’d taken, this was the end of everything. We were surfacing, showing ourselves, and the Japs were up there, waiting…

Captain Warder slid down the control-room ladder. His feet hit the deck.

“Use negative!” he roared.

The crew leaped to positions. On nerve alone they stood and toiled with valves and controls and huge wheels, their sweat-glazed eyes on the depth gauge with its needle swinging lower, lower…

There was a scream of escaping air. Water rushed into the Wolf’s gigantic emergency tank.

But we were still going up—up. I could hardly keep my feet. I grabbed a handle.

“For Christ’s sake,” a high-pitched voice screamed, “the conning tower’s out. They can see us!”

“All ahead, emergency!” Captain Warder’s voice was electrifying. “Bowplanes, sternplanes, hard dive!”

The Wolf’s powerful motors burst into an ear-splitting whine. She drove forward like a catapult. We waited, breathlessly. We had done all we could. If she surfaced now, it was out of our hands.

Slowly the needle began to climb. Slowly the Wolf checked her rise and began her descent. But for the moment we had to forget everything and save our lives again. The Wolf was gathering momentum now, plunging toward the bottom so swiftly she might reach depths so great the water pressure would cave in her sides. We had to stop her plunge downward as swiftly as we had stopped the plunge upward.

“Blow negative!” Captain Warder shouted. Air shrieked into the emergency tank, forcing the water out again. “All back, emergency!” We were reversing our propellers, we were giving ourselves away again to the enemy, sending air bubbles to the surface…

If ever the Seawolf seemed destined to meet her end, this was the moment.

Ba-room! The first depth charge came over. With it the Wolf seemed to split up inside. Before my eyes the bulkheads billowed inward, then returned to their original position. The huge radio and sound gear, 800 pounds of panel and tubes and machinery, swayed like a drunken man. Water swished and churned madly through the superstructure over my head. In the engine room men were swept from their feet. And thrown from side to side, hurled from one bulkhead to the other, with wood and metal crashing and splintering about us, my mind went round and round like a broken record playing over and over again, “Where is he, where is he, there he is, there he is, O God, there he is, there goes another, is that the last, is that the last…?”

Then, for a little while that seemed an age we waited at our stations, mouths dry, gasping, in air so foul, so thick, you could almost feel it in your hands. It was dusk in the world above us. Somehow the word came through. We had broached because somebody misinterpreted an order. Someone had blown too much water out of our bow tank. We went deeper now, and waited. I sat with my earphones, Maley at my side, and I trembled. Would I ever get out of this alive? We’d probably all be completely exhausted, every man helpless on his bunk now, if the broaching hadn’t knocked us into alertness again. I looked up, and Lieutenant Deragon was in the doorway, looking at us. I must have looked pretty bad. He disappeared but was back in less than a minute.

“Here, Eckberg,” he said, with a stony face. “You look as though you’ll be needing this.” He placed a roll of toilet paper beside me and vanished again.

That broke the tension. Maley and I grinned at each other.

“Remember those freighting days,” Paul whispered. “Remember how we griped when we could sit around and play cards and argue about the news? Remember how we griped we were just carrying freight around…” He coughed, and grinned again.

Captain Warder, the perspiration beaded in his eyebrows, deep lines in his face, looked in. “Eckberg, how much sleep have you had?”

“I don’t know, Captain,” I said. “I’m not very sleepy.” I was so keyed up now I could have remained awake all night, I think.

The Skipper mopped his brow with a wilted handkerchief. It was Maley’s watch coming up.

“I think we’re going to stay down a little while longer,” he said. “But most of the excitement is over. You’d better turn in and get some sleep.”

“I don’t think I can,” I said. “I want to see us up and away so I can quit worrying.”

The Skipper looked at both of us, and the corners of his mouth turned up in a tired smile. “All right,” he said. “You boys have done a real job today. We’ll get out of here and head for home now as soon as conditions permit. See that you get some sleep, Eckberg.” And he was gone.

