No Ordinary Joes (17 page)

Gordy celebrated his nineteenth birthday in Albany. In August, American forces invaded Guadalcanal, and after a ferocious battle, they secured the island in the first major land victory of the war. Word of the triumph slowly reached the submariners in Western Australia, but Gordy was more focused on his own situation. He wanted off the
Holland
and out of Albany, and if that meant getting reassigned to a submarine and going out on patrol again, that was fine by him. He soon got the transfer he wanted, not to a submarine but to another tender, the
Pelius
back in Fremantle. As it was with so many American sailors in Australia, he said good-bye to his girlfriend, Linley, both of them promising to stay in touch and keep the fire burning.

On the
Pelius
, he was assigned to polishing brass. Each day he would sit on the forward deck and polish away for a couple of hours, then go hide and nap or write letters.

One morning just before he was to go on duty chipping paint, Gordy was sitting on a five-gallon can of paint thinner nursing a hangover and
feeling sorry for himself. With his head in his hands, he heard a voice speaking in an Australian accent. “What’s the matter, mate?” He could see a pair of brown shoes and coveralls, and quickly learned that it was a lieutenant J.G. (junior grade) in the repair crew.

Figuring he might as well tell the truth, Gordy unloaded his complaints. After listening to him, the officer issued a stern rebuke. Sensing he had nothing to lose, Gordy asked to see the commander.

The next morning he got his wish, and after stating his case again, he was surprised by the commander’s response. “You’ll be at sea within a week,” he said, and assigned him to the
Grenadier
, which needed several men for her next patrol.

A few days before heading out on patrol with the
Grenadier
, Gordy wrote his mom again:

T
im got lucky. Punching an officer in a beer-fueled poker game was a remarkably dumb thing to do, but the fact that it was wartime and every hand was needed kept him from being severely punished. Instead, he was transferred off the
Trout
and assigned to the sub tender
Pelius
, which left Hawaii the next day bound for Fremantle, Australia. For the next several months Tim worked on relief crews getting subs ready to go back out into battle and trying to stay out of trouble.

It had been several months since the first American ships had arrived on the west coast of Australia, and there were mounting complaints from the locals about the American presence. The initial goodwill and tolerance were starting to wear thin. The sight of drunken sailors staggering down the street, some of them with young Australian girls on their arms, was getting old. In the first few months of the Americans’ arrival, people had accepted the sexual flings and the loosening of morals, deeming it okay for local girls to have a frolic on the beach after the sun went down with a guy about to leave for war. For the most part, the warnings about the unrealistic hopes of falling in love and then galloping off to America went unheeded and now the reality of fickle lovers, unwanted pregnancies, venereal diseases, broken hearts, and tear-jerking separations was beginning to take hold.

Eventually, Tim got reassigned to the
Grenadier
, and he was on board as the ship headed out of Fremantle on its sixth patrol. Like his new
crewmates Chuck Vervalin, Bob Palmer, and Gordy Cox, he had mixed emotions about this patrol. On the one hand, he was eager to get back in battle and feel he was contributing to the war effort. He had taken his work on the relief crew seriously, but he liked the danger and the rush of combat. He hated the Japanese. It wasn’t because of anything that had happened to him growing up in Texas; he’d never even seen one. This was a hatred born out of the destruction he’d seen at Pearl Harbor. To him, they were everything the propaganda had portrayed: “little bucktoothed, slant-eyed savages.”

But while stationed in Fremantle, he, like Chuck, had found the love of his life, Valma Gray, a beautiful blue-eyed redhead who had recently been crowned Miss Perth. They’d met at a dance, and he’d wasted no time in letting her know how he felt, telling her he wanted to marry her after the war and take her back to Texas with him. For her part, Valma was enchanted by Tim’s courtly manners and enthusiasm. She also found his Texas accent endearing. From that night on, he’d spent every possible minute of leave with her. The night before leaving on this patrol, he’d proposed and given her an engagement ring. She’d accepted and promised she’d wait for him.

The
Grenadier
left Fremantle on its sixth patrol on March 20, 1943. For the first seventeen days there were no sightings of enemy ships. Then, on the night of April 6, a small freighter of about 2,000 tons was sighted off Phuket Island. A surface torpedo was fired and there appeared to be an explosion, followed by the wounded freighter firing at the
Grenadier
, its shells zinging over the sub or landing in its wake. The
Grenadier
returned fire from its deck, but when the freighter moved into shallow waters near the beach, Captain Fitzgerald ordered the ship to submerge and move to the safety of deeper water.

The next sixteen days were again uneventful, with no sign of shipping in the area. Anxious to inflict damage on the enemy, Captain Fitzgerald sent a request to move to a more fruitful area. Then, on the moonlit evening of April 22, 1943, before the request to move was granted, the lookout
spotted a worthy target: two large enemy freighters. Upon closer look, he saw they were unescorted. Relatively easy prey.

Tim felt the rush of adrenaline when Captain Fitzgerald ordered the men “to man battle stations.” Fitzgerald was Tim’s kind of captain—tough, straightforward, a look-you-in-the-eyes kind of man. His decision to aggressively pursue the freighters was not second-guessed. If the tide of the war in the Pacific was going to turn in America’s favor, as it slowly had been since the battle of Midway, then the mentality of the new breed of submarine skippers was that they needed to spearhead the attack, to be aggressive.

