Run Silent, Run Deep - Страница 26

Nor were there any complaints from the crew at this temporarily increased watch load or the inconvenience caused by latching shut the five-hundred-pound doors.

A period of even higher tension came as we neared Cristobal, the harbor on the Caribbean Side of the Panama Canal, where, if anywhere, German submarines would be concentrated, but where also our defense forces were massed in strength. A long-range, two-engine flying boat first spotted us.

A little later another joined and we were continuously under air coverage for the last hundred miles of our approach. A few miles outside the harbor an escort vessel, a converted yacht similar to the Vixen but smaller, came out to meet us, flashing a signal searchlight insistently from the bridge. We had the recognition answer ready, flashed it in our turn.

"MIKE SPEED FOURTEEN," spelled out Rubinoffski, as an- other series of flashes came from the yacht. "What shall I tell him, Sir?"

I paused for a moment, trying to think just how to word it. "Send him 'MIKE SPEED TWENTY REQUEST PERMISSION TO PROCEED AHEAD OF YOU.'"

The signal searchlight clattered as Rubinoffski banged away on the shutter handle. As the answering message came back, Rubinoffski shouted the words one by one.

"HELL YES THIS OLD TUB WAS BUILT FOR SEX NOT SPEED."

Rubinoffski didn't get the ninth word, had to have it repeated twice more, by which time everyone on the bridge had recognized the letters with loud delight.

"Maybe that's the yacht I heard about a little while ago,"

Jim commented.

"Which one's that?" I said, inspecting her through my bin- oculars. "She's a mighty neat-looking craft, I'd say."

"Neat is right. The story is that a little while after the Navy took her over they found that if you pushed the right button the bulkhead between the skipper's and Exec's state- rooms turned out to be an electrically operated sliding door."

The spectacle of a pajama-clad skipper confronting his startled half-undressed Exec was too much for my straight face and I joined the guffaw of laughter.

"Send him 'THANK YOU,'" I called to Rubinoffski as soon as I managed to regain my composure. "Jim," turning to him, "lay us a zigzag course for the harbor entrance."

As Jim disappeared below I took another good look at our escort. Here and there streaks of black paint showed through the seat of wartime gray. Although salt spray encrusted her sides and delicate yacht fittings and she looked considerably the worse for wear, there was no doubt she once had been a and lovely yacht.

We passed fairly close aboard without slackening our pace.

I watched her until the wash of our screws set her rocking in our wake, then tamed to search for the passage through the Cristobal breakwater to the sheltered waters beyond.

Going through the Panama Canal is a thrilling and never- to-be-forgotten experience, even to those who have done it many times. The great locks, one thousand feet long and one hundred ten feet wide, were planned to take the largest ship anyone might conceivably want to build. Now streaked with moss and green with slime on their inner sides, they still performed the function perfectly-a testimony to the competence of the Army Engineers who built them. That only recently had any vessels tested their size was a testimony also to the vision of their designers.

It was still early on the morning of June sixth that we passed into the breakwater at Cristobal, there to be met by a message directing us to proceed to the entrance of the Panama Canal and make transit that same day. There was something in the wind. No one seemed to know what it was.

It was not exactly hushed expectancy or worry, more an attitude of waiting for news. Our pilot, whom we queried as soon as he came aboard, knew nothing at all. Dave Freeman searched the schedule sheets, but beyond discovery of an unusually large group of messages all in the same code- which Walrus had not been issued-he could furnish no enlightenment.

It took us most of the day to travel the forty miles of canal from Atlantic to Pacific. When we got there we were met on the dock by the Commanding Officer of the Naval Station, another old-time submariner, now a Captain, U. S. Navy, but still known as Sammy Sams. His car was waiting, and he whisked me off in it to his office.

Once there, he closed the door carefully. "Rich," he said, "have you heard the news from the Pacific?"

"No, sir."

"It's a battle. Biggest one yet."

"Where?" I asked.

"Midway. The Japs are trying to capture it."

"Capture it? Not just attack it?"

"Nope, they're going to move in this time. They muffed their chance at Pearl Harbor. They could have taken Hawaii with a battalion, then, or Midway with a couple of boatloads of seamen. This time they are coming for keeps."

