Submarine! (5 page)

The blame for failure in this attack, if failure there is to be, will rest squarely where it belongs—where Warder has for months known it belongs—on the torpedo itself.
Seawolf
will fire each fish carefully and deliberately, and will record the performance of each. Rather a heroic test, this, and one
which should have been performed by the Naval Torpedo Station in the calm and peaceful waters of Narragansett Bay years ago!

At last Warder and his Seawolves sight what they seek:
Sagami Maru
, an 8,000-ton transport lying at anchor in Talomo Bay, a small harbor. Warder surveys the harbor, the anchorage, indication of current; he pores over the chart of the area and carefully selects and memorizes the “getaway” course. He has the torpedoes given one final check, then he quietly calls his crew to battle stations.

With Fred Warder at the periscope and Bill Deragon, Executive Officer, backing him up,
Seawolf
creeps into position, running silent. Every bit of machinery not essential to firing torpedoes is secured.

Closer and closer creeps the submarine, her periscope popping out of the water at irregular intervals, never for very long. Finally,
Seawolf
is in position. Range, 1,400 yards. Target speed, of course, is zero. Target course, not applicable. Current, zero, indicated by
Sagami Maru's
anchor chain which is hanging straight up and down.

Ever an enthusiastic and ingenious fellow, young Reserve Lieutenant Jim Mercer has rigged up a new gimmick to try out: a system of taking pictures through the periscope. If
Seawolf
can get a series of half-decent photographs there will be indisputable evidence to back up the arguments about torpedoes!

“Up periscope!” Fred Warder snaps. “Bearing—mark! Range—mark! Down periscope!” The data are fed into the old-fashioned Torpedo Data Computer, located in the control room.

“Angle on the bow, one one oh starboard!—Control, what is the generated gyro angle?”

Don Syverson, torpedo officer, checks his TDC carefully before replying. “Gyro angle one degree left, Captain!”

“What do you head, helmsman?” Warder's next question is directed to the man at the wheel.

“Mark! Three oh six, sir!”

“Come left one degree to three oh five, and steady!” Skipper
Warder is determined to eliminate all possible points of error or argument. He will fire his torpedoes with zero gyro angles, at the optimum range. The “straight bow shot”—the simplest one in the book.

“Steady on three oh five, sir!” The helmsman's report coincides with one from Don Syverson that the gyros now indicate zero.

Sweat standing out beneath his short stubble of beard, Warder turns to Bill Deragon. “Take a look—fast!”

As Deragon squats before the rising periscope, Warder busies himself with last-minute preparations for firing. “Make ready bow tubes!” he orders. Theoretically the torpedo tube outer doors should have been opened and the tubes flooded long ago, but experience has shown that the longer a torpedo is in a flooded tube the less chance it will run properly.

“Set depth eighteen feet!” With the target's estimated draft of about twenty feet, and with allowance for the torpedo to run only slightly deeper than set, this fish should pass right beneath the dazzle-painted
Sagami Maru
and explode magnetically under her keel.

“Bow tubes ready, depth set eighteen feet!” A young sailor standing in the forward part of the conning tower swiftly relays the telephoned report from the forward torpedo room.

Fred Warder takes over the periscope. “Standby forward! . . . Standby ONE! . . . Up periscope. . . . Final observation and shoot!”

The periscope comes up. “Bearing—MARK! Range—MARK! Standby!”

“FIRE ONE!”

With a hiss of air and the sudden whine of rapidly starting gears, the torpedo in number one tube is on its way. The whole ship recoils as the ton and a half is suddenly expelled. Immediately comes a confused burble of water back-flooding the tube and rushing in through the poppet valve, as the air bubble which would otherwise come to the surface is swallowed within the ship.

Grimly determined, despite previous training and doctrine, to see the whole show, Warder now keeps the periscope up.
An ever-lengthening path of fine bubbles streaks unerringly for the dappled side of the target. A mist of oil smoke rises from the water where the torpedo has passed, indicative of excessive oil—a minor matter, but annoying, for it will certainly attract the enemy's attention.

Straight as a die speeds the torpedo. The corners of Fred Warder's mouth curl almost imperceptibly. “If that fish works the way it's supposed to,” growls the skipper, “this ship is a goner. It should break him right in half!”

All eyes are on Bill Deragon, who holds the stop watch. The seconds tick away with excruciating slowness. . . .

Suddenly the captain lets out a yelp. “Camera! I nearly forgot! Standby for a picture!”

Bill snatches the camera off a locker top and hands it to his skipper.

Warder keeps his eyes at the 'scope eyepiece. “How much time, Bill?”

“Forty-seven seconds, Captain!”

“Damn! Should be hitting right now!” The fervent comment echoes the thoughts of everyone in the conning tower.

Suddenly Warder whips the camera toward the periscope eyepiece, feverishly fits it into place. Almost simultaneously the roar of a torpedo explosion fills the conning tower, and a moment later the sound of hoarse cheering wells up from the control room. “We've hit him! A hit with the first shot!”

The skipper furiously quells the incipient jubilation. “Pipe down! That was
not
a hit! Fish passed under point of aim and exploded on the beach!”

Dead silence.

The skipper's voice cuts through the gloom. “That torpedo was a Mark XIV. Deragon, see that the depth we set on that fish is logged and witnessed, and that the serial number and type are noted. This time we've got proof of what happened. This picture will show the torpedo track to the target and the explosion beyond it.”

