Run Silent, Run Deep - Страница 29

"What's the idea!" I asked my friend, Eddie Holt, the E&R Officer.

"Relax, Rich," he said. "Admiral's orders." He went on: "We're trying to cut the silhouette down as much as possible.

Every boat that comes in here from the States has got too much stuff on her and looks bigger than the one before, and he's out to out it down so you can get away with night sur- face attacks without being seen. Say," here Eddie's eyes widened, "weren't you the boat that was shot at by the German sub a while ago?"

I nodded. We had, of course, reported the incident by dispatch immediately.

"W-e-l-l, I should think you'd have had all this extra super- structure off here before this. He nearly had you, you know.

The way I heard it, you didn't even see him until he fired the torpedo at you."

"That's about right," I admitted.

"We've found that pulling off the plating around the peri- scope shears lets enough light through that they can't be seen on the horizon. The difference is even more noticeable at night. That's why we're taking off your cigarette deck bul- warks, you don't need them. We'll give you lifelines to lean against."

Three days we were alongside the dock at Pearl Harbor, during which the welding smoke, the babble of workers, and the clatter of air-operated chipping hammers never left us.

I had thought the workmen at Electric Boat were fast, — but these, every one an enlisted man in the Navy, were faster.

Furthermore, time apparently meant nothing to them. They worked as if their lives depended upon it, and more than one man I saw remained aboard for twenty-four consecutive hours, working, almost continually. Russo, I found, was responsible for some of this. He and his assistants always seemed to be cooking something. There was a never-ending stream of sandwiches, bowls of soup, cookies, and the like coming out of his galley. I noticed also a few private little repairs and improvements being accomplished under his direct supervision, and, having had some experience in the ways of the American sailor, said nothing. No doubt we had paid for them with a couple of extra sandwiches or perhaps a surreptitious mid- night steak.

Toward the end of our third day alongside, exercise torpedoes once again arrived. Next day we took a cut-down Walrus to sea for our first day of training.

It was a repetition of our time at Balboa except that we had farther to go to reach our target area, and there was plenty of help to retrieve torpedoes. We got under way before daybreak and returned after dark. Three nights we remained at sea all night-for a convoy was arriving from San Francisco and an opportunity to practice a — convoy attack was too good to miss.

The radar, although it did not work consistently and gave us some other incidental troubles, proved to be an invaluable instrument in making a form of attack I had never thought of before. The Germans, it seemed, had done most of their destruction at night without bothering to dive. By staying on the surface they had greater mobility than the slow, closely bunched ships in the convoys, and they would race about at high speed, firing their torpedoes when opportunities best presented themselves. Apparently because they lay so much lower in the water than their huge targets, they were practi- cally never sighted. Admiral Small believed we should adopt the same tactics, and had been pushing for a radar which could assist us. The Germans, of course, had used no radar, but our convoys were so large that they hardly needed one.

The Japanese, on the other hand, had small convoys, and a "fire-control" radar, as he termed the S J, would be invaluable.

Finally our week's training was over. It had been an ex- hausting period. Walrus lay quietly alongside the dock at the submarine base and the torpedo trucks began returning our original load of torpedoes to us after overhaul by the Sub- marine Base torpedo shop. Apparently the Admiral had not been entirely satisfied with the performance of torpedoes in recent months and had directed that every torpedo brought in by a submarine from the States, as well as those he had in his stockpile, should be overhauled and checked before being issued for war patrol.

Fuel we took on from a connection right in the dock, and then came trucks bringing provisions. Every nook and cranny' in the ship was crammed with food. I had a couple of extra lockers in my room, a single, relatively commodious room compared to the one I had shared with Jim in the S-16, with floor space nearly four feet by five feet and a desk all to my- self. There was more space than I would be able to use; so- Russo crammed several cases of canned food, can by can, into the unused spaces.

Other empty corners throughout the ship were packed in the same way. Up forward on both sides of the torpedo tubes, there developed a large space, not very accessible, but ideally suited for stowage of food in cans. In the comers of the control room and behind the engines in the engine room were other such spaces. The regular dry provision storeroom and the refrigerator space, of course, were crammed to overflowing.