Somehow the time passed. Men with towels around their necks moved sluggishly with mops, swabbing the sweat from the decks, wringing the mops out into buckets. Buckets full of sweat stood in corners of the Wolf. Maley and I stewed in the radio shack. We alternated on the sound gear. We couldn’t slow ourselves down.

It was nearly midnight when Captain Warder appeared again. “We’re going to surface very shortly,” he said wearily. “Take a good sweep all around and let me know what you hear.”

I bent over my gear and searched. We knew it was black night up there, and that Captain Warder depended on sound to let him know what conditions were. I must have spent ten minutes investigating every suspicious noise in every degree of the circle.

Finally I reported, “There’s nothing up there as far as I can tell, sir.”

“That’s fine.” His voice came hollowly from the conning tower. “All right, boys. Bring her up to periscope depth.”

We rose slowly. Captain Warder upped his periscope. For fifteen minutes he scanned every inch of the horizon. I think it was the most concentrated scanning he had ever done. Then, his arms over the periscope crossbars, he turned. “Have the night lookouts come to the conning tower,” he said.

The word was passed for the night lookouts. They climbed up.

“Boys,” said the Captain, “I don’t have to tell you to keep a sharp lookout tonight. I know you’re tired, but this good air will revive you. Report anything at all suspicious.” Then he ordered, “Surface!”

Three blasts of the horn, and up we went. At 1: 10 a.m. the hatch opened. The Wolf had been under for many hours and most of her crew had been without sleep for forty-three consecutive hours. The air roared through. A sudden chill made me shiver as I sat at my desk. Lieutenant Deragon came by again. He looked in. This time he grinned. Nothing ever seemed to upset him.

“Why don’t you turn in, Eck?” he said. “We’re O.K. now.”

“I know,” I said. And I asked him where we were. We were on our way to get around the point of the island, he said. “Let me show you,” he added, and he led the way to the charts in the control room. He pointed out the route we were taking. We were going to a port in Australia. It was to be our new home port. “Here we are now,” he said. “We turn at this point and head south.”

“Where were we when we broached, sir?” I asked. He pointed that out. I said frankly, “I don’t like it. We’re not very far away from those destroyers.”

“No,” he said, “but we will be.” He glanced at the speed indicator. “No, it won’t be long now,” he went on. “Anyhow, there’s no use your staying up any longer. Turn in and get some sleep. You need it.”

I said I wanted to stay up until we got around the corner, and so I did. First I sat down at radio and sent a long dispatch to the High Command, dictated by Captain Warder, recounting what had happened to us. Then I turned in.

When I awoke it was afternoon. I had slept fourteen hours. The Wolf was riding cautiously at periscope depth, on the alert for planes. Most of the crew were in their bunks, too, recuperating. They were too tired to talk. That night, after surfacing, we received a message from the High Command:

Captain Warder had copies typed and posted conspicuously about the Wolf. The men clustered around the bulletin board in Kelly’s Pool Room and read the Captain’s personal PS:

We knew the Japs had air supremacy in the Christmas Island area, and we proceeded cautiously toward Australia. Finally, one afternoon we were near enough to the Australian coast to surface in daylight. Captain Warder reported from the bridge, “It’s a nice day… A little cloudy. Choppy sea up here. We’ll let a few of the boys come up.”

I waited my turn. Frank Franz called down, “Got your dark glasses, Eck?”

I shouted up, “No. What do I need them for? It’s cloudy up there, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” he said. “But that doesn’t make any difference. You better wear those glasses.”

I was too anxious to go up. I had not been topside for many days and nights. I stopped at the entrance of the bridge. I shielded my eyes with my hands.

“Permission to come on the bridge, sir?” I asked the officer of the deck.

It was Lieutenant Syverson. “Come ahead, Eckberg,” he said.

I watched my feet as I moved up. Now, two steps to daylight. I lifted my hands, and lightning seared my brain. I clapped my hands over my tortured eyes. I saw red. My eyes burned as though I had been scalded. Hands over my eyes, now peering a bit, slowly I grew accustomed to daylight.