A smile plays around the corners of Warder's mouth. “For the next torpedo, set depth eight feet and have that witnessed and logged also!” If he's going to break specific instructions,
Fred Warder is going to do it properly, with malice aforethought.

“Standby TWO. . . . Range—
mark!
. . . Bearing—
mark!

“Standing by TWO, sir! Depth set, eight feet!”

“FIRE TWO!” The cross hair of the periscope exactly bisects the single vertical stack of the target.

Again the wait for the explosion, but this time it is not
so
long. As the impact of the explosion reaches the submarine, the skipper grins and motions to Deragon to take the 'scope for a look. “I think we really did hit him that time, Bill.”

Through the tiny periscope eye can be seen a cloud of spray and mud thrown into the air, accompanied by what looks like pieces of debris. The ship rolls far over toward them, approximately thirty degrees, and immediately returns to an even keel.

Stare as they may,
Seawolf's
skipper and exec must admit that there is no conclusive evidence of damage. Despite an obvious hit and the subsequent wild rolling, the target has suffered no appreciable increase in draft.

“How long did that torpedo run?” Warder suddenly asks.

Bill Deragon looks at his stop watch. “Forty-four and a half seconds, Captain.” The two men look at each other thoughtfully.

Warder speaks first. “Let's see, now. Torpedo run . . . torpedo speed . . . Why, the earliest that fish could have got there is forty-five seconds, probably a little longer! It must have gone off just before hitting the target!”

The exec nods in agreement. “That's why he rolled over so far. What'll we do now?”

“Do? We'll let him have another one, that's what! Set depth FOUR feet!”

And so a few moments later fish number three goes on its way, set even closer to the surface. Again the torpedo track is observed to run straight to the target, but this time there is no explosion whatsoever. Sound hears the torpedo running perfectly normally long after the time it should have hit the target. Suddenly it stops.

“Standby FOUR! . . . FIRE FOUR!”

Again nothing.
Seawolf
has expended all her bow tubes, and
Sagami Maru
still rides at anchor in Talomo Bay—unharmed. And now the submarine has drawn upon herself the quite understandable wrath of
Sagami
. Two large guns on the Jap's bow and stern have been manned and are lobbing shells at
Seawolf's
periscope. The explosions of gunfire on the surface of the water are remarkably loud, and possess a characteristic entirely their own. If
Seawolf
ever had any idea of trying her luck with the deck gun, this battery effectively changes it. But Warder has no thought of quitting with his target still afloat. The Mark XIV torpedoes have failed. Now he will try the old Mark X fish.

Working against time, “topping off,” checking and reloading torpedoes in the four bow tubes, the men of the
Seawolf
silently perform a miracle of effort, in spite of a room temperature hovering around the 120-degree mark. And half an hour after the fourth torpedo was fired the submarine stealthily creeps back into Talomo Bay for another try.

Having lost sight of the periscope when it was lowered, the gun crews of
Sagami Maru
are firing blindly and rapidly in all directions. Again Warder approaches as close as possible before shooting—if anything a little closer this time—again gyro angle is zero, and the camera ready, and so are the obsolete torpedoes.

“FIRE ONE! . . .” This one does it. The torpedo explodes in the stern of the ship. When the smoke clears away the after gun crew has disappeared and
Sagami
is sinking at last, with bow up and stem down. Time for the
coup de grâce
.

Seawolf
has approached so close to her enemy by this time that it is necessary to turn around before shooting again. Besides, this will enable her to fire a stem tube, and will tend to equalize expenditure of torpedoes, always a concern of the provident skipper.

Sagami's
forward gun crew have deserted their posts, and
Seawolf
is allowed to complete her reversal of course within the harbor unmolested. Twelve minutes later she is ready with the stern tubes, and fires one torpedo.

“WHANGP!” A solid hit, in the bow. A fire sends billows of
smoke into the air, and the target now sags down by the bow, with the more slowly sinking stern up. Several backward looks from
Seawolf
—snaking her tortuous way seaward—confirm that
Sagami Maru
is on the way to Davy Jones' locker with a whole cargo of essential supplies for the Japanese occupiers of Mindanao, and in plain sight of hundreds of native and Japanese watchers from the shore.

And then come the countermeasures. Three aircraft direct two anti-submarine vessels to the vicinity of the submarine.
Seawolf
is forced deep and into evasive maneuvers, but receives only a portion of the licking which by this time she so richly deserves.

A few hours later Fred Warder composes the concluding Words to an official report. He has expended six torpedoes, of which the four new Mark XIV were defective. The ship was sunk by the old torpedoes. He has photographic proof of the whole thing. And so he contents himself with a simple statement of fact, leaving much more between the lines than in them: “The failures of the first attack are typical, and merely add weight to the previous complaints of other C.O.s and myself as to the erratic performance of the Mark XIV torpedo and its warhead attachments.”

On December 1, 1942,
Seawolf
observed her third birthday as she entered Pearl Harbor after seven consecutive war patrols under the command of Freddie Warder. Less than a month before, thousands of miles away, she had fought her battle with
Sagami Maru
—or perhaps it should have been said that she had fought her battle against ineffective American torpedoes, with
Sagami
as the prize. The contribution she thereby made to the war effort was far greater than merely the sinking of one vessel.

The torpedo problem was not solved yet, for it takes more than one documented report to change the mind of a whole naval bureau. But the weight of evidence continued to mount.