Under Russo's ingenious supervision veritable mountains of canned food disappeared below, and Russo proudly reported that he had even stocked the storeroom in accordance with the menus. When I looked in I knew what he meant.

He had crammed the shelves and the spaces between the shelves and then he had started stacking things on the floor.

Finally food had been piled up right to the access hatch in the control room deck. It wouldn't do in such circumstances, ac- cording to Russo, to put all the beans in one place and all the potatoes in another, because if we did we would be eating beans for a week before getting to the potatoes and eating potatoes for two weeks before we got to the canned soup.

It was the day before we were to get under way for patrol that we had what appeared to be a serious casualty, Jim and I were relaxing over a cup of coffee in the wardroom when a piercing scream came from aft. With one motion we leaped to our feet and raced down the narrow passageway to the control room. Jim got there first. I was just behind him. The place was filled with choking, black smoke. Kohler was already there and Larto arrived from the conning tower at about the same time as we.

"Fire in the control room!" bellowed Jim.

Without saying a word Kohler reached up alongside the ladder to the conning tower, pulled the general alarm. Then he grabbed the announcing system microphone. "Fire in the control room!" he shouted.

I could hear the word "Fire" reverberating throughout the ship. The smoke was coming out of the forward distribution panel, in the forward starboard corner of the control room near the door through which Jim and I had just entered. Larto darted forward.

"Excuse me, Captain," he muttered, pushing me back at the same time. He reached down, grabbed a switch near the floor, pulled it. There was a loud electric "snap" and the smoke commenced to subside.

Sitting on the floor, staring in disbelief at his right arm, was one of Russo's "mess cooks," a young, red-haired sailor known as "Lobo" Smith. I looked, too, and nearly retched.

The arm was charred black. Great lumps of what had once been flesh hung on it. I was surprised Lobo was still conscious.

It must have been excruciatingly painful, or completely numb with shock.

Groups of men came pouring into the control room carry- ing various pieces of firefighting equipment. Jim waved them all aside. "Fire's out," he said.

Russo showed up from aft. "What's the matter with Lobo?" he began.

John Larto turned on him furiously. "You dumb bastard, who told him to stow anything behind the power panel? Look at him!" Larto indicated the hapless Lobo's right arm.

Russo stepped forward suddenly and, before anyone could stop him, gripped his assistant by the injured arm, commenced to strip off the charred flesh. There beneath it was Lobo's arm perfectly good and sound, though minus its usual crop of red hair.

"You jerk, Lobo," he said, "don't you have no more sense than to store powdered milk over there?"

So saying, Russo pulled the shaking Lobo to his feet, still gripping the supposedly injured arm. "Listen, I told ya before, PORT corner, not STAROARD! Don't ya know which is PORT and which is STARBOARD on a ship?"

By this time all the charred "flesh" had been knocked off Lobo's arm. Russo indicated the switchboard, looked at the electrician, who nodded. He reached behind the panel and pulled forth the remains of a can with, a blue paper wrapper labeled 'KLIM.' The edges were seared and melted; the con- tents, once a white powder, had bubbled up with the flame into large black globules. Covering and sticking to Smith's arm, this was what had given us the impression of charred flesh.

"I thought you was going to qualify in submarines, Lobo,"

Russo said roughly. "You get everybody mad at you and you'll be mess-cooking all your life, you'll never. qualify. Now you pull all this powdered milk out of here and stick it where I told you to and then you go get a rag and clean up the back of this here auxiliary power panel."

Larto grinned and nodded, and Lobo began to reach with trepidation toward the power panel. Tom Schultz, who had meanwhile arrived, and Jim were by this time grinning at each other, and Kohler and Larto broke into guffaws.

"Go wan, Lobo," said Kohler, "it won't bite you."

"Look out, Lobo," offered Quin, "it might burn off your other arm or maybe your head this time.

Lobo looked appealingly at me. After his experience he was obviously in deathly fear of the power panel. He had piled up cans of dried milk behind it until one of them had made contact with a copper bus bar. The resulting flash of fire had scared the wits out of him, not to mention the reaction at seeing his arm apparently burned off to the shoulder. I couldn't help chuckling a little despite his discomfort and terror.