It was a beautiful day. Never had the sea seemed so blue, the whitecaps so white. My eyes drank in the glory of the sky and the open air. The smell of salt was so strong in my nostrils that I had a fit of sneezing. The taste of salt was in my throat. I stared at the other men as they came up. Their bodies, naked from the waist up, were an obscene white, like the white underbelly of a fish. Their faces were gray, like the faces of men taken out of dungeons. We discovered that only a few minutes on the bridge under that cloudy sky sunburned us. We discovered that none of us carried an ounce of excess weight. It was as though we had been in a Turkish bath, reduced and exhausted and dehydrated, days on end. When we finally climbed back into the depths of the Wolf again, we realized for the first time how foul the odor was. The air above made us dizzy when we came down. Our faces were flushed. We began to perspire. I lay down in my bunk for a twenty-minute rest after ten minutes in the air.

Our Australian port was only a few hours away, and it might mean our first mail since the war began. All the magazines we’d used to get at Manila might be waiting for us. But the mail! Word from home! We relaxed completely. We slept and ate—an orgy of fresh vegetables and milk and butter at the port was wonderful to look forward to—and went on deck every chance we had. We played our phonograph hour after hour. “The Five O’Clock Whistle” and “Melody in F” and swing and boogie-woogie sounded in Kelly’s Pool Room day and night. We began breaking out our shore clothes. Men were pressing their dress blues all day long on the mess table. The ship’s iron was hot twenty-four hours a day. For the first time in months we opened our razor cases. The blades were rusty and green with mold.

Captain Warder relaxed, too. He resumed his setting-up exercises, a slender, bearded figure in shorts and sandals, taking deep breaths, flexing his muscles, counting to himself. In the afternoons he closeted himself in his stateroom and wrote out his reports—his war diary of the Wolf’s activities. Rudy Gervais accosted the Captain with an idea.

“Captain,” he said, “how about us decorating our conning tower with Jap flags? We sunk a lot of ships.”

The Skipper thought it over and said, “No, Rudy, I don’t think that’s a good idea. The Seawolf doesn’t need flags up there. Everybody knows we sink ships. Let’s not brag about it.”

That disappointed some of the men. They liked the idea of having the Wolf come in with a broom upside down sticking out of the tower, or with some silhouettes of Jap men-of-war we’d sent down. But we had to admit that in sub circles everyone knew the Wolf did all right.

Finally the Wolf reached a prearranged rendezvous point, outside the port. Here a pilot came aboard and led us through the mine field guarding the entrance of the harbor. Then luck was with us. What we’d been waiting for—the bag of mail—was brought aboard. I grabbed a thick bundle of letters that bore my name and hurried into the sound room. Maley had his bundle and was reading them in his bunk.

I was so nervous I couldn’t get the first envelope opened. I seemed all thumbs. But from the first one tumbled four snapshots. They were of Spike and Marjorie. I couldn’t tear my eyes from them. I studied them over and over. Here was Spike in his carriage—the same Spike I had left, but much bigger. Here he was laughing in the sun—and behind him, Marjorie, looking the picture of health, smiling and wholesome and waiting for me. I felt like bawling. I read all the letters. Twenty-five of them, two from my brothers, twenty-three from Marjorie. She gave me a detailed picture of Spike. I followed him through each letter. He was a husky kid… he hated that afternoon nap… he was eating like a horse… now he was grabbing the sides of the crib and trying to stand up by himself… That hour made up for many things.

As we were about to glide into the harbor, another American submarine, Lieutenant Commander Lucius H. Chappell commanding, came into view. She had been out on a run and was returning to the dock. Captain Warder, who had never been in the port before, decided it would simplify matters to follow Captain Chappell in. He signaled him, “Go ahead, I’ll follow you in.”

The reply came back: “Congratulations, Seawolf. Proud to be with the record-breaker. After you, sir.”