Fitzgerald had gained even more respect from his crew earlier in the patrol when he confronted Thomas Trigg, a muscular mess cook from Texas and the only black on the crew. He was easily the most disliked man on board; the crew thought he was sullen and disrespectful. At the time, America was still a Jim Crow, segregated country, and most of the men on board had never been around blacks. The Navy was still segregated, and on submarines a black could only be assigned as a mess cook, helping to serve the men and wait on the officers. It was not uncommon for someone to wake Trigg in his bunk and order him to bring coffee to the skipper. Most blacks in the Navy were compliant, but not Trigg. Built like a linebacker, he’d arrived on board with a chip on his broad shoulders (or at least that’s how the crew described it), a chip nobody on board was eager to try to dislodge. Earlier in the patrol, when someone allegedly witnessed him spitting into the officers’ soup, a livid Fitzgerald ordered him up to the bridge and challenged him to a fistfight, an invitation Trigg declined. Fitzgerald put him on notice that he had filled out court-martial papers and would file them when they returned to port. The incident had elevated Fitzgerald’s standing with the crew even higher.

Dawn had broken over the Strait of Malacca on April 23, 1943, when the
Grenadier
surfaced. The bright sunlight gave the promise of a warm, tropical day. Hours earlier, after encountering the two freighters, Fitzgerald
decided to do an end-around on the surface to intercept them. But after getting into position and submerging, all he could see through the periscope was the plume of smoke of the two ships zigzagging away. He gave the orders to surface. Never mind that standard submarine procedure was to always stay submerged while in enemy waters, or that he was disregarding the fact that the enemy knew a submarine was in the area.

Shortly after the sub surfaced, the lookout on duty, George Stauber of New York, spotted a Japanese dive-bomber coming in their direction. “It’s coming in low out of the northwest,” he informed the skipper.

Fitzgerald hesitated briefly, waiting to confirm the sighting. As soon as he saw the plane, he gave the order to dive. “All ahead emergency!” he commanded.

The bow plunged underwater, heading down at a steep angle. At 120 feet, the executive officer turned to Fitzgerald. “We should be safe at this depth,” he said.

In the engine room, Tim heard a turbulent swishing noise. A second later he heard a metallic click: the sickening sound of a firing mechanism activating. Then came the explosion, deafening, like “two trains colliding head-on at full speed.” It was an aerial torpedo, a weapon weighing 1,900 pounds with a warhead of 500 pounds of TNT. Dropped from a low-flying torpedo plane and capable of hitting a submarine up to 300 feet beneath the surface, it was a hallmark of Japanese tactical effectiveness.

The
Grenadier
shook violently, listing hard to port, slamming Tim against the bulkhead and knocking other crew members off their feet. In an instant, the ship was going down, stern first, plunging toward the bottom of the ocean.

The lights flickered and then went out. So did all electricity and power for propulsion.

They were in total darkness, out of control, and plunging toward the ocean floor. Behind Tim, two men were sprawled on the deck, unconscious. Others struggled to their feet, groping for something to hang on to. Ceiling cork fell to the deck, lightbulbs shattered, locker doors flew open. Men were cut and bleeding. Groans echoed through the compartments.

At 300 feet, the ship slammed into the ocean floor, quickly settling into the silt at a 20-degree angle, bow up. A quick assessment by the crew revealed massive damage.

The propeller shafts were seized in a vise-like grip, pressed against a bulkhead. And with no propeller, the ship was dead.

In the engine room, close to where the blast had occurred, tubes were bent, pipes ruptured, gauges and valves broken. In the radio room, somebody had forgotten to securely fasten the ship’s radio transmitter, and the explosion had sent it flying against a bulkhead, smashing it beyond repair and leaving them with no way to radio for help.

But the biggest problem was the salt water pouring through the loading hatch and other openings. To Tim it sounded like Niagara Falls. If these hatches couldn’t hold under the pressure, he was about to die a horrible death. He thought about Valma.

Surprisingly, nobody was seriously injured from the initial explosion and despite the massive damage the ship and outer hull were still in one piece. Working frantically, the electricians quickly activated the emergency lighting, casting everything in an eerie red glow.

“Fire in the maneuvering room!” a voice cried out.

The smell of smoke rapidly permeated the ship. An electrical fire spread swiftly, sparks and short circuits popping everywhere. Tim knew that if the maneuvering room was lost, getting back to the surface would be impossible.

“Stay calm,” encouraged Fitzgerald.

Stay calm? They were in a submarine that was on fire on the ocean floor, with salt water spraying into the engine room.

“All available hands man the bucket brigade,” Fitzgerald ordered.

Tim found comfort in Fitzgerald’s voice, trusting his leadership. The plan was to move the excess water from the engine room to the forward torpedo room, which would hopefully balance the boat, the first step in getting back to the surface.

The heat from the fire was intense, a temperature gauge now showing
120 degrees. Tim stripped to his shorts and stood in the bucket line between the motor room and forward torpedo room, passing along the buckets. There was urgency to the crew’s efforts: if the water level reached the main propulsion motors, there was no chance of ever restarting the engines, and no chance of escape. Adding to the peril was that the ship had come to rest on a shelf, dangerously close to deeper water, with a strong current pushing it in that direction. If they went over the shelf, the pressure would tear the ship apart.