"What are the latest reports? How's it coming out?"

"The whole Jap Navy," said Captain Sams, waving at a map of Japan on the wall behind him, "has been steaming across the Pacific loaded for bear. They attacked Midway yesterday, and it has been a hell of a fight. Our forces are badly outnumbered. I wonder how Nimitz scraped together enough carriers and airplanes to stand up to them."

"I guess it was not so much a question of 'how' and 'have to,'" I ventured.

"Have to, is right," Captain Sams exploded "If those monkeys ever get a base in Midway we might as well kiss Pearl Harbor good-by."

We talked on for some time, and it was with an enlarged appreciation of the supremely critical nature of the Pacific operation that I journeyed back to my ship. As I approached the dock where I had left Walrus I had a moment of panic.

She was not in sight! I had visions of some catastrophe for a split second before I realized that in the interval I had been gone the tide had fallen several feet, concealing her hull from me.

It was a welcome relief to stretch our legs ashore after a week at sea, but Captain Sams didn't give us much time, only what remained of the day of our arrival in fact, and then solely for the purpose of using it to unload our cargo of "warshots" and take aboard exercise torpedoes. Next morning we were under way again, bound for what he called his "refresher training area," Las Perlas Islands, not far offshore.

Not many submarines had yet come through his station, the Captain said, but be intended to help us make the most of the few days allotted before we were to start for Pearl Harbor. From somewhere he had collected a motley fleet of boats they could hardly be classed as "ships," to be used in "convoys" as targets, and for three days he kept us at it day and night, making us get under way as dawn flooded the anchorage and keeping us at approach work until long after dark."

For three days we fired torpedo after torpedo-the same ones over and over again because Captain Sams had only a dozen exercise torpedoes in his entire base and we had ten of them. We would fire a torpedo; then we would surface, pursue it, lift it aboard with our torpedo loading equipment, slide it down the torpedo loading hatch into one of the torpedo rooms, overhaul it, clean it up, refuel it, refill the exercise head with water, test all mechanisms; then we would load it in a torpedo tube and fire again. With six torpedoes 'm the forward torpedo room and four in the after torpedo room, there were always a couple under overhaul while the others were being fired. At the end of our first day our torpedomen simply curled up on the deck or on their zippered, water- proof mattress covers and went to sleep, oily, greasy, filthy, and exhausted. The rest of us were not far behind.

Sammy Sams drove all of us relentlessly, cajoling, wheedling, threatening, and promising. It was soon apparent that his target fleet either idolized him or was petrified with fear of him, for every morning they got under way before us in order to be ready for the first approach in plenty of time, and they always gave us the favored position, winding up at quitting time much farther away from the anchorage than Walrus.

At the end of the third day Sammy Sams declared our refresher training over, and invited everyone in the ship except the duty section to what he announced was a Hawaiian luau.

There was no roast pig, no poi, nor any octopus, but we had fish and shrimp and other sea food delicacies, and the piece de resistance was roast beef. Toward midnight the old sub- mariner rapped for quiet and made us a speech.

"You men are men, not kids, even though some of you are still pretty. young. This is the biggest opportunity you will ever have to repay to the United States some of the debt you owe for having been born there. The enemy is vicious and treacher- ous, but the important thing is that he is also very able-don't ever forget that. That's why, so far, he has had us back on our heels. There aren't enough of us and what we've been able to accomplish hasn't been nearly enough. He is equal to us in equipment and in the bravery of his soldiers and sailors, but the One thing he doesn't have, and never will have, is the tremendous staying power of America." He went on for some minutes, sometimes eloquent, sometimes bone dry. It didn't take me long to sense that he was trying to tell us why we were in a war and pass along to us something of his own philosophy about it.

His ending was simple. "I know you know this will be a tough war. I know you realize that Walrus may never come back and that maybe some of you men won't come back either, and if that's what it comes to for you, if I can leave you with one thought, one bit of comfort, it's this: it's worth it. It's what America expects of all of us." He sat down. There was silence for a second, then our men were, on their feet with a roar, led by Kohler who was clapping like a man inspired.